before we begin:

a note on site design and navigation

When you click the purple square below, and you travel to the next screen, you'll find two frames. The frame on the left side of the screen represents hypertext documents I created as a final seminar project in a graduate level Spatial and Visual Rhetorics course; it also contains the site's primary navigation. The frame on the right side of the screen features short pieces of reflective prose I composed in response to the hypertext documents presented in the left frame; these reflections complicate and extend the ideas I originally presented in my seminar project when I created it in 2008. My original project asked: How do instructors with little knowledge of the Web or digital composing approach the teaching of digital assignments in their own classes? How do students, excited about the possibilities of digital communication, manage the skills necessary to compose such projects without giving up (now or in the future)?

While this website does not attempt to definitively answer these questions, it does attempt to think through the emotional responses we experience when the digital world and linear narrative collide. In this collision, the digital world becomes a site of anxiety about what we do not know — a closure — rather than a practice through which potentials are explored from the perspective that learning is never finished and always emerging — an opening. In this text, I rely heavily on Doreen Massey's (2005) conception of space as "stories-so-far" (p. 9). For Massey, thinking of space as closed, fixed, or static — a plane across which we travel in order to be somewhere else — precludes the possibility of a future outside of the singular narrative the West tells about progress and development. In this narrative, the first world moves, and all others follow until they catch up. No, if the future is to be truly open, she argued, then so must space and place. Thus, this webtext is an experiment with reflection conceived as an open practice capable of re/producing open digital, emotional, and pedagogical space. Instead of offering specific conclusions, I offer episodic prose pieces — "stories-so-far" — brought together across the recursive organization of the site.