Writing Centers and Students with Disabilities: The User-centered Approach,Participatory Design,and Empirical Research as Collaborative Methodologies

This article discusses issues of accessibility and how user-centered and participatory approaches can inform empirical research to guide the Universal Design of virtual spaces and influence writing center efforts for students with disabilities. Because this article describes how to integrate usability/accessibility testing for online and in-person services, it can work as a model for writing centers struggling with the challenges of serving students with disabilities. Toward this end, the article discusses two generations of usability testing on a large, well-established online writing lab (the Purdue OWL), as well as the collaborative projects that emerged between the usability team and campus disabilities services as a result of this testing. The article concludes with heuristics and generative questions that may assist readers in developing similar projects tailored to their own contexts.     

Writing, technologies, and the fifth canon

Andrea Lunsford's keynote address to the 2005 Computers and Writing Conference at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, expands the definition of writing to include epistemic, multivocal, multimodal, and multimediated practices in the computers and writing classroom. The article describes the development and piloting of a new undergraduate course in Stanford's Program in Writing and Rhetoric that applies these concepts to the undergraduate composition process. The address closes with a challenge to create classroom experiences that allow students to compose in “the most compelling discursive modalities of their generation”.     

Determining effective distance learning designs through usability testing

To add to the developing understanding of Web-based writing instruction, we conducted usability testing to assess the design of our online first-year composition courses at a large community college in the Southwest. Beyond the course-specific results, this study offers two primary contributions. First, it offers a model for conducting usability testing of Web-based writing classes to diagnose potential design problems in a course. This includes providing an indication of what kinds of results and data teachers should expect to gather, how to interpret that data, where to go for assistance, whom to involve in the testing process, and what to do with the results. Second, this study provides an initial understanding of guidelines for course design using Web-based technologies. These guidelines were developed by examining writing classes in the study and then comparing the results with already established principles of design from usability engineering.     

Narratives of digital life at the trAce Online Writing Centre

This paper examines text-based interactions found on the Internet—that is, stories contributors have told about themselves and their everyday lives, specifically The Noon Quilt, Lost, and Home, as well as Migrating Memories, The Dawn Quilt, and The Road Quilt. All of these sites were developed and managed by the trAce Online Writing Centre between 1998 and 2005.     

Writing about cool: Teaching hypertext as juxtaposition

This article takes as its departure point the near simultaneous work on notions of cool, technology, and composition in 1963, to begin discussion on how the juxtaposition of these moments can lead to an electronic rhetoric. Based on classroom work done at the University of Florida in two courses entitled “Writing About Cool,” the article presents juxtaposition as a method for writing electronically. Because this particular juxtaposition revolves around the word cool, the rhetoric proposed here is called a rhetoric of cool. The article frames a rhetoric of cool by describing how temporal events in the respective fields of writing, technology, and cultural studies seen in juxtaposition provide a model for electronic research. The article considers the influential 1963 Conference on College Composition and Communication (4Cs), writings by Albert Kitzhaber, Marshall McLuhan, Douglas Engelbart, and Amiri Baraka, and demonstrates how these works inform writing instruction in a contemporary networked writing classroom. Finally, the article examines how students working with hypertext, drawing from these works and juxtapositions, are able to not only write about cool, but are able to write cool as well.     

The development of an ESL OWL, or learning how to tutor writing online

This essay describes the development of an ESL OWL by grounding practices in language and literacy pedagogy theory. An initial discussion explores OWLs emulating physical writing center spaces. Two areas of concern are then addressed in meeting the needs of second language writers as they relate to practices and training for online tutoring: error correction—an area of frequent concern to second language writers—and increased interactivity—meeting second language writer expectations and creating autonomous learners. Issues of plagiarism by second language writers are discussed as related to the type of feedback OWL tutors can provide. Highlighted throughout are samples of interactions between tutors and writers that show a process of learning how to create dialogue rather than dictations from the tutor to clean up a single essay.     

Online community and the personal diary: Writing to connect at Open Diary

Open Diary was the first online diary service to be created, in existence from 1998 to 2014. An ethnographic case study was performed in 2006–2008 to explore community-creation on the site, using the theory of sense of virtual community (Blanchard & Markus, 2002, 2004) to analyse site practices and the member experience. The study describes a cohesive community based on a culture of support, empathy and open sharing of personal lives enabled by anonymity and privacy protections. The article discusses these results in terms of community-creation online and compares Open Diary to current forms of life writing online, blogging in particular, arguing that it was the members’ and designers’ understanding and experience of the traditional pen-and-paper diary that enabled the building of a unique community on the site, creating an experience that is perhaps no longer possible to replicate due to the social and cultural changes that have occurred on the web since 1998.     

Cognitive,social, and environmental attributes of distributed engineering collaboration: A review and proposed model of collaboration

The objective of this article is to review the attributes that influence distributed collaboration groups engaged in engineering tasks in order to guide the research into the development of new tools and methods to support engineering groups. Three comprehensive areas of literature that describe the cognitive, social, and environmental factors influencing collaboration are covered including task characteristics, collaborative technology, and group/individual development. A model is proposed that can contribute to the understanding of the engineering collaboration process, distributed group interaction, and the role of the task within this environment. The relationships between the attributes included in the model are hypothesized to affect the distributed collaboration process. This article discusses the attributes and suggests that further research is required to validate the model's relationships. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The evolution of the Computers and Writing Conference, the second decade

This article, written for the twentieth anniversary of the Computers and Writing Conference, is the sequel to “The Evolution of the Computers and Writing Conference” (Computers and Composition, 12(3), November, 1995). The earlier article analyzed many of the intellectual concerns, values, and language expressed in presentations at the Computers and Writing Conference from 1982 to 1994. This article does the same for the second ten conferences, 1995-2004. Throughout the second decade, we have developed a new comfort with computers, expanded our idea of “writing” beyond the traditional essay, and gained a respected place in the academy. Computers and writing has become an institution. At the same time, we sometimes worry about losing control over our teaching and can feel overwhelmed by the size of the task we undertake. Many of our values have stayed the same; however, we are optimistic about the place of technology in our work and in the culture at large, we love to experiment, and we routinely weave ideas from other disciplines and other areas of our lives into our computers and writing research.     

Learning to write in an online writing center: The effect of learning styles on the writing process

One of the main advantages of online learning materials is that they can be adapted for students with different learning styles. This article presents a study and a methodology to investigate whether students with different learning styles make use of the potential flexibility of online learning materials, i.c. in the context of an online writing center. The study aims to investigate the effect of learning styles on (a) the students' approach to the writing task (process), and (b) on the letters they write (product). Twenty students each completed a module on writing ‘bad news’ letters designed for Business Communication courses. Their reading and writing processes were recorded. The letters were also graded to determine their quality. An effect of learning style was found: Active and Reflective writers approached the task differently, but only in the beginning of the process. In this early stage Reflective learners were more likely to focus on the theory section than Active learners. This suggests that writers with different learning styles tackle the learning materials in different ways, often in line with the preferences that characterize their learning styles. However, no effect of learning style on text quality was found.     

The Invisible Interface: MS Word in the Writing Center

Writing centers have developed best practices in order to help student writers, most popularly, non-directive tutoring pedagogies, based on the use of paper drafts. These same tutoring protocols have been extended to computer-based face-to-face sessions under the assumption that they will have similar outcomes, which subscribes to the myth of technology as a transparent tool that does not affect the writing that emerges from it. A lack of attention to computers in the writing center extends to the use of word processing programs like MS Word. This article discusses these issues in the context of a case study of one tutor in computer-based tutoring sessions in a writing center. Throughout these sessions, situations arose involving the use of the MS Word interface that affected the nature of the session itself. This case study suggests that computers, and particularly the MS Word program, need to be examined critically to consider how their use corresponds with the mission of the writing center itself. There are a number of strategies that can also help tutors use MS Word in ways that will best serve students’ individual needs.     

基于EOWL的簇集成协作本体

不同的本体之间通常需要进行协作。标准OWL只是预留了一个owl:import接口，是一种“全盘的肯定方式”。文章提出了一个不同于当前本体之间的约束协作方法，构建了一个本体与外部本体群的协作模型，进而基于OWL进行了扩展(EOWL)，引入了本体的协作接口。利用这种扩展，建立了一个本体的分簇分层次的协作管理机制，这种扩展从本体语言自身解决了本体与外部本体群之间的协作。     

Can icons enhance requirements engineering work?

When novel artifacts are proposed, their usability must be taken into account. We argue that effective visual notation depends critically on its usability, which assists members in more easily communicating with each other while reducing misunderstanding. In this paper, we extend prior research by elaborating already-refined artifacts (requirements engineering modeling, icon-based modeling and user preference modeling), and by carrying out summative (confirmatory) evaluation. The summative evaluation assists in determining artifacts׳ utility. Employing usability measurements, we examine perceptive, ergonomic, and hedonic qualities. The tests were performed in three series of iterations by two groups of practitioners. The first iteration was assigned to a few selected experts in computer and software companies to execute pre-testing. The second iteration was tested by the rest of the experts in the computer and software companies. The third iteration was examined by PhD students in the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Jyväskylä. The findings demonstrate the usability of an icon-based approach, integrating altogether three artifacts, that serves users in a novel yet fairly effective manner. We suggest that an icon-based approach could serve as a positive basis on which to construct a requirements engineering visual notation that is easily understood and learned.     

基于UML的本体建模研究

详细对比分析了OWL（Web Ontology Language）特性元素和UML特性元素及本体开发,在讨论OWL本体通过UML类图向面向对象语言转换方法的基础上,通过具体的示例进一步提出了一般多值域OWL属性本体建模的方法,并且说明使用该方法能够直观、清晰地进行本体建模,为下一步研究开发较成熟的软件产品奠定了良好的基础。     

Examining effectiveness of communities of practice in online English for academic purposes (EAP) assessment in virtual classes

The literature on English for academic purposes (EAP) methodology highlights the significance of learners' engagement in learning language (Hyland, 2006) in mainstream general and online contexts. Blogs have been recommended in many studies as having the potential to bring the sense of community and collaboration in online classes. Therefore, this study sought to investigate whether blogs in large classes would help students enhance their perceptions of learning. To this end, Forty-two undergraduate students of Information Technology (IT) at an Iranian university participated in a weblog writing course in order to promote collaboration and reflective learning. Instrumentation included a questionnaire of perceived learning and sense of community, semi-structured interviews, and participant observations. The findings revealed a significant difference in perceived learning between the students with low sense of community and those with a high sense of community. Based on the qualitative findings of the study, we suggest an assessment framework incorporating constructivist and social-interactionist theories of learning in order to treat students as members of a community of learning. The findings may promise implications for gearing EAP assessment to more collaborative modes in online courses and suggest a model framework for the assessment of students in EAP online classes.     

Writing with speech recognition: The adaptation process of professional writers with and without dictating experience

This paper describes the adaptation and writing process of writers who have started using speech recognition systems for writing business texts. The writers differ in their previous writing experience. They either have previous classical dictating experience or they are used to writing their texts with a word processor. To gather the process data for this study we chose complementary research methods. First the participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire and given instruction about the speech recognition system. Then they were observed five times using the speech recognition system during their day-to-day work. Finally, they also filled in a logging questionnaire after each task.

The quantitative analysis of the use of the writing mode shows that those participants who had no previous dictating experience, tend to use the voice input more extensively, both for formulating and reviewing. This result is confirmed in the more detailed case analysis. The other analyses in the case study—i.e. repair, revision, and pause analysis-refine the differences in the organization of the writing process between the writers, and show that the speech recognition mode seems to create a writing environment that is open for different writing profiles.     

Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies

This review considers the work in Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies, an anthology edited by Laura McGrath that examines the evolving significance of collaboration within the English classroom. This book contributes to the discussion of collaboration in several meaningful ways, including connecting collaboration to interesting digital tools and moving beyond merely considering the discipline's concern of scholarly production to instead examine the evolution of collaboration's relationship between teaching, technology, and user creativity. McGrath's work is divided into two sections, one that addresses scholarly concerns and one that addresses pedagogical concerns. Several important components of English studies are addressed throughout the text such as affinity spaces, the work of writing centers, graduate student research contributions, cross-cultural understandings of text, and interdisciplinary research. McGrath and the contributing authors succeed in providing a thorough argument for continued collaboration in the discipline as well as a clear suggestion that the digitization of the field is a challenging and valuable necessity. Readers from English studies graduate students to full-time faculty to practitioners in the field can appreciate the depth of the theoretical background, the pedagogical implications for academia and the workplace as well, and the diverse models that provide discussion of interesting connections between collaboration and the digital.