The Beats (Figure 9) is an open-ended ToolBook program which is centered on the texts of the works of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It was designed to incorporate the use of a Rhino Word Beat (1994) boxed set of three audio CDS entitled The Beat Generation which contains recordings of these authors reading some of their works, jazz, period radio interviews and much more. The Beats also includes hypertext background materials and pictures. More importantly, the Beats contains generic tools designed to support student (and teacher) discourse and reflection about literary works.

The Beats is a hypermedia environment in which students can explore the lives and works of the Beat writers and develop personal and collaborative meanings about them. Central to it are the works themselves (Figure 10). These can be accessed either by author or by title, and consist of either the complete texts or extended excerpts. In many cases, the user can choose to hear the work read by its author, and most pages also contain illustrations and/or animations. In addition, linked to every work is a three page discourse area (Figure 11) where students and teachers can leave their general comments and/or questions about it.

Surrounding these central texts is a variety of background information presented in words, pictures, and sounds (Figure 12). The Beats contains a biography (Figure 13) for every author represented, as well as descriptions of many of the places that figured prominently in the history of the Beat movement (Figure 14). The program also contains period newspaper articles and radio interviews, musical selections, photos, and a glossary of beat terms. All background information contains hypertext links to other information and/or the literary works themselves, and buttons through which photos and cuts from the audio CDS can be accessed. Global and local navigational tools are provided in the top and bottom margins of all pages.

Most importantly, the Beats contains a set of response-based tools which are accessible through a right button click from any page in the program (Figure 15). Clicking on the buttons (shown below with tool descriptions) on the toolbar which then appears, activates the corresponding tool. These are of four types:

The Personal Notes Tools allows students to link the literary texts in the Beats to writings in a personal journal by linking every page in the main program to a page in a separate ToolBook for each student. Each student can access their "private journal" (Figure 15) by clicking on the Personal Notes Tool on the toolbar. All pages in the journal can be copied and/or printed, as well as separately accessed.

The Notes Tool allows students to drop buttons in the margins of any page in the the Beats to annotate text (Figure 16). These buttons pop-up scrolling text fields in which anyone can read and/or write. Notes is thus a tool designed to support public discourse linked to particular elements of literary works. The spaces it creates hold reflective conversations among students and teachers across time.

The Links Tool supports student creation of links between any of the pages in the Beats. Clicking on the Links icon on the toolbar pops-up a dialog box in which the student is asked to name the relationship they see between the two items they are linking. The program then adds that name to a Links button, which the student can place anywhere on the page, and asks him or her to go to the page he or she wants to link to. On that page, the student similarly positions a return link.

Media tools allow students to link photographs and audio clips to text:

Clicking on the Photography Tool allows students access over one hundred photographs of people, places, and things related to the readings.

The Audio Tool similarly lets students access audio tracks from the three audio CDs it incorporates.

These four tools were specifically developed to support response-based teaching and learning in ways we felt made the best use of the unique characteristics of the computing medium. Table 10 outlines the ways in which these tools instantiate the response-based criteria concerning knowledge and the roles of text, students, and teachers developed in the first phase of the "Multimedia and Literature Teaching and Learning" project. Table 11 highlights the response-based features instantiated in the tools and pages of the Beats. It shows that all of the features identified as supportive of response-based literature teaching and learning in the first phase of the project can be found in the program.

The Beats was designed to enhance discourse among students in ways we hoped would complement regular classroom conversations. In particular we hope it would:

1. Support the voices of reticent students.
   
2. Encourage more reflective conversations.
   
3. Free discourse from time constraints.
   
4. Encourage discourse by providing concrete representations of conversations, and