Our reflections on cyber writing as a tool for multicultural understandings result from participation in a Community College Humanities Association initiative, "Advancing the Humanities through Technology" (funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities).

Participation in that initiative enabled us to develop and offer a course, Humanities 299, in which  we envisioned groups of students (from different but potentially related courses) meeting on line and review, develop, and discuss materials relevant to "Student Perspectives on World and Multicultural Writers."   We felt that this broad topic would connect with a number of our English, Humanities, and Writing courses, and would have potential interest for certain Social Sciences and other courses which have been developed to qualify as "WIC" ("Writing In Context" of other disciplines) and/or "MIC" ("multicultural infusion courses") at our college.

For the Spring, 2000 experimental course, we proposed recruiting interested students from our English/Humanities courses, as well as others, for an independent "Special Studies" 199 or 299 credit course in collaborative authoring of webpages. Students would be grouped to develop a web site appropriate to in-depth or extended study of a focused literary topic, such as a particular author, work or theme. Critical, contextual, comparative, and/or interdisciplinary components would be encouraged. Students would be given some initial training in web-authoring, plus models and templates for the kind of sites they are asked to produce, and would meet in a group for these initial training sessions. Subsequently, students could collaborate asynchronously through our First Class Conference system.

We planned for student websites to include reviews of available and recommended sites, as well as original student commentary, questions, and research findings about the subject. Websites would also feature an "about this site" page devoted to identifying student web-authors, the envisioned rhetorical context (e.g. purpose, audience, web-genre), key principles guiding project development, criteria for evaluating websites, and self-reflections on achieved learning outcomes. Once topics were chosen and projects underway in Spring 2000, we proposed to recruit a small group of interdisciplinary faculty—optimally those with interest in the project and/or expertise in student topics—to serve as project reviewers and content-area resources.

The experimental course HUM 299: Student Perspectives on World and Multicultural Writers, was taught by Cora Agatucci in Spring 2000. By the end of that quarter, eight students had completed their web sites, and those sites were reviewed by our Faculty Evaluators. Cora taught the course a second time in Spring 2001, and five students completed their web sites.

Learn more about our Project:

  Overview of Hum 299 Student Websites
URL:  http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/ASA/studentwebs.htm

  Humanities 299 Course Home Page
URL:  http://www.cocc.edu/hum299/

  "Cyber Rhetoric: Creating an Online Learning Community in the Humanities,"  Advancing the Humanities Through Technology at Community Colleges [CCHA-NEH Project Information] 
URL:  http://www.cocc.edu/hum299/ccha/ccha.html