Case Study #1b -

An Introduction to the Process of Writing Internet Style

21st Century Tools for Thought


  • First, read the directions. If you later need to recall these directions, scroll back to this point and take these text links , including How to Use This Case Study Web Page. Correlations with NC's teacher/faculty computer competencies are also available. You may wish to print out the text which narrates the actions in the tutorial videoclips.


    • If you know which videoclip  demonstration you want, you can go there directly instead of scrolling. Click on its number below:
     
      

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    Situation

    Mrs. Jones had a writing assignment coming up for her class. Her paper was due towards the end of the semester. She needed to address the suitability of American juvenile literature and other resources for some aspect of multicultural education.

    She chose to focus on China and its art. She wished to compose her paper while using the most current and powerful information systems at her disposal. That is, she wanted her desktop computer to be of more use to her. She needed to look for information and collect it. Then she wanted to write in such an interesting manner that she would be sure to evoke a positive and interested response from her professor and others. Also, she knew that that her work would be stronger if she had a way to let others assess her emerging ideas. Finally, she wished to publish her work in a way that others who helped in her development could easily benefit from her study. To guide her paper's development, she chose the CROP web site and its four stages of problem solving: Look, Evoke, Assess and Publish. The process and problems that she encounters are universal to a wide variety of composition activities.

    Look

      1. How To: Connect to the Internet using the Netscape Application.
      To help work through her concerns, she found software that connected her to the Internet. She also discovered that in different computer labs the procedure to start an application varied. She asked the lab assistant to get her started when things seemed too unfamiliar.


      2. How To: Reach the CROP site.
      Once connected, she linked to the CROP web site. CROP is a set of online and desktop resources for both personal problem solving and working with groups of people in a team or teams to solve problems. Her needs at the moment are personal to her paper. She reads the explanatory information about the basic idea of CROP again just to review its basic design.


      3. How To: Make a Bookmark in Netscape.
      Realizing that she will come to the CROP web site frequently, she makes a bookmark to the site. Using this same computer, the bookmark will allow her to return to this site with a single click at any time.


      4. How To: Find Higher Order Questions.
      Knowing that a clear statement of the central question for her paper speeds her work, she takes the link to the THINK branch and calls up and browses a list of question formats and their definitions for higher order thinking: recall, analysis, comparison and so forth. Comparison! That will work. How does the juvenile literature on China compare with resources for students found on the Internet? That's it. Further browsing reveals a wide variety of resources for the higher order thinking activity expected of graduate students.
      The material also provides a definition that reminds her that comparison is about both similarities and differences. She will need to develop information about both to excel with her comparisons. As she searches for current information on China, she will look harder for information categories in which one can more clearly make comparisons.


      5. How To: Explore LEAP.
      Now that her question has focused her efforts, she is ready to work on answering this question. She clicks on the LEAP link. LEAP is an acronym for a process: Look, Evoke, Assess, Publish. Each letter leads to a different set of activities and tools. LEAP is a distillation of problem solving processes in many fields.


      6. How To: Study Procedures in Problem Solving.
      Mrs. Morris begins by Looking for information. She finds that it helps to look at the phrases and words from many different fields of learning which focus the process of looking for information. She calls up this LEAP comparison table and scans it for concepts that will assist her looking. While there, she notes the different terms that different fields use for the activity of Looking for information. She finds this mental scaffolding useful to consider as she works through the steps. Her preference is for the simplified four term model under the writing process.


      7. How To: Make a Folder on a Diskette.
      Knowing that she will be collecting information in a word processing file and perhaps saving other files as well, Mrs. Jones makes a folder on her diskette in which to place her collection of files. She can close and open this window to her disk at any time. To remove her disk from the computer, she would drag it to the trash can. This does not erase the disk. This process only ejects it.


      8. How To: Make a Word Processor File, Save it, and Place it.
      Next, Mrs. Jones opens a word processor window and resizes the window. The word processor window will hold the information she copies from the Internet. When you work with more than one window, windows can be resized so that they are overlapping. This means that some part of every application window you are using is visible on the computer screen. If your screen pointer can touch any part of any window, no matter how many windows are in front of it, it will be brought to the front (e.g., top of the stack). These windows are metaphors for pieces of paper. So, these computer windows are like different pieces of paper. As long as you can see any corner or part of a piece of paper, you can do the electronic equivalent of picking it up and placing it on top so that you can work with the information in that window. Mrs. Jones sets her two windows so that she can see big parts of both her Internet (Netscape) window and her word processing window. Which ever window she clicks on with her screen pointer will come to the top. She brings the word processor window to the top or front.

      There are many ways to get started. She chooses to do some brainstorming, listing as many of her own ideas as she can. If she gets stuck, she knows there are many other tricks for getting started:

      Paradigm's centering; UW-Tacoma's Interview ideas ; UT-Austin's brainstorming Texas A&M's analysis ; Princeton's wondering.

      9. How To: Find a University Web Site.
      Mrs. Jones wants more direct contact with experts themselves, most notably those with expertise in China. She has learned the critical advantage of direct contact over reading an article on China. The answer to her question may not be in the article, but the article cannot tell her that. However, experts can quickly size up a situation and either indicate that they do not know or restate the question so that they can provide a highly focused response targeted to Mrs. Morris's needs. Further, they can ask questions of Mrs. Jones. Stored media cannot do this this. The ability to open a two-way channel of communication is what distinguishes connecting people directly versus using different information media stored and accessed in various ways.


       Using some of the search tools on the People Direct web page, Mrs. Jones tried to find email for the American Ambassador to China but failed. She decides to find a University with a strong program in the Pacific area. As Stanford University is well known and is in a state bordering the Pacific, she seeks its web address in the People Direct section of CROP. Once she has found an email address she saves it for later. She does not want to waste the experts time on trivial questions and wants to wait until she is sure she knows he more difficult ones.

      The topmost segment of the Look pyramid contains tools for directly contacting human beings. This thought reminds her to also set a meeting with the librarian to review any new source material that has come to the library. They meet and conclude that they have several references for the United States that will be useful in making comparisons but some the China resources are a bit dated. She decides to go hunting for more current information.

      As she looks for data and information, the pyramid icon and structure of the web pages reminds her that information comes in different qualities. That is, a variety of search tools are sorted and listed in a special order. They are placed in rough order of the amount of human intelligence that is available or used in the organizing and storing of the information. Her strategy is to start at the top of the pyramid, and depending on how well the searches go towards the top of the pyramid, she may or may not need to work through to the bottom-most layer.

       Throughout this process of information collection she must continually weigh the quality of what she finds for truthfulness, currency, accuracy and more.

      10. How To: Find Faculty Contact Information.
      Having found a relevant University, she finds the name of a faculty member who teaches about China, but this web page does not give his email address. She copies into her China notes word processing file the information about the expert she just found. She saves this file to the China Project folder in her disk. She will return again and again to this word processor file to add further information in the days ahead. She will be organizing the file as the data in it grows.


      11. How To: Find and Save Email Data.
      Given the information she has found, there is another way to proceed. Once she knows his name, she returns to the Stanford home page and looks for a Directory link. Following these links, she finds a place to enter his name. When the computer system has looked up his email address and made it visible, this email address and other contact information is also copied to her word processor file.


      She has now found a no-cost way to interact with a Professor at Stanford University with a specialty in Chinese Art, and his email address. Later, she will add the names of two or three more people on different campuses as backup resource people.

      12. How To: Find a LISTSERV.
      The Internet has also formed communities of people who trade email on topics of interest. These developments are known as email conferences and come in two forms, LISTSERVs and newsgroups. These will come in handy later as further questions arise. When questions occur that stump her, she can take her questions and using her own email account, send it to the email conference.


      Using search engines (e.g., databases available through the Internet), she searches tens of thousands of these global communities. First Mrs. Jones searches for LISTSERVs that discuss China. She notes that help pages are available to teach her how to subscribe to a LISTSERV. In the subscribing process she puts her name and email address on the conference list of names. Then, any email sent to the conference is also sent to her email account. She justifiably worries that this could flood her email account if the conference gets very active. So, she does not join (e.g, subscribe) now but saves the addresses in case of greater need.

      13. How To: Find a Newsgroup.
      Using roughly the same path of links, she next searches for newsgroups. For now, she collects contact and subscription information for the conferences. She will have to carry out other steps later to actually see the email being traded among those participating in the conference.


      14. How To: Organize with an Outline Processor
      She adds all these addresses to her word processing file, China Notes, and organizes them under various headings, such as Email Contacts and Email Conferences. Later, she will contact or interact with the people she has found online.


      15. How To: Find Juvenile (Children's) Literature Online


      The Library of Congress is the planet's largest library, but it is but one of but thousands that you can access.

        15.1. Find Major Libraries e.g., the Library of Congress.
        15.2. Find and Use Telnet to Connect. Telnet is one of the original Internet applications along with FTP applications and email. There is a version of Telnet that works with any speed modem and nearly any vintage and brand of computer. Netscape may be used to start up the Telnet program, but it is still independent of Netscape and not necessary to run Netscape if you know the address of your destination. In this case, the address you enter into telnet is locis.loc.gov without any closing punctuation.
        15.3. Set Up to Capture Data. There will be so much data as a result of this activity that it is saved as its own file instead of copying the data into her Notes word processing file. However, she will put the name of this file in her notes.
        15.4. Search the Library of Congress.
        15.5. Quitting LOCIS and Telnet.
      Other online resources are also available. A middle section of Look's Tool Pyramid provides access to paper and other non-computer publications generally found in libraries. These publications contain information approved by committees and editors anxious to keep the reputation of their publication in the highest regard. Mrs. Jones first looked for stories about China at the juvenile literature level.


      Online links can connect her to many libraries for which she can search for juvenile and children's literature and the subject of China. For now she is interested in books, at another time she use the links to hunt for periodical articles. The references that she finds (e.g., citations) are copied and saved and will later to edited to the proper bibliographic format for this paper.

      16. How To: Find Quality Child-Rated Web Sites.
      The lower level of the Look Pages' Tool Pyramid connects to resources that are immediately available over the globe's computer network called the Internet. This level provides the greatest quantity of information for immediate access. But it can be of lower quality than the previous higher levels of the pyramid. She will need to more critically analyze what she finds here than in higher levels of this pyramid.


      This bottom level in turn has its own prioritized layers. In fact, it has its own pyramid structure. At the top of this section of the pyramid are search engines (e.g., search systems) which contain reviews and ratings of qualified web sites in their databases. This is called the refereed sub-section. Mrs. Jones searches her favorite, Magellan, for sites with four star ratings. She visits these links to see if they are truly appropriate for students and then saves selected sites as bookmarks. If she needs even more information she will use other web search tools further down in other sub-sections, such as the Catalog and the Robot systems sub-sections.

      17. How To: Gather Further Email Addresses of Experts and Consultants
      When visiting one of the sites, she discovers an interesting email address. She adds it to her collection of experts in her China Notes word processing file.


      18. Moving Bookmarks to Disk and Back

      19. How To: Search a Web Catalog Search System.
      The web pages commercials are distracting, but she learns to ignore them the same way she does with TV commercials. She searches Yahoo for a couple of bookmarks.


      20. HowTo: Search a Web Robot based System
      Next she searches a robot system, Lycos, but the immense number of references is intimidating. She simply records the number of references and plans to make more detailed searches if she needs further information. She makes a mental note that searching for China plus something more specific based on questions that emerge from her study would be of interest later.


      21. How To: Print.
      A significant number of resources have now been collected. To better organize her efforts, Mrs. Jones keeps a notebook for this paper. Returning to her word processing file, China Notes, she adds a title, boldfaces and centers it, adds the current date and prints it out. She uses the three-hole punch then places this printout in her notebook.


      22. How To: Annotate a Netscape Bookmark.
      She opens the bookmark file and annotates it briefly. She includes the web page address in the annotation, so that when it prints, she and others will be able to see the actual electronic addresses. In this way, others can use her printouts, type in the addresses manually and arrive at the same locations without needing to open her special bookmark file.


      23. How To: Save and Print Out Bookmarks.
      Then, she also prints out her bookmarks on China. The printouts are three-hole punched and inserted into the notebook. She compares this year's printout of four star web sites with last year's and notes with satisfaction that the list has grown significantly. However, she knew to expect that, given the 10-20% a month growth and the rate of change of the information on the Internet.


      Mrs. Jones realizes that she must weigh the credibility and validity of all her sources, but especially question those from the Internet and its web pages:  St. Cloud's credibility.

      Problem for Reflection: Mrs. Jones pauses to reflect frequently on what she has found. She writes these reflections in her notebook for the paper. The questions that emerge from this reflection set up later activity. Answering her own questions deepens her understanding. At the moment, she realizes that she does not know how to get the resources that she is finding to a significant percentage of North American students. Many of the books will not be in their libraries and/or they will not have access to the Internet. She phrases this problem as a question and saves it in her notebook for later reflection. She now realizes that access is an important factor to consider in her comparison for this paper.

      Evoke

      24. How To: Find the Evoke section of LEAP
      Using her bookmark to CROP she returns to its LEAP page. Having completed many activities at the Look stage, Mrs. Jones is ready to move to another phase of problem solving. She moves to the Evoke stage, the composition phase. It is time for more complete compositions using the data she has collected. Mrs. Jones has had her interest in learning more about China raised significantly. That is, her research has evoked a greater interest in China an in her question. Her challenge is now to compose in such a way that her readers develop this same interest.


      She looks over the set of tools in the Evoke section to remind herself of a range of possibilities for composition. From this list of tools she decides to continue to use the word processor she already knows and to use a spreadsheet which she has begun to learn to use. The CROP site merely reminds her of the tools available at the Evoke level. New application ideas are continually being added at CROP. She may or may not use these Evoke links. If she does use these links, she will also need to have the application programs of this web page on her computer and to have used the Options or Preferences menu to prepare her Web browser (e.g., Netscape, Internet Explorer) to activate these applications on her computer. Otherwise, she can use her computers standard operating system and start up applications in more familiar ways.

      25. How To: Use a Spreadsheet.
      She does recognize that multicultural work places high emphasis on comparison. She decides to experiment in determining how easily students could find comparative data. Her professor had mentioned the CIA Fact Book. Further, the rows and columns of a spreadsheet will be an excellent way to organize ideas in tables for comparison. Further, it will introduce her to the use of spreadsheet without the higher level of intimidation that immediate mathematical activities will raise. The spreadsheet that she has available may be different than the one that can be activated from the CROP site, but that is not an issue. She merely finds and runs the spreadsheet of her choice. The process is widely similar to many spreadsheet programs.

      26. How To: Modify Netscape to Run a Local Application.
      If she chooses, she can set up her computer so that a click at the CROP web site will start up that application on her desktop computer. Or she could make her own web page of her favorite applications on her machine and then create a bookmark to her applications web page. Either way, this would eliminate a step in finding the application that she needs for their work. But it is only an alternative, as she knows other more familiar ways of starting up needed applications.


      [#27 reserved for later additions.]

      28. How To: Develop First Draft.
      She begins this first draft of this paper by inserting her notes data in a new word processing file which she will edit and change while she continues to add to her notes file. She will return to her notes file again and again to pull from it new bits of data that she has found and saved on her diskette.


      29. How To: Find the State's Curriculum Objective Requirements
      As she types she realizes that she does not have a copy of the state's requirements that address multicultural classroom activity. Needing to review the state's requirements, she uses the link in CROP to bring up the curriculum matrix and check out the details. After initial exploring, she will find the third grade social studies curriculum page which addresses the study of other cultures.


      She will copy and paste the relevant, goals, objectives and competencies into her Notes file. This collection of information then needs further organization and development:

      St.Cloud's introductions and conclusions; Princeton's myths; Washburn's development ;Princeton's arguments. Scroll also to NU's section titled Documenting Sources.

      Problem for Reflection: Mrs. Jones now knows that she can easily find a large quantity of information on China. She has already begun to answer an important part of her paper's question. Much of it though is not in suitable form for many grade levels. How can she ever make such a large quantity of information accessible to school students? She leaves her reflective question in her notebook to ponder another time.

      Assess

      Feedback is a critical part of the problem solving and composing process. Feedback can be achieved in several ways, both off and on the Internet.

       Local Computer (Off the Net)
      There are computer software tools that can run on your own local workstation without a network connection. Use the spell check and grammar checker for your word processor.

      Ask others to help. Ask a friend to look over your composition. Visit your campus Writing Center and in addition to working with the center staff, check out their publications on writing.

      Global Computer (On the Net)
      The Internet is also both a resource of publications and of people.

      Many ideas about revision and grammar inform her editing:

      Trinity's questions ; Rensselaer's faults ; Paradigm's editing and revision. For guidance on your writing style and grammar, see Strunk's classic Elements of Style Also, scroll to the National Writing Center's page and their section on Grammar and Punctation.

      There is also a new service called Criterion Online Writing Evaluation. It allows students to get an instant score on writing samples  they submit. Our Perception online testing and
      assessment software provides the user interface for Criterion, which uses e-rater, ETS's proprietary automated  essay scoring system. For more see:

      There are many methods for interacting with others through the Internet. They can give you feedback on questions as they emerge, whether on the subject of your paper or on the paper itself, such as the SUP (Still Unsolved Problem) database or email conferences. The trick is to find those who are interested in your topic. Mrs. Jones tries several approaches with the email addresses that she collected from her prior research and stays on the lookout for more contacts.
       
       

      [The #30 is reserved for further development.]

      31. How To: Organize for Interaction
      She finds that email messages have a short "shelf life" on the Internet's email conferences. Often but a few days will pass and then they will disappear to make room for new messages. CROP's SUP database ensures that questions and answers to interesting questions can remain in a stable location to which she can direct others interested in her questions and to potentially collect their responses in a place that others can easily read and follow the discussion. She invites some of her email addressees to react to her questions in the Still Unsolved Problem database.


       She is, in effect, beginning to form her own study or problem solving team. Using any computer linked to the Internet, she will connect with CROP's Center for question sharing:

      Her "teammates" can use these processes of adding and searching to enter their own questions, read the questions of others and leave their own responses. If they give themselves a team name ,they can quickly retrieve each others questions. They can also invite experts to leave questions of interest and responses at CROP in the SUP database.

      She concludes that she has been given a simple way to create her own specialized email conference in place of a newsgroup or a LISTSERV. Here, her questions and the responses to them do not disappear overnight as with a newsgroup. To keep them, she does not have to save them to a word processing file as with a LISTSERV. She discovers that through this process she is also providing an important community service. Articulating questions and leaving a trail of responses and answers will some day be of use to others.

      Mrs. Jones reflects that these questions, the research and the four phase sequence itself are an important part of the writing process. In many cases, this work provides the "question starters" for other writing activity that could lead to other papers and hopefully even published articles in the journals she has been reading.

      32. How To: Use Email Conferences


      As the earlier searching showed, there are tens of thousands of electronic mail conferences. Though a few email conferences are primarily made up of school children, most are electronic conversations among adults. Mrs. Jones uses them for her professional level needs, to keep as current as possible on various topics and to have a ready source of expertise. But she sees problems for school use of global email conferences as a whole because she can never tell when adult language, adult attached images and unacceptable writing behavior will flare up in online email. This is not to say that there are not age-appropriate moderated email conferences, but as a general rule, any classroom general classroom use of email conferences requires highly controlled access and continuous monitoring for appropriate dialog. Mrs. Jones was pleased to hear in class that she can also work with her local Internet Service Provider to create an online email conference that will only allow her students and others to whom she has given specific permission to participate if she would like to pursue this option.

      One easily reached form of email conference is the newsgroup. Earlier Mrs. Jones used search systems to discover the newsgroup whose name is soc.culture.china and saved this data in her China notes. Working with newsgroups requires some flexibility. The procedures for sending and reading email vary from one web browser to another. Further, the software from any one browser company changes, sometimes significantly, with each new version of the software.

      Mrs. Jones uses several basic procedures in accessing newsgroups.

      33. How To: Send an Email Attachment.
      Having completed many parts of the first draft of her paper, she wants to share it with an email correspondent who has a great interest in China and has actually traveled there. She will use her email system to send her paper as an attachment to an email message. But she must make sure that her friend is using the same application as the attachment she sends or her friend will not be able to read it. In the same way she attached this word processing document, she can also attach multimedia files such as drawings, pictures, sound and video clips. Her friend can respond in minutes or in a couple of days. This same technique works just as well in newsgroup messaging.


      34. How To: Email a Newsgroup with a New Topic.
      She also sends a new news message to the K12.ed.soc-studies newsgroup that her paper is available for any would that would like to see her current draft. In doing so, she finds another way to enter a newsgroup. She tells this email community that she can also fax it to the first two or three who offer to critique it, but that she does not yet know how to make her own web pages so that as many as would like to can download it for with minimal effort.


      Her return email over the next week generated several new resources and a couple of excellent suggestions. They also generated the email addresses of two Chinese students that would be willing to trade email with her. These addresses are copied into her electronic notebook for future use. These interactions lead her to shift again to the Evoke stage of problem solving for additional composition.
       

      Problems for Reflection Email conferences, particularly newsgroups, vary from the depraved to the enlightened, from gossip to emergency assistance in times of disaster. Even if she does not teach her students to explore newsgroups, some will find the the seamier areas of this electronic email. How should she prepare students to handle strong adult material which they should not be encountering? To what degree should she seek to censor student access in and out of school? The new power she is discovering has inevitably revealed new problems she had not considered. She decides to work these reflections into her essay as well.

      Publish

      To share your work with others is to publish. In this sense, printing her final draft and handing in this assignment is a form of publishing. Mrs. Jones also realizes through this work that there other audiences that are important to her and to her profession. These audiences could benefit from another way to share in this work. She wants to look into ways in which she can quickly and inexpensively share her paper with others, classroom teachers, researchers and parents in her school. She arranges a meeting with the district computer coordinator and asks if her paper could become web pages for others to see use a web server. If possible she would like the quickest and simplest way to turn her finished paper into a web page visible across the Internet. Then she can simply give others its Web page address.

      How To: Make a Simple Web Page
      Her district computer coordinator asks her to attend a workshop that will take her through very simple steps to do this quickly. Once learned, this process actually takes but a matter of minutes. This workshop will also point out other steps that will allow her to improve the look, appeal and readability of her web pages in time and with more experience. Once the web pages are ready, they must be placed on a computer that runs software called web server software. This application will distribute or disseminate them on request from others on the Internet as they tap links on their web pages.

      How To: Use Fetch to Transfer Files between Computers
      A computer that distributes (publishes) web pages is a web server. The computer coordinator showed her workshop a list of several institutions that are interested in supporting teachers that wish to share their lesson and unit plans for free. These range from the state department of public instruction to agencies with grants to support education to the nearby university and community college to the school district superintendent who is looking into creating a web server that will be run by their school district.

      The workshop leader takes Mrs. Jones through the process of transferring (uploading) a file using a Macintosh application called Fetch. On computers running Windows operating system software, they might use FS_FTP. Once the file is transferred, the webmaster of the web server computer will make a new link from existing web pages to the new document on a web page the the webmaster manages or Mrs. Jones can create her own home page with a link to her paper.

      She decides to buy a modem and an Internet account for her home to make this work more convenient. Her Internet Service Provider makes web page file space available for a small monthly fee. She can then send her changes and updates directly to her web page over the telephone line from home and have them take effect immediately.

      How To: Copy a Disk.
      There are of course simpler forms of publishing including the use of a printer to make a printed copy and "sneakernet" to carry a paper copy down the hall to another teacher. A faster form of local information distribution is to make many copies of her diskette, as her resources files are as valuable as her paper. Mrs. Jones made a copy of her disk with the paper and related files and sent her disk to a neighboring city with an educational agency that has a grant to support educational projects in her area. She also sent email to journal publisher who requested a copy of the disk to consider it for publication.

      Both institutions chose to put her work online on their web sites. That is, they put her paper on their computers and made a link from their pages to her work. When the webmasters of those sites replied to her that the task was completed, they also gave her the electronic address of her paper, known as its URL. When she had received this data, she asked her building principal to include the electronic address or location of her unit plan in an article to her colleagues in the building and parents for the school newsletter so that they could read her material as well without running up duplicating costs.

      She also sent email to friends who had helped with her unit and to many in her k12.ed.soc-studies newsgroup. She informed them all of the several electronic locations of her web pages. Mrs. Jones is sure that ready access to her paper by those with whom she interacts will yield even more ideas for improving it should she wish to pursue it.

      All this interest then led her to thinking about other older forms of publication. Many publishers, journal and magazine editors, and writer's groups provide contact information, publication requirements and more through the Internet. Some are:

      Inkspot ; Purdue's Writing Lab.

    Problems for Reflection The idea of creating linked web pages puzzles Mrs. Jones. The links on any given web page connect with the web pages of others from around the world. It is a skill within the range of her students to learn and some already have. The writing process that she teaches has several stages: pre-writing, writing, editing/revision and publishing. As Mrs. Jones teaches composition, which stage of the writing process should be used to incorporate the ideas and process of linking? Is it possible that linking is a new category within the writing process or is a different process? How does this change the nature of writing and composition? As her continuing reflections in a new notebook indicate, the process of inquiry never ends.

    The End

    Case study #1b provided an extensive set of professional skills for the Internet, techniques for writing and problems for reflection. Additional case studies will be developed at this site in the future. Now use CROP to address your concerns and projects!

    Communities Resolving Our Problems: the basic idea
    [SUP: Sharing Problems] [THINK: Guidance] [LEAP: Solving Problems]
    Pub: v1.0, 4/5/98; updated Sept. 17, 2000