English 351, "Hypertext"
Fall 2003
MWF 11-12
408 stv

Jim Kalmbach (kalmbach@ilstu.edu)
421H Stevenson 438-7648, home: 454-8017
Class website: http://www.english.ilstu.edu/351/
Office Hours: MWF 12-1 and by appointment.

I define hypertext as nonlinear text/nonlinear reading whether in print or electronic form. In this class, we will study the history, theory, and practice of nonlinear writing and reading, focusing on the World Wide Web. During the semester, we will explore publishing on the web through a number of informal activities and three major projects. "Hypertext" is a class which focuses on the rhetoric and design of web sites. The emphasis is on creating attractive, clearly written, intuitively organized sites with easy-to-follow navigational schemes.

Texts
Krug, Steven, Don't Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah & Montfort, Nick. The New Media Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Towers, J Tarin Macromedia Dreamweaver Visual Quick Start. Optional

 

Software (Recommended if you have a recent computer)
Dreamweaver MX (newer than the class version but mostly compatible). Available for $99 at the Alamo

 

Virtual Learning Spaces
Class listserv
Listserv archive
Class Community Website This is a new feature of the class and it make take me a few weeks to get a handle on it so please cut me some slack here.

Course Requirements

• Attendance and Participation (10%)
  Participation includes the following activities (as I don't have a better place to put them.): You will post reading responses (informal reactions to the ideas in the text) to our class community site if I can get it working. As part of participation, you will write responses to the readings and post these responses to our listserv. You must post your response before we discuss the reading in class. Also as part of participation, you will post questions for discussion about a reading prior to the discussion, and you will participate in our cool site of the week project, a project in which you post the URL to a site you think is particularly interesting or effective and lead us on an exploration of that site. We will sign up for cool sites on Wednesday 8-20.
  
  
• Web Site Critiques (10%)
  You will write two critiques of web sites during the semester. The goal of these critiques is to develop critical skills in looking at the web. The first critique should be of a site that explores ideas or creative expression. The second critique will be of an organizational site of some sort.
  
  
• Student Web Site Response team (15%)
  I will place each of you in a website response team. The task of the members of your team is to respond to each others evolving website. I value thoughtful specific responses that engage with the details of the site. For each project, you should provide each of the web authors with feedback twice, first when they post their web prototype and second when they have a complete draft site up. We will use our community website to track these responses.
  
  I used these response teams with good success last semester, when the students shared their project urls on time. In groups where everyone followed the schedule, student got valuable feedback in a timely manner. In other groups, however, some of the students did not post their urls until extremely late in the process and/or made comments too late in the process to help the author. To address this issue, I have made the following changes: (1) I have increased the impact on your grade of participating in the response teams. (2) I will review and evaluate your comments for the first two projects (3) I will reduce your grade if you do not participate or are extremely late. I hope being a hard ass helps because when these teams function, they are extremely helpful.
  
  
• You will work on three major projects (70%) More information about the project process is available at the end of this page.:

  Repurposing You will pick a print document that you have written (it can be any genre: fiction/poetry/essay/technical writing, autobiography, etc.) You will turn this document into a website and write a preface attached to the site discussing what you feel web publishing adds to and takes away from the original document. Please send me an email (kalmbach@ilstu.edu) telling me what you want to do your repurposing on and why, that is how you think reconceiving this text on the web will add value to it. As part of this project, you will write a reflective paper, telling me, why you choose your text, how you changed the text for the web, why you segmented the texts into individual pages in the manner that you did, and how in your view the web version is different from the print (whether better or worse). How does the web add to or take away from the experience of reading your document. This paper may be done as a webtext and linked to your project, or turned in on paper. Either way is fine with me.
  
  Identity You will create a web site that constructs some aspect of your identity.
  
  Final Project You will end the semester creating a major web on a topic of your choosing. There are no restrictions in terms of genre or topic.
  

• Portfolio (5%)
  You will assemble your projects from the class into an electronic portfolio and write a reflective essay about the projects and about what you have learned in the class.
  
  
• Graduate students will do an additional project of some sort that they construct in a manner that will advance their education and/or career. In most cases, this project will be a paper (see gradpapers.html for more info) in print or electronic form because writing a reflective paper is the best preparation for your comprehensives. As part of your research for this project, you must do a certain amount of critical, reflective reading, basically at least a book (or an equivalent number of print or electronic articles). To ensure that you get credit for your reading, include a "Sources Consulted" section in addition to a "References" section in your final project. If you wish to make the case a project that doesn't involve a reflective/critical component, then you will need to do independent reading in some area and write a response.

See the sections in the course website on Grading, Critiques, and Schedule for more information about the class.

The project process
For each of the three projects, we will work through a five week process:

Week 1: Proposal You write a simple, informal proposal telling me what you want to do for your project, why you want to do it, and what ideas you have for the project at this point.

Week 2: Prototype I am a big believer in getting something up on the web quickly getting feedback, refining the design and then gradually adding content and links. Act fast, test, and refine. Your prototype is often just a single page that shows off your design plan the information architecture of your site (how things are organized). One of the values of a prototype is that you can often catch major problems before you invest huge amounts of time spreading those problems through your site. To help you spot those problems, your response team will usually meet in class at this point to talk about the prototypes.

Week 3: Preview This is the hardest week in the process. A preview draft has all of the pages done for your site. It is basically a rough draft of the entire site. Once you get this done, you can then go back and fine tune. At this point, the students in your response team should work through this draft outside of class and provide detailed feedback. I need a record of that feedback so we will use our community site for this purpose (more details to come).

Week 5: Rollout At this point, you are ready to go public. You rollout version 1 of your site. T-shirts all around. It is time to move on to the next project. At this point, I will go back and do a formal evaluation. You can, of course, continue to make changes to the site until the end of the semester, and I will try to provide you with clear feedback about what things need to be changed and what issues you need to think about in your next site.