I was going back through the readings this week to catch up on my blog posts and master procrastinator that I am, decided to review through some of the optional readings first. I discovered the optional reading that was assigned for week 10, and I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t taken advantage of this resource. Admittedly, I am no expert in hypertexts, but the design of Madeline Sorapure’s webtext was so clean and intuitive that I spend a good few minutes navigating through it and ran out of time to read it! I wanted to reference it here though, because it would have been a really good example to use in the reading facilitation last week.  While the authors referenced Brent’s hypertext, Sorapure’s (and I am guessing that her text came after the articles assigned for reading this week) is an excellent example of a hypertext that meets many of the assessment criteria that we as a class decided upon. Long story short, if anyone is interested in hypertexts that are (seemingly) perfect, I’d recommend visiting the link on our course schedule to Sorapure’s text. One thing that I did notice, as I truly spent some time exploring Sorapure’s text, was that she credits ABC with the code used for her hypertext. This is something that I have heard (copying code), but I don’t quite understand. How does one copy and paste code? How does one acquire permission to use/augment code? Do you need permission? Do we cite code as we would direct quotations? Just some thoughts/questions.

Moving on to something I did read in full….In the Moran and Herrington article they offer an interesting analogy that I found myself spending some time considering when thinking about traditional essays versus hypertexts: “Those who argue for school uniforms say that such a policy will help students concentrate on academics and not on dress. Given our experience here, we can imagine a similar argument for the traditional, paper-based essay” (251). Being firmly planted on the anti-uniform side of this repetitive freshman paper topic, while the analogy is in some ways a bit cautionary, I found it to actually be an encouraging comparison that make me want to use hypertexts in my classroom–they are the anti-uniform, they encourage self-expression, originality, etc.–if we are to accept this analogy of course! (And I think it’s a rather good one.)

One of the issues that I ran into with this week’s readings was indeed an issue of self-expression and originality. As the articles discusses assessment, they often also discussed color choices, style selections, etc. I was mildly concerned that as begin to break down the hypertext into multiple genres and then begin to develop standards for those genres, are we going to turn hypertext genres into “uniforms” also? I suspect the answer is eventually, yes. However, I also suspect that by that time, or at least in the future, as technology advances, there will constantly be genres that precede assessment “rubrics”–this is something that draws me to digital compositions, and I hope that they will constantly and continually be evolving so that the uniform makers just can’t manage to keep up.