About "Kairos Critique: Kudos and Curses"

"Letters and webtexts written in response to previous Kairos issues are requested for this interactive part of the journal. We particularly are looking for class projects or scholarly works that are based on Kairos publications."

• webtexts designed to help ground pedagogical theory in classroom praxis
• editorials from teachers regarding classroom experiences

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See: Comparison of this web site, before and after testing.
When I asked my technical writing students to review this web site, each wrote about 125 words -- about 50 more than each had written in their critiques of Kairos.  Any number of variables may have prompted the greater output, but more important, the comments reflected higher-level critical thinking.  This is not surprising, because the students understood that I was going to use their critique to improve the site; hence, their inquiry was more focused.  Collectively, they leapt at the opportunity to evaluate my work. (All quotes in this section are partial comments... see the full text.)

• Some students complained about my tendency to overuse bold text.  (I have eased up a little.)
• Others were puzzled about the the purpose of this web site.

(I have since added other introductory and explanatory material, including this section; I have also shortened the blurbs on the home page, in order to pull more article titles higher up on the page.)
• Some students simply didn't take to it.
• "Just as you thought that the new Kairos site was intimidating, I found your site to be intimidating as well."
• "The language is not suitable for the everyday user. If this critique is meant to appeal to other web design gurus like yourself then it is great!!! But if you want the average person to critique your critique then you might want to change some of the language."
• Others particularly disliked the tone of writing.
• "The tone sonds mean and condescending. If desginers/writers of Kairos saw the critique, they would miss out on useful information because the sarcastic tone would offend them."
• "...some of the funny, sarcastic phrases didn't seem to go with text like, 'online rhetoric is a complex and arcane pursuit, best left to brilliant but soulless code-crunchers, or to gnostic theorists who have discovered a medium that affirms their pre-existing ideas about textuality.' It makes the reader wonder when you mean it and when you don't....
• "A lot of words you used I've never even heard of before. Halfway through sentences I got frusterated and stopped reading them."

• "Your critique is well put and stated with due professional prose. The critique is well thought and well done."
• "I felt that you showed us several ways to present the issues from blunt to light humor. I liked what was said about the three suggestions on how Kairos could best serve its readers. I agree completely with this."
• "Wow, insant credability. tenure anybody?"
• "I think the way you tried to critique it was actually good, you brought out the most important points in form of instructions. You actually demonstrated the instructions with showing the links at the end. I like that."
• "The critique page itself is layed out well, offering abstracts of each portion on the main page which link to the full text for the section they describe. This allows the user to get an overview of the critique on the first page and then they can easily locate the full text for an area that they're interested in. The critique makes it easy for users to obtain the full text with only one click, a good idea since the main complaint of the critique is how difficult it is to reach the full articles on Kairos."