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Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment: Details

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DIWE provides tools to support all phases of the writing process. The following example describes the progress of an essay from initial assignment to final draft, incorporating many of DIWE’s features. For this assignment, students are asked to write a persuasive essay on an environmental controversy.

Assignment Background
To help the class start thinking about various approaches to environmental topics, the students read three short stories addressing ecological issues. Then everyone joins InterChange for a real-time class discussion comparing and contrasting the stories. The transcript of the discussion is saved so students can return to it later and analyze the key ideas that emerged.

Class discussion using InterChange

Topic Development (Prewriting)
After the students choose preliminary topics, they use Invent to explore and develop those topics. Invent asks questions about the topic and provides a space for the student to respond. All of the student’s work is saved in a plain text file. DIWE provides a broad variety of question series to support different kinds of writing assignments; instructors also can modify these questions or create their own using the PromptManager tool.

Exploring a topic using Invent

First Draft
The student opens his or her Invent work in Write (or any other word processor). In some cases, the student might be able to edit portions of the Invent work as the basis for a first draft. In other cases, the prewriting will simply help the student remember relevant details while writing a draft from scratch.

Composing a first draft in Write

Exchanging Drafts
Using the simple document utilities in DIWE, students can turn in any kind of file, including Microsoft Word documents, for their peers to read. This feature eliminates the need for students to print out multiple copies of their essays, and it also makes it easier for students who miss class to obtain their peers’ drafts.

Choosing a student's paper for peer review

Peer Review
Students usually need guidance in providing effective feedback on each other’s drafts. Respond provides that guidance by leading students through a series of questions about each draft. These questions direct the reader to consider fundamental issues such as audience, purpose, and focus. When finished, the peer reviewer prints out the comments or sends them electronically to the draft’s author. As with Invent, instructors can modify questions or create their own to better match the assignment.

Shared Research
Since all students are researching environmental topics, they can help each other by sharing information about their sources on the class bulletin board, called Mail. The students send three Mail messages to the entire class. Each message provides a complete bibliographic citation for one of the student’s sources, along with a summary of the contents. The students then read each other’s messages and respond with whatever questions they have about sources that seem potentially useful for their own papers.

Additional Drafts
Students revise their drafts based on the feedback they’ve received and then turn in the new versions using DIWE’s document utilities. Once again, they use Respond to offer suggestions for revision. In these later rounds, instructors may ask the students to use a different question series that focuses more on fine tuning, addressing such issues as style or supporting details.

Documenting Sources
In order to document the sources for their essays, students enter bibliographic information into BiblioCite by filling in easy-to-use forms. Once they’ve entered all the information, BiblioCite creates correctly formatted MLA or APA bibliographies that can be copied and pasted into their essays.

Documenting sources with BiblioCite

Publication
When the students complete their final drafts, they turn them in using the document utilities. Even if the instructor chooses to grade essays that are printed on paper, turning in the electronic files serves as a form of publication for the students’ work, giving them a chance to read the final result of their collaboration.

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