Part One is designed to be taught early in the semester, probably the first full section of the book that you cover. The whole unit can take you from two to five weeks depending on how much additional technical information you include in the early part of the semester. You may or may not ask students to read the Internet Nuts and Bolts section of Chapter One. While you're moving through the rhetorical information, you may also want to intersperse introductions to Internet technology like those found in Chapters Six, Seven, Eight and Eleven, or the chapters at the end devoted to Web composition.
As you teach in computer-assisted environments, it is important to think of alternative methods of evaluation and assessment. You should find ways to value and credit the work that students do in their on-line discussions. Like traditional essays, these electronic forms of writing require students to shape and support an argument for a particular audience. In addition to evaluating these messages as homework assignments or daily grades you can incorporate this work into the assessment of larger writing assignments. If you assign a few discussions and queries as part of a larger project, you can stress the ways that compositions develop in stages and give students credit for the process leading up to the finished product.
A portfolio approach to evaluating assignments is one effective means of considering informal writing. In addition, you may want to involve your students in the process by letting them choose which assignments they want evaluated. With a portfolio system students feel free to experiment and "test the waters" in new writing environments, because they aren't penalized for mistakes they make in individual writing assignments. Instead, instructors can track the progress of a student's work over a large period of time. If students make mistakes as they become more comfortable with a new medium, the lessons they learn may eventually lead to better compositions, and instructors can get a more complete view of a student's over the course of an entire semester.
There are any number of ways to use portfolio assessment. The portfolio could include all the materials from a course, or only certain representative assignments. You can have students draft a number of projects and then focus their energies more clearly on one or two larger projects which will be evaluated. You may want to make the process of arguing convincingly a more integral part of compiling the portfolio; ask students to submit a statement describing the materials and arguing for a particular grade. By allowing students to compile and present their work hypertextually, the Web provides a particularly powerful method of facilitating portfolio grading. Whatever method you choose, we want to stress the importance of considering alternative forms of evaluation for Internet writing environments (for more information on The On-Line Learning Record, on interesting alternative method of evaluation, see http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~syverson/olr/).
One way to emphasize the writing process for your students is to collaboratively compose a paragraph in class. The goals of this exercise are to demonstrate the multiple steps involved in any composition, the collaborative possibilities for writing and the way that writing draws upon previous knowledge. You might want to select a recorder from the class to keep track of the composition on the board or on a computer.
Begin by asking the class to suggest possible topics for the paragraphyou can let them suggest such broad topics as "gun control" or "campaign finance reform" at first, but through a process of suggesting and questioning, you can get more specific topics like "automatic weapons should be banned" or "the democratic party should be censored for their political campaign finance." As a group, decide what general claim you are going to make. After you've worked this claim into a sentence, ask members of the class to submit additional sentences. Then, discuss each sentence as a group deciding whether to accept, reject or modify it.
It's OK to be a little silly here; you just want to make sure that the composition has some coherence and that the sentences are at least connected. After you've composed a short paragraph, demonstrate to the class how this composition began as a fairly random topic and progressed into a well-developed thought and how it drew on the intellectual resources of a number of people. You should also take a moment to point out what assumptions the composition relies on, what types of evidence would be needed to support the claims and in what directions you might take the paragraph to expand it into a larger essay.
Another helpful in-class demonstration is to come up with a group definition for "loaded" words like introverted, communism, high tech, globalization, biased, cult, etc. Drawing upon the discussion in the book about the communal construction of language, you can easily bring home the importance of clear writing by asking the class to precisely define one of these terms and seeing what a wide range of responses you get. Ask students to explain the reasons for their definitions when they disagree. Try to map areas of consensus in definitions. While it may take a broad definition to satisfy all parties, stress to your class how many different possible meanings these words can take on.
You might want to spend time as a class deciding the conventions and procedures for discussions, papers and other forums. Making this a collaborative activity gives the students input into the process and can highlight for them the necessity of these conventions. The above exercises can be good preparation for this one. Decide for yourself which areas of the class you'd like input on. Remember, though, that students can be surprisingly productive in defining rules of decorum for class discussions, forum postings, and methods of collaboration. This process can also be important in making your class feel like a "community" in which they understand the ground rules. Be sure to record whatever conventions you develop and post them somewhere (possibly to the class Web site) for class members to refer to.