Melzer, Dan. “WAC Websites as Knowledge Webs.”

Melzer, Dan. “WAC Websites as Knowledge Webs.” The WAC Journal. 17 (2006): 23-32. 07 Feb. 2009. http://wac.colostate.
edu/journal/vol17/index.htm.

In this essay, I argue that creating an online presence for WAC is an important initial step, as crucial as designing workshops, organizing a campus writing committee, or creating a newsletter. As Sarah Kimball argues in her essay “WAC on the Web,” “decisions involved in designing and revising a website are rhetorical” (62). The goal of this essay is to provide not technical advice but a rhetorical framework for building a WAC website, with reflections on my experiences creating a WAC website and my observations about model websites from three WAC programs that I looked to for inspiration in designing a site: Writing Across the Curriculum at George Mason University, the University of Missouri at Columbia Campus Writing Program, and the North Carolina State University Campus Writing and Speaking Program. Using these models, I argue that WAC websites should be thought of as much more than tools for delivering information. WAC websites can be used to persuade, connect, and support students and faculty to create what distance learning theorist Chris Dede terms a “knowledge web”: a socially constructed clearinghouse of information connected by hyperlinks in an ever-expanding web. I end the essay with my vision of the future of WAC online and use the example of the WAC Clearinghouse to argue that a website should be thought of not as a supplement to a WAC program but as the center of the WAC “knowledge web.” (23-24)

Area Cluster: 106–Information Technologies
Methodology: Grounded Theory Research
Money Quotes JBolter JJohnson-Eilola

Money Quotes:

A website can also persuade, and I found that much of what I was posting online as I expanded the site was meant not to inform but to persuade both faculty and administrators. The simplest example of this is a quote from Barbara Walvoord that is the first piece of text on the main frame of the home page of the website: “Writing is so complex an activity, so closely tied to a person’s intellectual development, that it must be nurtured and practiced over all the years of a student’s schooling and in every curricular area.” (24)

“In an educational climate where many WAC programs struggle to get funding and faculty support, persuasion is an important aim of a WAC website, and creating an online presence could help persuade faculty and administrators that your program is extensive and valuable” (25).

Being just two links away from the CSUS home page reinforces the institutional support of the WAC program and is a kind of argument for its legitimacy. In addition to WAC connecting to other programs, sometimes other programs and faculty members link to WAC. For example, Graduate Studies includes a link on their website to WAC’s thesis writing workshops and peer response group programs, and the library links to WAC from their preventing plagiarism website. Because the WAC website includes resources for students, some instructors include a link to it on their syllabus. This kind of linking reinforces the spirit of collaboration and connectionthat WAC programs stress and provides concrete examples to administrators that the WAC program is collegial and works with other campus programs and faculty across disciplines. (26-27)

Chris Dede’s notion of knowledge webs, as applied to distance learning, describes the phenomenon of Internet resources linking through search engines, hyperlinks, web rings, etc. to form multiple layers of information. Since each link leads to further links, there’s a sense of an ever-expanding web of knowledge. This web of knowledge is a socially constructed series of relationships and connections, with dispersed but like-minded members of a discourse community connected through the linking powers of websites. The Writing Across the Curriculum website that most closely resembles Dede’s definition of a knowledge web is the WAC Clearinghouse at http://wac.colostate.edu. (29)