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The following Report describes my process of producing a web page for English 010, "Basic Writing." My goal was to provide easy electronic access to the syllabus and other course materials and to encourage students to become familiar with web-based resources. The process of creating the website was both challenging and rewarding, and the site itself now exists in a fairly satisfying though still preliminary form. However, it is clear that further efforts to advertise the availability of the Basic Writing materials, to faculty and tutors, as well as to students interested in improving their writing, is definitely in order.
Goals:
My plan for this project was to create a web page for English
010, "Basic Writing," the half-credit developmental
writing course which I teach each semester. My main goal was to
provide an efficient way of ensuring student access to the syllabus
and other course materials. I do not use a textbook in this course,
preferring to rely instead on a variety of handouts which I photocopy
and distribute in class. I wanted to make it possible for students
to access these handouts directly if, for example, they miss a
class or manage to lose their copies. A second goal was to enable
students to become familiar with electronic resources in a fairly
simple way, gradually leading to their becoming comfortable searching
for additional websites. I envisioned links from the English 010
page to the Writing Tutors page and possibly to a variety of off-campus
resources.
Strategies:
Before designing my own electronic syllabus, I decided I had to
spend some time becoming more familiar with the whole concept
of web-based syllabi and materials. I am grateful to various "electronic
pioneers" at Wheaton (in particular Marc LeBlanc, Myrna Pearson,
Tommy Ratliff, Jonathan Walsh, Gordy Weil, and Brenda Weiss) whose
on-line syllabi I studied and stole ideas from. I'm also indebted
to Shaoping Moss for her eminently patient instruction in the
use of Adobe PageMill website construction software, and to the
student assistants in the Kollett Academic Computing Center for
their willingness to rescue me when I couldn't remember how to
do something they had shown me earlier in the week (or earlier
the same day!).
My second task was to decide how to present and link the various
items I wanted to make available on the Basic Writing page. I
found that drawing up a chart of the materials and then inserting
arrows for links was extremely helpful in this process since it
involved a switch from my original, strictly chronological organization
to one that reflected a lateral rather than temporal hierarchy.
I ended up with a home page and seven sub-pages, two of which
were actually folders containing up to seventeen additional pages.
Thus, the navigation bar for each page has eight possible links:
[Home] [Letter] [Syllabus] [Policies] [Procedures] [Journals]
[Class Materials] [Assignments]. I don't know enough about other
course websites to know whether this is fairly normal, meager,
or somewhat excessive.
Once I had a sense of the overall organization for the website,
I set to work inserting individual pages and linking them to one
another. This part of the project was both interesting and time-consuming.
I suppose I could have sub-contracted some of the work, but I'm
such a control-freak. Besides, I was really curious about the
nuts and bolts of the process. I found PageMill to be an extremely
user-friendly and powerful tool, and I would certainly recommend
it. Believe me--if I can use it, anyone can.
The final stage of the process was to get my Basic Writing page
installed as part of the Wheaton page and to check for errors.
Once again Shaoping Moss was extremely helpful.
When classes started in September, I alerted the students in Basic
Writing to the fact that all class materials would be available
on the web and encouraged them to take advantage of the resource,
particularly if they missed a class. I emphasized the point that
there was now no excuse for not keeping up with class activities.
Assessment
and Plans for Dissemination:
I'm sorry to say that I don't yet feel that my efforts to create
a Basic Writing website have paid off in any particularly demonstrable
way. One reason is that the class this semester was unusually
small (only four students), and class attendance was excellent,
making one of the functions of electronic access to class materials
unnecessary. Another reason is that I didn't make any concerted
effort to advertise the availability of Basic Writing materials
to others in the community who might have some interest in them.
It occurs to me that faculty concerned about their students' writing
problems might like to know about some of the items in the Class
Materials folder (e.g., advice on avoiding plagiarism, writing
book reviews, effective revision strategies, using sentence connectors,
etc.). I also need to encourage the writing tutors to download
any exercises they might find helpful in working with their tutees.
These are steps I intend to take next semester, and I would be
grateful for any additional suggestions about how to promote more
widespread use of the materials that are now electronically available.
Beyond new efforts to advertise the availability of the materials
on the Basic Writing web page, I also hope to add more links,
both internally (to the newly constructed Writing Tutors and ESL
Tutors pages) and externally (to some interesting sites at other
colleges and universities). In fact, one of the students in the
fall tutoring course has already done a considerable amount of
work toward these goals as part of her final project for the course.
Updated
on 11/26/00
Send questions about this page to: Susan
Dearing
or contact Wheaton
College.