The Online Tutor as Cross-Curricular Double Agent

Tutors occupy a complex pedagogical space in which they are often asked to serve two masters: teacher and student. When the tutoring goes online, a new level of complexity is added to the web of power relationships.

Tutors who have been trained well will not readily abandon the institutional goal of student learning. But even well trained tutors can end up working against, rather than for, the goals of the teachers whenever the tutors and the teachers operate under substantially different epistemologies.

Passing Theory in Action: The Discourse Between Hypertext and Paralogic Hermeneutics

A reader of a Web text can, and is actually encouraged to, move freely within and outside of a particular text. This movement can be perceived as problematic if an author feels compelled to move the reader down a particular knowledge path.

Paralogic hermeneutics gives needed insight into this problem in that this theoretical approach sees the act of communication between two parties as a strategic guessing game.

Hypertext Reflections: Exploring the Rhetoric, Poetics, and Pragmatics of Hypertext

Hypertext Reflections grew out of a roundtable discussion at the l997 Conference on College Composition and Communication. Our goal, as we noted in our session proposal, was to:

discuss some of the most compelling elements of current hypertext theory, as well as use the occasion of this conference and its theme to break the frame of the traditional conference presentation. The just writing and just teaching of the conference theme are integrated with questions of power and control. By creating a session that will practice the theory it preaches, we hope to explicitly model the theoretical interrogations of the session.

Hypertext Reflections recreates and makes accessible to a larger audience the exchanges that took place during our roundtable discussion. Within this site, you'll find the five webs that contextualized our discussion of hypertext, our opening remarks, and our proposal for the session.