Welcome to the Home Node for the 2003-2004 course project in a 4th year Honours Seminar "The Theory and Practice of Effective Communication" in the Communication Studies Program in the Division of Social Science at York University.

This year, students in the class have constructed a group hypertext based on issues emerging from our course. (To view, earlier class projects go to 2001/2002 and 2002/2003.) Students choose to work on
topics individually (with the exception of 3 students who worked together on one topic) and for the most part did not duplicate topics. Four categories emerged ("Communicaton forms", "The migration of a story from print to film"; "A Story and its Interpretations" and "The evolution of a genre") and this was the rationale for the pull-down menus on the left. It is also possible to access the topics by consulting the alphabetical list of students and their topics.

An ongoing concern of mine is to develop a "rhetoric of academic-based hypertext"; to this end, students consulted about the design layout and how best to construct the nodes and the links. To establish coherence among the topics, the students agreed to follow certain style conventions on their individual nodes. They wrestled with the content and how best to present their information in such a way that the nodes could be discrete, but they could also be seen as part of their larger set of nodes. I believe that this project furthers the "exploration of the potential for hypertext to work in academic settings." (from the course web site of 2002-2003)

Thanks to the following students for their extra work on this project:

Design work carried out by Aisha Gilani, Liat Fishman and Doris Hsiao
Migration of projects to the Web carried out by Doris Hsiao, Michelle Gibbons and Riaz Khan
Class Photo taken by Jackie Guenther

Mary-Louise Craven
Associate Professor,
Communications Studies Program,
Social Science Division, York University