Welcome to the Web Pen Pals site!

This site showcases the Web Pen Pals project, a telecollaborative, intergenerational university-secondary partnership between pre-service English teachers at University of Tennessee, Knoxville and local middle school students who meet online to talk about young adult literature. This site describes the philosophy and beliefs underlying the project for new participants, in-service teachers, school administrators, parents, university colleagues, and anyone else interested in the role communication—influenced by new Internet technologies—plays in the learning process. The site also serves as the portal to the adolescent literature course Blackboard site where Web Pen Pal participants host their personal homepages and access the discussion forums and collaborative journals they use in the project. In addition, the site includes extensive resources on everything we consider crucial to the project: dialogue or “exploratory talk,” critical and new techno-literacies, and young adult literature (including author bios and information on books we use in the project).