Writing the World Wide Web (Preliminary Report)
Lesley Smith
16 February 1998

General Conclusions

In both the internet evaluation section and the hypertext classes, students reaching Bs and Cs produced more thoughtful, more thorough and more imaginative work than students gaining As for thier paper assignments, in-class work and journals. Only two of the students gaining As for the whole course ever reached A-grade work in the computer units.

Hubris proved part of the problem for A students. The exercises seemed simple, and several adopted the attitude that 'anyone' could work with a computer, leaving themselves little time to complete exercises thoroughly. They often looked for models they could copy, a tactic which they exploited successfully in traditional papers, rather than completing all the exercises.

The pitfalls glared from the final hypertext submissions. While students working hard to hang on to their Bs and Cs used the strengths of the medium to sharpen their analysis, the A students, and some at the high end of the B range, undertook high-quality acts of mimicry by copying the set-up of the dominant internet model, the commercial site. As a result, the hypertext version of the advertising analysis read much more like an advertisment (CLICK here to buy Levi jeans; See our spring colors HERE, etc) than an analysis.

The computer lab also challenged their established expertise within the classroom power structure and some students 'opted out' as the process grew more demanding, although finding 'reasons' for doing so. One excellent writer noted in her journal, for example:-

"I did a net search, but didn't have time to browse through all the sites it listed, and when I narrowed my search I never got any hits. So, I decided that I would wait until I was at home to do the research, but every time I tried to log on the system was busy. I'm getting rather annoyed with the whole idea of the web. There is so much useless crap on it now that I have to take at least five minutes per site to distinguish what is fact and what is just some person's or corporation's ramblings."

As we were using class time for the computer work, I included it as a critical part of class participation grade. If I taught the course again, I should grade it as a separate section of the class, both to recognize the intense effort the work demanded of those students who completed it all, and to spur the more accomplished traditional writers in the class to a thorough investigation of the medium.

My caveat, of course, given the size of the sample, is that all conclusions are tentative. I, however, was astonished at the multiple thinking, researching and writing tasks we activated while working with the web. They complicated my rather linear view of a clean, comprehensive lunge into the information age, but offered dynamic access to baseline skills necessary to college work, and transformed students' first stab at sustained research into a fast-moving, collaborative venture, which I should like to exploit in building further computer units for a 101 class. In the end, I had taken some of the 'fun' out of computers but I hope I had also injected some 'fun' into the tasks of thinking, researching and writing in the future. At least one student thought so...

"Computers fascinate me...By being able to relate schoolwork to something I enjoy, it makes learning a lot easier, as well as fun."


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