It was a classroom need that inspired a message forum
script which
lets readers interact in a web environment.
When my class and I produced an American literature site as part of survey course in the spring of 1995, I was excited by the possibilities for annotating electronic versions of texts. In particular, I wanted students to be able to attach comments to passages and key scenes. I used a mailform (a combination of a form composed in html and one of the popular early scripts that lets a web server interact with information from a browser). The form sent me e-mail from the middle of the text.As students sent me their comments, I would paste them into the html file and repost it to the server. Needless to say, this got to be overwhelming. I worked with our systems administrator to refine the mailform script. The new script compiled the messages and wrote them out to the html file automatically.
In the revised script, readers could comment and subsequent readers could respond. It soon became apparent that the script was well-suited to discussion; it was not really a form but a forum. I added a version of the discussion forum to a section of our class site that explores The Yellow Wall-Paper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.What has happened at the Yellow Wall-Paper forum speaks to the potential for the expanded audience of the web environment to more literally collaborate by adding their insights to the archive of the site itself. The collaboration also reveals another aspect of the web environment that is often overlooked: the hidden side of the web, the server side.
| Teaching __ | Theory __ | Interact __ | MU* __ | Web__ | Opening Screen |
Daniel Anderson
The Computer Writing and Research LaboratoryJoi Lynne Chevalier