Appearing alongside Powell's concern over the issues of materiality is his reflection on the use of the Scalar paths to chunk and arrange his online response. Powell’s use of the multimodal space seemed to allow him a way of expressing tension or complexity in his argument; however in the act of making his argument, he frustrated the community standards we had established for the book. These frustrations made for productive engagement with Powell’s work, as fellow students were constantly having to relearn how to read his responses.

The success of the model is reminiscent of McCarty’s notion of a successful model of: “models, however finely perfected, are better understood as temporary states in a process of coming to know rather than fixed structures of knowledge” (“Modeling”). In the ‘process of coming to know’ it was useful to have a model and space in which we could more freely experiment with form and design.

For publication, however, we removed all subnavigation from the exercises and instead chose to include each page for each assignment in the paths. In some cases, this altered students’ arguments; however, we were conscious of a very different audience for our work in a publication setting. Our assumption is that readers of scholarship are interested in following a linear argument. (Compare example of subnavigation in old version of page with linear navigation)

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