The grant project Hypertext Writing Technology in First-Year English Composition was implemented in two sections of ENC1102, the second semester of English Composition at Miami Dade College on the Kendall Campus. Enrollment for each section was 25.

The course goals/ competencies for ENC1102 include: the student will write a fully documented research paper. Thus, this course, rather than ENC1101, was selected for the grant which utilizes Story Space, a hypertext writing software program, which fosters collaborative writing and is ideal for long research-based writing assignments that can be done in a group. George P. Landow, a literature professor at Brown University, who taught a Victorian Literature course, developed the Story Space software for his students to use hypertext writing for their assignments. The results of his students’ writing assignments make up the Victorian Web, an online hypertext document, now part of the World-wide Web.  Within the Victorian Web is the Dickens Web, hyperlinked documents on the author, his time, and his works. For my grant project, I decided to replicate what Landow had done at Brown by having my students write a hypertext document which consists of individual but related research paper on a literary topic. Thus, I assigned reading Great Expectations and writing a research paper on it.

The course was taught in a computer classroom with 25 computer stations equipped with Story Space. The research paper assignment was completed on Story Space, writing software that is designed for creating hyperlinks to text within the document. Although each student was responsible for his/ her research paper, it was a collaborative paper. In fact, all papers were ultimately linked because they all wrote about some aspect of Great Expectations. Each group of between four and six students wrote about one of the following critical approaches to literary analysis: biographical, sociological, psychological, historical, or reader response. Moreover, within these subtopics on Great Expectations, students chose a literary element such as character, plot or setting to focus on, which provided them opportunities to make further connections in the Story Space environment. Before writing their research papers, they met in groups to share ideas, and to avoid repetition, but also to plan the hypertext document. After completing their individual research papers, they loaded their documents onto the master document and created individual hyperlinks. As they did so, they were able to use the tools of the program which provided a visualization of links on several screens: the map view and the chart view, for example.

The project was assessed through the written assignments completed throughout the course. The letter grade on the essay assignments is not a good measure of how much the students benefited from the Story Space software because these grades reflect overall writing skills, like grammar for example, which is not what is being learned in this project. Rather, the focus of the project is on critical thinking skills and collaboration skills. Thus, I assessed or evaluated the benefits of the technology on linking ideas (what links were students able to create between each other’s papers, and how did these linked ideas foster better critical thinking and writing skills). In other words, I was concerned to measure whether they were better able to put together the sections of a group paper using the software. So, the final Story Space version of the student research papers serves as one set of data. Another measure I used was the Dickens Web Exercise, in which the students explored a self-contained “web” created in Story Space and now online on the Internet. Here, students were asked to complete an exercise which is designed to demonstrate how hypertext technology may have enhanced the students’ ability to make connections between ideas and locate information (e.g. for a research paper) through a sequence of hyperlinks.

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