Because many of you have different levels of familiarity with technology and writing, and because I would like to establish a theoretical context for the work we are doing, we will begin the course with Walter Benjamin's famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and discuss the implications of Benjamin's work for digital culture and texts. From there, we will test our suppositions as we read and discuss Shelley Jackson's hypertext fiction Patchwork Girl.

By the end of the third week, you should all have active email accounts and know where and how you will have computer access. Because we do not have a computerized classroom to rely upon and must thus work out of borrowed space, open labs, and home computers, we will all have to be ingenious, generous, and flexible. In week 4, I will be introducing you to MOO work through Tari Fanderclai's MOO, Connections. Once we have all become comfortable in the MOO, we will have the option of meeting virtually in the MOO for some of our other sessions.

Weeks 5, 6, and 7 we will devote to lab work. During this time, we'll learn the nuts and bolts of getting a document on the WWW, how to use a file transfer protocal, basic html code, how to navigate and research the internet, and a bit about the semiotics of web design-- what, for instance, does it mean for an image to be part of the "text"?

For the rest of the term, we will divide our class time up between discussing short essays grappling with the issues of technology, culture, and text and working on our major projects. For weeks 13 and 14, and 15 we may choose to watch two X-Files episodes significant for their rewriting of traditional "stories," or we may choose to consider film or narratives that the class chooses. In either case, we want to think in these last few weeks of the course about the relationship of the novel, film, and hypertext to a culture's technology, imagination, and construction of self and other. Along with this, we will be "presenting" our final projects and considering how these projects extend the ways in which we can think about texts and technology.

• "Discussion"--in-class, email, MOO --25% First, your own intellectual and philosophical considerations of hypertext literature and the social, cultural, and theoretical issues at stake in the move to a digital culture are an important component of both the "reading" and the "writing" of this course. I put these terms in quotation marks because email "conversations," MOO "discussions," and collaborative, multi-vocal web work collapse the boundaries between "speaking" "reading" and "writing." Each medium combines the fluidity and spontaniety of oral communication with the record and permanence of a written text while requiring that we read as we "talk." While many of our sessions, especially at the beginning of the term, will follow the traditional classroom's structures of meeting and discussing our work, many others will be conducted virtually, either through email assignments, MOO work, or group work in the lab. For each of these sessions, the record of the conversation counts towards your grade. This may require that you log MOO transcripts and turn them into me, that you email responses to our readings to the class, or that you post reflections upon our work to the class's collaborative web page. For each class session, we will decide as a class what issues are most salient, how we want to consider them further, and exactly what form our extended discussion (and your graded work for this) will take. It is thus essential that you keep up with each class's work and that you know where, when, and how we will be "meeting" for each session, (in our classroom, in open lab or IST spaces, in the MOO from home...).
• Collaborative Texts and Technology website design and development-- 25%
  You'll be contributing in at least three ways to the collaborative website. First, as we read and think about hypertext, our "discussions" will create a text of their own. Our collaborative website is to represent the text of this course. As such, you will each be weaving strands of your contributions to the thinking of course into a hypertext for which this class's homepage will serve as the foundation. You will be responsible for graphic design, layout, images, structuring and ordering narrative links-- you can get as creative as you would like here. If you know a great deal about design and can write javascript for this site, that counts. If you are a poet and feel inspired to verse for this site, that counts. If you have a revelation about one of our readings, that counts. From beginning to end, the class is responsible for deciding what should be on this page, what it should look like, and how it should be organized.
• Final Digital Project-- Hypertext, MOO, or combination-- 50% For your final project, you will develop an internet-based narrative. This project must fit the theme of this course and demonstrate your intellectual work with the issues at stake in the digital cultural revolution. In particular, I want the projects to involve a self-reflexive consideration of "text," "audience," "reader," "writer," "production," "dissemination"-- in short, the ideas we will be working with throughout the term. Within these parameters, you can design virtually any kind of project you can imagine. You might want to do a hypertext narrative along the lines of Patch-Work girl, or you may choose to make an extensive website bringing together sophisticated web design incorporating image, sound, and text. Or, if you are attracted to MOO work, you can build a realm-- a virtual world, if you will. We will be discussing the possibilities for these projects throughout the term. By the middle of the semester, you should determined the form the project will take (hypertext, advanced web site, MOO, some combination)and propose your project to the class and invite discussion about and help with it. Remember, during the last three weeks of the class we will be presenting our work, so you will also have to think about how you want to present-- shall we take a guided tour through your website? Will you give a dramatic reading of your hypertext? Be invited to solve a mystery you have prepared for us in your MOO realm?