Questions to ponder before starting:

What drives our decision to locate a public writing assignment on the web will shape how we design, frame, teach and assess assignments as well as how we conceptualize the course. Below are some questions to consider before getting started.

For some guidelines, I first turn to McKee and Edwards and their article " The teaching and learning of web genres in first-year composition," in which they describe and reflect on their own practice incorporating web genres into their courses. They identify three important considerations for those who want to include web genres into their courses:

1. "We should acknowledge students' expertise in understanding, navigating, and composing in Web genres while also sharing our own expertise in analyzing and understanding genres..." ( p. 213). (They explain that students' "insider knowledge" often contrasts with the instructor's "insider knowledge,". They found that students' web pages sometimes reflected knowledge of web discourses in which they, the instructors, were not proficient.)
   "
2. "We should cultivate an awareness of and receptivity to hybrid, changing genres both in ourselves and in our students..." ( p. 214).
   
   
3. "We should foster awareness of the multiple, overlapping influences on the composition of web texts" (p. 215).

For those who are considering incorporating on-line writing assignments into their courses for the first time, I would suggest four sets of questions which help clarify their intentions and facilitate assignment design.

Course goals questions

• How does the assignment fulfill the course goals?
• What content or learning outcomes am I willing to sacrifice to incorporate this web assignment?
• What learning outcomes will I need to add to the course in order to incorporate the web assignment?
• What criteria will I use to grade the assignment?

Institutional/departmental expectations and requirements questions

• How much can I depart from more traditional genres of writing and still meet departmental/institutional expectations?

Genre and form questions

• What genre(s) will the assignment model?
• Will students post traditional essays on a web page? Or will they craft arguments that depart from the traditional essay and espouse a specific web rhetoric?
• How familiar am I with other forms of rhetoric, including visual and web rhetoric?
• What experiences with web rhetoric and discourses are students bringing to the course? For more on this topic, turn to McKee and Edwards(2005) and their discussion of students' "insider knowledge" which they define as "knowledge about how discourse works on the world Wide Web" (p. 206). This knowledge, McKee and Edwards argue, shapes how students conceptualize/ write their web pages.

Technical questions

• How comfortable am I with helping students with the technical aspects of writing for the web?
• How much technical knowledge will students have to master in order to complete the assignment? How and when will they get that knowledge?

Before we even approach adding a web-based, public writing assignment, do we know how we want students to write?





Resources
Edwards, M. & McKee, H. (2005). The teaching and learning of web genres in first-year composition. In A. Herrington & C. Moran (Eds.) Genre across the curriculum (pp. 196-218). Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.

Here is an online list of various evaluation standards for writing and digital writing (including the NCTE writing standards and the ALA information literacy standards:
http://digitalwriting.pbwiki.com/Standards+related+to+digital+writing