Fall 1996

Once Upon a Time in ENWR: The World-Wide Web as a Publication Medium for Student Essays
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, T.A., Department of English

In the Fall of 1995 I began teaching ENWR 101 (Introductory Composition) in the English Department's newly opened electronic classroom as part of a small group of graduate students coordinated by faculty member Peter Baker. Containing fifteen Gateway 2000 personal computers, each with a high-speed Internet connection, Bryan 203 is fully capable of supporting a paperless classroom, with students composing their essays on word processors, submitting them (from anywhere on Grounds) via electronic file transfer, and receiving instructor's comments through e-mail. Of even greater interest to me, however, was the possibility of using the World-Wide Web, with its ever-increasing popularity and its rich multimedia capabilities, as a publication medium for student essays. How, I asked myself, could the Web relieve some of the malaise that inevitably seeps into even the most successful composition classes, while simultaneously enabling me to experiment with forms of pedagogy that would have been otherwise unavailable? The end result was Once Upon a Time in the Eighties, a collaborative hypertext written by my first-year students and published (a term whose usage I will clarify) by us on the World-Wide Web.

The project required each student to select and research an historically significant trend, event, or personage from the decade of the eighties, and then to prepare an 800 to 1000 word essay, while also, at the student's discretion, incorporating images, sound clips, and hypertext links both to each other's papers and to outside Web resources. Written and assembled during the final weeks of the semester, Once Upon a Time in the Eighties was subsequently reviewed and rated a "Top 5% Web Site," and has also been a featured link on several high-profile Internet hotlists.

Grateful as I am for the attention the project has received from various segments of the wired world, it is important to undertand that there is more at stake here than a pedagogical publicity stunt. In my opinion, the crucial dimension Web publishing projects add to student writing is the dimension of audience. Every composition class runs the risk of becoming mired in a cycle wherein papers are simply shuttled back and forth in a closed loop between writer, instructor, and -- once or twice a semester per student -- the other members of the class during workshops. The Web offers the opportunity of breaking out of such a cycle by exposing student writing to an outside readership who will deliver real-world feedback and response straight to the author's e-mail account. And, though my discussion here draws from my specific experiences as a teacher of composition, there is no reason why these ideas cannot be applied to courses in other subjects as well. It is worth pausing for a moment to distinguish between two different usages of the Web for the publication of student writing. The first, which involves less effort and advance-planning, consists in simply reproducing electronically a set of student papers originally written as print documents. This is useful and valuable, and can achieve many of the benefits I outline above. The second kind of publication, however, involves both imposing some thematic unity on the essays, and also taking advantage of the unique authoring potential of the electronic writing space. Projects of this sort, which typically exist as inter-linked multimedia hypertexts are much more ambitious, and could not easily be reproduced on paper. The Nameless Museum, written and constructed by the students in my colleague Karlyn Crowley's Spring 1996 ENWR class, sets a strong example here; the project transforms the reader into a visitor in a fully contoured space that projects the illusion of a three dimensional art gallery through which he or she can maneuver.

Regardless of what form the project takes, however, it is crucial to understand that the Web is a genuine publication medium for students only in so far as the instructor is willing to go to the trouble of publicizing their work. Cyberspace is truly a place where trees fall in silence when they fall with no one there to hear them. Publication on the Web therefore entails (at the very least) registering the students' site with the Net's major search engines -- currently Yahoo, Alta Vista, Lycos, Open Text, Infoseek, and Excite -- and also aggressively soliciting links from existing sites with relevant content. Announcing the URL on appropriate mailing lists is also often an effective technique. But without active measures to splice student work into the existing network, it will remain unread, and for all intents and purposes, unpublished.

Because I aggressively publicized Once Upon a Time in the Eighties, it now receives comments on a regular basis. Most of the feedback is quite positive, and ranges from the virtual back-slap conveyed by a "cool site!" message to more thoughtful and substantive remarks from others interested in the integration of technology and pedagogy; I have also received several generous comments from UVa alumni. On occasion though, there has also been negative feedback. Several readers wrote to castigate one student for incorrectly stating that the character of "Duckie" in the film The Breakfast Club was played by Andrew Dice Clay; the role, it seems, was in fact played by one Jon Cryer. Another student, meanwhile, was (quite rightly) taken to task for getting the date of the Challenger explosion wrong in his paper on that same subject. In both cases, the tone of these rebukes was harsher than I would have preferred.

While it is unfortunate that two of my students were "flamed" on the Internet, what these students learned, and what the class as a whole learned from all the positive responses they received, was that they were no longer passive consumers in the classroom. Rather, they had become producers, producers of real work read by real people in the real world (however "virtual" that world's Web interface might be). With production comes responsibility. And surely responsibility for the words they write is among the very most important of the things we should be teaching our students in the composition classroom.