Several weeks ago, Felicia, Sally, and I listed for each other what we thought were "Writing Project Principles" that would guide our work with all of you this summer.  Two of these were:

• We want you to have wonderful, rich writing experiences first, then think about how to create similar experiences for students.
• We want to give you plenty of time for process writing and process talk, because we believe that by making our thinking visible, we can develop into a community of learners, learning from each other.

With first day of the Advanced Institute fast upon us, I would like to take this opportunity to make some of my thinking visible by describing the early stages of the process of designing of our "Language and the Internet" Web site at MyClassSite.org/sum2002. I offer this story of my thinking as an example of the kinds of reflective process writing we will invite you to do this summer.

When I was building the Web site, I was impressed with how the technology or mode of Web design seemed to be intertwined with my reading and writing processes. Sometimes researchers look at Web pages as final products and consider how the multimedia and hypertext aspects of a Web site play off of each other. Although such analysis is important, I think it would also be worth considering how composing for the Web changes the process of writing as well.

For example, was the idea of starting with a question -- which sits by itself on the opening page -- a composing decision or a design choice? Both obviously. Then, the decision to make the letters blink? What could that possible mean?  I think I wanted to create something flashy, over the top, unnecessary -- yet possible and typical of what happens to words on the World Wide Web. I wanted this question to be a good example of the new choices our students face because of their access to the Web. How to help students to use flashy fonts and animation in expressive and thoughtful ways is just one question that I think is worth exploring.

While I was planning the "Language and the Internet" Web site, I was reading Cyberpl@y, by Barbara Danet. On page 7, she quotes Richard Lanham's suggestion "that when we read a digital text, we are always looking first AT it [the text] then THROUGH it, and this oscillation creates a different implied ideal of decorum, both stylistic and behavioral." This makes a lot of sense to me.  I tend to pay more attention to fonts and formatting when I write for the Web than I would otherwise, and the blinking question is one example.

Another example of this notion that language on the Web has both a meaning and a visual presence is the font I chose for around the compass on the main page. I wanted it to be something that most people would have to look AT before they looked THROUGH it. I searched for and found a font that uses symbols from alphabets other than the standard 26. So that the sign for the British pound is used for the capital "L" and the copyright symbol is used for the capital "C".  Again, I want to be clear that I didn't use this font to frustrate or to amuse people. Instead, I consciously searched for a font that would implicitly express something important about what the "Language and the Internet" Web site is all about.

Similarly, I put a lot of thought behind the overall design of the main page as well. I got the idea of using a matrix with a compass at the origin point (0,0) while reading the first chapter of Douglas Biber's Variation across speech and writing. To introduce his key concept of "multidimensional analysis," Biber asks the reader to compare two, then three, then four different kinds of texts: a conversation, a scientific paper, a panel discussion, and a narrative. First he uses two separate continuums, then he represents one type of discourse difference with a y-axis and the other with an x-axis.... Oh! It's too hard to explain it all here, but I was reading this chapter when I was planning this Web site, and it seemed like an interesting way to represent the different ways language is used on the Internet.

There's more I could add about other things that influenced the design of the "Language and the Internet" Web site, but I hope the examples I've given are enough to suggest the ways in which reading, writing, and Web design were coming together for me.

Soon, I was searching the Internet for a fitting image of a compass. The next step in my planning happened when I found a compass with four different colors. I was almost ready to write! The four colors gave me a design idea, a visual representation of four categories that seemed to me to be a way to make connections between different theories about language and the Internet. "Ah-ha!" I remember thinking, "the site could be a giant Cartesian grid, the axes representing two of Biber's dimensions. And on the color-coded quadrants I could plot specific Internet situations or environments as they are described in David Crystal's book Language and the Internet, and by others in other places."

So far though, I was just talking to myself. I started writing -- scratching away with a pencil in my notebook --  an introduction to these theories and the design of the "Language and the Internet" Web site.  At the same time, I was having a technical problem. The image of the compass had colors on the inside of the circle, and I wanted to make it look like these colors extended a few screens in all directions from the middle of the screen where the compass would be.

Without getting too technical here, I think it's useful to explain that my first solutions didn't look good enough for me. The colors immediately around the compass didn't exactly match the colors in the outer parts of each quadrant. Finally, I decided to use Photoshop to split the image of the compass into four parts. Why am I explaining all of this? Well, it's significant because the technical solution of dividing up the compass gave me an idea for writing. I heard myself saying (to myself), "Why not write four different versions of an introduction to the ideas behind the design of this Web site? And you could make each introduction more or less fit the Internet environment or language dimension represented by that quadrant!"

So that's what I'm in the process of doing. First, I created a hypertext essay that takes advantage of some of the multimedia possibilities of the World Wide Web -- sound, text, image, links. You can find this essay by clicking on the link in the blue part of the compass. After I finish this message, I plan to write an e-mail to all of you, introducing you to this summer's Web site. In that e-mail, I'll include links to student samples that might show what discourse differences on the Internet are all about. This correspondence will be copied and linked to the red section of the compass. By the end of the first week of our work together, I'll add another link under the yellow part of the compass. This link will take you to a transcript of a chat session we will have had about the theory and design of the "Language and the Internet" Web site.  Finally, you'll find the Nicenet message that you are reading now copied and linked to the green part of the compass.

I know that many of the theories and details that I've included in this message need more examples and fuller explanations.  I hope the other introductions linked to the compass help to clarify some of what I've mentioned briefly here. I have three reasons for posting this message. First, I wanted to tell this story of my braided processes of reading, writing, and Web design to suggest the kinds of experiences with composing for the Web that we want you to have this summer. We want each of you to feel the dialectical power of composing words for a Web design and designing a Web page with important content.

Second, and more generally, I offer this story of my thinking as one example of how the Internet changes our ways with words. In addition to writing for the Web, you will also be experiencing the power of new forms of language this summer in chat rooms, on bulletin boards, and through e-mail!

Finally, I hope this message can serve as an example of the kinds of reflective writing we want you to do this summer. You don't have to write a Bible like this one every time, but by making your thinking visible, you will contribute to our learning community this summer. I welcome any response to this message, and I look forward to reading your process stories!