What does the ubiquity of digital media mean for higher education? Must we embrace the new technology simply because it exists? Given that a considerable amount of time in college is spent on writing and that digital media are writing tools, how can we best use these tools? Undeniably, word processing has enriched our lives and those of our students. In the age of the Internet, however, we have moved far beyond seeing computers as word processors. Online bulletin boards for cross-campus discussions and Web authoring software have entered the classroom within the last several years. For many students these applications have sharpened their prose and sense of audience. As professors, we have discovered that online innovations have meshed writing theory with praxis. For example, online classrooms support postmodern and social-constructivist theories as well as collaborative learning and writing across the curriculum. We have also found that online communications require a whole new set of literacy skills. Reading hypertext is different than reading print, and online forums challenge writers to sustain a dialogue. As college teachers, we must think hard about what these new forms of communication mean. How will the Digital Age affect the way people think and write? Some computer theorists claim that we are at a turning point in history parallel to the invention of the Gutenberg press. Some have predicted that the ways in which we communicate will change radically within two to three decades. Thus, those of us teaching online forms of communications are, in effect, pioneers, and though our stories are in their infancy, they are seed droppings for a new epistemology. Our initial forays have much to offer others. Furthermore, as we tinker with technology, we delve into new theory-making ventures, helping us to be more reflective practitioners. With these goals in mind, this paper describes exemplary case studies of classroom practice, examines emerging theories in the field, and offers examples from my own teaching.

In the1998 National Council of Teachers of English's publication Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum, forty-five instructors from across the disciplines offer testimony about the benefits of online communication. For the sake of time, three cases are highlighted. First, Linda Shamoon describes online debates between her University of Rhode Island students and peers in England, Ireland, Korea, Finland and other countries. Shamoon found, based on three years of experience with the project, online communications fostered writing across the curriculum, collaborative learning, and global awareness. She added that it was critical for instructors to structure the context and provide topics for discussion, suggesting that although the medium engages students, the teacher's work in the background affects the success of online discourse communities.

Teresa Redd summarizes a cross-cultural project, this time between urban, black students at Howard University and rural, white students at Montana State University. In this project, Redd's first-year engineering students emailed drafts of English papers to students at Montana State taking an art class. Assigned to write about race relations in the United States, the Howard students used radically different strategies when they wrote for an audience distinctly different from their classmates and teacher. Writing for white students coming from one-room schoolhouses in Western prairie towns compelled the urban students to shed time-honored cliches. Furthermore, their audience was now the oppressing class. Redd remarks that her students were forced to clarify their perspectives, for now that they faced "a real rhetorial audience" (141). In a reciprocal arrangement, the Montana students sent illustrations to accompany the Howard students' writings, and collectively the groups produced a book. In the end, Redd found, "The frank and frequent exchanges opened … students' eyes, minds, and hearts" (146). The final thirty-two-page booklet On (the Color) Line: Networking to End Racism revealed the power of electronic media to extend classroom walls and create opportunities for interactive public discourse.

Michael Strickland and Robert Whitnell describe a joint venture in which their computer science and English students collaboratively designed their college's first Web site. The students devoted a considerable amount of time to the writing task and developed a strong sense of community. The authors' final comments convey the full potential of the media: "We like to think of the Web as an ongoing interdisciplinary laboratory with the biggest windows in the world. When anyone can look in and see what you've produced, your incentive to collaborate and do well is greatly increased. This is a heady sense of empowerment and ownership" (200). Strickland and Whitnell's experiment, like Redd's, found that online discourse promoted cross-disciplinary learning and fulfilled a public purpose—in this case, furnishing the campus with a needed Web site.

In the 1999 volume Passions, Pedagogies, and 21^st Century Technologies, compositionists from varied theoretical bents explore the implications and ramifications of online writing. Gunther Kress in the aptly titled essay "'English' at the Crossroads: Rethinking Curricula of Communication in the Context of the Turn to the Visual" projects that the visual nature of the Internet will revolutionize the way we communicate. Linear text will no longer be all that there is, and how pieces in hypertexts are juxtaposed and interact will give genesis to variant forms of communication. Kress holds that we must train students to produce "culturally valued text" and acknowledge that the visual is rapidly "becoming prominent in the landscape of public communication" (67). In sum, composition studies need to be re-contextualized as a melding of text and image.

Numerous postmodern theorists in Passions and Pedagogies point out that networked environments allow the diverse voices in our classrooms to be heard. Lester Faigely, a fifteen-year veteran in the field, reminds us that online writing fosters student-focused instruction, collaborative learning, commitment to task, and participatory classroom structures. Social constructivists and liberal feminists, vocal in Passions and Pedagogy, claim that the mere arrangement of the electronic classroom into pods, clustered workstations, and terminals on the periphery of the room abrogates a professorial hierarchy. Such student-participatory environments bring to fruition the postmodern theories of Paulo Freire, popularized in the United States by political compositionists like Mike Rose, Ira Shor, and Victor Villaneuva. In Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Sherry Turkle comments, "Computers embrace postmodern theory and bring it down to earth" (18). In networked classrooms, students create the agenda. Their online composing is the content and curriculum of the course.

In Computers and Community, Richard Lanham calls instructors in networked classrooms "learned coordinator[s]" (xiv), and Carolyn Handa points out they "control less" and "say less" (xx). Thomas Barker and Fred Kemp, also in Computers and Community, call such classrooms a "knowledge-making enterprise" where an "egalitarian state" is realized (6). Students sitting at computer terminals—composing and revising texts, absorbed in electronic peer reviews, and hacking away in online discussions—are active learner and writers. In such classrooms, the instructor is merely a background voice amid the din of tapping keyboards.

Based on fifteen years of experience teaching in electronic classrooms, I have found it increasingly easier to implement strategies that reflect my beliefs. Web-site tools and graphically based bulletin boards have made public discourse and writing synonymous. In the 1980s word processing and email created opportunities for such discourse in limited ways. Principally, students could produce class anthologies and speak to others at distant sites. A greater variety of software and multi-media advances in the 90s, however, have engendered new possibilities. In the following, I describe experiences from my fall semester first-year composition class and spring semester graduate education class to illustrate how online communication led to new learning opportunities.

The initial assignment for the composition class served as a launch pad for writing memoirs. To help students place their lives into a historical context, they created a time capsule. The project introduced students to hypertext authoring. They selected three or more events from the year 2000 that they would want to memorialize, and each event served as another component in a webbed hypertext. During the first few minutes of class, students drafted an opening page, mainly a table of contents of what they would put in a time capsule. As students developed these capsules, the text in their table of contents became hyperlinks, each link connecting to another page in the capsule.

One student's text began: "These are three major events that represent the millennium year, 2000. They might not be positive ones but I consider them to be the most important happenings worldwide in the year." Her page displayed three photographs with hypertext links announcing worldwide events she considered monumental: the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk, the World Olympics in Sydney, and the U.S. Presidential election. Once viewers entered her site by clicking on hypertext, they experienced an interactive script combining text and photographs. Clearly this experience was visually and kinetically different than reading a print document. As Jay David Botler states in Writing Space, "As a global hypertext, the Web has provided the most convincing evidence of the computer's potential to refashion the practice of writing" (xi). Students in the class, as hypertext authors, were beginning to experience this reality.

At the time that students created their time capsules, they worked outside of class writing a memoir—a narrative recounting a pivotal event in their lives. Cognizant that memoirs would be placed on the Internet, students chose topics deliberately. For example, one student wrote about the murder of her best friend in a drive-by shooting, thinking that this topic would attract readers. To assist in gauging audience response, students used online peer reviews and conferred with writing center tutors. To make the narratives visually detailed, students used photographs taken at the time of the event. One student, who described the jubilant reaction of her large, extended family to the arrival of her sister's child, perched alongside her computer keyboard a series of scrapbook photographs. Most students decided to use photographs in their Web sites. The initial placement of the pictures into their texts caused them to revisit their writing. While rearranging text to fit around pictures, they saw the words anew. The on-screen juggling helped students envision how viewers would see the composite. In effect, the medium and its technological features drove revision.

Another writing project called upon students to write profiles—an exercise requiring interviewing a person on campus. Among people selected were a gay student activist, the Director of Campus Ministry, a dance instructor who chose her profession based on a childhood disability, a weight-training coach, a community service-learning project coordinator, and the Director of Intercultural Affairs. Once the profiles were completed, students published a book for distribution and added their texts to their Web sites. By publishing their stories on the Internet, students learned firsthand the journalistic axiom: check all facts. When one subject viewed her profile on the Web, she noticed errors, prompting the writer to make changes. Interestingly, the printed version of the text with the same errors did not bother the subject. Thrilled with their Web site profiles, subjects recommended the sites to family and friends, increasing the audience for writing. The project married well with public discourse theory inasmuch as the students’ texts served a public purpose¾ to inform others about members of the college community. In this respect, the project was reminiscent of Strickland’s and Whitnell's Web-site project where student writing met a public need.

When students incorporated their profiles on their sites, they created a homepage linking their accumulated hypertexts. Once they uploaded their revised sites, they became more cognizant of broken links—links that did not work or go anywhere. They observed that some viewers left pages without fully reading them. That is, while the hyperlinks eased navigation, they also had a confounding effect. The students discovered as James Sosnoski tells us in "Hyper-readers and Their Reading Engines," web readers use filtering, skimming, and fragmenting strategies, and, as Susan Hilligoss in Visual Communication: A Writer's Guide instructs, "move from keyword to keyword and link to link rather than sequentially (77)." As an interactive medium, the Web gives readers a quasi-authorial identity, at times subverting the writer's goals. Perhaps one of the greatest challenges for teachers of hypertext is teaching students how to write for a medium that invokes new reading strategies. In the course, students returned to their texts and applied strategies to grip readers' attention, including selecting details with greater care and crafting sentences energizing readers forward.

When the class moved on to its next unit of study, writing commentaries, participation in cross-campus bulletin boards proved to be invaluable. Students joined the Intercollegiate Electronic Democracy Project—IEDP—where five hundred students from across the country were available for conversations. For ease of facilitating dialogues, students joined a handful of forums. Topics centered on controversial issues attuned to college students' interests: abortion rights, violence in the media, gun control, pop culture and so on. Forays into the discussion groups gave students time to explore topics. For example, one student who participated in the gun control forum elected to write about why gun manufacturers, just like any manufacturers, should not be held liable for how consumers use their products. Posts from upper-division students enrolled in a political science writing course extended the student's research scope, and cross postings from these students and other students helped her develop her argument. Students noted that the online community was a microcosm of the United States. As they explained, they preferred to go online rather than talk in class. The classroom dynamics reflected what Redd discovered in her interracial project—online communication gave students a broader world perspective. Students also observed how cultural background, economic class, and parental upbringing affected language and views. They confessed that these factors colored their own thinking, and, in turn, influenced their writing. More keenly aware of how audiences react to argumentative rhetoric, students decided to put an email reply command in their hypertext commentaries—thereby extending the dialectic loop in the writing process. Furthermore, email replies prompted revisions to flesh out ideas, marshal evidence, and produce reader-focused prose.

One of the most successful projects came near the end of the course. At this stage, students were well accustomed to writing for an audience. The specific genre—reviews—was one that they liked. They read reviews to decide what films to see, what concerts to attend, and what books to read. As consumers of this genre, they were eager to be creators of it. To help with the assignment, they studied reviews on the Web and noted how page layout and graphics affected message. This exercise motivated them to experiment with new composing strategies, trying out double-column layouts, banner headlines, slick language, hyperlinks to related sites, glossy photographs, and other effects. More so than any other assignment, this one generated much classroom discussion. For example, the student who raved about the Chili Peppers concert and the student who lambasted The Blair Witch Project as amateur trash faced dissenting voices in the classroom. The student who claimed that Anna Quindlen's Black and Blue, a novel about spousal abuse, was a must-read was corralled into giving an impromptu booktalk. The Internet displayed students' views for all to see. In this scenario, writing led to another public discourse act. That is, instead of being an end act, writing became a catalyst for another public discourse form—oral debate.

For a final course project, students expanded their commentaries into research papers. This exercise meant that they worked from an existing text and augmented it with supplemental references. Creating a research paper for the Web proved to be a challenging experience. Students were sensitive about their positions on controversial topics, especially those for which they perceived the public as split or outraged, such as partial-birth abortion and genetic engineering. To make their work inviting, they found themselves thinking about how they could use the technology's tools to their advantage. Students found that breaking long sections into smaller chunks, incorporating provocative visuals, and inserting hyperlinks to authoritative sites helped. In viewing their final sites, students noticed overlaps between their commentaries and research papers. Some students elected to replace their commentaries with their research papers, whereas others decided to connect the two so a reader could oscillate between them, each illuminating the other.

Once the course ended, I learned that one student revisited her online research paper and used its theme, teenage suicide, to develop a new Web site solely devoted to the topic. This site contained statistics and facts, tips for prevention, links to online help organizations, and lyrics to songs addressing suicide. Whereas the purpose of the student's initial paper was to convince viewers that teen suicide was a serious problem, the new site offered practical solutions. The end result was an interactive, social-action research paper.

The second course where I implemented Web sites was a graduate education course, Computers in the Classroom, attracting pre-service and classroom teachers, K-12. The course already had a strong public discourse component but a limited audience. That is, students published their writing in books that were distributed on campus. Yet their writing beckoned for a larger audience. Students' reviews of educational software and accompanying lesson plans could be immensely helpful to a wide audience of educators as well as parents. Once Web site software debuted on the college campus, it was a logical step to add Web authoring into the course. Thus starting in 1998, Web sites were incorporated into the syllabus, and by this spring, they were a major component.

As in the past, students' sites began with annotated hyperlinks drawing readers into the parts of the site. Once students completed their software reviews and complementary lesson plans for their Web sites, copies of the texts were added to a comprehensive, class site. Throughout the semester, this comprehensive site and the students' own sites generated traffic from across the country, and software publishers requested permission to publish students' work as well as affix hyperlinks from their sites to the students'.

By placing their Internet lesson plans on their sites, the students extended their reach to include their own students, who went online to do the lessons. One third-grade teacher wrote to his students doing an online author study: "For this assignment, you will connect to the Web site that has a detailed biography of Patricia Polacco. After reading … the information in the biography, complete the … questions on the Patricia Polacco Biography worksheet." By clicking on a hyperlink icon, the third graders reached Polacco's Web site. The teacher discovered that placing his assignments online not only helped his students but kept him organized and informed parents of what their children were doing in school.

The graduate students also added PowerPoint displays to their sites. One student used his district's weekly vocabulary words for his display—his motivation stemming from his students' boredom with the drills. He scanned photographs of his students and inserted these on slides. Each slide showed a student, a word and a definition. He reported that his students were ecstatic, and parents were going online to see the displays.

By the end of the course, students reported that they were looking forward to expanding their sites over the summer. As they reflected back on their experiences in the course, they remembered seeing Web sites created by other students in my classes. At the time, the new students feared that they would be expected to accomplish the same feats. In the final analysis, they rejoiced at surpassing expectations and acknowledged the complexity of their sites. As the professor, I once again discovered students' willingness to extend themselves far beyond syllabus requirements.

The graduate class also joined the IEDP project. Going on line with students considerably younger created an interesting dynamic. Whereas my first-semester composition students keyed into cultural differences, the older learners were struck by a generation gap. Many were ill at ease and reported that they felt as if they were eavesdropping on their children's conversations. As the semester unfolded, however, more commonality than differences emerged, as students tapped into shared interests, ranging from e-mail sloppiness to high-stakes testing to violence in schools. The education students began to see how electronic bulletin boards could be implemented in their own classrooms. In essence, learning how to create Web sites and participating in IEDP provided the teachers with valuable skills. Their students would benefit not just from having access to online lesson plans, but from having teachers who were prepared to teach online writing.

As K-12 teachers discover the advantages of going online with their students, those of us in higher education can only expect to see more of our students prepared to engage in online activities. My classroom experiences teaching first-year students demonstrated that students today are enthralled and empowered by the technology. As teachers, our role is to ensure that the technology is used wisely and effectively. We need to reconfigure our teaching in light of how the technology drives writing as well how it refashions communication. We also need to remember that the technology invokes new literacy skills while it sustains old ones. Critical reading skills and the production of insightful texts can characterize the Web, and as college teachers we should assume some responsibility for the direction that online writing takes in the future. Together with our students we can explore and shape the definition of new writing tools. Recalling Holzman's plea—"Don't look back," I suggest we look ahead, to envision how the technologies enrich communication, create ideal opportunities for public discourse and make writing a publicly critical act.

Works Cited

(*Works Noted)

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Twenty-First Century. Ed. Carolyn Handa. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1990. 1-27.

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*Faigley, Lester. "Beyond Imagination: The Internet and Global Digital Literacy." Passions, Pedgagies, and 21^st Century Technologies. Eds. Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe. Logan: Utah State P. 129-139.

*Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Rev. Ed.). New York: Continuum, 1996.

Handa, Carolyn. "Introduction." Computers and Community: Teaching Composition in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Carolyn Handa. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1990. xvii-xxii.

Hilligoss, Susan. A Writer's Guide to Visual Communication. New York: Longman, 1999.

Holzman, Steven. "Don't Look Back." Digital Mosaic: The Aesthetics of Cyberspace. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Kress, Gunther. "English at the Crossroads: Rethinking Curricula of Communication in the Context of the Turn to the Visual." Passions, Pedagagies, and 21^st Century Technologies. Eds. Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe. Logan: Utah State P. 66-88

Lanham, Richard. "Foreward." Computers and Community: Teaching Composition in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Carolyn Handa. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1990. xiii-xv.

Redd, Teresa M. "Accommodation and Resistance on (the Color) Line: Black Writers Meet White Artists on the Internet. Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum. Eds. Donna Reiss, Dickie Selfe, and Art Young. Urbana: NCTE, 1998.

*Rose, Michael. Lives on the Boundaries. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Shamoon, Linda. "International E-mail Debate." Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum. Eds. Donna Reiss, Dickie Selfe, and Art Young. Urbana: NCTE, 1998.

*Shor, Ira. Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change. Chicago: U. of Chicago P.

Sosnoski, James. "Hyper-readers and Their Reading Engines." Passions, Pedgagies, and 21^st Century Technologies. Eds. Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe. Logan: Utah State P. 161-177.

Strickland, Michael B. and Robert M. Whitnell. "Weaving Guilford's Web." Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum. Eds. Donna Reiss, Dickie Selfe, and Art Young. Urbana: NCTE, 1998.

*Trimbur, John. The Call to Write. New York: Addison Wesley, 1999.

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

*Villanueva, Victor. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1993.