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My Web Designing Philosophy Some people may find a "web design philosophy" to be far-fetched, but it's not. I've been engaged with the visual arts since childhood. Since the fetal stage of the Internet, I have been "connected." Even though most people view the Internet as a commercial venture, I feel that its importance as a medium of information can never be overlooked. I sincerely feel that users should be able to learn something from each page that is presented to them, whether it be commercial or something more personal. There should be something of worth that the user can take with them. Of course this is very subjective. What is "something of worth"? Only we know what it is on our own personal level. Unfortunately, at this writing (August 2000) the Internet is still in its infant stage. Because of browser shortcomings and slow downloads (especially in Europe) the potential for the Internet to become a full-fledged multimedia medium is only now beginning to be realized. My Teaching Philosophy As a writer, I have a sense of the creative process that occurs in the minds of those who write, the motivations, the need to express oneself, and the manipulation of language to evoke images and emotional responses. To understand literature is to understand oneself. My students have been very responsive to writing about themselves, fictionalizing their experiences, and critiquing their peer’s work in workshops. I have used film and animated shorts to connect the students to their dreams and imagination. Visual art and music are the mediums I use to teach students how to write a poem. My literature classes are a combination of lecture and discussion. I usually do a 3-5 minute observation on the reading and this eventually ends with a question. The students jump in with comments and we go on until I can anticipate discussion is about to peter out. I then start the cycle again. I like to keep a spinal column of continuity to the discourse and I reorient discussion when a student seems to be drifting off topic. At the same time, I encourage spontaneity and creativity. Presently, I am examining how multimedia and Internet access can improve the ways in which literature and writing are taught. I live in Germany and have researched the origins of the Grimms’ Hausmärchen. Much of this work is being incorporated into multi-media presentations that examine the significance of fairy tales. The targeted audience is college to graduate level students who are studying comparative literature. My writing tends to be very visual. I have worked primarily on war/combat literature combining realism and post modern collage-texts. I have also done graduate work in screenwriting with a focus on the full length feature film. I have always admired those writers who have taken their experience
of war and its surrealism and horror and recreated it in fiction that supersedes
any fathomable sense of reality. That is the nature of war.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. comes to mind with his science-meta-war-fiction.
His combination of theme and technique has always spoken to me unlike many
other authors.
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