This article is going "to press" more than a year after the study was conducted; therefore, I thought the reader might appreciate an update on the student participants and the school website as well as some additional thoughts from the researcher.

In the spring semester of 1998, the gold group (Danielle, Maria, and Brian) dropped out of the web design project in order to learn about video production and to work on the school newspaper. The blue group (April, Jason, and Skye) trained two new web crawlers on their own, while I continued visiting the school once a week to support the media arts teacher and the web team. By the end of the 1997-98 school year, the school website boasted 28 webpages and no obvious navigational flaws. Now, during the 1998-99 school year, there is a new group of web designers working on the site, with Brian serving as a consultant. (In fact, Brian has now created his own personal webpage.) This year's team has chosen to create the current school website from scratch rather than build on last year's template; therefore, both sites will be linked off of last year's school page located at http://earthvision.asu.edu/~maya/fwjhs/.

I am now engaged in a full-scale research project at the school, but this time I am working with a language arts teacher rather than exclusively with the media arts teacher. We are putting the school newspaper online and are initiating a student-run electronic magazine (e-zine) project. One seventh grade language arts class is responsible for determining the content, structure, and layout of the e-zine, while the rest of the language arts classes are submitting original written work.

Although it is too soon for detailed data analysis, I am discovering additional challenges to integrating multimedia technology and hypermedia design projects in the language arts curriculum. First, there is the serious issue of access to computers. Many language arts teachers do not have computers in their classrooms; therefore, students must leave the room to work on hypermedia design projects. This poses obvious problems with monitoring student usage, troubleshooting, and ensuring equal access. If there happen to be a few computers in the room, there are still problems with access and noise control.

The second challenge involves time. Students generally need 60 to 90 minutes of uninterrupted time to work on computer projects, which obviously limits the time available to address other curricular needs and projects. In an inquiry-based curriculum this may not be critical; however, in a more traditional curriculum it would be a significant problem. If teachers are required to "cover" district-mandated content such as grammar units or whole-class novel studies, then there will be a conflict of interest in terms of the time needed to devote to hypermedia design projects.

Third, there is a challenge for language arts teachers in terms of grading student work. Because computer-related instructional objectives and outcomes are unclear at this time, it is difficult for teachers to assess student progress in computer-mediated curricula. Further, there is the additional challenge of trying to assign grades to collaborative work.

Fourth, there will always be a few students who are not interested in computer-mediated learning. Conversely, there will always be some who like it so much that they neglect other modes of communication. No medium is perfect for all student needs; therefore, language arts teachers are advised to provide many different kinds of opportunities for students to construct meaning and communicate their understandings with others.

Finally and most important, many hypermedia design projects do not demand extensive reading and writing of printed text, as was evidenced in the student-designed school website project reported here. Since the major objective of language arts instruction is still based on traditional reading and writing, some language arts teachers may hesitate to devote a great deal of class time to hypermedia-based literacy. The antidote to this challenge may be to offer computer-based projects that require reading and writing printed text, such as online newspapers, electronic magazines, student-initiated research projects, keypal projects, or online curriculum projects with other schools around the world. In this way students can explore print-, oral-, and hypermedia-based literacies as a natural outcome of learning and inquiry.

Return to top

Go to next section

Go to discussion forum