Daniel Anderson will focus on two implementations of Web teaching that try to fulfill discourse learning goals

One of the obvious advantages of researching with discourse communities it that positions are tested as they move through the group; the learning becomes dialectic. To capitalize on this potential, I wanted to have students send a research query through an Internet discourse forum. Students first worked through web based assignments that prompted them to refine a topic into a research query and then to post that query to several newsgroups. The goal was to refine their thinking about the topic through dialog and also to provide discourse based resources for the research project. If you're interested in the process and the results, get more information about the student project.

The second web project that works with discourse pedagogy is a hypertext web courseware project that teaches Alexander Pope's poem The Rape of the Lock. Since discourse about a literary text foregrounds issues of interpretation, I wanted this project to enact certain aspects of reader-response criticism. The project uses cgi-bin technology to allow anyone with a web connection to post messages about various aspects of the poem. The goal is to enact an interpretive community in the (hyper)text itself and in doing so bring additional perspectives into the interpretation of the work and show students that the meaning of the text emerges from both the original document and the voices that articulate it. You can get more discussion and link to the hypertext by going to the Rape of the Lock and discourse communities page.

Joi Chevalier will focus on discourse learning through MU* spaces and the World Wide Web.

Conveying cultural and social constructs often proves difficult when discussing Early Modern Literature. Demonstrating to students the relevance of not only historical information but cultural and social traditions and structures can be complicated by the lack of artifacts, material, and models for examination. In other words, it is difficult for students to get a 'feel' for a society and time which would then underlie and inform their reading of a text. As part of a continuing goal to provide methods of using current computer technology to allow instructors to represent and model the culture, even the very text, they are studying. This technology, Multi-User Shared Hallucinations (MUSH) or its counterpart, Multi-Object Oriented Dimensions (MOO) are tools which can provide for Early Modern Studies many issues which are essential for students to 'see' and understand, but are difficult to truly represent.

Once students have reestablished a relationship with the text, then in depth critical analysis can begin. Here, the World Wide Web becomes another environment for examining and evaluating discourse learning. In self-generated discussions, students can, over time, see connections between periods, authors, texts and complicated social constructs, and also consider their own rhetoric and how they discussed those issues. With Web message forums and Interchanges and posted roleplaying, students can perform self-analysis and evaluation...discourse and metadiscourse, if you will.