The purpose of this chapter is to establish a context for Chapters Three, Four, and Five, the chapters on each of the study subjects.  This chapter will discuss how I became interested in hypertext theory and how I introduced it to my classroom several years prior to the study. It will explain the curriculum that supports the hypertext projects my students do in the classroom.  This  chapter will also provide the theoretical framework for the study and discuss the methodology I used for the study, including why I chose some methodologies over others.  In addition, it will provide some brief background information on the study subjects themselves, and introduce the chapters devoted to those students.

Riverton

Riverton Middle School is part of Riverton Public Schools, situated in a small town north west of Lansing, Michigan.  The district has approximately two thousand students and the middle school, which houses grade six through eighth, has 460 students.

Riverton was settled in the early 1830’s, first by pioneers from upstate New York, and then by immigrants from the Westphalia region of Germany.  Today it is largely a bedroom community because of its location on an expressway between Lansing and Grand Rapids.  The largest employer in the community is Riverton Public Schools.  Riverton’s population has remained stable for the past twenty years, as has the school population.

Riverton Middle School is housed in the former high school, which was built in 1962.  The facility was refurbished in 1989.  During the furbishing process the middle school was equipped with two Macintosh Computer labs.  One lab contained twenty-five Macintosh Classic computers, and the other contained twenty-five Macintosh LC’s.  In the fall of 1998, the district installed a PC lab with thirty-one computers and a server.  The lab was networked using Microsoft Windows 95NT.  The computers came installed with a Microsoft software package that included Internet Explorer. Netscape Communicator was downloaded and Story Space, a hypertext-composing program was also installed on each of the computers.
Becoming Networked and Connected

When the PC lab was installed I was the only teacher in the building who had experience with the Windows platform and a plan to integrated computer technology into an existing curriculum.  I originally planned four hypertext projects for my eighth grade language arts students, projects designed to integrate their American history class with their language arts class.  However, because I found that the web projects took much longer than more traditional approaches to the curriculum, I eliminated one of the web projects.

A year prior to the installation of the PC lab, my eighth grade students did smaller web projects.  The first one was a Holocaust web.  Students used the Macintosh Classic computers and the Mac version of Story Space.  These computers were not networked, nor were they equipped with modems. When the eighth grade history curriculum changed its focus to a different historical period, I changed the focus of my language arts course—from twentieth century American history to the period ranging from Spanish Conquest through the Civil War.  Students currently create webs that focus on Native American history, a biography project, and a project that focuses on African American history or culture.

Student Participants

 Students participating in this study were part of my eighth grade language arts class.  None of the students had any experience composing hypertext documents prior to entering my class.  In January of 2000, after students had completed their first project, a poetry annotation project based on Native American poetry, and were well into their second, a biography web project, I asked for student volunteers to participate in this study.  Initially, fourteen students volunteered and turned in two project permission forms, one signed by the individual student, and another signed by a parent or guardian.  Ultimately the study focuses on the hypertext composing processes of three of those students.

My Own Hypertext Learning

I became interested in hypertext theory when I took a graduate rhetoric course as part of my doctoral program.  As part of the course requirement I composed a hypertext web on an ancient rhetorician, and though I found the experience frustrating, I sensed that, with the help of a web editor, my students might find the experience interesting.  I also sensed that composing hypertext webs might immerse students in forms of textuality they hadn’t encountered before, at least as authors. Few students had had any experience weaving graphics, written language, and a hypertext link to construct meaning for an audience, either an audience of just themselves as individuals, or for an audience beyond themselves.  My students had used our aging Macintosh computers for word processing, but because we only had two computers connected to the internet, their on-line reading experience, in a school environment, was minimal.  And, according to an informal survey taken at the beginning of that semester (1997), few students had computers at home.

Focusing on Hypertext

Hypertext usually employs not only what we would refer to as traditional text, but it uses color and graphics, even sound and film. And, of course, it employs a textual link to other screens.  This link requires readers and writers to think deliberately about the relationships between pieces of text.  It was this deliberate linking that made me wonder whether hypertext composing could be a meaningful literacy event in the classroom. But I wanted to keep in mind David Barton’s (1994) concept of a literacy event. He explains that a literacy event is any use of written language that people encounter in their daily lives.  I sensed that hypertext was going to be something that students would encounter frequently, even though as of 1997, few had much experience with it.  I wanted them to be ready for the explosion of electronic text I believed they would encounter.  I was very curious about the processes they would use in constructing meaning from multi-linear text. I believe that we learn by linking what we already know to something new, that we construct new knowledge for ourselves through connections with our prior knowledge. Hypertext brings that linking to consciousness.

But I also knew that my students, in some ways, already had a frame of reference that would help them think “hypertextually.”  Many of them played video games, either on a computer or on special gaming spaces like Nintendo or Playstation.  Janet Murray reminds us that gaming spaces are really hypertextual spaces that allow players to jump from one gaming situation to another (98). For example, students at Riverton Middle School enjoyed playing Sim City, a simulation game that places the player in the position of being mayor to a city.  This program is installed on the Machintosh computer lab and is often incorporated into the seventh grade geography curriculum.  Decisions that the mayor/player makes determine how well the city functions, and the player can immediately see the results of decisions he or she has made.  The mayor/player then has to make additional decisions, which place him or her in a continually changing environment.

Sim City can be viewed as a type of hypertext fiction, fiction perhaps that does not employ traditional text, perhaps, but that allows players to become immersed in a type of storytelling environment.  And it is certainly a “textual system,” because the game itself is created by language, by text.  And in our post-modern quest to broaden the definition of text, Sim City and other games such as Myst, Doom, and Civilization can be considered text.

But Riverton students have been exposed to hypertextual thinking in more than just electronic gaming situations.  Although it does not allow the viewer to choose which scene to jump to, certainly music videos tend to leap from scene to scene asking the viewer to suspend whatever plot there may be until the end of the song and the video.  And Murray points out that such television journey stories as Star Trek, where each episode provides one story in an on-going and dimension changing journey, are early attempts to use electronic media to immerse viewers in text.  And the dimension- changing and time-changing inherent in such journey stories as Star Trek have built several generations of reader/viewers who can easily negotiate the jumps and turns of hypertext (111).

But television and gaming are not the only hypertextual experiences students have probably had.  Choose Your Own Adventure books are popular with upper elementary students in Riverton, and many students find a similarity between those and the hypertext webs they create.  Some students note a similarity between hypertext and such epic stories as Beowulf and The Odyssey. It is important to point out that “hypertextual” thinking is not new (Bolter 1991). Hypertext makes overt many associations we can make unconciously when we read or write.  Indeed, Bolter points out that the meaning we gain from any text stems, in part, from its relationship to other texts.  When we read, we think of not only the experiences we have had, but the experiences we have had with other texts that share a similar structure or subject matter, or in some way connect us to the text we are currently reading.

Hypertext in My Classroom

My first hypertext web was composed using hypertext mark up language, often called html codes.  Figure 2.1 is an image of the html codes that form a web page.

Figure 2.1  A screen shot showing the html codes for figure 2.2.

Figure 2.2  A screen shot of the page illustrated in Figure 1 as it appears on the World Wide Web.

But I was hesitant to teach this to middle school students.  I thought students would do best using a web editor, a program that wrote the mark up language for a writer who, rather than seeing the codes on the screen, saw the “results” of the codes, as figure 2 indicates.  These web editors are often called WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) programs because the computer screen displays the emerging web page as a viewer would see it on the internet or world wide web.

Initially, however, because Riverton Middle School did not have enough computers, I selected a small group of students who agreed to work on an independent web project.  They used the only computer that was connected to the internet and created a hypertext story about a murder. And though students had problems with the software they used (Hyper Studio) and they could not realize many of the plans they had made for their story, the experience told me that middle school students could, indeed, engage in the kinds of thinking that hypertext seemed to demand.

By the next year the school had purchased ten copies of Story Space, a web editor published by Eastgate that allowed writers to create map views of their webs. Many of the initial articles I read about hypertext theory used Story Space map views to illustrate the various threads of meaning that hypertext enables, and I thought the program would help students engage in that kind of thinking.  I thought students would be able to understand the nature of hypertext webs if they could see a map of their individual documents within the web.  Figure 2.3 is an example of a Story Space map.

Figure 2.3.  A Story Space map view showing how each lexia links to other lexias in the web. Students learned to create their hypertext webs in Story Space first, and many used the mapping feature in all of their hypertext composing.

But because we only had ten copies of Story Space, students had to take turns using the computers where Story Space had been installed.  While a third of the class worked on their webs, two thirds of the class either engaged in reading workshop or looked for information to use when it became their turn to use the Story Space computers.  And, because the computers that Story Space was installed on were not connected to the internet, students could not publish their webs.  This was not an ideal situation.

However, by the following fall, 1998, the school had the new computer lab with 31 computers networked with Windows NT and connected to the internet through a cable modem.  Installed on the computers were two browsers, Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator.  With Netscape Communicator came Netscape Composer.  With grant money from the NextDay Technology Grant sponsored by the Michigan Department of Education, the school purchased enough copies of Story Space for each computer.  This meant that students had a choice as to which web editor they wanted to use.  Students tended to use Netscape Composer more often than Story Space because they found they could insert graphics more easily in Composer than in Story Space.

The Curricular Context for the Study

Throughout that 1998-1999 school year I developed an 8th grade language arts curriculum that used web composing as its primary means of negotiation.  Students worked on three large web projects throughout the year.

Why Hypertext in the Classroom?

It would be easy to simply say that more and more information will be displayed on the World Wide Web and that it is thus important that students know how to find that information and write for that particular space.  But hypertext has more power in the classroom than the easy prediction that students will need to know how to write hypertext for some future employment arena.  That may be true, but chances are the technology will continue to change and any programs students learn today will be outmoded by the time they enter the job market.

 Rather, I wanted students to experience a new role as authors.  I wanted them to create documents that overtly shifted authorial power to a reader.  I wanted them to experience first hand the knowledge that a document they had written would never be read the way they planned.  To a certain extent this is true of all text.  But hypertext, perhaps more than any other kind of text, dramatically gives the reader permission to read according to his or her agenda, not the author’s. In traditional text the reader is bound by page numbers, chapter sequences, and the author’s plan.  And while the reader has always had “permission” to skip chapters, move beyond a section, and quietly thwart the author’s organization, it has been more difficult.  But hypertext gives us permission to read the text in any order that seems best for that particular reading situation.  And the author understands this.   In many ways that seemed to free up my students.  They no longer had to guess how the teacher wanted their text organized.  They could make decisions regarding this on their own based on the availability of information, their interests of the day, and their sense of what aspects of their web needed work. They were able to shift back and forth between looking at their web more “globally,” and focusing on each “local” lexia.  It proved to be wonderful training for these emergent writers.

And in a very real sense, until my students studied the information they would ultimately include in their webs, and recreated that information into a network of information, linked, negotiated, and shared, that knowledge did not exist for them.  This is very much in keeping with constructivist classroom theory.  Knowledge doesn’t become knowledge until it is called into being by the learner.  The hypertext webs, as Snyder points out, created a fertile environment for students to call knowledge into being (103).  This is true not only for the topic each student chose for the hypertext web, but for the nature of hypertext itself.  Students cannot know how to call a knowledge of hypertext into being until they have had experience not only with reading hypertext, but with creating it.

The language arts curriculum at Riverton Middle School is a standards based curriculum, meaning that each teacher is free to select materials that he or she feels best helps students grow their literacy.  Many of the teachers within the department use some form of the workshop approach, best outlined, perhaps, by Nancie Atwell.  Students for the most part choose their own reading materials and selected their own writing topics.

As department chair I have encouraged language arts teachers to make curricular connections between language arts and other content areas.  Teachers in the department found it most convenient to connect to the eighth grade history curriculum.  Already in place was a joint language arts and history biography project.  Students would select a biography related to a figure in American history and have both language arts time and history class time to read.  History teachers asked students to make an oral presentation on their person, and language arts teachers asked students to make a large poster about the person they read about.  Both classes coordinated lessons in note taking from the books and helped students gather additional information.
When I integrated web technology into the regular curriculum in my eighth grade classroom, I changed the poster project into a web project.  So, rather than asking students to make a poster, I asked them to create a web site about the person they read. The leap from poster to web site wasn’t a great one, actually.  The posters were meant to be representations of what students had learned about the person they chose to read about.  I added a poetry annotation project at the beginning of the year where students focused on Native American poetry.  It was through this annotation project that I hoped students might learn more about the Spanish Conquest and the westward movement of white Europeans.  The biography web project allowed students to create their own opening screen and divide information into chunks that seemed logical to individual students and then link those chunks of text.

The third hypertext project I added to the curriculum originally involved students writing a piece of hypertext fiction.  It was designed to be part of a slavery unit we did, again in conjunction with something the history classes were doing.
Students in a middle school in Ghana researched the slave trade in West Africa and even took a field trip to a slave castle on the coast of Ghana.  They then wrote the first half of a slave narrative.  Our students researched the slave trade in the western hemisphere, and their task was to finish the slave narratives begun by the Ghanaian students.  The first year I incorporated the hypertext projects into my curriculum, students had to first turn the Ghanaian part of the narratives into hypertext fiction, then add their own part of the story.  This proved to be very time consuming and very frustrating.  And so I decided to revise the project.  During the year when this study took place students were asked to choose an aspect of African American history or culture and develop a website about that.  They completed the slave narratives using a word processing program and organized their text in a more traditional way.

In an effort to align the language arts curriculum with the eighth grade history curriculum in hopes of providing a better context for student reading and writing, I planned the school year around three projects--one that centered on issues related to the Spanish Conquest, another that incorporated a biography project that was already in place, and a civil war project that actually asked students to focus on some aspect of African American culture or history.

Timeline of the Study

When this study began in the fall of 1999 and I told students in my eighth grade language arts class that I was going to be gathering research for my dissertation,  they were very curious about the dissertation process and excited to think they might be a part of it.  In January 2000, just after I received permission from the university to conduct my research, I asked the students in my eighth grade class if anyone would like to volunteer for the study.  I explained that they could do an extra project or that I might talk to them extensively about a project that they were doing as part of their coursework.  Initially fourteen students volunteered.  I gave them two release forms, one for individual students to read and sign, and one for parents.  All 14 students returned their release forms within the next week.  I then had to begin the task of narrowing the field to three students.

Looking for Students Who Could Articulate Their Processes

Over the next few weeks, as I watched students build  hypertext webs, I took notes, gathered copies of journal reflections and casually interviewed students who had volunteered for the project. Knowing that I would have to winnow my study subjects to three or four students, I was looking for students who could articulate their processes and who seemed enthusiastic about sharing what they were doing with me.  I was not necessarily looking for students who could build “perfect” webs, but for students who could discuss the decisions they made, who could articulate those decisions.  And, I was also looking for students who would not feel uncomfortable in a tape-recorded interview.

Think-Alouds

Initially I thought I wanted to record students’ “think-alouds” as they composed.  And, in fact, I recorded several of these. These “think-alouds” were largely procedural, which I initially thought might be helpful.  Students explained that they were about to insert an image, or that they were going to make a link, but the tapes were often difficult to understand.  At times the sound of fingers tapping on the keyboard obliterated the soft voice that spoke into the tape recorder.  Students felt self-conscious talking into the recorder, and, in fact, one student dropped out of the study because she did not want to be seen in the computer lab apparently talking to herself.  There is no computer in my classroom, so there was no private place for students to do their think-alouds.  Ultimately, I decided to abandon that mode of data collection. I also realized that the information I had hoped to gather through the think-alouds came out in the post-project interviews I conducted.  The think-alouds did not give me any more insight into students’ hypertext composing processes than the post-project interviews and my own observations during their composing sessions.

Field Notes

 By January of 2000, I still had thirteen students who had volunteered for the study.  I had by this point taken field notes on all of those students and was beginning to narrow my field of possible study subjects.  My notes were often hurried jottings that simply said “Jeff—looked for images today.”  Or they might say “Kay—helped new student learn to make links.”  I realized that if I were to get anything more meaningful than those hurried jottings, I would have to meet with students either during my conference period, during lunch, or after school.

Winnowing the Number of Study Subjects

But a number of the students who volunteered could not stay after school either because of sports commitments or because they lived too far away and needed to ride a school bus home.  There was no other way for them to get home.  I eventually began to eliminate these students as the possible study subjects.  A number of other students seemed to be reluctant to be interviewed on tape, even though they initially agreed to do so when they volunteered for the study.  Others didn’t seem to be bothered by the tape recording process.

By the beginning of February, I had six students who I thought would be excellent study subjects, who did not mind being tape recorded, and who seemed able to work within the schedule of time that was convenient for me.  They all seemed to represent what I was seeing in the classroom as a whole.  These students were enthusiastic about their hypertext composing, even those who seemed to struggle with deciding what words or phrases should link to another lexia, establishing an opening screen that provided an overview of the web, and dealing with the mechanics of linking itself—the naming of a file and the use of that name when creating the link, a protocol that is necessary for a link to work.

 I also realized that there was a student in the classroom who had not volunteered for the study, one who was initially very resistant to the whole idea of linking the eighth grade history class content to the language arts classroom.  She was also very resistant to the technology.  But her resistance had melted only a few weeks into her first project, and over the next several months I had had a number of interesting conversations with her about her web building.  I finally asked her if she would like to volunteer for the study.  She agreed, took the permission slips home and returned them signed. I was quite sure I wanted to include this student in the study because I had established a good rapport with her, and because she was able to discuss her decisions regarding her hypertext composing clearly and thoughtfully.

Several students who volunteered for the study chose to create an extra project for the purposes of the study.  Throughout the next few months, I provided time for students who wanted to work on the additional project. I often got permission from other teachers to allow these students to work during other classroom hours.  Students also chose to go to the computer lab during their lunch period.

One of the now seven students remaining in the study was not one I initially thought I would use as one of the three study subjects.  It was sometimes difficult to get him to talk about his processes, and his web-building was sometimes erratic.  There were days when he seemed to accomplish a great deal, but there were other days when he seemed more interested in web-surfing and talking than working.  But my attitude changed when I was invited to participate in a technology showcase in Grand Rapids.  Suddenly this particular students, Aaron, became very enthusiastic and hard-working. Indeed, it may have been that he was enthusiastic and hard-working before the invitation came in, but I didn’t notice those qualities. However, I began to notice them, and I began to realize that though he may not be able to express why he made the decisions he did, the webs he was building were interesting in many ways, and that his processes reflected the experience that some of the students in my class were having.  This student, like some of my others, had difficulties deciding what to link in his web, and seemed to have difficulties controlling all the different textual threads that went into his web.  And so, I began to realize that this student could make a valuable contribution to this study.

By the end of March I had made my final decision regarding who was going to participate in the study project.  I chose a student, Susan, with whom I had an excellent rapport and who could articulate her choices regarding web-building.  I chose a boy, Aaron, who had difficulties but who, as were many of the students in the class, very enthusiastic about hypertext composing.  And I chose another student, Cathy, who was a very hard worker and who, simply enough, had an open hour during the school day to talk to me about her web composing. Including Cathy in the project was actually based on the fact that she was available, and, of course, willing to participate.

Collecting Data

Once I had my three participants, I collected and organized my notes from earlier in the year on their hypertext composing.  I also collected their earlier hypertext webs so that I could provide a history of learning for them in the chapters I would devote to those students.  I also began taking more notes about their composing.  Again, these notes were quick jottings.  And though I intended to take more complex notes as I observed them composing in an empty computer lab, my notes were still just jottings.  For example, one of my notes on Aaron, written during a lunch period composing session, reads, “Aaron—3/11—looking for squiggle image to put below written text on lexias.”

When the three study subjects finished their study projects, I interviewed them in front of a computer with the study project on the screen.  We then discussed the project and the decisions they made.

My original plan for note-taking was to interrupt the study subjects as they were making a link, or inserting an image, and ask them why they were executing that particular move.  But what often happened was that my act of interruption distracted the students, and they frequently forgot why they were making a certain decision.  This happened often enough that I decided middle school aged students were easily distracted and that I should simply observe their composing and hope that they would be able to reflect on their decisions when the project was finished.  As it turned out, this was a good decision.

My own observations of the students as they worked turned out to be quite valuable, as were the post project interviews.  When I conducted the post project interviews, I did so in front of a computer.  The student and I looked at the published project and used the various changing lexias as points of discussion.  And though I went into the interviews with a set of questions, I generally let the conversation take whatever course it did, making sure the questions were asked whenever it seemed logical at the time to pose them.

 Another valuable part of the study was the in-process projects.  It was very valuable to have the growing drafts of the projects, from hand-written or word-processed beginnings to the on-line projects that can be viewed at http://www.npatterson.net/mid.html.  These showed me the stages that each web went through and gave me some valuable insights into each student’s composing processes.

Teaching About Hypertext

It is important to understand how I taught about hypertext in order to put this dissertation study in perspective, especially since any decisions I made as a teacher affected the decisions I made as a researcher, and, indeed, affected the research design and data analysis.  Students in the class began working on their webs the second day of school.  I had compiled a packet of poems written by Native Americans and distributed it to the class.  Some of the poems dealt with issues of alienation while others dealt with culture and religion.  I scoured the library for materials on Native Americans and put together a reference library in my classroom.  I also combed local bookstores for books dealing with Native American religions.  In addition, I borrowed materials from other teachers.  By that second day of school I had a sizeable classroom library.  My students and I spent the next few days reading the poems in the packet and discussing them. I asked them to write journal entries about what they were learning.

When we finished reading the poems and doing a little research on the Spanish Conquest, I asked students to team up with another person in class and choose one poem from the packet.  I then asked them to re-read the poem and highlight any words or phrases they didn’t understand or wanted to know more about.

Two students underlined the following words in Shirley Hill Witt’s poem Punto Final:

 You Spaniards.  You evil ones
 Of the golden tongues and
 Miraculous dreamweaving!
 Once again a believing Malinche
 Finds herself with amputated
 Hands, feet, heart—like Acoma.

  You never have enough, do you?
  There are always the Seven Cities
  Of adventure beckoning
  For you to plunder, loot, rape
 Always upon the horizon
 Awaiting for your deflowering.

 And Malinche’s like me,
 We always surrender, don’t we?
 No matter how proud we be
 Always we capitulate
 In the darkest night
 To your cobra persuasion.

  This Malinche yet stands
  While the joy that had grown
  Inside her bronzen body
  Melts away searing her limbs
  With molten streams of shame,
  Of humiliation.

  Someday soon I will be
  Old and ugly and wear a wig
  And live in a foreign hotel
  Eating my meals alone.
  And I too will mouth my thoughts,
  No one to hear me.

  It must be the daiquiri
  But they all look like Navajos
  And I keep dropping my bread.
  I want to weep for La Vieja
  Two booths away,
  But I can’t:  she is me.

   --Shirley Hill Witt
 

The underlined words indicate those aspects of the poem these two students either wanted to know more about or did not understand. These became the focus for their research. During the course of the next few weeks, even though we did not have access to the computer lab, these students and their peers began a quest for information and insight into the history and literature of the Spanish Conquest.  Their search for information was based on the poem they selected.  Other poems in the packet included poems by N. Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo, Mary TallMountain, and Nila northSun, among others.

By mid-September our lab was finally open and students could take their quest for information on-line.  Using search engines and their growing knowledge of the time period, students began sifting through the enormous amount of information available to them on the World Wide Web.  This in itself was a learning experience.  They were surprised at first that a search for Acoma, for example, would turn up repair shops, real estate firms and other sites they discovered would not provide the kind of information they were looking for.   And though I showed them how to help determine which sites would be the most productive as far as information, it seemed that they had to truly learn this by trial and error.  But it did not seem to take students very long to get a sense of which items on a search engine results page would provide the kind of information they were looking for and which ones would not.  Reading a search engine results page seemed very much like reading the table of contents of a very large magazine, and students easily gained skill in doing this.

I’m not sure I was prepared for the enthusiasm my students showed once we entered the computer lab.  Generally in a middle school classroom students need to be called to order, often gently, but called nonetheless.  But I suddenly found myself in the midst of students who would enter the classroom, collect their computer disks, and rush to the lab.  They were logged on and working before the bell rang.  I was also surprised at how willing students were to help each other.  And I was almost chagrined at how quickly they outpaced me in my knowledge of Story Space.  Within a week students had learned far more about the program than I had during the summer.  And they were very eager to show me their new-found knowledge.  Their willingness to help each other out of little technical difficulties made my job easier.

My role in the classroom became that of adviser.  I helped students think of ways they could expand their webs and I assisted them with many of the technology glitches they had.  And when things really clicked, I often would stand back and watch them make decisions about their writing, help each other, and learn.  It was almost humbling to see how self-directed they were. I no longer had to nudge students back on task.    George Landow saw the same self-directed learning taking place among his Brown University students.  Hypertext may be the answer to teachers’ prayers for “active independent-minded students who take more responsibility for their education…”(Convergence 163).

We know that computers can be highly motivating classroom tools.  Part of this may have to do with what Lanham considers a sense of play when it comes to computers.  He asserts that there is something about computers that engages us in play, even when we are intent on “hard” work (72).  Certainly there are a number of studies that point out just how motivating computers can be in the classroom.  Ollila concluded that even though students were working in what was potentially a distracting environment, the power of computers held their attention for sustained periods of time (17).  I saw this happen throughout the school year, and on the days, for one reason or another, we couldn’t be in the computer lab, students were genuinely disappointed.  Even on the final day of school when the temperature in the lab was more than 90 degrees, students were still working on their projects, eager to put the finishing touches on them before the final bell rang.

 The second web project students in my class did called for them to read a biography of a famous figure from American history.  Students were asked to create a biography web about the person they read and continue doing research on that person using the World Wide Web.   I asked students to create an opening page that would give their readers choices.  Because the biography project is a joint project between the history and English departments, students were given some guidelines in their history classes regarding the kinds of information to look for (Appendix A).  The history worksheets helped guide students through their reading and ultimately helped my students create categories for their opening pages of the biography webs.  Students included such general topics as childhood, historical contexts, formative experiences, and family.  As students progressed they were able to break these down into smaller units, so that a biography web that focused on Sacagewea included opening page categories such as “Tussaint,” “Lewis,” Clark,” etc.

It was during this second web construction that I saw students truly thinking of themselves as hypertext writers. I saw them wrestling more deliberately with and their role in helping a reader move easily through the web.  They began considering color as a textual cue.  They included more graphics, and they varied their fonts in order to add variety to their lexias.  All of these were suggestions I gave them either in individual conferences or in whole class mini-lessons.  I also overheard students giving advice to other students in class that mirrored this advice.

 It was during the biography web project that I narrowed my field of subjects to five students.  These five students seemed to be very cooperative.  They consistently came in during their own free time to work on their webs.  And they seemed to be able to articulate what they were doing during their web construction.  Over the next several months I continued to observe these five students.  I collected journal reflections from them, took notes as I observed them composing, and studied their emerging webs.  I then selected three students to write about here—two girls and a boy.

 I would like to point out here that I was sensitive and sometimes uncomfortable during the data collection process because I was keenly aware that I brought to the study my own authority as the teacher of the students involved.  I knew that these three students were operating under my own definition of good hypertext composing and I felt all along that I was walking a fine line between wanting a valid study and wanting to teach the study subjects about hypertext composing.
The Study Subjects and a Preview of Chapters 3, 4, 5

Aaron
At the time of the study Aaron was an 8th grader enrolled in my language arts class.  He was a very active student who often made funny comments during class.  He was popular with his classmates and his humor was infectious.  Often, it was too infectious, and initially I had a difficult time dealing with Aaron’s behavior in class.  However, once we entered the computer lab, Aaron’s demeanor changed.  He was still humorous, but he seemed better able to focus his energies on his emerging web pages.  In the classroom it was sometimes difficult to keep Aaron focused on pen and paper tasks.

Aaron lives with his mother and sisters.  He began school in a neighboring community and lived there until he was in fifth grade, then moved with his mother and sisters to Riverton in the middle of the school year.

I chose Aaron for the study because he became a very enthusiastic web-author.  He seemed able to talk about the decisions he made as a writer, and he was willing to put in extra hours of work on his web projects.  He seemed to approach web writing as something more than just a school assignment.  In January, for example, I received an invitation to set up an exhibit of student work at the Michigan Association of Computer Users and Learners (MACUL) Technology Showcase in Grand Rapids.  I was allowed to bring six students.  When I announced the invitation to the class, Aaron was so excited about the showcase that he began working on a special website in hopes that he would become one of the students I ultimately took to the showcase.  Aaron had been one of the 14 students who volunteered for the study, but I did not seriously consider him until I saw how enthusiastic he was about the showcase.  Even then I didn’t consider using him in the study, or consider taking him to Grand Rapids, until I saw his developing web. Not only was I impressed with the special web project he was doing—on the twentieth century—but I was also impressed with the way in which he could discuss his developing web and his plans for completing it. And though I saw that Aaron was having some difficulties linking his lexias in the way that I had shown the class, I sensed that the struggles he was having were reflective of those that other students who were not part of the study were having.

Susan
Susan was also an eighth grader in my language arts class.  She is the youngest of three children in her family.  Susan’s middle brother was an exceptional student, and an exceptional writer when he was at the middle school. Susan also seemed to possess these gifts. She was an excellent student who consistently earns A’s in all her classes.  Getting good grades was very important to her, and, in fact, it seemed that getting A’s was more important than learning.  However, she worked hard to earn her A’s and seemed to always make sure she understood what the requirements were in order to insure that she could always earn an A.

For that reason, Susan was initially very resistant to doing the hypertext projects.  In an early journal entry she wrote that she did not understand why the class had to take history twice a day.  She said she would rather do language arts related lessons rather than history.  But during a conversation later in the year, Susan admitted she was worried that she wouldn’t be able to fulfill the requirements of the hypertext projects and get an A.

At first I was concerned about Susan, not because of my research, but because I wanted her to enjoy the literacy events that hypertext made possible in a classroom.  I even called Susan’s mother to let her know that I was aware of Susan’s frustration and that, if need be, I would allow Susan to do something other than hypertext projects.  I asked that we give Susan a couple of weeks to get used to the more open-ended and student-centered approach in my classroom.  Two weeks into Susan’s first hypertext project, she changed her mind and her resistance faded.  And, in fact, she discovered that she had some talent in web design.  She soon discovered that breaking a topic into smaller segments and creating individual lexias that related to each other in several ways was “fun.”  Once she saw that she could be successful academically in my class, she relaxed.

Susan has a great deal of poise and confidence.  When she wrote about her early frustrations, she did so respectfully and honestly.  And when she began enjoying her web work, she voiced those feelings also.  She often was able to help other students in the class, and did so willingly, seemingly taking quiet joy in her growing expertise and her ability to help others.  She was a very cooperative student.  And when I announced that I was looking for volunteers for this study, Susan was one of the first to turn in her permission slips.  I selected her as one the three subjects in this study because she was so cooperative, and, perhaps because of her early resistance.  I also selected her because of her ability to articulate why she made the choices she did in her web authoring.

Cathy
As were Aaron and Susan, Cathy was a student in my eighth grade language class.  And as with Aaron, I did not originally believe Cathy would end up being one of the subjects of this study.  But as the weeks went by, I realized that Cathy was a very hard worker.  She was a good student, perhaps no so much because she is good a school work, but because she is such a hard worker.  As with Susan, grades were very important to Cathy.  But I sensed that they did not come as easily to Cathy as they did to Susan.  But Cathy’s hard work and willingness to ask questions led me to believe that she would be a good subject.  She also seemed so good natured about her work.  And, like Susan, Cathy seemed to be able to easily talk about the choices she made when she composed her web projects.

Cathy is the youngest of three children and the only girl.  At the time of the study, she was active in sports and at home loved to garden.  In fact, she helped her father design the family flower gardens, using rocks, plant symmetry, height, and texture, as well as foliage and bloom color in her design considerations.

The next three chapters will show how these three individuals learned to compose hypertext webs and will highlight those initial web compositions as a way of foregrounding their web composing processes in the study project.
 
 

Abstract

List of Figs

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Appendices

Wrks Cited