The Student Web Zine Project
Once each group
lets me know what sup-topics their group members will be researching,
I use Photoshop and Dreamweaver to construct with the class a hypertext
front page that structures and links all of the different topics together:
3
As Alexander (2002)
discusses, the creation of the title of a class web-zine can be an important
rhetorical moment because the students are pushed to consider their own
style and voices in relation to the audience they hope to reach. In one
of my class, the students’ decided on the name “Daily Brewin”
because it plays off of the title of our school newspaper, The Daily Bruin.
Moreover, students also wanted to make a play between the making of coffee
(brewing) and the production of beer. Here we see how students can participate
in the act of re-mixing culture by sampling more traditional modes of
representation and reworking them in a postmodern context.
After the class reviews together the main structure of our course hypertext, I ask the students in the “integration” group to write one of their papers as an over-all introduction to the different topics that the class project will address. Once this paper is finished, I post it on our discussion board and ask students to supply feedback and suggestions for the revision of our first class page.
Technology, Writing, and Higher Education
Student Writers as Hypertext Users
Changing Conceptions of Academic Writing
Home and School Models of Literacy