• Not just supply and demand

In this forever-changing, high-tech world, the electronic media have placed increasing demands on students’ thinking and communication skills.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that students have become accustomed to writing in the “unstructured, chatty” style of e-mail, and they have been unwilling “to revisit their work once it scrolls off their screens.”

Such findings have prompted colleges nationwide to develop new ways of teaching writing to the techno-savvy students of today, and thanks to a $10,000 Ameritech Corporation grant, Wittenberg will aid in this endeavor.

One of Ameritech’s Partnership Awards for Independent Colleges, the grant will enable humanities and political science faculty to introduce online conferencing into five pilot courses: Introduction to Spanish Literature, Writing for Teachers, Pulp Fiction, Political Theory, Ideology and Film, and Public Speaking.

“Wittenberg has already demonstrated the usefulness of computer-assisted composition instruction in its first-year writing courses through its use of the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment,” said Robert Davis, associate professor of English and project director.

The Daedalus Environment is computer software designed to address a specific task or stage in producing a piece of writing.

“What has been lacking, however, are innovative strategies for addressing the demands of critical thinking, and the related skills of textual analysis and verbal presentation, in intermediate and advanced courses across the liberal arts curriculum,” Davis said.

The conferencing program, called InterChange, which Davis and his fellow project colleagues, D. Scot Hinson, assistant professor of English, Ruth Hoff, instructor of languages, Kurt Miyazaki, adjunct instructor of political science, and Catherine Waggoner, assistant professor of speech communication, plan to introduce, serves as a tool for real-time, text-based conversation.

With the program, students can send and receive messages on a scrolling screen during classes, in writing labs or across the campus network. Faculty can then create transcripts of the online conversation, which can become the basis for further writing and discussion.

InterChange also supports Wittenberg’s commitment to critical thinking in a number of ways. First, “it encourages dialogue among a higher percentage of students by allowing them to ‘voice’ their opinions while still promoting accountability for their words,” Hoff explained.

“For many students, anxiety and low self-confidence can hinder class participation. InterChange, however, provides an intermediary step for these students by allowing them to participate in online class discussions in which they ‘type’ instead of ‘speak’ their conversation,” she said.

Such online discussions can also provide a seedbed of ideas in the early stages of the writing process, according to Davis.

“Not every online conversation is focused and productive, but the transcripts map the rhythms of collective thought and thus provide students with a record of gathered insight, which they can then use in their writing,” he said.

College professors, Davis explained, have often commented that few students take notes when oral discussions are intense and engaging. As a result, the students are left with little to refer to when they begin to write papers.

“The InterChange transcripts help solve this by providing the raw material of student writing, which students can shape and build upon later,” Davis said, adding that as students write their final papers and respond to the ideas and questions raised in the InterChange sessions, they learn that academic texts are not made in ivory tower isolation but through complex and deliberate engagement with others.

The online discussions also encourage students to become more aware of the intellectual processes that form their communication, Davis said.

The transcripts slow down the discussion for the students and allow them to notice revealing details in their writing and thoughts: the frequency and length of their messages, the questions that provoked response, and the places they felt frustrated, he explained.

In addition, according to Waggoner, this kind of reflective self-analysis helps students gain control of their writing and gives them important information about how they interact through words.

“The printed transcripts emerging from online discussions help students see themselves as members of a discourse community, a self-awareness that is difficult to teach with oral discussion-based pedagogies but vital for success in our democratic society,” she said.

The InterChange program will be introduced in January, and a further description of the project, including syllabi, course material, student responses to the project and an overall assessment of the project, will appear on Wittenberg’s web site in May.