Computers, Writing, Rhetoric and Literature

Return to Part One

6. I thought that, while challenging, the assignment was understandable. And yet, students came to me again and again saying, "I don't get it. What are we supposed to do?" They were frustrated with me ("Why can't she just tell us what she wants?") and I was frustrated with them ("This is so simple, why aren't they getting it?"). I gave them specific goals to meet during each session in the lab. I produced more handouts, trying to clarify and repeat the instructions I had given earlier. No one seemed to be doing any work on the Web Project. But toward the end of the semester, when I was contemplating calling off the Web Project completely, its problems unexpectedly mutated into a challenge. Late in April, a woman spoke up: "Can we talk about the Storyspace project? We really don't understand what you want us to do, or why we're doing it."

7. So I repeated everything I had been saying throughout the semester about intertextuality, cognition, and estrangement, and added the following: "You know, there's an encyclopedia of science fiction in the library. You can use it to look up what the authors think about various topics in science fiction. You can search by title, author, or keywords. I don't want you to recreate the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, but I'd like each of you to try to contribute something you've learned about the overall subject of science fiction. You can talk about themes, about authors, about texts, whatever you want." And somehow, that did it when all my other explanations had failed. The magic word "encyclopedia"--the light bulbs went on over heads all over the room.

8. I offered to drop the project from the syllabus completely, since this epiphany about the nature of the assignment had come so late in the semester, but somewhat to my surprise a number of students wanted to proceed. We agreed instead to make any further work on the web project optional; anyone contributing would receive 5% extra credit. They also expressed a preference for working with Storyspace individually, with each student creating one or two text boxes to the class web, rather than continuing to work in groups of 3 or 4 creating separate webs. About 15 or 16 students eventually submitted work. I recruited a student to serve as editor of this class "encyclopedia web"; people e-mailed her their submissions and she reformatted the text and put it into boxes. I offered assistance on linking the boxes. I also made a copy of the class web for each student who requested one, formatted as a stand-alone Storyspace Reader so that the student could view the web on a Macintosh even without access to the full Storyspace program.