The Early Days of My Internet-based Teaching
I began using the web in my teaching in the Fall of 1996. That first year I tried having students create web pages in 3 of my classes, English 101: College Writing (Sections 4 and 9) and English 322: Technical Writing (Section 1). In those early days, students could only create web pages by entering HTML computer codes manually. This was a frustrating and time consuming process. Things went wrong all the time, and only painstaking editing and assistance from my best computer science students ensured any success in our early attempts to create and post home pages. However, all this frustration also made it that much sweeter when a student's home page finally would appear on the web. And the chance to make student writing public kept me working on this pedagogy, even with the many bumps along the way.
I eventually co-wrote (with Nicholas Mauriello and Tammy Winner) an article about learning to teach with the web during it's early days. The article, "Reading Between the Code: The Teaching of HTML and the Displacement of Writing Instruction," appeared in Computers and Composition in 1999 (Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 409-419). The article explores what is gained and lost by making web page creation a part of the composition classroom.
I'm happy to say that the students who helped me experiment with the web early on have all graduated. Unfortunately, most of the servers which held those students' early web pages have also graduated (but in this case out of service). Fortunately, I've managed to save a few sample pages from those bygone days just to illustrate what students were able to accomplish in the face of much difficulty. These pages are, more than anything, distinctly personal. And in the end, that's what attracted both me and my students to web publishing: the chance to call a little slice of virtual space your own. Today it is much easier technologically to create your own home page, but at the same time, I'm not always sure it means as much to my students today as it did when we had to work so hard for it. On the other hand, students still light up when they see their own ideas appear on the web for all the world to see. Which is why I keep using this pedagogy. It's a way to help students see that their own writing is worth something; it's a way to prove to students that a person doesn't have to be a famous author to have a voice. On the Internet every voice can have a say. I hope that will always be true.