This qualitative research project has several limitations that may prevent some of its findings from being generalized to other students, schools, or situations:

• The project was completed over a very short time period for this genre of research and is therefore somewhat limited in its scope.
• The six student participants were volunteers for the study from within an elective class, which may render them less than representative of the total school population.
• Although I was a teacher-researcher in as much as I served as the student participants' teacher for this project, I was not the regular classroom teacher and was therefore not responsible for the rest of the media arts students. This allowed me a great deal of freedom to focus on the specific needs of the web design team.
• The project was housed in a media arts rather than a language arts setting, thus possibly limiting its applicability to the language arts curriculum.
• The results from this study on school website construction might not be generalizable to all forms of hypermedia design, although many parallels were drawn in this article.
• Some of the findings may be the result of a novelty effect that could fade over time.
• Some of the excitement that the students experienced is related to the singular fact that they were the first in the school to create the website; therefore, some of these results might not be replicable with future groups of students.
• Finally, there may have been confounding effects from the instructional model (collaborative, constructivist, inquiry based) that cannot be rightfully be attributed to the instructional medium (hypermedia design). Leu (in press) notes that this is a common problem with research in hypermedia design.

I encourage readers to integrate the information that seems relevant to their own current situations and to put aside the rest as a compelling story of student voice, empowerment, and pride unique to the nascent culture of the FWJHS web crawlers.

Due to these limitations and as a result of further questions that may be raised as a result of this study, I suggest that future research be conducted by a collaborative team of teacher-researchers over a longer period and with a larger sample of students. It would also be informative to design a study in which all of the students are given opportunities to compose authentic, collaborative hypermedia projects that reflect the students' own areas of inquiry.

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Section Reference

Leu, D.J. (in press). Continuously changing technologies and envisionments for literacy: Deictic consequences for literacy education in an information age. In R. Barr, M.L. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, & P.D. Pearson (Eds.), Handbook of reading research: Volume III. White Plains, NY: Longman.