Creating
this e-zine deeply involved all of the class , with certain students
putting in surprising above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty efforts. No doubt,
part of what drove them to produce an excellent e-zine was their awareness
of that potentially much larger audience out there on the Internet.
Creating
this e-zine was especially attractive to the students who wanted to
publish
and to the students with an interest in computers and the Internet.
This project has experienced reverberations beyond that initial semester. The e-zine was featured in coyotE: An Undergraduate Interdisciplinary E-Journal for excellence in undergraduate achievement. I also facilitated a second issue of the e-zine with a new group of creative writing students in the Spring '98 semester.
Was there a downside to this project? Yes, there was. Even though the students performed most of the work in creating the e-zine, it still required many additional hours of work on my part to set up the committees, to assist students with doing final revising and editing, and to keep things running smoothly. And, for the second issue, a few students resisted the idea of publishing their work on the web. We compromised by letting them publish their work anonymously.
I have not put together an issue of the e-zine with a creative writing class since that first year. I really needed time to reflect upon this experience, and in part, writing this piece has helped me to do just that. If I initiate another issue of the e-zine, I will try to find ways to make the project less stressful for everyone involved. The good things that emerged from the completion of the first and second issues suggest to me that it is certain worth another try.
It is clear that I achieved my initial
goals.
The e-zine project did help students to become much more committed to
participating in the
class and to improving their writing. What might have been simply minimal
participation by students taking creative writing to fulfill their
advanced
writing requirement instead became a fascinating collaborative effort and
a powerful record of their development as writers at that point in
time.
|
|
|
|