- "Syllawebs." There's some debate about what this term
includes or doesn't include, but the web is a great place to
publish class syllabi and other class materials. The
World Lecture Hall is a great place to see examples of
this.
- Guided Web Research. Teachers can create pages of links
they can send their students to in order to guide their on-line
research. This is particularly useful for classes that revolve
around a subject about which the instructor has done some previous
and promising online research.
- Web Quests. Generally for high school readers, these
sites are applicable beyond secondary school in intro to
literature classes. A matrix of some web quests is available at
http://edweb.sdsu.edu/webquest/9-12matrix.html
- Collaborative Web "Textbooks." Students and teachers
can together research a particular topic to find readings
available on the web. They can work together to create a site that
will in turn become part of a reading list of materials or a
virtual "textbook" for the course.
- Analyzing Web Sites. This activity can take several
forms, but students can analyze "effective" or good web sites,
trying to identify their characteristics and patterns. Conversely,
much can be learned by examining "ineffective" or bad web sites as
well. This activity essentially asks students to conduct a
rhetorical analysis of web publishing. Students could further
compare analogous print sources to note similarities or
differences-- for example, compare the web site for Kellogg's
Cereal with print ads, the side of cereal boxes, etc.
- Student Publishing. Depending on institutional
constraints, students can publish versions of their more
traditional essays on the web. This dramatically changes not only
the potential audience for a student essay but the definition of
"student essay" itself.
- Student Web Site Creation. Depending on institutional
constraints, students can create full-blown web sites on either
independently or collaboratively. This is different and perhaps a
more detailed extension of "Student Publishing" in the sense that
instead of merely publishing something on the web, creating a web
site means taking advantage of the Web's hypertextual capabilities
and potentially creating texts/sites that go beyond the goals of a
particular class.
- Collaborative Web Site Creation. Web pages are ideal
vehicles for collaborative work for student writers. Because it is
a time-consuming and labor-intensive process to create web pages,
sometimes working together on web sites truly creates the best
results. HTML also allows the flexibility for writers to work
relatively independently from each other on parts of a larger
whole that can linked together as part of an overall site design.
Further, writers can link their individually composed web pages to
the pages created by their colleagues.