Funding

  Project Proposal:   
 UCWRITE: The University of California Writing Institute(Second-year)

  Participants:
  UCB, UCLA, UCSB, UCSC, UCD and UCI

  Principal Investigators:
  Elizabeth Abrams, UCSC

The University of California Writing Institute (UCWRITE) committee, representing the Writing Programs at UCB, UCLA, UCSB, and UCSC, and in consultation with the Writing Programs at UCD and UCI, requests funds to continue developing the UCWRITE Web site initiated with TLtC funds in 2001-02. Specifically, we request funds to do the following:

• Add more materials to the categories we've developed on teaching entry-level students;
• Develop two new sections, one for upper-division and transfer student writing, and one for writing in the disciplines;
• Research and implement appropriate protocols for using existing writing-related databases; and
• Research and implement modest automation for sections of our site that will continually need updating.

Aims: UCWRITE was proposed with two parallel aims in mind: (1) to create a location - a password-protected portal - where writing faculty systemwide could gather to discuss and develop pedagogy, engage in collaborative work, and share their experience of teaching in the separate campus writing programs; and (2) to offer an overview of the writing requirements and expectations for college-level writing at UC campuses, and the writing resources available through the UC Writing Programs, to a broad set of interested audiences.

Audience: In our 2001-02 grant proposal, we specified the following audiences for the site:

• Secondary school teachers and community college instructors interested in knowing more about the expectations for academic writing at the University of California. Reaching out to these teachers, we hoped, would "engage them in crafting a solution to the problems of underprepared first-year and transfer students" - a problem increasing with our enrollments.
• Graduate students just beginning their teaching careers. We aimed to offer graduate students and those who train them systemwide a collection of reliable resources in writing pedagogy.
• Prospective students and their parents interested in knowing more about UC writing requirements and approaches to writing, both in introductory courses and within disciplines.
• Writing faculty across the system interested in discussing the philosophy and pedagogy of the various writing programs, and in developing writing materials. Through UCWRITE, we hoped to offer a model and means of collaborative work across the campus writing programs.
• Writing faculty interested in learning more about the place of computers-and other related technologies-in the writing classroom.
• Faculty across the disciplines interested in developing and extending "write-to-learn" efforts in their classes. Materials provided on the Web site, we hoped, would support teachers interested in assigning writing but uncertain how best to offer guidance.

As we noted in the original proposal, 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." UCWRITE is designed to meet these challenges by providing in one place information about the individual campus writing programs and about the teaching of writing-information that is currently scattered and difficult to access systematically. UCWRITE is thus intended to be a hub for faculty and students across (and beyond) UC.

  Progress to Date:

Our timeline specified that by April 2002 we would mount a test version of the site and request feedback from target audiences; and that by June we would open a working version of the site, open to the public, and linked to the Web sites of the individual writing programs. Thus far we have developed an operating version of the Web site: http://ucwrite.org.

The site contains an initial version of the "password-protected portal" for faculty discussion: an online forum using a customized version of the UC-supported courseware package WebCT. This forum is about to open, and we anticipate beginning to build a "client base" of users in the next several months, as we add materials to the site in preparation for our public launch. (Along with the UCWRITE site itself, the forum will be publicized through the UC Writing Programs as well as through formal presentations at two major gatherings of writing professionals in the next several months - the Composition Conference sponsored by the Southern California Writing Program Administrators Association in late April, and the Writing Placement Exam (Subject A) reading held in Berkeley in early June.)

We have also made progress on the second objective. We have devised a basic site architecture appropriate to our various audiences (a considerable task given the diversity of these audiences), researched the copyright issues that are a continuing concern for those who publish on the Internet, and made a significant start on collecting, writing, customizing, and posting audience-appropriate materials on the Web site. In a slight modification of our original aims, for Year 1, the UCWRITE committee decided to focus on those issues most pressing for entry-level students and their parents and teachers: information about the UC Writing Programs themselves, Subject A, ESL, writing expectations in the first year of college, and the impact of computers and computer technology on writing education-the main categories currently on the Web site. In Years 2-3 we intend to build on these elements by adding categories on upper-division and transfer student writing and writing in the disciplines. The individual contributions of our large team are described in the "Background" section, below.

Though we have made significant progress in collecting materials for the site, we still have some distance to go. Many of the materials we have collected still need to be prepared for online presentation and loaded onto the site. And more information and materials have yet to be gathered. Our aim of collecting and synthesizing information from all eight of the system's undergraduate writing programs and researching, reviewing, and selecting from among the best online resources on writing - an aim we planned to meet in the first summer of the grant - has proven too ambitious. Much of the review and synthesis work depended on the prompt return of requests for information and materials, difficult at the best of times and doubly so over the summer. We ran into a second challenge, too: collecting information and materials for a Web site depends on having decided on the basic categories and subcategories for the site. Once we finalized these subcategories, our team members were back to teaching full time (those with release time for the project were released by their departments in spring quarter only). As a result, the major push for completing the first stage of this project is taking place now, in the spring, and will be completed over the summer, especially in the sections on ESL and first-year writing. And finally, but perhaps most challenging: this project requires a large team of people from geographically distant campuses to work together, but such collaboration poses logistical problems only partially alleviated by regular online meetings. Thus we will push the June 2002 launch date back eight to ten weeks to flesh the site out. We will also invite initial audience review and comment on the site later than originally planned (in June rather than April 2002).

  Background

The major effort underway already is the UCWRITE site itself: as outlined above and described at length below, under "Activities and Results," it is well on its way toward meeting its main Year 1 goals. Our expansion aims are threefold - content, participation, and technology - and we have begun preparing for each element of the expansion.

• Content: To expand UCWRITE's scope to address writing in the disciplines and upper-division and transfer student writing. Team members from UCLA, UCSB, and UCSC - and a future team member from UCD - all represent campuses with rich curricula and services to draw from in these areas, and our Year 1 survey of Writing Program chairs has given us more information about such courses.
• Participation: To expand our team to include representatives from other campuses - and thus to gain more immediate access to resources from those campuses. To this end, we have signed on UCSB as a full participant in our Year 2 efforts, invited a UC Davis faculty member to rotate onto our team in Year 2, and have entered into a formal exchange agreement with UCI's SPIDER team - each team will send a member to attend several quarterly meetings of the other. We have also initiated an informal collaboration with Tara Madhyastha (Computer Engineering, UCSC), P.I. for a TLtC grant on educational software, whose peer editing software has impressed us as a useful tool in writing teaching. Her expertise, along with the SPIDER member's, will help us on our last expansion goal, below.
• Technology: To increase the depth and usability of the site by exploring (in Year 2) and implementing some database-backed automation in key parts of the site (modestly at the end of Year 2, more thoroughly in Year 3). In consultation with our Web developer, we have begun exploring the requirements of establishing a database to make parts of our site more powerful. For a modest sum, a database programmer would be able to adapt an existing database structure such as the SPIDER site (far less expensive than custom-programming one).

Activities and Results:

Meetings & Presentations: UCWRITE committee members from the Berkeley, LA, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz campuses met twice in person, in June and October 2001 (in addition to a feasibility grant meeting in March 2001), and many times in cyberspace in "Tapped In," a Stanford Research Institute-sponsored MOO/ "office building" developed to support projects in education. (We received permission to use this meeting space after having written a grant proposal for access.) We have one more in-person meeting planned in June 2002, which we expect representatives from two more campuses, UCD and UCI, to attend. During these meetings we planned and revised the site structure, assigned tasks and deadlines, and strategized outreach - both to solicit materials and to develop a group of interested users of the site. An early result was the division of our team into five working groups, responsible for gathering and synthesizing materials on each of our main categories: the UC Writing Programs themselves, the Subject A requirement, first-year writing, multilingual writers, and computers and technology.

In October 2001 we presented UCWRITE as a work in progress at the UCSB-sponsored conference "Writing as a Human Activity," and there gathered valuable suggestions for outreach, making use of pre-existing (but so far unconnected) UC databases of academic and administrative information, and offering publication credit for work appearing on the site. The database suggestion, in particular, has helped shape our plans for Year 2: we intend to research database construction and automation in Year 2 for full implementation in Year 3. In April 2002 we introduced UCWRITE to the UC Council of Writing Program Administrators.

Results: The working groups each had separate (though related) aims and mandates:

• Elizabeth Abrams, UCSC, George Gadda, UCLA, and Gail Offen-Brown, UCB, have worked on the UC Writing Programs section. They created a structure with the following divisions: a statement of shared philosophy and goals, thumbnail sketches of and links to individual programs, comparative information about writing instruction on each of the campuses, comparative information about other writing activities and publications. The anticipated audiences for this section include prospective students and their parents (e.g., how will my multilingual child's writing needs be served at UCR? At UCLA?); high school and community college teachers advising students on requirements and expectations at individual campuses; and faculty across the system who need to understand how, for instance, each campus handles the Subject A requirement. Group members conducted a survey about the separate UC Writing Programs' instructional offerings and administrative structures (so far they have received responses from six of the eight Writing Programs), investigated the programs' Web offerings, and consulted with our Web designer for the best presentation of our results. A sample set of matrices compiling comparative information for UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC Santa Cruz is about to be posted, and the remaining matrices will follow by June.
  One challenge we anticipate for presenting this material in the matrix format is technical: without a database back-end, any changes to this information must be posted by hand, requiring constant vigilance. A related challenge is in the presentation: without database-backed automation, it is difficult to select and present comparative information on a specific topic - say, ESL offerings - across all eight campuses. Though the information compiled in this section of the site has never been gathered in one place before, it will not be quite as easily searchable as we would prefer. A final challenge: we found it more difficult than expected to get responses to our requests for information, and as none of the subcommittee members had release time for this work until spring 2002, follow-up was delayed. We anticipate completing the collection and synthesis of this information by June 2002. At the end of Year 2, we plan to have modest automation in place for this section of the site to make it more dynamic and searchable, and to enrich the site with a "what's new in writing" feature including a calendar or compilation of writing-related conferences and meetings and calls for papers or collaboration.
• James Donelan, UCSB, Lisa Gerrard, UCLA, and Patrick McKercher, UCSC, developed the Computers & Composition section. Because most writing instructors are unfamiliar with computers and composition as a field and many hesitate to bring computers into their courses, the mandate of this section was to clarify ways to use computers in writing instruction, dispel anxiety about potential abuses, and create opportunities for instructors to collaborate on computer-based writing projects. Thus, most (though not all) of the pages of this section address instructors rather than students. Group members developed a structure with the following divisions: computing resources on UC campuses, course materials, professional resources, realtime collaboration in 3D worlds, and FAQ on computers and composition. They have found materials for each of these sections, about 2/3 of the intended collection. They reviewed approximately 500 web sites important to computers and composition, selected 65 sites that showcase the best practices in this field, and linked them to this section; annotated a little more than half these links; formulated a set of questions to initiate discussion in the Forum section of UC Write, including a FAQ section; and customized a 3D realtime "world" for use as a virtual home to UCWRITE and have begun to document the results of tutoring in such immersive online environments, for which we have a year's results.
  By June, we intend to have added approximately 35 links and annotated all of those that require annotation, and to have written and posted a rationale and description of the pedagogy underlying this section. It is worth noting that this part of the site is the most richly developed thus far. We speculate that research on this topic is relatively manageable: many of the best resources may already be found on the Web, limiting the research possibilities and making the sources readily accessible. Year 2 goals include further expansion of the immersive environment, and further evaluation, testing, and reporting on the plethora of courseware and other educational software available.
• Virginia Draper, UCSC, Farnaz Fatemi, UCSC, and Sonia Maasik, UCLA, developed the First-Year Writing section. It is perhaps the most encompassing of the sections (first-year writing includes or is affected by questions about Subject A, ESL, and so on), and thus the one that will take most time to continue expanding in Year 2. The aims of this section include informing high school and community college instructors and their students of the expectations for writing at UC; offering them preparatory resources-both materials offered on our site and a collection of reliable online resources; providing graduate students preparing to teach, and those who train them, a reliable set of recommendations for textbooks, syllabus and assignment construction, and more; and providing UC writing faculty with exemplary syllabi and assignments developed across the system in response to the specific challenges and goals of each writing program-a context this section of the site will provide. The structure for this section includes categories on first-year writing on each of the UC campuses, sample syllabi and assignments, with instructor-written rationales, from the separate programs, textbooks and other teaching materials, preparing students for university-level writing, and professional resources for teaching writing. Materials for students also include a FAQ about college-level writing (in preparation), and a collection of writing assignments and materials from a range of representative courses across the disciplines that expect writing in the first year-large gateway courses in the majors, college Core classes, and so on. This section of the site also summarizes an important new report on "academic literacy" produced by a joint committee of UC, CSU, and California community college Academic Senates that is poised to affect curricular decisions in middle and high schools. When the full report is released to the public, our summary will link to it, and will thus help disseminate information about these academic competencies. Many of the materials for this section of the site have been collected; others have yet to be collected and synthesized for presentation on the site; and rationales and context for syllabi and assignments must still be solicited-aims the group members will work toward fulfilling this summer.
• Melinda Erickson and Maggie Sokolik, both of UCB, developed the ESL section, with categories on campus programs for multilingual students, syllabi and assignments, textbooks, professional literature, and FAQ for instructors with multilingual students in their classes. This committee has solicited syllabi and assignments from the campus programs via the University Committee on Preparatory Education (UCOPE) subcommittee on ESL, solicited textbook descriptions and reviews from a major Teaching of English as a Second Language textbook discussion list (teslmw-l@cunyvm.cuny.edu), begun a listing of annotated resources on multilingual pedagogy, and started planning the FAQ. Members have also secured the support of the standing formal UCOPE subcommittee for regular review of materials for the UCWRITE site. This section of the site will be substantially completed by August 2002.
• Subject A: The Subject A section of the site mainly consists of links to the excellent UCOP site on Subject A and the equally excellent (though still in progress) Diagnostic Writing Service site, of interest to high school teachers and their students. This section will also contain short explanations of how Subject A is handled at each campus, alongside some sample syllabi that George Gadda, who organizes the systemwide Subject A exam and reports to the UCOPE, has begun compiling and will complete by June 2002.

  Nature of the Collaboration

In Year 1, collaborators substantially conceptualized the site and continue to ready it for its public launch. Because of the scope of the project and the scope of the system, we envisioned a three-year project in which additional campuses join as full partners gradually. In Year 1, the full partners were the Writing Programs of UCB, UCLA, and UCSC. To these we add, in Year 2, UCSB's Writing Program as a full partner, and representatives from UCD and UCI. We plan to invite representatives from UCR and UCSD to attend an end-of-Year 2 meeting as well, in preparation for Year 3.

Many of the participants from the first year are returning for a second year working on the site - a happy circumstance, as we have developed strong working relationships. And collaboration is familiar to this group: to cite only one example, a UCSC member of the team has 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 the heart of this project is the collaboration of UC Writing Program members, we are attentive to the efforts of other entities mounting sites and using technology to do outreach, provide services, and share materials, and we are eager to work closely with, for instance, the Central California Writing Project as it prepares to launch its Web site. We have also entered into an informal consultation with Tara Madhyastha (UCSC), as noted above, in "Background." Through our ESL group, we have begun working with the ESL subcommittee of the University Committee on Preparatory Education (UCOPE), and we hope to work with the Central California Writing Project this summer to have high school teachers, a target audience, test the utility of the site and recommend further developments. And we are committed to working closely with the UC Council of Writing Programs administrators group, whose convener, George Gadda, is working on UCWRITE now.

In Year 2, we will also explore establishing a partnership 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 introduction of representatives from UCD (John Stenzel) and UCI (a member of the TLtC-sponsored SPIDER team to serve as an advisor at two of our quarterly meetings) are worth particular note. UCD has a long-standing and well-articulated program in computer-aided instruction in which Mr. Stenzel has been intimately involved, and the SPIDER team has extensive experience in the site design processes and editorial procedures required for database construction. Though neither UCD nor UCI are yet full partners in the project, the expertise of these two new members will be invaluable as we begin to explore the requirements for site automation, and will expand our representation to six of the eight undergraduate campuses at UC.

Structurally, we propose two at-large technology consultants - one, Patrick McKercher (UCSC), largely responsible for researching and developing plans for automation in Year 3, and whose other duties involve managing the discussion forum, acting as webmaster and liaison with the UCSC Humanities Computing Group, where the Web site is housed, and managing the 3D V-UCWRITE. The responsibilities of the second technology consultant, John Stenzel (UCD) include developing appropriate templates, editorial procedures, and parameters for submission of materials to a UCWRITE database; investigating and reviewing instructional software appropriate for UC writing classes; researching, selecting, annotating, and explaining the materials included in the Computers & Composition section of the site.

Two others with course releases will serve as site managers: Lisa Gerrard (UCLA), and Elizabeth Abrams, P.I. (UCSC). Site managers will primarily be responsible for setting and enforcing deadlines, handling editorial procedures, and receiving and distributing contributions to the site to our student technical assistant, who will label them electronically and post them. Ms. Gerrard will also assemble materials for the new sections of the site, and work with Mr. Stenzel, on the Computers & Composition section, especially in reviewing instructional software. Ms. Abrams will, of course, oversee the project year round and will also continue assembling and synthesizing materials for the section about UC Writing Programs, as well first-year writing and the two new sections. She will consult with administrators of campus writing programs, the California Writing Project, and the UC Office of the President. As Ms. Abrams is also responsible for the considerable logistical work of convening meetings, summarizing results, handling expenses, and other management details, we are requesting two course releases for her work.

Three others will serve as at-large content developers assigned to collaboratively assemble and synthesize materials for the site. We anticipate this work to be ongoing throughout the year, and will involve collecting relevant materials, soliciting and editing course rationales by contributing faculty, writing or redacting new materials for the site, and researching and annotating further links for each section of the site. Content developers are Gail Offen-Brown (UCB), Sonia Maasik (UCLA), and James Donelan (UCSB). Content developers will receive a $2500 summer stipend as it will preclude them from doing other paid work, such as teaching summer school. Salaries for Writing faculty are variable; $5000 is a commonly used per-quarter-long course figure, representing the actual salary of Writing faculty in the early-middle stages of their careers at UCSC and some other campuses.

Four UC campuses - Berkeley, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz - have signed on as full participants in the project. Details of their financial support may be found in their letters, attached to this proposal, but all pledge significant in-kind support in the form of staff and faculty time. In addition, UCWRITE and UCI's SPIDER project have entered into a reciprocal agreement. Each group will send a participant to attend two of the other group's quarterly meetings, and will consult with each other as appropriate during the year to coordinate the complementary (not overlapping) work of the two projects. Finally, UCWRITE has begun communication with another TLtC applicant, software expert Tara Madhyastha (UCSC Computer Engineering), with the hope of tapping her expertise for our expansion plans and providing a broader audience of writing professionals access to her peer editing software.

  Choice of Technology  

As in Year 1, our primary choice of technology is simply the Internet: the best and least expensive means of both accessing other online sources (such as campus writing program Web sites) and posting large amounts of material that would otherwise not be widely available.

Per our original grant, we have also begun customizing one of the colleges in "Virtual UCSC," an interactive graphic representation of the UC Santa Cruz campus now gathering pedagogical content. "V-UCWRITE," an immersive realtime virtual world version of our writing institute, will serve both as an alternative portal to the materials posted on our site and as a test site for online realtime tutoring - a project that has been ongoing this year. We have also committed to using UC's WebCT courseware as our discussion forum software - which is both free for use by UC members and easily customizable. Finally, in Year 2 we plan to research database requirements and emerging standards for academic database construction, including appropriate mark-up language (following UCI, probably XML).

  Project Goals

The goals of the project and its rationale have not shifted substantially from Year 1. The UC Writing Institute we have begun developing 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. UCWRITE's forum and its Web pages on Subject A and multilingual writers 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 forum on the site, password-protected for use by writing faculty, allows teachers experimenting with various technologies to post their results as they emerge; once coherent opinions emerge, they can be posted on the main part of the 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.

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.
• To improve the efficiency of writing teachers systemwide by making exemplary syllabi and assignments 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.) And as the context for a class affects the syllabus - e.g., at UCB, College Writing Program courses satisfy two writing requirements - a linked goal is to provide contextualizing rationales and explanations for the course materials posted on the site.
• To improve the preparation of high school students by explicitly identifying UC's expectations for academic writing.
• To support outreach to high school and community college students by clearly articulating those expectations for their teachers.
• 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

• June 2002: final meeting for Year 1 of grant; planning and detailed timeline for content production and delivery in Year 2 proposed and agreed upon; syllabi from the new sections on upper-division courses and writing-intensive courses in the disciplines solicited; sample syllabi for Subject A and Computers & Composition sections edited and posted; the first iterations of the Subject A and Computers and Composition sections completed (late June); technical assistant engaged for content submission and posting during Year 2.
• July 2002: test version of the first-year writing section and V-UCWRITE completed for initial review by K-12 teachers participating in the Central California Writing Project Summer Institute; site design adjusted based on evaluation; new sections of site designed.
• August 2002: initial version of the ESL section complete; site launched publicly and reviews from peer institutions solicited (late August); textbook publisher invited to review site for possible corporate sponsorship after Year 3.
• October 2002: demonstrate UCWRITE at UCSB and UCSC (early October); first quarterly meeting of Year 2 (mid-October) to assess initial responses to online surveys and on the forum.
• December 2002: database research and assessment report with hardware and software recommendations drafted; report on procedures and templates for content submissions to database, and templates themselves, drafted.
• January 2003: database programmer engaged; confer with site designer and database programmer; course rationales for syllabi in the two new sections received and edited for posting on the site; database construction, testing, revision (January through March).
• March 2003: demonstrate UCWRITE at UCLA and UCB (early March); second quarterly meetings to assess progress and review site design and database changes (late March); progress reports from UCWRITE subcommittees drafted.
• April 2003: test version of the site with modest automation in one or two sections mounted (mid-April); target audiences invited to navigate the site and report their findings; textbook publisher invited to review renovated site; Year 3 grant proposal completed.
• June 2003: final quarterly meeting.

  Project Evaluation

Plans for project evaluation include the following: for the test version mounted in May 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 we will include an online 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 for the next version. We will ask participants in the Central California Writing Project's summer sessions-largely K-12 teachers and thus key members of our target audience-to navigate and evaluate the site. We will ask peers at Harvard who have launched a site that is one of the models for our own to review the site. Finally, we will solicit responses from online discussion groups specializing in ESL, freshman composition, computers and composition, and writing in the disciplines.

  Budget Justification:

In our original proposal, we anticipated that for a project of this scope to be successful, participating faculty would need time to talk through common philosophies, consider materials that will appropriately represent the University of California, and write materials (or introductions to them) that did not yet exist. We proposed an oversight committee, a group of content developers, and three at-large technology consultants. We were proven correct on our expectation that time would be our greatest need - but also found that the allocation of time was insufficient for the scope of our plans, and the challenge of coordinating the work of eleven members on four campuses unwieldy in the first year. For Year 2, we propose a smaller working committee: four members on course release (instead of the two proposed last year) and three on $2500 stipends.

A course - at least at UCSC - is understood to represent 220 hours of work (22 hours of work per week for ten weeks). Hence, the $2500 stipend represents approximately 110 hours of work over the year for each content developer. Content developers will likely put in a great many more hours than this, so the $2500 stipend represents only minimal compensation.

Though this may look like a great deal of compensated time, at UCSC for example, lecturers otherwise teach eight courses per year and simply cannot take time to do this important work unless they are relieved of class responsibilities or the necessity to teach summer school. Again: one course relief represents 220 hours, a bare minimum for the technology consultants to research database protocols, develop templates, investigate, consider and adapt instructional technologies appropriate for UC writing classrooms, and to think through the way material is presented on the website itself, or for site managers to receive, edit, and distribute contributions, set and enforce deadlines, arrange meetings and collaborations, and assemble and synthesize materials for the site. The $2500 course relief for content developers represents 110 hours, most of which will be spent in the summer gathering, evaluating and organizing material for web publication, as well as writing introductory material-as well as any materials which are necessary and not otherwise available. For purposes of comparison, when the Harvard Writing Web site was developing its content, faculty were paid $250 per handout they produced.

In Year 1, UCSC's Humanities Division Computing office offered to host the site, providing space on the server and necessary administrative support; the director, requested that project appoint a formal webmaster and Patrick McKercher agreed to serve in this role. In Year 2 we will continue this arrangement - with the understanding that if traffic on the Humanities server becomes prohibitively busy, UCWRITE will buy its own server.

The project also requires funds for further design and web development consultation, for database programming (adapting an existing database structure for UCWRITE use), and for technical assistance in transferring material to the web. In addition, we request funds for travel to three quarterly meetings, alternating between Northern and Southern California, to complement those held online; we also request travel funds for a SPIDER representative to attend two of our quarterly meetings. (In turn, one of the UCWRITE group will attend two SPIDER meetings.)

  Plans 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.

Mr. Stenzel's expertise in the field of computers and composition is deep-critical for this project-and he has already reviewed our site with an eye toward next year's changes. His participation this year is the first stage of UCD's expected full participation next year.