• Intro: Radical Occasionality
• February 1995: @Rhetnet
• March 1995: Washington D.C.
• May 1995: El Paso, Texas
• July 1995: Somewhere in Michigan
• August 1995: I-90 Eastbound
• August-September 1995: Troy, New York
• September 1995: @MediaMOO
• October 1995: Troy, New York
• June 1997: Honolulu, Hawaii
• November 2001: Dallas, Texas
• Further Reading
• Salvo Responds: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Kairos logo circa 1996.

The other problem, of course, is that right now teachers tend to select texts based on their own taste and writing practices, and what they think will work rather than on any independent assessment of students. Students get assaulted by their teacher's writing prefences, or fall in love with the teacher who most closely reproduces eir own style.

The challenge will be to sell a meta-pedagogical product, a text that includes many pedagogical approaches and offers each (in context) to students. How can teachers be convinced that such a system is in their students' best interests? By delivering the best pedagogical style to specific learning styles, learning to write (or learning just about anything) will become not only effective (dare I mention efficient?) but also pleasurable. Such has been the thinking behind TOPIC.

And it is a pedagogical application of a user-centered system, a system which has the needs of the user at its core of concerns rather than the needs of the teachers or of the institutions that employ them. And it is this pedagogical and design principle rather than the use of technology that makes the student-centered model of education a threat to the status quo.