Funding

  Project Proposal:
  UC Writing Institute (First-year)

  Participants:
  UCB, UCLA, UCSB, UCSC

  Principal Investigators:
  Elizabeth Abrams, UCSC

  Overview of the Request:

The Writing Programs at UCLA, UCB and UCSC request funds to initiate a systemwide online institute for writing at the University of California. This Web site will

• Inform secondary school teachers and community college instructors of the University of California's expectations for academic writing, and engage them in crafting a solution to the problems of underprepared first-year and transfer students;
• Offer graduate students a collection of reliable resources in writing pedagogy, and allow those who train graduate students systemwide to coordinate their efforts;
• Support and extend "write-to-learn" efforts across the disciplines, and offer support to faculty eager to assign writing but uncertain how best to offer writing guidance;
• Represent UC writing requirements and approaches to writing-both in introductory courses and within disciplines-to prospective students and their parents;
• Establish a model (and means) for uninterrupted collaborative work in Writing Programs across the system in pedagogy, philosophy, and development of materials in writing;
• Support faculty at each campus as they develop their local sites;
• Explore and encourage the possibilities of technology in writing classrooms.
• The Online Writing Institute will serve simultaneously as a think-tank and as a publisher and disseminator of recommended teaching tools and practices to the public. It will have two audiences, the general public (as defined above), and U.C. Writing Programs faculty. For the first, a small group of faculty, directed by an oversight committee, will design and develop content. This information will be available via a publicly accessible portal on the Web site. For the second, all members of the UC Writing Programs will be invited to participate in ongoing online collaborations via a second, password-protected portal open only to them; here, for instance, they could test and report on the various classroom technologies now available.

  The need to improve clarity and efficiency among writing teachers systemwide is particularly pressing as the university contends with the breaking wave of students nicknamed "Tidal Wave II," and at the same time intensifies its outreach efforts. The demands on writing faculty-to articulate their theories and practices, to confer with secondary and college teachers and to mentor their newest colleagues as more faculty are hired to cope with increasing enrollments-are increasing exponentially; hence, writing faculty need quick access to materials that they can trust truly represent the best UC has to offer in the teaching of writing. Writing faculty also need quick ways to gather information from other programs; now, for example, if writing faculty at a campus need information about how campuses systemwide are enabling transfer students to adapt to university-level writing, they must call colleagues at each campus, a time-consuming and inexact process. The Online Writing Institute will address each of these challenges.

  Nature of the Collaboration:

In the first year, the three campuses above-in consultation with the other five-will conceptualize and initiate the site in two formats, a series of inter-linked web pages and a virtual-reality version. Because of the scope of the project and the scope of the system, we envision a three-year project in which additional campuses join as full partners gradually: UCSB, UCD, and UCSD in the second year; and UCR and UCI in the third year. (Beginning with all eight campus writing programs would simply be unwieldy.)

Though the heart of this project is the collaboration of UC Writing Program members, we expect to work closely with other entities mounting sites and using technology to do outreach, provide services, and share materials: the Central California Writing Project and the Diagnostic Writing Service, and the UC Council of Writing Programs administrators group, which has sponsored previous systemwide meetings among writing faculty. And as we plan to explain (and link to) information on Subject A, we expect to confer with the UC Office of the President and the University Committee on Preparatory Education as well. In the second and third years of the project, we will establish a partnership with the one other university we have located that has an exemplary Web site for students, Harvard, and with the most significant publisher of textbooks in composition, Bedford/St. Martin's, in the hope of achieving some integration between in-print and online materials and obtaining sponsorship for long-run maintenance of the site. The director of the Expository Writing Program at Harvard has expressed interest in such a partnership (as has the new director of the Expository Writing Program at Princeton); we are in the early stages of investigating corporate sponsorship for maintenance.

Finally, via the California Writing Project we expect to confer online and in person with secondary school teachers of writing, in order to develop a clearer sense of their needs for clarification about university expectations; in the second year of the project, we will also hold a conference for community college teachers of English to assess their needs and expectations for web-based information.

The collaborative work involved in this process is very complex; it is also extraordinarily important and thoroughly feasible. To present the "face" of Writing Programs systemwide requires us to hammer out and describe the theories that govern our work and the pedagogies that result. Though we have not yet expressed a collective pedagogy, we are well-acquainted with individual pedagogies, as lecturers regularly express their teaching philosophies and approaches during personnel reviews. One task we propose for the oversight committee, then, is to gather and review such statements-along with excellent reflections of collective pedagogy such as UCB's fine "forum" on teaching writing, "Writing Across Berkeley"-in order to identify a coherent vision for the UC Writing Programs.

Crucially, unlike Web sites at many other universities that simply offer worksheets for students and links (often outdated) to other sites, ours will frame these materials with an intellectual rationale explaining the pedagogical approaches and materials that we endorse to our audience of secondary school educators, students, and parents. This element is worth underscoring: rather than simply posting potentially useful but uncontextualized writing tools in cyberspace and hoping that they'll make a difference, our site will enact the pedagogy it endorses: it will explain how to use the materials it makes available, and in what contexts these materials will prove most useful. (An example: a handout on thesis construction is infinitely more valuable to a novice writer when it explains the difference between a description and a claim, and indicates how, for instance, a close reading assignment will produce one kind of thesis, and a "text in context" assignment will produce another. Such explanations make the difference between formulaic writing and context-sensitive writing. Writing teachers produce handouts of this sort regularly; the UCSC Writing Program Web site now under construction is at work collecting such resources.) The goal of this collaboration, then, is to make our shared pedagogy transparent.

The development of this rationale and the content for the site overall will take a great deal of time from participants: time spent on research and development, on systemwide meetings and online conferencing over plans for the site. Hence it is time, as you will see in our budget, for which we are fundamentally requesting funding. To the extent that campus Writing Program Web sites serve as pilot projects for the Online Writing Institute, some of the complex work of conceptualizing and developing content for the site has been done. But the additional work of developing content for the site-annotating available material; writing and framing new materials; researching, testing, and reporting on available classroom technologies-requires course relief or summer stipends for our oversight committee and content developers. Participating campuses will provide a considerable amount of the infrastructure for the site as part of their in-kind support (see budget).

Our confidence in this process comes out of our two-day feasibility/planning meeting March 30/31, in which, after intensive discussion about many issues regarding the project, from its purpose to its implementation, consensus came easily. Nor is collaboration new to this group: faculty at UCSC have worked closely with high school teachers of English in various ways, on vertical teams through the Educational Partnership Center, and at conferences and institutes sponsored by the Central California Writing Project. A number of faculty in this group had also met previously in Council of Writing Programs conferences (now discontinued) and in the systemwide reading of the Subject A exam, and thus have some shared sense of standards and philosophy, though a great deal more consultation is needed in this area.

  Project Goals:

The Online Writing Institute we propose is meant to extend the effectiveness of the UC Writing Programs by familiarizing a much broader audience than we currently reach with the expectations of university-level writing. Web and virtual technologies are a new technological means for doing so, one particularly helpful as enrollments skyrocket and the demands on writing faculty members' time increases-and thus limits their ability to do the kind of outreach, both within and beyond university walls, that has made the UC Writing Programs so successful. One objective of the project, then, is to make outreach possible-indeed, to extend its scope-via internet technologies.

A second objective has to do with the demographic shift in California that has recently begun to reach our classrooms. Writing teachers are among the first members of the university to encounter the increasing number of students from previously under-represented communities, whose complex linguistic histories present new challenges to our pedagogy. Currently, efforts to respond to these populations take place ad-hoc on each campus; though systemwide committees such as UCOPE discuss such issues and bring their findings back to individual campuses, there is currently no system in place for rank-and-file teachers to confer with each other about the best practices. The Online Institute will serve as a means of instant access to these practices.

A third, and especially important, objective is to investigate the most effective forms of instructional technology for writing classes. A plethora of software and web-based resources exist for classroom use, but it is ordinarily presented in a kind of smorgasbord, with some of the clearest descriptions of them linked to or contained in the sites of the companies who develop the product. We think it is essential to evaluate this material particularly for UC students and courses and to present it accessibly to writing teachers who have not until now considered using technology in their classrooms. The informal, password-protected element of this project allows teachers experimenting with various technologies to post their results as they emerge; once coherent opinions emerge, they can be posted on the public site for teachers in general-a process mirroring that of writing itself, which moves from draft to polished work. We envision this element of the site as a sort of clearing-house for information on useful but underutilized instructional tools.

Once a recommendation appears on the public side of the site, it will be carefully organized by writing "elements"-the best resources on how to develop an arguable thesis, for example, or how to structure an essay. The public site will also test different means of delivery. It will offer materials to students via two different interfaces, "text-only" (Web pages containing textual information only) and "virtual reality," a visually oriented "tour" through the process of writing an essay. The virtual site will be based on a pre-existing component of "Virtual UCSC," an interactive graphic representation of the UC Santa Cruz campus now gathering pedagogical content. Our goal in including this site is to determine the best means of reaching students who, now more than ever, are oriented toward visual culture. Through a grant from the Center on Teaching Excellence, the UCSC site is already testing online tutoring through both interfaces, and we expect to make recommendations on this strategy as well.

The goals of the project are hence multi-faceted and inter-related:

• To improve the teaching of writing at the University of California systemwide by identifying and representing best practices.
• To enable writing programs systemwide to cope with the influx of new students by making materials for new teachers of ESL and introductory writing easily available in password-protected drawers.
• To improve the efficiency of writing teachers systemwide by making syllabi for courses available systemwide. (For example, a teacher planning a technical writing course at UC Santa Cruz could consider versions of such courses taught around the system. As UC Merced becomes a reality, writing faculty there could see what other campuses expect and do.)
• To provide carefully-vetted materials for students on writing, sensibly organized and engagingly worded. A model for these materials is the Harvard University site, with which we propose to explore a partnership.
• To improve the preparation of high school students by explicitly identifying UC's expectations for academic writing. (In an introductory writing class at UC Santa Cruz recently, 100% of the students said that they had been instructed in how to write a five-paragraph essay and told it would be expected of them in college-this despite the massive outreach efforts done by writing teachers all over the state.)
• To support outreach to high school and community college students by clearly articulating those expectations for their teachers. The Diagnostic Writing Service site is a model of what this side of the site might look like.
• To investigate the most promising uses of technology in writing classes and make recommendations for writing teachers in the UC system.
• To refine the assessment of student writing through the use of password-protected threaded discussions which would allow writing teachers to post examples (with students' permission) of student writing and discuss the origins of the problems in it as well as pedagogical solutions to them. A model for this kind of discussion exists on the National Writing Project site; we need this kind of informal consultation among teachers at UC.
• To support the development of campuswide Web sites compatible with and linked to the systemwide site.

  Timeline:

By June 2002, we will have mounted a working version of the Online Writing Institute, linked to the Web sites of UCB, UCLA, and UCSC, and will have prepared for UCD, UCSB, and UCSD to join the project. The timeline projected reflects budget realities: most of the content must be developed and framed by early fall as we want to have it available for review as soon as possoble. (Oversight committee members, though, will spread their work out over the year.) Projected dates include the following: by the end of August 2001, content developers will have substantially completed collecting writing materials from colleagues and writing introductory blurbs for them (as needed), and will have begun to organize and cross-reference them, for hyperlinks, by category. The oversight committee will have examined the legal questions of copyright protection, and will have begun working with a Web designer to plan out the key elements and design features of the site. We plan a meeting in mid-October of content providers and oversight committee members to report on work completed and strategize the next stages. By this time, our at-large technology consultants will have completed the major adaptations in available technical materials for use on this site: "Virtual UCSC" will have been converted for use as the "Virtual UC Writing Institute"; available Web-based computer-assisted instruction programs and other forms of instant communication, such as the "eLearning" and collaboration tools provided by CentraNow.com, will have been linked to and documented for use by the Institute. From mid-October through March, we plan the technical work of downloading and linking materials, and refining the site design to reflect the Institute's goals. By early April we expect to have mounted a test version of the site; we will invite members of our target audiences to navigate the site and report their findings so that the site may be refined for launch in June. In addition, by June we will have had a meeting with representatives from the next year's partner campuses, UCSD, UCD and UCSB.

  Project Evaluation:

Plans for project evaluation include the following: for the test version mounted in April 2002, we will invite members of our various target audiences to navigate the site and comment on ease of movement, clarity of organization, and appropriateness of the material for the target audiences. For the revised version, we will count hits and track the pathways different users take through the site (do they start at or stumble into the Virtual UC site? How long do they stay there?). We will also include a user's survey asking new users to comment on the usefulness of elements of the site, ease of navigability, readability, and so on, and to comment on areas that might need refinement (e.g., other categories of writing guidance) for the next version. Finally, we will ask peers at Harvard who have launched a site that is one of the models for our own to review the site.

  Plan for Continued Funding:

The bulk of the work for this site will involve the writing of content and the investigation of materials and technological strategies. We expect to do this work within the three-year period of funding possible under the Teaching, Learning and Technology Collaborative Grant. The major need for funding once the site is launched is for maintenance: removing links that are obsolete or materials that have been superseded by new ones. As writing faculty become more technologically proficient, some of this can be done in the course of their routine work. But certainly a faculty member will need to oversee the site long-term, and for this we plan to seek outside funding, preferably sponsorship from a large and reputable publisher of composition texts for whom the site would provide a ready-made audience but who would have no vested interest in compromising the integrity of the materials.