The Online Evolving Essay Project:

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The Online Evolving Essay Project A New
Approach To Supporting Student Writing
Lynn Reynolds Katherine Harrington Peter ONeill
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London Met Writing CentreTrained Undergraduate
Writing Mentors
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One-to-one tutorials collaborative and
non-directive
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The Essay

• Not part of any assessed coursework
• 1500 word psychology essay
• Evaluate Freuds theory of personality
• Written publicly and online over a six week
  period
• Process explicitly related to individual
  assessment criteria
• Finished essay also posted online

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Rationale

• Harness the collaborative potential of Web 2.0
  to support the writing process
• Common methods of supporting writing focus on
  exemplars of the finished product
• Model essays are not always helpful and can even
  be discouraging
• Exposing one writers process with all its
  imperfections provides inspiration from the
  bottom up sheer cliff vs plenty of footholds

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Some of the Footholds

• On personality
• Putting off the inevitable
• In praise of freewriting
• Active reading this was even tried out by LDU!
• Gathering evidence
• A session with a writing mentor
• Reading note-taking
• A beginning, a middle and an end
• Drawing a conclusion
• Being an editor
• On referencing

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Comment student contributor

• When there's a model answer or example essay
  given to you as a guideline, you can become so
  paranoid that people might think you plagiarised
  it that you completely deviate from it. And
  through this determination not to use the same
  points or concepts, you leave out key material
  that you may otherwise had included had you NOT
  seen the model.

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Materials

• Wiki, Blog, realtime text capture
• Free of charge
• Always online
• Effectively exploits the wisdom of crowds

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Example of the wisdom of crowds contribution
from a philosophy student

• When we inquire into someone's personality we
  may be asking, "what is s/he like?" However, what
  someone is 'like' changes regularly. We either
  give an ephemeral answer or pose the question
  differently. "What is it that we are referring to
  when we mention a person or their
  personality?"Some (Plato, Descartes et al) go
  down the metaphysical route of an immortal,
  intangible moral agent (soul) that is merely
  occupying a body before proceeding to the
  after-life. But, to the self-respecting
  'scientist', this is not a viable option.
  Firstly, it isn't empirically testable. Secondly,
  it creates a dualism - how can physical stuff and
  non-physical stuff interact?Personally, I think
  Locke had the right idea. He saw personality as,
  principally, a thinking thing that sees itself as
  existing through time.In this light,
  'personality' is viewed very much from the
  first-person perspective rather than it being a
  congregation of outward, qualifiable and measured
  features.

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PbWiki

• Online document which multiple users can edit
• participants can log in and directly edit the
  writing
• As easy as making a peanut butter sandwich!

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(No Transcript)
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Blogger

• Online diary to which comments can easily be
  added by readers
• Used to document thoughts, difficulties and other
  quirks of process
• Excellent medium for conversation, encouraging
  contributions from readers and keeping the
  authors nose applied to the grindstone!

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(No Transcript)
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Camtasia Studio 4

• Captures text as it is typed
• Great for showing the process of freewriting
• Example of freewriting available online as a link
  from the Wiki
• Thanks to Celine Lewellyn-Jones, Learning
  Technology Support Officer at London Met, for
  introducing me to this technology

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Comment a student participant

• As I mentioned in one of my posts before, I
  have heard of the concept of freewriting but
  never actually seen any develop in this way. I
  find it an absolutely fascinating process that
  allows the writer to truly unleash their
  thoughts. In many ways it is also a confidence
  boosting exercise as students realise how much
  they actually know about a subject. I will
  definitely be giving this a go!

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How it Felt