reflecting quality

if students publish their work to a web site, and that web site is viewable all over the world, perhaps the quality of the students work is not reflective of the quality of the school.

over the period of a schoolyear, the teacher tries to help the student reach his or her full potential. also, rough draft feedback from web visitors might help students with some issues of clarity and factuality.

giving students a chance to participate in scholarship in a larger arena, with more than just words, hopefully this would give students more freedom to express themselves, to find a way to take a school subject personally, and so put substantial energy into the assignment.

if these don't work, here are a few other suggestions:

the sites could be internal to the school

the sites could be distributed selectively on cd-rom

students work together in teams to develop their sections.

students displaying a lack of tenacity might be responsible for smaller projects.

plagarism

Putting all these papers online creates a vast repository for students to poach the words of others.

Web searches can find exact stolen sentenes, and similar stolen sentences, but a teacher would have to suspect the student. It is the same now, no?

web skills

how should a teacher approach making a web site without any experience in the field? And then, how can they teach their students both web skills and curriculum?

web sites are easy to make - that's why there are so many. teach yourself web production by making a small site this summer about something you know.

your students could probably teach you, and could definitely teach each other.

some software will perform many of the difficult web creation and management tasks for you.

site complexity

managing web sites is difficult enough for paid internet professionals, let alone busy teachers with full courseloads.

suggestions:

start small, learn the medium with small projects. Understand that making web sites is not difficult. Making them stellar is a learning process for teacher and student alike.

find students with web skills (they're definitely out there) and harnass them to be assistant site administrators.

nature of the beast

The best writing for hypertext tends to be "chunky" - pieces that make a whole rather than a pure whole (pieces are better integrated into a diversified web environment). This is a different writing style than what schools are used to. Indeed, many find writing for hypertext discontinuous and shallow. There should be a middle ground, but it will take struggle.

hypertextbooks | personal publishing | technologee writings

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