Teaching and Learning on a New Playing Field: What Does It Give, and
What Does It Take?
A Review of Sommers, Elizabeth. “Can Anybody Play? Using the World Wide Web
to Develop Multidisciplinary Research and Writing Skills.” Weaving a Virtual Web:
Practical Approaches to New Information Technologies. Ed. Sibylle Gruber. Urbana:
NCTE, 2000. 59-77.
In short, fresh enough and novel enough to provide multitiered possibilities, the Web
becomes an environment for students learning to understand ideas, scholarship in
the disciplines, themselves, and one another. Multidimensional, fluid, transitory, and
playful, the Web also provides a playing field on which participants can and do
experiment with ideas, knowledge and wisdom, the boundaries between genres, and
disciplines; and the participants’ roles—writers and readers, viewers and listeners—
blur in the process. (Sommers 61)
Elizabeth Sommers’s essay, “Can Anybody Play? Using the World Wide Web to
Develop Multidisciplinary Research and Writing Skills,” describes an undergraduatelevel web-based course the author developed for teaching multidisciplinary research and
writing. Sommers also reflects in this essay on what she has learned about web-based
research and writing pedagogies—the problems as well as the benefits—as a result of
designing and teaching this course.
Learning outcomes of Sommers’s course (titled “Electronic Reasearch and Writing”)
include acquisition of a working familiarity with both the content and use of traditional
and electronic libraries and with methods of accessing information sources with
electronic reference tools and popular web search engines. Students also come away from
this course with a larger repertoire of strategies for evaluating academic and scholarly
sources on line, for writing to a variety of audiences using a variety of genres on the web,
and for reading and writing hypertext (63-65).
Teaching strategies that Sommers employs in her course include the use of asynchronous
conferencing, cross-disciplinary course readings that lead to genre analysis and a deeper
consideration of the implications of technology in our writing and in our lives,
collaborative project work, a mentoring system whereby students who have already
completed the course offer assistance to those currently enrolled, and practice in using the
variety of computer technologies that enhance electronic research and writing (65-66).
To supplement her course narrative, Sommers includes representative course documents
(syllabus, reading prompts, project ideas, and so on) as appendices to the essay.
The value of teaching about the web as a research tool, Sommers suggests, is largely in
the fact that such use of the web “seems to urge us to reexamine our ways of thinking and
knowing, our ways of sharing and creating ideas” (61). Elaborating on this claim,
Sommers observes that in exploring online research practices,
Students can and do ask the right questions about the purposes of research, its
audience, and the relationship of form to content. Students also can and do ask with
is “good” research? Should it provide information, patch together new knowledge,
acknowledge wisdom or even strive toward a wisdom of its own? (61)
Beyond developing expertise in electronic research and writing, students also benefit
from taking this web-based course in the following ways:




A web-based pedagogy tends to extend students’ involvement in their own
learning (for example, through web-based projects and participation in user
groups, email and other web-based communities).
Students tend to relate to the course and their learning experience more
horizontally—that is, they view the knowledge they are gaining as an
enhancement rather than a replacement of their existing knowledge.
Web-based discourse provides a contrast to other genres, particularly the
academic, and thus prompts greater attention to all discourse forms.
The Internet is already a primary medium through which students learn and
communicate, and so exploring a new area of web literacy helps students use it
more fluently and discerningly.
In reflecting her experience in teaching Electronic Research and Writing, Sommers notes
some negative aspects, including a frustration that the “staggering” amount of time and
effort involved in web-based teaching means she can’t provide much continued support
to students beyond the course duration. She also feels challenged by the fact that some
students reject the notion of personal agency and authority that web-based pedagogies
encourage, for the forms that their resistance takes tend to cause problems for the rest of
the class.
Sommers offers several pointers to instructors who may be interested in adopting a
similar pedagogical approach. First, as a cautionary note, she suggests that the
“traditional teacher who prefers to remain the primary authority in the classroom, expects
a homogeneous group of students, or fails to provide careful scaffolding for students to
learn about both language and technology” (66) would likely find web-based teaching
problematic. Sommers advises anyone who is willing to take the plunge into this
pedagogical approach to “observe as many classes as you can, talk to as many teachers
and students as possible, study lesson plans and the philosophy behind them, and learn to
use some of the Web’s capabilities” (67) and to cultivate a technology support system in
which you can participate as both learner and mentor and that may involve students as
well as colleagues. She also cautions teachers to remember that the dominant form of
academic discourse is still linear and print-based, and so any effort to introduce students
to the new ways of thinking and knowing that emerge on the “playing field of the Web”
(61) needs to be balanced with continued attention to the more traditional kinds of
information and knowledge these students may need in their chosen careers. Nonetheless,
Sommers celebrates the fact that
In various ways, through different means, the participants in Electronic Research and
Writing arrive at unique conclusions about the nature of knowledge and information,
the limitations of any given way of knowing and the infinite possibilities that open
up when many symbol systems, many ways of knowing are embraced. (68-69)
As a feminist and teacher who is committed to exploring alternative forms of academic
discourse and new strategies for teaching and learning, I read this thoughtful and practical
essay with great interest. While Sommers is quick to point out the complexities of webbased teaching, I believe, with her, that at least for some of us, an awareness of the
positive aspects of this pedagogical approach for our students will impel us to rise to the
many challenges inherent in establishing a new way of teaching.
Tracy Ann Robinson
WR 520—Computers and Composition
Oregon State University
4/30/02