Jeff Gundy: Emails and Responses

I played around a bit more with the Daedalus trial version this morning. I think I'm starting to understand how it works, but the installation and so forth is more complicated than ConnectWeb, and I think we'll not try toconfuse ourselves by doing two things at once.

If you do want to downloadthe program, I'll copy in the instructions that I got below. Once you havesaved it all to the desktop, click on the icon and unzip it all--I'd save all that to the desktop as well. If you then click on the folder--mine'sDiwe533--it'll show you some "disks" in subfolders. Click on Disk1 and onsetup.exe and the program will install itself. (A) To download a single file containing the complete DIWE installationprogram, use the following address:ftp://ftp.daedalus.com/software/windows/DIWE533_Complete.exe (8 MB)

Password: been29questLet me know how this goes, if you do decide to try it. -Jeff

(9/5/01)

Hi, folks--I looked at two sites--the first was the essay by Condon, which turned out to be old (1992)--and not very useful to us, though there were a few sensible suggestions about making decisions about software that might still apply. The second site I looked at was the Texas Tech one that Kari reports on below, which I think is far more relevant to what we're up to.

I found myself wanting more than just a little summary of stuff there, so I opened a Word file and cut-and-pasted stuff there, along with making notes and comments. I saved it on my H drive so that I could call it up later from my office, where I am now. I'll attach that file for you to look at--I think the stuff about Daedulus, which Kari summarizes well, is pretty interesting. We may well want to find out more about that--I think it's available for purchase, too.

I hope to look at the other sites in the next day or two, and look forward to hearing from the rest of you as well. On we go . . .

Jeff

http://corax.cwrl.utexas.edu/cac/archives/v10/10_1_html/10_1_5_Condon.html Selecting Computer Software for Writing Instruction: Some Considerations William Condon

(1992)

Pretty dated-pre-Web, and refers to problems with RAM that are unlikely to affect us any more. A sensible idea about "considerations," though: "In selecting software, then, we need to consider whether we want students to be able to collaborate, communicate, evaluate their own and each others' writing, develop an effective and efficient writing process, learn how to make their written products as correct and as clean as possible, or accomplish a host of other activities or tasks that some, most, or all writing teachers would want students to do. The first step in buying the right software is to make a fairly specific assessment of the needs and the practices of the teachers who are likely to teach in the classroom or lab, and then make sure that the software supports--or can be made to support--as many of those needs as possible."

Other categories: versatility, ease of use, and building your own.

http://english.ttu.edu/department/computers/computer_info.html Eleven Years of Computer-Based Writing Instruction Research at Texas Tech History of program. Link to information about Daedalus and Computer-Based Instruction The Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment By Fred Kemp (Article published in _Education Technology_, Spring, 1994) http://english.ttu.edu/department/computers/daedalus_info.html

I found myself thinking big chunks of this article were interesting enough to cut and paste here. "The Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment (DIWE) is writing instruction software based upon the concept that we can't tell people how to write. We can't even show them how to write. All we can do is put student writers into writing situations, situations which include reasons to write well that the students can not only understand but feel, and then allow them to improve themselves. [ . . . . . . . . . ] Writing is not the demonstration of a writing "knowledge," gained through diligence in drill and practice, but rather something else. The writers of the Daedalus software propose that good writing consists of the fine-tuned ability to manage words and ideas in such a way that the reader not only wants to continue reading but actually accepts some of the tenets of the writer and adopts them as his or her own. The Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment is the best means of providing student writers constant and productive reader feedback. The student writes a draft on the computer and mails the draft to a peer reader. The peer reader, perhaps responding to a set of prompts or guidelines provided by the instructor, then critiques the draft and sends the critique back to the writer. At first the prompts are simple, perhaps asking if the reader sees a focus to the draft or can identify general strengths and weaknesses. But as the semester progresses, the critiquing prompts grow more demanding, and the peer reader must respond with closer attention and what we call "critical interpretive skills." The reader learns how to read student papers, how to find good and bad things in the document, and most important, how to articulate these good and bad things in feedback to the writer. [. . . . . . . .]

The Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment provides the text distribution and management tool which allows students to engage in intensive writing with feedback. In essence, it simply sends text files from work station computers to a network server, and then from the server to other work stations, allowing distribution of student writing to other individuals, groups, or the entire class. Peer readers then reverse the process by sending reactions back to the writer. As anyone familiar with local area networks will admit, the above movement of text files can be done using general network software and does not require Daedalus. However, the problem in trying to manage student files on general network software like Novell or AppleShare alone is that the process encourages a great deal of confusion, error, and frustration. The second feature written was InterChange, a mechanism which allowed a room full of students to hold a written conversation. Each individual student writes a comment in an editing "window," and when the student deems that the comment is ready to be read by others, chooses a menu item or clicks a screen button and the comment is appended to a stream of comments in another window shared by all students in the room. The effect is a classroom discussion held on-line and in text. People who have not experienced such an ENFI session ("Electronic Networks for Interaction," a process first proposed by Trent Batson in 1984), have a difficult time understanding how it would work or how it would be beneficial to writing instruction, but work it does, and it usually only takes the skeptic one viewing of ENFI in action to realize all the pedagogical benefits.

Besides the fact that students can hold complex discussions in class and walk away, immediately, with a complete electronic transcript of the discussion (for later use in developing drafts), InterChange also allows less aggressive students more participation in the discussion, provides for much more thoughtful exchanges and extrapolations, and greatly reduces the teacher's natural dominance in discussions. InterChange is, as students report time and again, a compelling classroom activity, much "warmer" and more communicating than traditional classroom discussions. In traditional classroom discussion a single student speaks while others listen, a sequential process, and the teacher, as moderator, has an inhibiting amount of control. In InterChange, everyone is literally reading and writing all the time, a parallel process, and while the various discussion threads that appear in the shared window are initially confusing to the interloper, the participants quickly learn to navigate the various simultaneous conversations productively. The net effect is thought-provoking classroom activity beyond the dreams of the most optimistic "student-centered" instructor.

The third feature built into DIWE is Daedalus Mail, a very simple email function which allows students to send papers, comments, or just chatter to other individuals. Mail creates a person-to-person capability which supports the group work in InterChange and the individual work in Daedalus Write. Instructors can take roll using Mail, send encouragement or criticism privately to individual students, and even post grades. Students can work intensively with other individual students, ask for discreet help from instructors, or announce interesting events or personal experiences.

What we have discovered is that Daedalus lets us make a quantum leap in the workshop approach for writing instruction, that all the benefits of allowing students to take responsibility for their own learning are greatly enhanced in a networked environment. There are indeed major problems in using networked computers, not the least of which is the greater effort required of the teacher. In contrast to the early popular conception of computers as teaching machines which would replace teachers, we have discovered that the commitment and sheer effort needed by teachers to make the network pedagogy work is greater than required by the traditional classroom. Greater too is the understanding the teacher must have of what writing is in the first place, of how people actually learn, and of which writing behaviors are most effective.

In other words, teachers who use computers in sophisticated pedagogical ways (as opposed to just using them as word processors) are forced to rethink the classroom itself and their relationship to it. In the end, this may be the greatest value of classroom software like DIWE, that in challenging old notions of productive classroom activities (which almost no one has ever proved all that productive), those who try to use these new methods are re-born in their understanding of what they are doing and why. Teachers who attempt to employ Daedalus in their classroom instruction must re-examine all their assumptions about how students learn and how teachers teach. Those who espouse "back to basics" and romantic notions of how effective their own education was will always resist such profoundly inventive methods as networks and computer-based collaborative learning. But others who recognize how changed both the student population and the work force expectations are in the 1990s will see this re-examination of assumptions and methods as precisely what is needed in writing instruction."

Change at Texas Tech in the late 90s: "Obviously, if we were going move the computer-based processes that we had discovered to be so effective and stimulating beyond the logistical limitations of computer-based classrooms and the mere 1000 students we could serve in those rooms, we would have to figure out how to break out of the fixed support limitations of the computer-based classroom. Accordingly, I removed myself from the computer-based classroom in my own writing instruction in order to discover if we could continue using computer-mediated processes but using general Texas Tech computer facilities and the students' own machines. The problem was not the availability of alternative access to equipment and the Internet, for we have easy generic access to computers on our campus and an increasing number of students have their own computers and internet access. The problem was the greatly confusing interface and useability issues that arise once you can't train a class in a computer room with a single platform and compatible software. When you try to get students, especially freshmen, to use computers on their own with their own equipment and software, you run into lots of skill problems and confusions. If only ten percent of your students get bogged down in menus and translation difficulties, that's enough to fatally inhibit an assignment schedule." They went to something called "TOPIC," Texas Tech Online-Print Integrated Curriculum. The manual is online at http://english.ttu.edu:5555/manual/manualframe.asp?typeof=manual With lots of information, background, etc. It deserves a closer look.

"The four computer-based classrooms serve 40-55 sections a semester of basic writing, composition, literature, technical communication, and creative writing, appoximately 1000 students. [Click HERE for a schedule of classroom assignments for the fall of 1998.] Classes meet full time in these rooms and generally all activity in the room is on computer and involves text-sharing, peer-review, and collaborative critical work. About half of the work employs the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment software, but most instructors incorporate sophisticated word processing, desktop publishing, and Internet browsing and discussion software into their assignments. Four to six sections are actively working with other classes on other campuses using email lists, newsgroups, and MOOs. The instructors who teach in the computer-based classes, some 20 to 25 a semester, belong to the English department Computer-Based Writing Instruction Research Project. Contact person for more information is Chad Covey (ccovey@ttu.edu), the English department's Information/Instruction Technology Specialist, a full-time professionally supported university employee committed solely to computing in the English department." Site also has some discussion of actual computer-based classes; the first two I looked at were rather lukewarm about how well the computer stuff actually worked. Overall, though, this site and Texas Tech are worth more investigation. They seem to have a lot of experience with CWI.
 

(9/23/01)

My Response to Is Cyberspace Destroying Society? An Online Conference with Sven BirkertsMay 30, 1995

It seems that what Birkerts is most afraid of the loss of what he calls"depth," "subjective self-awareness." He's afraid that we're all losing ourdeep, individual sense of who we are and of personal struggle to merecollective interchanges that may be easy and quick but are also shallow andtrivial. Online media, he says, "plunge us into an amniotic bath of ersatzcommunication which takes the edge off the search, which must always besolitary. Am I a romantic? Guess so.

"What do I think? Well, last spring when I was on sabbatical I spent much ofmy time sitting in front of a computer, with my e-mail program and internetbrowser running. I worked at writing and revising essays and poems, ofteninterrupted by an email arriving, often pausing to check the stock market orthe sports scores. I used the web to browse for information, often, andusually found what I wanted quickly and easily. For some kinds ofinformation it's just ideal to do a web search. One example-in a book byBarry Lopez he described an image found in some Eskimo cultures of a polarbear that seems to be flying or gliding, perhaps swimming. I searched onGoogle for "gliding bear Eskimo" or something like that, and bingo, foundthree or four images. They weren't the same as seeing one in the flesh andholding it in my hand, but they were lots better than just trying to imagineit.In between those little research moments and distractions, though, I spentmy time doing pretty much what Birkerts says online media work against:constructing things made of words that reflect my private, personalexperience of the world in some kind of public, plausible, persuasive kindof way. Were all the things I did marred, weakened, cheapened by my doingthem on a computer, saving dutifully, rather than with a pen and paper or ona typewriter? Possible, of course, but I'm skeptical.

I spent two weeks at an artists' colony called Ragdale during my sabbatical. I borrowed a college laptop and a printer to take along, but there was nophone line to my room, so to get on the web or check email I had to goelsewhere; I kept myself to one check on email per day, mostly.

Being in myroom alone with the laptop and some books most of the time was differentthan being in my office, surely. It was quieter, and had the kind of strangeness that comes with novelty.I had planned to spend my time at Ragdale working mostly on poems, and Idid-I wrote so many poems that I'm embarrassed putting a number to them.Some weren't all that great, but I think some of them were pretty good.

Would they have been better if I'd done everything without electronics? Thelaptop enabled me to type in a draft (almost always I did the first draftlonghand, either in my little notebook if I was out on a walk, or on ayellow pad if I was in the room) and then fiddle with it as much as Iwanted. Often I printed out a copy, then looked at it and made a batch ofchanges, then printed it out again. It was much handier than typing it overagain every time . . . is this a great threat to individualism andsubjectivity? Well, I doubt it.

I do think that Birkerts has a point about the way we often interactonline-it can often be just a quick, trivial, shallow exchange of data, notreal human interaction. But even there I don't think it's necessarily so. Iwrite a lot of quick, trivial emails, just doing business of one sort oranother, sometimes just making quick contact with people. But I've also hadsome long, intricate, and substantial discussions with people throughemail- things that would have taken much longer and maybe not happened at allin any other format.

So I think that as a teacher in This Modern World my challenge is to helpstudents learn to use the tools that they have well and wisely. That mightwell mean cautions about the pernicious possibilities of interactive media.But surely it also means encouragement to take advantage of all the newpossibilities that are available to us.

Part Two. I'm going to defer my answer to my own question(s) here, because I want to hear what you folks have to say first.

Part Three: Important Announcement. Because of another engagement I won't beable to meet with you tomorrow night. So I am suggesting this: finish bothparts of the assignment for this week and send them around to the group.After reading all the responses, let's have some further discussion in thenext few days about Birkerts and about the ideas for the direction of thegroup that people come up with. In the course of that discussion, we'll tryto figure out just what it makes sense to do next, and I'll try to sum upthe sense of the group and suggest what we might work on.

Timeline: complete Asst. 3 by class time on Monday (6:30). Make followupresponse by Wed. at 5:00. I'll send around the next assignment/plan byThursday noon.

Onward and upward! -Jeff
 

(11/3/01)

Hi, folks-- I thought we had a good session last night, especially once we all got logged on to Daedalus. I know you all tried some of its features last night, and what I'd like you to do for next Monday is mainly to keep exploring it and checking out how things work. Specifically, try composing a brief essay comparing Daedalus and Connectweb. Just to try it out, include at least a couple of bibliography entries, and use the bibliography program that comes with it to enter a book, a magazine article, etc. The Help files are also worth checking out. There's a lot of stuff there.

I'm mainly interested in your reactions to how the program works. Clearly it's more complicated than Connectweb--the question, I think, is whether those complications are worth it for the added resources they provide.

Have fun exploring!

Jeff

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