Integrative Student Essays
This integrative approach to higher education can be found if we click on any sub-category and see how each student essay combines a traditional academic form with hyperlinks to other student essays, outside articles, and different levels of the class diagrams. While it may appear that these essays are determined by the form and structure of the classical academic essay, I argue that the requirement to link these texts to other student essays pushes students to see how their writing is part of a shared project and that they are writing both individual papers and simultaneously a collaborative hypertext. From my perspective, this structure allows me to teach both old and new ways of writing through the combination of standard academic prose and new hypertextual model of composition.
My desire to integrate traditional academic essays with hypertexts exists, in part, because I think that educators must respond to often contradictory institutional demands. For example, we need to help students to write for their other classes by teaching them the conventions of the academic essay, and we need to incorporate strategies that focus on helping students to improve their computer literacies. Furthermore, my assignment allows students to feel that they are being evaluated both as individuals and as group members. In fact, in the past when I gave students only a group grade, they often complained that they were being brought down by the weaker members of their group. Instead of just ignoring the pragmatic desire of students to be judged as individuals, I have decided that it is best to try to combine this strong sense of student individualism with a social understanding of knowledge construction.
Technology, Writing, and Higher Education
Student Writers as Hypertext Users
Changing Conceptions of Academic Writing
Home and School Models of Literacy