Throughout the previous chapters I have investigated whether hypertext provided a space in which the three study subjects, as they composed web-based projects, could experience high degrees of textual awareness, high levels of engagement, and sense a high degree of agency as they composed in a school setting.It is important to again stress that this hypertext composing was situated in a school environment.Even the most progressive and student-centered of teachers practices in a classroom situated within a larger institution that often regiments how students spend their time, where they can go within the larger building, and generally, what they can do and say.It regiments what they read, what they write, when they are assessed and what form that assessment takes.At least to some extent school dictates when students use the restroom, when they can drink water, and when and where they can eat.Schools control students when they assign them to begin learning a given subject and when that learning should stop and move on to a different classroom and to a different subject.And they control the speed at which a given subject should be learned and the path that learning takes.And while students may attempt to disrupt the system, they are rarely successful in implementing any lasting change.In short, they have little power to create change.They have little power to make meaningful choices and see the results of those choices.Any writing conducted within this school sphere will be affected by the nature of that sphere.

Critics such as Alfie Kohn point out that one of the results of the institutional structure of school, with all its rules and authority, is disengaged students who rebel against the system by opting to only do as much work as they have to. Or the system creates compliant students who do the work out of some sense that they will either gain the approval of their families or that doing well will lead to a later goal (7). Students have learned to either adapt to a greater or lesser degree, or opt out to a greater or lesser degree, either because they don’t sense they fit into the system or because they don’t want to. Some theorists like Landowbelieve that hypertext has the power to change the face of education, either through the democratization of the world through its ability to make fluid the borders of text and/or through its ability to link millions of pieces of information (Hypertext 2.0 223-23).And, once the issue of access is resolved, perhaps it will someday.But the structures of school and the definition of school are apt to remain much the same for a while longer.However, people like Catherine Beavis theorize that some of the more troublesome aspects of schooling such as inflexible assessment practices are beginning to change because of computer technology.And, Beavis points out, many of these changes are seen in approaches to literacy that provide children with more choices, less testing and more project oriented assessment, etc. (243).It certainly is no coincidence that instruction that accepts writing as a process has come along at the same time personal computers have entered many people’s writing lives.Computers and word processing programs allow us to more easily see that writing happens through a recursive process that is individual to each writer and often individual to each writing event.

The purpose of this dissertation, however, was not to discuss student agency or the lack of it in a school setting, but to investigate the ways in which working within a hypertext environment affected the writing processes of three middle school students.We saw that the three students in this study, though they all had some exposure to electronic multi-linear text, including hypertext, initially had no experience composing text of that nature.For two of the three study subjects, Aaron and Cathy, that lack of composing experience impacted their first web projects.Lack of experience and perhaps comfort with the technology can be might be seen in their less imaginative layout, their difficulties in finding or establishing interesting links, and their struggles with the multi-linearity of the overall structure.This does not mean that they did not have experience with the concept of multi-linearity.It simply means that they had not consciously addressed the concept through the composition of their own texts. But their struggles during their first web composing project may, too, have been examples of what Mina Shaughnessy witnessed when students paid more attention to surface features than to their written expression.It may be that Cathy and Adam were paying more attention to the technology of writing during that first web composing experience than the content of their webs.

For Susan, of course, that initial web composing experience meant early frustrations that seemed to cause problems in the way in which she approached the act of composing.Those problems, once her concerns about grades were addressed, diminished and she composed a very fine web project with associational links, a unifying graphic, interesting visual layout, and interesting information presented with a minimum of surface errors. However, we can see that all three students, by the time they approached their third project, the study project, were able to consider such things as unifying graphics, interesting layouts, interesting written text, and workable links.And they were able to talk about the choices they used as writers, the rhetorical decisions they made regarding graphics and color, and the choices they made regarding linking pieces of text together.

Articulating their processes seemed an important developmental step and one that came after the technology of hypertext began to disappear for the students, after they could focus more on creating text than creating text with a new technology.Susan always seemed the most articulate when it came to talking about what she was doing and why.She had probably developed her writing abilities more quickly than her peers, or she was more aware of herself as author.Certainly she was the most accomplished writer of the three prior to the hypertext experience.Aaron and Cathy, however, became sophisticated enough as hypertext authors to articulate their plans for their developing study project webs, revise those plans as necessary, and adjust their composing to those new plans. However, I need to point out that other students in the class were also able to articulate their plans for their developing webs.It seemed that as they became more experienced with the technology, they became more aware of what the technology could do for them and they could plan more clearly and, ironically, with greater flexibility.In other words, as they became more accustomed to the technology they were better able to make plans, and adjust those plans as needed.

What I found as I observed and listened to Aaron, Susan, and Cathy, and the others in the class, was that they were highly involved in their own composing processes, that they were able to make decisions based on what they knew about their topic, their perceived audiences, and their own abilities to use technology to construct text. While it may be that once these students released their hypertext webs into the wilds of the World Wide Web, their authorship was de-centered by a kinesthetically active reader, the act of composing centered them as authors in ways that I had not consistently seen before in students who were engaged in more traditional acts of composition, whether those acts took place in a word processing space or in hand written spaces. In this final chapter I will take the three points that I am arguing—engagement, textuality, and agency, separate them, and show how the three study subjects exhibited increased awareness of these three elements as they worked through their study project.To do this, I will discuss the similarities and differences in the ways they selected their topics, made their links, worked with graphics, images, and color, and controlled their writing processes.Figure 6.1 serves as a summary of those elements of the students’ processes.
 

Invention and Drafting Strategies	Aaron	Susan	Cathy
Topic Selection	Selected timely topic that could be subdivided into many smaller topics so he could write a lexia on each smaller topic and create a “good” web as defined by teacher	Selected topic that would provide enough lexias to insure a top grade	Selected topic that was interesting to her and that had enough subtopics for her to create enough lexias for a “good” web as defined by teacher
Pre-writing	Read a book that helped him establish his sub-topics	Read a novel and used notes taken for history class	Looked up information on the internet
Drafting	Wrote each lexia by hand in a spiral notebook	Composed in a word processing program	Wrote each lexia by hand in a spiral notebook
Control	Wrote links at bottom of handwritten lexia and indicated where link would take reader	Composed first in word processing program, labeling linking words and destinations, re-labeling again when pasting into web editing program (Lexia 1 became “Opening”)	Highlighted linking words in hand written draft, noting links and destinations at the bottom of hand written lexias.
Links
Placement	At bottom of written text, below leaf decoration	In the body of the text (intertextual)	In the body of the text (intertextual)
Destination	To the “chronologically” next event	Sometimes to an “associational” lexia, sometimes to a lexia that doesn’t seem to have much to do with the linking word	Associational
Layout and Design
Text Placement	Written text sandwiched between graphic bar elements with links at the bottom of the screen	Written text placed between two horizontal bars	Written text placed in a table opposite image
Image Placement	No images. Used graphic decorative horizontal bars	Image placed at top of lexia in center	Image placed in a table opposite text
Background	Used background image of flag, Statue of Liberty, etc., in keeping with topic	Used beige background with railroad track border to indicate Underground, which was in keeping with topic of slavery	Used a plain black background, no image or wallpaper
Engagement levels	Worked during lunch and at home. Project not required for a grade. Found web composing “fun”	Worked at home using word processing program. Found web composing “fun”	Worked during unassigned hour at school and at home, sometimes on bus to track meets. Found web composing “fun”
Home computer access	None	Yes, with internet access	Yes, with internet access

Figure 6.1. A comparison of the three study subjects, showing their prewriting and drafting strategies, their linking strategies, layout considerations, and evidence of their engagement levels.

Engagement

Alfie Kohn reminds us that when students lack interest or engagement in classroom tasks, they learn less and they spend less time on those tasks.Conversely, when they are engaged, they learn more and they spend more time on the task, “even if the process takes a while” (What to Look for 4). The students in this study were so highly engaged that they spent considerable time outside of school working on their projects. And what is interesting in this regard is that they used their out-of-school time to do the less appealing, in their eyes, tasks involved in the project.Both Cathy and Aaron spent out-of-school time hand writing their lexias.Aaron also used his out-of-school time to research his topic. Susan composed her lexias using a word processing program.According to their post-project interviews, they did this so that they could devote school time to the tasks within the process they enjoyed the most—working with graphics, color, and linking.They were all willing to do “the grunt work,” spending many hours outside of school, in order to “play” with color and images at school where they had access to the program they worked with.Each web project took approximately five weeks to complete.

Perhaps more telling than the work these students did outside of class was the attitude with which they approached their hypertext composing.Cathy and Susan were good students who could be expected to work on projects outside of school time.Aaron was perhaps a little more casual about doing work outside of school, but he was able to maintain good grades.What struck me most as I observed these three students was the intensity in which they approached their work and the attention to details.It wasn’t enough for them to simply put together a collection of lexias.They had to find just the right background, or just the right images and color combinations.All three students commented that this was the part of the composing process they enjoyed the most.Remember that Bradford Barry found that students who created hypertext projects experienced a high degree of what he called “rhetrinsic motivation.”What is perhaps even more interesting is the fact that this rhetrinsic motivation took place with the other students in the class.Aaron, for example, was not the only student to come into the computer lab during lunch.Other students in the class also chose to spend most of their lunch period throughout the year working on their webs.Indeed, this does not seem to be an isolated phenomenon.

Much of the heightened sense of engagement that Susan, Aaron, and Cathy experienced in the act of composing hypertext seemed to come about because of the heightened awareness of textual features.Susan responds in her post project interview , ”I like to design a lot.I really like designing.And you get to kinda choose your own page and how you want it to be presented, I just like to really get into it…” (Appendix E). Cathy pointed out that she liked working in hypertext because she enjoyed the research aspect of her projects, but she also said “[I} like designing a different layout.It’s kinda neat.Like I haven’t really seen this anywhere before…the colors are different…I like them” (Appendix G).And Aaron found the “fun part” happened when he “was looking on the internet and looking at different websites…for different backgrounds and stuff like that” (Appendix B).

We cannot ignore the power of the visual in hypertext composing and we cannot ignore the power of the manipulation of those visual elements as one of the factors that engaged the three students in this study, as well as other students in the classroom.Keene and Zimmerman (1997) point out that the inclusion of images in student response and in student writing indicates a high degree of comprehension and that images spoke to students emotions and their senses (129-30). Bolter points out that the verbal writing space of print technology has become penetrated (or is penetrated by) “the pictorial space of the image” (79).In her chapter entitled “The Aesthetics of the Medium” in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Janet Murray talks about the ways in which images satisfyingly immerse a reader in a pleasurable environment.And though Murray refers to gaming images and virtual reality, it was the immersive quality of electronic images, illuminated the way they are by a computer monitor, that so captured the students in this study.Or it could be that the computer allowed them to use professional quality images and design methods such as placing images and text into such visual organizers as tables that so motivated students.

All three students commented in their post project interviews that what they really liked about hypertext composing was the time they spent on the computer.It was because they were able to negotiate visual elements such as color, images, and links that the three students in this study were highly engaged in the act of composing.

Kathryn Henderson reflects on the growing area of visual literacy and explains that in a world where images convey so much meaning, children are called upon to be visually literate. And the more they are able to construct meaning with images that better they become at that mode of meaning construction (196).

We also cannot ignore the role of play when discussing hypertext composing and the role of the visual in that play. Jay Bolter reminds us that writing “is the creative play of signs, and the computer offers us a new field for that play.It offers a new surface for recording and presenting text together with new techniques for organizing our writing” (10).It is that play, perhaps, and the ease with which that play could be carried out on the electronic surface that so engaged the three students in this study.Remember that a number of studies concluded that students experienced a high degree of involvement when they composed using a computer.

Deborah Brandt proposes that effective writers and readers are aware of “what a text is saying and what it is saying about what [the writer is] supposed to [be] doing” (5).She adds that literacy “is a fundamental, enabling awareness of the mutual work that is under way around an unfolding text, a growing understanding of how language and work (text and context) constitute each other” (5). And later she points out that writing “is not merely a matter of preparing a text for an eventual reader but also a matter of maintaining the conditions that keep writing itself going” (8).The three students in this study were able to maintain the conditions for their writing, evidence that engagement was happening.Indeed, it is remarkable the pains these students took to maintain the conditions of their writing.

Cathy read and printed pages and pages of information from the internet about Bald Eagles, and then carefully codified that information in a spiral notebook where she highlighted linking words and noted their destination (Figure 5.8). Aaron, knowing he had difficulties controlling his web-composing processes, also took care to write his lexias in a spiral notebook, carefully planning his links and lexias, carefully selecting a topic that enabled him to maintain and control the conditions of his composing (Figure 3.6). And Susan maintained those conditions by controlling her processes in a word processing program, highlighting her links, renaming her lexias on her word-processed sheet (Figure 4.10). It may very well be that it was the visual elements that allowed them to maintain those conditions.They had the smart tools at their disposal, tools that allowed them to use color and insert images that added to the overall textual sophistication of their emerging texts, tools that allowed the condition of composing to be maintained.

Bradford Barry concluded in his dissertation that students who compose hypertext are highly motivated because they become immersed in “concerns for rhetorical matters of audience, purpose, arrangement and/or style” (iii).And certainly the students in this study experienced those concerns.Working within a hypertextual space allowed the students in this study to become highly aware of audience. Aaron gave directions to his imagined reader, explaining how to negotiate his 20th Century web. He also considered his reader when he placed his written text between his starts and stripes banner and his “squiggle” graphic.

Susan established her opening screen of her slavery web with her audience in mind.She said in her post project interview:

“You want to give them options to go anywhere they want to start out, and it gives them a way so they don’t have to go through everything to find out what they want.So it has all the links set up…” (Appendix E).

There is another reason why these three students were highly engaged in the act of composing hypertext webs.What they were doing was “meaning full.”This speaks, again, to Deborah Brandt’s premise that engagement happens when students can maintain the conditions of writing.The students in this study were allowed to select their own topics and research them in whatever direction those topics took them.They were free to find whatever associations or connections they could and they were free to find images and other graphics they believed meaningful to their project.They were free to maintain their own conditions for writing.Hypertext is an ideal vehicle, albeit not the only one, for this discursive freedom. It requires that students do more than make marks on a piece of paper.It asks them to find associations between chunks of text, therefore almost automatically placing students in a position where they must consciously employ metacognitive thinking.The student must ask himself or herself “What relationship does this word or concept have with something else I will write or have written?”Or the author must ask herself or himself “What relationship does this have with something else I should link to?”That metacognition and the dialogue between the writer, a potential audience, and the content of the web itself became powerful elements of engagement for the study subjects. Bolter reminds us that semioticians now suggest that the mind is itself a web of text, a “writing space filled with interwoven signs” (208).

And we cannot ignore the power of textual play.Remember that Bolter refers to writing as textual play.Jerome Bruner claims that “It is not so much instruction in either language or thinking that permits the child to develop his powerful combinatorial skills, but a decent opportunity to play around with his language and to play around with his thinking that does the trick” (81). And this seems to be exactly what happened with Aaron, Susan, and Cathy.They “played around” with the “language” of hypertext, the images, color, fonts, graphics, and links that go into hypertext composing.

An example of the “playing around” took place one afternoon when Aaron was working on his 20th Century web.He was trying to find a background image for his lexias.I watched him for fifteen minutes as he scrolled and clicked his way through an internet site that contained free graphics for people to use on web pages.He would harvest a background from that website, save it in his file on the school server, than insert it in a lexia.He would then go back to the image site, find another background, and go through the process again.When I asked him what he was looking for, he replied that he didn’t know but that he would recognize it when he saw it.As it turned out, he did not find that day the background image that he would ultimately use.But the trying out of backgrounds, the playing around with that aspect of his web constituted very purposeful play.

Textuality

Another aspect of my investigation looked at the issue of textuality and whether or not hypertextenabled a greater awareness of textuality in the three study subjects.Landow points out that hypertext challenges us to rethink what we mean by the term “text” (Hypertext 2.0 59). Much of this is due to the fact that hypertext “radically changes the experiences that reading, writing, and text signify [because they are] so burdened with the assumptions of print technology” (Hypertext 2.0 57). Landow explains that part of the problem in using print technology terms when discussing hypertext is that hypertext challenges readers to be more active, taking on the role of author at times.Of course, this can happen theoretically for any piece of text, whether it is electronic or not.But the role of the reader in hypertext, because of the hypertext link, becomes at least more kinesthetic. Much of that stems from the semiotic significance of the hypertext link.

But part of the difficulty is due to the inter-relationship, the intertextuality perhaps, of color, images, words, and links that create not only an ecosystem within a given lexia, but an ecosystem of all related lexias. This ecosystem, which changes when the reader or writer moves about the lexia or within the hypertext web itself is created not only through the hypertext link, but through the meaning both reader and writer bring to the transaction with the texts.But Landow goes even further when he considers the textuality of hypertext.He includes the cursor, that visual reminder of the reader or writer’s presence in the text (Hypertext 2.0 59-60).

We only need to look at Adam’s quest for just the right graphic to see the heightened sense of textuality that he brought to his composing acts.If we look at any lexia within his 20th Century web we see a background image in keeping with the topic of his web.We see a horizontal bar with stars and stripes, again in keeping with his topic.And we see other carefully placed visuals that Aaron deliberately inserted either to make his lexia more appealing or more readable.

Aaron placed his textual elements very carefully.When I asked him in his post project interview why he decided to place his title in a particular place on his lexias, he said:
To separate the page is why I did that, so people knew that was the title and that underneath that was the text and that underneath that that icon is is where the links would be, and extra information (Appendix B)
We do not see random or haphazard placements of textual features, but a conscious consideration of how the individual elements work together to create a meaningful whole, an ecosystem of meaning.
Susan, too, made very conscious decisions about the placement of textual elements.In her post project interview she said:

I center my text two or three times, and then I tied the spaces in between, like my home page link and then my information, and then I make sure I have a space on each side so everything’s spaced out the same with the lines, and then I try to have the same space in between that and the picture.And then so everything’s space out and centered, and then I have a better background (Appendix E).

Again we see great attention to the textual elements on the page.Susan chose her color scheme carefully.On one occasion I observed her trying various color schemes—grey, black, and red.At one point she also tried various background images.But she finally settled on a cream background with a railroad border that symbolized the Underground Railroad.Again we see an ecosystem of meaning: the railroad track border existing with the written text about slavery, which is hemmed in by two horizontal bars.Above the bar is an image that works with the written text, the color and border.Each element in some way is dependant on the others yet by itself conveys meaning.

And of course we see much the same attention to textuality in Cathy’s decisions to place her written text and images in a table.Like Aaron, Cathy spent a great deal of time searching for just the right visual elements for her web site, and she experimented with various colors of text until she found the combination that look “more attractive.”She also decided her lexias looked between when she placed text and images in a table. She said:

I typed each one without a table, and then separated the [columns]. I chose the amount of [columns] I wanted from how much…writing there was (Appendix G).

Agency

Students experienced a great deal of agency as they composed their webs.If we think of agency as the ability to exercise control over language, or, as Janet Murray says as “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices” (126) then we can begin to see that the students in this study felt a great deal of agency as they worked through their project.As always, we have to situate this sense of agency into the broader context of a school environment that does not necessarily acknowledge or enable student agency.But the very fact that two of the study subjects chose to create hypertext webs that were not required by the classroom teacher is an indication that these students were not only highly engaged in hypertext composing, but saw themselves as situated within an environment where they could control textual features and information.And though Susan’s slavery project was part of the classroom curriculum, we can see that her change in attitude from the beginning of the course to the point where she composed her slavery web was really a change in the sense of agency she felt as a hypertext writer.When she felt she had no control over the technology and, by extension, her grade, she sensed little agency.Once she realized that she could work successfully within a hypertext environment, she embraced it.

Henry Giroux in a chapter in Counter Narratives: Critical studies and critical pedagogies in postmodern spaces , argues that the “schizoid images, proliferating public spaces and an increasing fragmentation…” (74) are opening up new interactive terrains that blur boundaries and cut across elements that separated students from any sense of legitimacy in a modern world. He urges educators to acknowledge that “identities among youth are being produced in spheres generally ignored by schools” (74).One of those spheres, of course, exists in an electronic world of e-mail, instant messages, electronic gaming, and the fast paced images of music videos and on-line fan sites with streaming video, chat rooms, and web forums. Giroux further argues that students must be placed in environments where they can experience agency-building in spaces such as those mentioned above where they can be authentically accountable to themselves and others (75).A hypertext environment would certainly be another one of those agency-building spaces, as indeed it was for Cathy, Susan, and Aaron.

We see that agency in the textual decisions these three students made, their search for images, their decisions regarding where to place their textual elements.We also see it in the engagement levels these three experienced.These students found themselves immersed in a textual environment that allowed them to make decisions regarding their emerging text, test those decisions, rethink them if they found it necessary, and create something they were willing to show to a larger world, a world beyond the confines of a classroom or a school.

Each study subject recognized the need to control his or her composing, and that they took the extra time to draw maps, handwrite lexias, or compose in a word processing program suggests they felt a great deal of agency as they worked.Each student recognized his or her need and acted upon that need in a way he or she believed best for that particular writing task.

Revisiting the Initial Study Questions

In Chapter One I listed a series of questions that I wanted to address in this dissertation.This next section will revisit those questions and provide short summary answers to them.First, we must acknowledge that these students used writing processes similar to those found in other composing situations.They invented, they drafted, they revised, they edited, and they published.And they negotiated these phases in a recursive manner.Those phases were never in question when I began this study. I expected to see students moving through the various stages of that writing process.What I wanted to find out was how they would go about those stages in a hypertext environment.

• How do students approach the process of composing hypertext webs?

• What role does agency play?

If we define agency as the ability to make decisions regarding one’s writing and seeing the results of those decisions, then we can see that the three study subjects experienced a great deal of agency as they composed their webs.Much of that can be attributed, I think, to the electronic environment in which they worked.Janet Murray writes:

The more realized the immersive environment, the more active we want to be within it.When the things we do bring tangible results, we experience the second characteristic delight of electronic environments—the sense of agency.Agency is the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices.We expect to feel agency on the computer screen when we double click on a file and see it open before us…(126)

When we speak of textuality in hypertext, we must address the very important role that visual elements such as color and graphics play. We saw that visual elements played a large role in the composing processes of the students involved in this study.The students involved in this study added visual elements carefully and used them to do more than just illustrate their written text.The visual elements became as much a consideration in the study subjects’ composing processes as the written text, moving beyond mere illustration.We need only look at the stark black background of Cathy’s bald eagle web, see the black and white line drawings of bald eagles, and the white text against the black background to see a beautiful marrying of written text, color, and images, set within a table to see how visual elements played a part in Cathy’s composing processes.Snyder reminds us that hypertext challenges us to pay attention to more than just the verbal, and that learning to exploit graphics is one of the new demands required of technology users.Certainly the students in this study exploited graphics and other visual elements in the process of constructing meaning through hypertext composing.

• What role does engagement play in students’ hypertext composing processes?

• In what way, if any, does a sense of audience affect decisions the student authors make?

Susan, who commented in her post project interview about how much she enjoyed designing her lexias, added that she liked making them “reader friendly.”But she also pointed out that she enjoyed the fact that her webs all had a similar look to them.But in her interview she also added that she wanted her lexias noticeable.She says “I wanna make [the reader] wanna see my page” (Appendix E).She then pointed out that she often finds herself not reading lexias on the internet because they simply do not look interesting enough to read.“…I don’t even find myself reading the text sometimes just ‘cause it’s so boring” (Appendix E).Susan sensed herself as a critical audience and composed her lexias according to her own critical criteria. She was able to engage in the dialogue as both reader and writer.This should not be surprising, given Susan’s previous writing experience and the maturity of her writing abilities.That she could carry out that mature behavior in a hypertext environment is significant.

• How do the student authors decide what their links will be?

In Susan’s slavery web, in the lexia entitled “middle passage,” the reader can click on the phrase “slave trade” and be taken to a lexia that discusses how the African slave trade began in Europe in the 1500’s.From there, the word “Atlantic” takes the reader to a lexia about slave ships.So, we again see the association or relational thinking that connects blocks of text.

What we see in Aaron’s lexias, however, is somewhat different.Remember that Aaron struggled with showing his relational thinking in his links.This does not mean that Aaron did not engage in associational thinking.It means that he was not yet able to control the multi-linearity of hypertext and his associational thinking.And so we see something very clever that works quite well in his 20th Century web.We see Aaron making chronological links that take the reader “ahead” one lexia, “back” one lexia, and “home.”So, presented with the problem of giving the reader choices, Aaron did so.He simply did not make full use of the multi-linear possibilities of hypertext.That he did so in his next project indicates that Aaron simply needed more experience with hypertext in order to “get the hang” of it.And we can see that he needed more time in which to explore the territory between his knowledge of linked text and his ability to use web technology to show that knowledge.However, we cannot dismiss the fact that Aaron’s web is visually delightful and that he provides his reader with information about what Aaron believes are important events in the 20th century.

• How do students keep track of multiple textual threads within a single hypertext web?

Aaron and Cathy both organized their webs in spiral notebooks first.Cathy used a pink highlighter to indicate her linking words or phrases.And she made a legend at the bottom of each handwritten lexia that indicated where each linking word or phrase would take the reader.In her “Partners” lexia, for example, she wrote the word “eagles” then drew and arrow, then wrote the words “bald eagles,” indicating that when a reader clicked on “eagles,” the reader would be taken to a lexia entitled “bald eagles.”Prior to composing her eagles project, Cathy had kept track of her textual threads by creating a Story Space map.But she decided she didn’t need to go through that step when she composed her eagle project.

Aaron, of course, kept track of his textual threads by never getting too far away from each lexia.In other words, by linking his lexias chronologically forward and back, he was able to maintain control of his textual threads.What is interesting, of course, is that in the project that Aaron did after he completed his study project, he linked his lexias more “intertextually.”But he also created at the bottom of his lexia two other options for his readers.One option took the reader to the “next” lexia, and the other option took the reader “back” to the “previous” lexia.Aaron was able to better control the multi-linearity of his links, but he still wanted to keep the “forward” and “back” option that he used in his 20th Century web.

• How do students maintain control of their composing processes within a multi-linear domain?

Cathy, of course, did much the same thing, which again, was a surprise.She seemed to be the most “hypertextual” of the three students, something I attribute to her gardening experience and her experiences with instant messaging and e-mail.But she seemed to believe that in order to control her composing, she had to plan ahead.And that plan was best realized by handwriting her lexias.

Susan’s beginning processes, of course, involved writing her lexias at home using a word processing program.She save everything to a disk, brought it to school, and then copied and pasted into a web editor.She did not feel the need to map out her web, but used her “linear” word-processed document as her guide when she began work within the web editing program she used.

Classroom Implications

One only has to look at the archives of NCTE-Talk or other English Language Arts discussion lists to see that teachers are constantly looking for ways to engage students.And though hypertext composing is not the only way in which to engage students in the act of composing, it certainly is one way to immerse students in a text-rich environment that gives them the opportunity to experience the types of agency that “real” authors experience.Michael Joyce seems to be correct when he theorizes that hypertext is a discursive form that allows novice writers to adapt cognitive skills that experts use routinely.The attention to detail and the deliberate quest for control over their writing processes are things that language arts teachers should continually want to see in their students.That composing hypertext webs can create this urgency in students is almost startling.And so too is the sight of 28 students intent over the act of composing, not because they are told to by an authority figure, but because they want to, because they are engaged in a meaningful act.

Writing is technology.And each shift in technology impacts how we define and redefine literacy.Part of the current shift in technology, from print culture to electronic is the fast-paced often disrupted and disruptive jumble of images, sounds, lights, shadows, screens, plot, and conversations.Our students are already a part of these “disruptures.”As literacy educators we are called upon to ask our students to create and reflect upon these disruptures so that they, as students, will be able to communicate and grow, to approximate and confirm their growing senses of text and textuality.

Literacy is an active endeavor.It is the act of constructing meaning. And hypertext composing offers a rich environment for meaning construction, for interaction with one’s own emerging text.It offers novice writers a fertile environment in which to problem solve, in which to acquire confidence and competence.It involves a myriad of meaning making activities that involve inventing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing.And because it is so engaging, because it seems to bring with it that wonderful sense of meaningful play, it may very well do what Michael Joyce believes.It may “unlock those [cognitive] skills for novice learners and…empower and enfranchise their learning” (40).Certainly it had that power for the three students in this study, and for their classmates.

I would offer a number of suggestions for teachers who want to implement hypertext composing into their classroom curricula.The first would be to allow students a great deal of choice in not only their topic selection but in the threads they decide to include in their webs.If hypertext web composing is going to be an effective classroom form of writing, students must be allowed to learn and then make the associational links that make hypertext so compelling.These links will largely depend on student interests.For example, one student who was not part of this study chose to annotate “Punto Final,” the same poem Cathy chose to annotate.But this student discovered information about Navajo Code Talkers during World War II and so he chose to create a whole textual thread dealing with the Code Talkers.His link from the poem was the word “Navajo.”And though the poem itself did not deal with World War II, the student, by making the association between the word Navajo and the information he found during his research, was able to “justify” that link.Students should be allowed that kind of freedom when they explore the possibilities for their webs.

Another suggestion for teachers is that they allow students to approach web composing in a variety of different ways.We see in the study subjects that two of them controlled their composing processes by handwriting lexias first in a spiral notebook.Susan, of course, used a word processing program.Just as teachers try to encourage and model various pre-writing strategies for novice writers, so should they model and accept various approaches to hypertext composing.And certainly one of those approaches, one of the choices students should have in their array of strategies, is mapping, either in a computer program such as Story Space, or in a less expensive graphic organizing program such as Inspiration. And, of course, students can map their documents by hand.

In a political environment that is calling for more “inauthentic” assessment such as standardized tests, published, student-composed hypertexts, displayed on the world wide web either on school domains or on the free web hosting services available, has the power to show others the type of writing and thinking that novice learners can accomplish.Hypertext webs should be published.They should serve as artifacts of learning.

And they should serve as vehicles for learning.That learning would include, of course, the technical elements of composing electronically.But we cannot overlook how much each of the study subjects learned about the topics they chose to investigate.Hypertext composing seems to be a wonderful vehicle through which students can learn more about a given subject.

It is no surprise that electronic resources such as the world wide web will become an increasing presence in our students lives.It should become an increasing presence in their classrooms as well. John Slatin, in an article about reading hypertext, points out that “Reading, in hypertext, is understood as a discontinuous or nonlinear process which, like think, is associative in nature, as opposed to the sequential process envisioned by conventional text” (874). And though Slatin is talking about hypertext reading, something students will continue to experience as the world wide web and other hypertexts become more present, his point about associative thinking is a good one.Students will need to practice, to experience the kind of associative thinking that goes into not only reading, but writing hypertext.Slatin points out“Linear thinking specifies the steps it has taken; associative thinking is discontinuous—a series of jumps like the movements of the mind in creating metaphor” (875).Hypertext composing places students in an environment where they must deliberately think about the relationships between pieces of text, and where they must broaden their definition of text to include other visual elements.

Implications for Further Research

As with most studies there are a number of areas in which more research needs to be done.

1.A comparison study is needed in order to investigate the differences in individual students’ print culture text composing and those students’ hypertext composing in order to compare such issues as agency, senses of audience and textuality, and levels of engagement and investment in the composing processes.

2.This study investigated the processes middle school students used to compose informational text.Other studies could focus on hypertextual argumentation and hypertext fiction.

3.<![endif]>Further investigations into the role the ways in which textual play affects composing processes would be very interesting. Play seems to be an important element in this study and it would be interesting to further investigate the extent that textual play enters into other students’ hypertext composing.

4.<![endif]>I deliberately chose to include both genders in this study.It would be interesting to see if there were any gender-based issues that affected how students controlled the multi-linear aspects of hypertext, the conscious sense of play involved in the composing processes, and the ways in which gender may or may not affect the use of visual elements.

5.<![endif]>Since we live in an era of chat rooms, instant messages, and electronic gaming, it would be interesting to study whether these electronic environments impacted in any way students’ authorial decisions.

6.<![endif]>It would also be interesting to compare the hypertext composing processes of more experienced hypertext authors to see how they controlled the multi-linear aspects of hypertext, how they used visual elements in their webs, and how they addressed issues regarding audience.

Ilana Snyder reminds us that no technology can guarantee a particular type of learning in students.Hypertext composing holds great promise for the classroom, but it does so only when the classroom is a space for authentic meaning-making. Its potential to build student awareness oftextuality, and increase agency and involvement is less likely to happen if students cannot choose their own topics and follow their own interests once they begin their web composing processes. But in a classroom where hypertext reading and writing is allowed to take place along with other meaning-based literacy events, students will become involved in text, discover multiple textualities, and become agents in their own literacy processes.
 
 

Abstract

List of Figs

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Appendices

Wrks Cited