A point could be made about the samples from the Raisin in the Sun projects shown here today, which might be said to suffer from a poor understanding of the general make-up and potentials of the web. For instance, many of the video clips used in these projects are too big to be conveniently loaded over a modem, and some are even too large for a direct internet connection to make them seamless parts of the compositions, and some readers may not be able to use any of these non-textual media. However, we did not decide to include these clips because we were not aware of these limitations. In fact, many of the stills that are woven throughout the projects and that are used to link to the video clips result from trying to deal with questions of capacity.

Our teaching of the web should understand these general axioms, borrow from what we know already about teaching, look to the larger claims about the potential of the medium and focus on finding particular ways to implement compositions that work at specific rhetorical tasks yet achieve their full web potential. This involves the use of interactive forms and mechanisms to make web compositions social activities. It means planning for multivariate and reader-determined texts. It demands understanding of the way the web works and of organizational strategies. It suggests the we begin looking for ways to implement useful learning activities in the web composition process, such as peer-review, and revision. It also means handling web issues like capacity, assuring that texts and other media work in conjunction with each other, and demanding that nodes work in conversation with each other.

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