Here I'll switch away from the rumination a bit, and come back to the more specific projects that are starting to get under way:

There are two professors in Modern Foreign Languages interested in developing some web work. One is working on an assignment having students put up web pages, another is working on tutorials/drills for students to use. For both, I'm thinking up possible applications, and will hopefully sit down to consult about their particular needs soon. At this point, I'm mostly full of questions:

• What is the specific assignment?
• Why do they want to use the web instead of print media
• What are the goals for the assignment?
• What kinds of media will students use (text, video, sound)?
• Will this be a one-off assignment, or something that continues through time?

There is clearly much to think about in the responses to each question (and there might be essential questions I have missed). The last one, though, is setting my imagination off the most. It points toward some of the most fundamental reconceptions of 'media' that we'll have to work on. They force new categories of 'media' beyond text, sound, and image because on the web these days they add in the temporal dimension. (I'll leave to the side the obvious temporality of sound and of moving images -- they depend on a real or perceived knitting together between sounds and images, whereas the web work of, say, a wiki, changes with time, but the changes are discontinuous).

So I'm curious about how faculty want to make use of the snapshots of what students produce. Looking at successive revisions of a paper is the obvious print analogy to this taking place on the web, but the analogy breaks down with the rapidity and quantity of changes. I'm wondering if Scott McCloud's definition of a comic might serve as a better analogy:

Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce and aesthetic response in the viewer.

Understanding Comics page 9

The gutters between panels are the space in which meaning and continuity are created by the reader of comics. So to, the time between updates on a web-based assignment might be the space in which student reflection creates a richer meaning for the assignment.

Oops, looks like I slipped back into rumination. I'll fold in lots of nitty-gritty application of this after I've met with the faculty.