Introduction

In this hypertext, I argue that the construction of a class web zine as a shared writing project can help students to integrate traditonal and non-traditional models of academic writing.1 In detailing my students’ production and reception of a web zine entitled “The Daily Brewin,” I turn to a hypertextual model of new media literacy and discuss how composition teachers can develop theoretical frameworks and pedagogical practices devoted to thinking across the institutional and subjective forces circulating in postmodern higher education and culture. Central to my analysis of the roles of writing and computers in postmodern universities will be an examination of how new modes of media are transforming the fundamental structures of literacy and how these transformations reinforce multiple digital divides in higher education.

As many scholars and critics argue, hypertexts offer the possibility of constructing an alternative mode of student writing centered on collaboration, non-linearity, multiple perspectives, and a transformed sense of the author, the audience, the content, and form of traditional and modern prose (Johnson-Eilola, 1997: Bolter, 2001; Landow, 1992). In other words, hypertexts rework our conceptions of rhetoric and our sense of academic discourse. However, I will argue here that the mere use of hypertexts in a university writing class does not by itself resolve the various tensions pitting the desires of progressive teachers against current-traditional and modern educational institutions; rather, I posit that critical teachers of composition and computers need to carefully construct hypertextual assignments that help to bridge the gap between individualistic and social conceptions of writing and technology. Morever, to match the form with the content of this web text, I have combined a linear essay structure with a series of hyperlinks. One of my goals here is to give the reader the option of reading this work as a traditional academic essay or engaging in a more fragmented, postmodern reading experience. Starting from the next page, the reader is free to click on the continue button and read this essay as a linear series of pages, or on the following pages, the reader can click on the hyperlinks and sidebar links to engage in a more hypertextual experience.

CONTINUE