What I was trying to say...

[Paul Allison]

This morning I wrote, "Writing with Hypertextopia brings with it a web of past teaching and learning experiences and imagined future conversations all circling around digital storytelling and links and hypertext, and a new form of literacy that transforms the space of our reading experience."

Let me try to tease out what I mean by that mess of words.

"Writing with Hypertextopia..." In this phrase I was trying to capture Julie and my sense that we want the experience of writing to be central, and the tool to remain in the background, at least at first. Today was a day about "generating writing," and perhaps we could be more explicit about that by asking participants to imagine other ways that they might have generated writing while using this tool. Yes, slowing down enough to have that conversation seems important. (Perhaps putting it here helps?)

The "web of past teaching and learning experiences" refers to so much that I'm not sure where to begin. If I were to break this down more it would include the work I did specifically with Hypertextopia with my 8th Graders this Spring "Memory Chain + Where I'm From = Hypertext Poem" and it would include the webcast/podcast that I did with Jeremy Ashkenas, the young developer of this site.

And so much more...

And forward to conversations I want to have with this group about hypertext, linking and the kinds of thinking and composing that these present to us and our students now... additional literacies.

[Susan Ettenheim]

I've been working in shelfari.com today and am so confused because there is a bigger gap than I had realized between my "book" reading and my online reading. Spaces like hypertextopia allow us to stretch words and imagination, somehow going around this odd discomfort that I am faced with today between books and online. This is about reading but reading is of course, all about writing.