Whether we mean for it to happen or not, we teachers of literature frequently design assignments which privilege display over other possible rationales for academic writing. One problem with shaping assignments whose raison d'etre is to showcase skills or knowledge students have acquired is that such assignments often result in a series of empty gestures on both the teacher's and the students' parts. With the traditional paper assignment, the teacher provides students with what is essentially a fake occasion to motivate their writing (i.e., pretend your reader has a gap in understanding that you can fill, or pretend that you have to persuade your reader about the meaning of text X); the students proceed to tackle the hypothetical problem or need, knowing all the while that their actual objective is attaining their teacher's approval via a display of some kind (they must show their grasp of the text, their analytical and rhetorical proficiency). The teacher then evaluates the quality of the students' written products with his/her pedagogical goals in mind; the stated occasion for the writing is just an excuse for an academic exercise. A way to begin to confront this predicament is to create assignments which aim to solve real problems or answer real questions: in other words, assignments in which the hypothetical and actual objectives are identical. A hypertext dictionary or anthology project is one such assignment. Fundamentally, in such a project, students are being asked to look critically at the ways in which knowledge is organized, disseminated, and received--and to envision possible alternatives to our current ways of shaping discourse and studying culture.
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