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Elizabeth Cooper, director of a large writing and rhetoric program, and Michael Keller, computer coordinator in the English Department, are both teachers of writing and trainers of teachers of writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. We work together to juggle the numerous institutional, faculty, student, disciplinary, and computers and networking variables involved in integrating new technologies into the writing classroom and curriculum.

While much of the work in the field of computers and writing has been concerned with first-year composition and rhetoric or more generic writing, we find that graduate courses in writing hypertext or professional writing present us with additional problems that must be addressed. For example, in the last decade composition theory has taught us much about how to respond to student text in development. How do we respond to hypertext in the making? How do we evaluate "finished" hypertexts? How do thesis and dissertation committees (many of whose members may be unfamiliar with hypertext) assess effectiveness or mastery of hypertextual submissions? In addition, for those of us trying to prepare students: What should comprise a curriculum on hypertext for graduate courses offered specifically to prepare future writers and teachers? Graduate students who take such courses enter with quite different motivations, expectations, interests, and levels of expertise--literary, work/career-oriented, scholarly/critical; their knowledge of discourse and experiences with writing are quite diverse; their skills with technology vary from almost nonexistent to sophisticated. How much teaching time should be taken up with technical issues rather than textual ones?

Elizabeth Cooper 
Michael Keller