My Work

During the Fall semester of 2012, I worked as a Teaching Assistant at the Wayne State Writing Center.

As part of a website redesign, the writing center director, Jule Wallis, wanted to incorporate interactive Web 2.0 materials. The drive to build these materials wasn’t rooted in some impression of them as the new, hip thing to do, but rather out of a need to have the website actually reflect the work of the writing center. Jule wrote about this in her recent post on the Wayne State Teaching Blog: “Using the OWL at Purdue as an example, a presenter [at CCCCs] navigated her audience through the site, showing the one dimensional and linear organization of the site. She then posited the question ‘If our instruction, if our websites all point towards a one stop ‘fix it shop,’ then why are we surprised when students expect instructors and writing centers to be just that?’”.

We had some major concerns throughout the development phase about how to make the work both accessible to a large portion of the university and stable for a long time. Within the tutorials, we wanted to make information clear and succinct, but we also wanted to maximize the ways that users were able to interact with the material.

We explored options like jquery, Adobe Flash, Camtasia, Captivate, and even products from academic publishers (like Bedford’s Writer’s Help and Pearson’s MyCompLab).

Ultimately, we settled on a building tool developed by the University of Wisconsin called the Critical Reading/Case Scenario Builder. The upside of the tool is that it is easy to use (no actual coding is required, though we occasionally did some anyway) and that it publishes content in a mix of xhtml and javascript (which is accessible through all web browsers). The biggest downside of the tool is that it limits certain types of interactivity that we would have liked to include (such as drag and drop, and more robust short answer question options).

Here are a couple representative tutorials that I built during with support from the writing center staff: (These will be replaced with links to W.C. website once those are live)

• Paraphrase Tutorial

• Rhetsim Tutorial

• Supporting Evidence Tutorial

While these tutorials fail my definition of games because they are not interactive enough and do not encourage play, they still can serve as an example of content-driven, interactive, digital instruction. At their heart, they take information we would teach in Composition classes, like paraphrasing or building cohesive paragraphs (I specifically avoided lower level concerns here), and transforms only the method of delivery.

If I were to redesign these as a game, I would look for ways to provide more branching paths (allowing for a coauthored experience), a more user-responsive interface (making the experience customizable), and elements to increase the intrinsic motivation of playing (they'd have to be more fun).

Works cited

Wallis, Jule. “Web 2.0 in the Classroom and the Writing Center.” WSU Teaching Blog. 6 Nov. 2012. Web.