I began conceiving of this course from the premise that contemporary literacy is most usefully understood as critical participation in the design of meaning (New London Group: 2000). In order to position the work of meaning making in the richest possible context, the course uses service learning and web publishing to link academic and non-academic purposes and audiences.
Daniel Boyarski and Richard Buchanan (2005) observe that "HCI [human-computer interaction] is like persuasive speech" in that the "user is led into the computer system and provided with every support deemed valuable for its use" (34). Because meaning is made in a range of modalities—including not only text but also image, sound, spatial relations, etc.—the course makes use of the flexibility of web writing to more fully explore resources and strategies for the design of meaning.
While I don't agree with the commonplace idea that academic contexts are somehow less authentic than those encountered elsewhere, clearly the context of the classroom does encourage the production of texts that respond to its particular purposes and audiences. And while the design texts for these contexts may be just as useful a learning experience as designing texts for others, the knowledge that one's work is relevant outside the classroom provides audiences and purposes that wouldn't be available without service learning.
Brian Hout (2002) asserts that "people who write well have the ability to assess their own writing, and if we are to teach students to write successfully, then we have to teach them to assess their own writing" (10). For this reason, we will work to develop skills with self-assessment through a series of assessments by and of others. Not only will you receive feedback from different audiences at different points in the development of your final project, but you will also have a chance to see how your classmates are handling similar design challenges while performing usability and accessibility testing on their projects.
Critical framing is the third of the New London Group's four components of a multiliteracies pedagogy, which also includes situated practice, overt instruction, and transformed practice. The idea behind critical framing is that it will help us to become aware of the full range of choices available and the stakes of those choices. In other words, while one may become a skilled web designer without critical framing, one may be unreflective about the practices in which they engage and thus not prepared to challenge established ways of producing meaning. Critical engagement with course readings in class activities, particularly course blogs and framing papers, will provide this critical framing.
Like hypertext, this class is organized not to delineate a set path, but to invite you to design your own experience within the structure provided by certain required elements. In addition, students are directed to a wide range of electronic texts and invited to choose the ones that work best for them as they work to realize a particular element of design. Students will have a range of choices for their service learning commitment and two choices about how to structure the relationship between their service learning experience and their final project. The course activities and assignments are designed and sequenced to draw on the range of learning experiences available through a combination of actual practice, explicit instruction, critical framing, and reflective practice.