An Interview with Ilona Vandergriff

Elizabeth Sommers: Please explain your project to your colleagues and students in Humanities. What's the philosophy underlying your project? How did you go about turning the philosophy into the project?

Ilona Vandergriff: Both in English and foreign languages, students often look at writing only in terms of the finished project, that is, the written text. When working on it, many do not think ahead. Often they don't write a draft that they then revise. And even if revisions are done, they are often rather superficial. While surface level grammar errors are often corrected, students rarely work on weaknesses in structure, form, content, or style. In my German 341, part of the class focuses on writing. So I was trying to figure out how I could get the students to look at writing as a process with several stages: brainstorming and pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing and proofreading.

Elizabeth Sommers: How is technology enhancing your ability to carry out your project?

Ilona Vandergriff: The Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment (DIWE) is a writing software package that emphasizes the process through which a writer creates texts. It allows the instructor to guide students through the writing of several drafts of each paper, starting with INVENT and other pre-writing activities. The prompts force the students to stay on task, focusing on style, audience, form.

Elizabeth Sommers: How did you go about implementing it?

Ilona Vandergriff: What got me started originally was your workshop on DIWE. I was interested in trying out some new ways to help my students become better writers. You walked us through the modules, specifically INTERCHANGE, which allows users to conduct a real-time discussion. I was interested in finding out how adaptable the technology was to foreign language use. (INTERCHANGE does not need to be tailored to foreign language since it does not use prompts.) I wasn't sure how well INTERCHANGE would work for my class - more on that later - but I was pretty sure that both INVENT and RESPOND would work, if only I could change the prompts that come with the software (in English, of course) to German. I knew I couldn't use it before I learned how to tailor the prompts to my class. As a next step, I checked out the DIWE manual in order to figure out how difficult the PROMPTMAKER is. It sure sounded easy, so I reserved the MAC classroom to try it out. Well, fortunately Dan Wong from the Foreign Language Multimedia lab was available to help me out. See, when you go into the program from the student server, you don't have the necessary privileges to change the prompts. I probably would have gotten stuck right there, if it hadn't been for Dan's help. Dan and I worked on this together for about 2 hours that day. After that it was really easy. The thing with the PROMPTMAKER is that you have to follow a pretty strict format. (I believe the upgraded version makes prompt creation easier.) Once I got it, it was as easy as using word processing software. No, really! And using the College of Humanities server, I was able to make prompts for the next class right from my office.

The first series of prompts I used were for a pre-writing activity; in fact, it was their very first pre-writing activity in this class. Students worked on their own. They responded to a series of prompts for a place description. Here is a rough English translation of the German prompts:

1. Think of a place that you would like to describe. It might be a city or a neighborhood, a building (farm, bar, disco, factory, etc.) or a room.
2. What will be your perspective? Will you see it from above like a bird, will you be part of it?
3. What is your attitude toward this place? How do you feel about it and which feelings will you emphasize?
4. Which sense do you want to address in your reader, e.g. the sense of smell or of sound?
5. Do you wish to express intensity or calmness, and how will you express it through the syntax or choice of words?
6. Do you wish to paint a concrete picture of an impressionistic one?
7. How can you interest your reader in the very first sentence?
8. Which rhetoric means (e.g. metaphor, simile, personification) can you use?

The topics and prompts were based on our class text (Corl, Kathryn A., Barbara S. Jurasek and Richard T. Jurasek. 1994. †bergŠnge. Texte verfassen. Boston/Mass.: Heinle and Heinle.) We met in the regular classroom twice a week and worked with the textbook; Wednesday was our computer classroom day.

Besides INVENT, I also used the module called RESPOND. It's much like INVENT. It features a series of prompts which focus the student's attention on different aspects of revising a text. We used it for peer-editing.

Both of these (INVENT and RESPOND) I found quite successful. I also tried out INTERCHANGE, only once, though. Remember, INTERCHANGE can be used for pre-writing. It allows students to have a discussion, and it allows them to write "under cover," with an alias. Well, this did not work well at all in my classroom. As one of my students wrote: "It [INTERCHANGE] would have been helpful if my fellow students had the maturity to stay focused on the topic." If it hadn't been for the silliness of some students, it could have been really great!

Elizabeth Sommers: What do you like most about your project? How did the students like it?

Ilona Vandergriff: The prompts really worked well. They focused the students' attention on the particular writing stage and task. Students used their language in a non-threatening environment, were spontaneous; everyone was participating. Yet, there also was a record of their output since they had to save their work to a disk or turn it in electronically (in other words, save it on my file).

I had students fill out an informal questionnaire on DIWE at the end of the semester. The response was positive overall.

While almost everybody found it helpful, one students who admits to not liking computer didn't. Here are some of their comments:

• " ...The prompts guided the direction the essay should take and it led to a better 'thought out' essay"
• "INVENT was very helpful in guiding the brainstorming process..."
• "...it was a change of routine"
• "I enjoyed working with INVENT..."

But there were also some mixed responses. Some of them stated that the rigid prompt series doesn't reflect how they approach the writing process. Other than that the critical remarks focused on details only.

Elizabeth Sommers: What do you find most troublesome about it? Do you know what others find troublesome?

Ilona Vandergriff: Well, as always - when things didn't work the way they were supposed to. For instance, students have their own DIWE account which requires a password. Many students forgot their passwords. Not a big deal, though, because you can log on under a different name; you just don't have access to your saved work then.

Then there is always the last minute rush. About 10 minutes before the end of the class I would ask the students to wrap things up and save their work. We ran into several problems with that, but were almost always able to save the work in some way: either on the student's disk, by turning it in electronically or by printing it out.

One PC-using student said he had trouble with the MAC platform. (Can you believe it?)

Elizabeth Sommers: Would you or would you not like colleagues contacting you about CMI projects?

Ilona Vandergriff: Sure, call me at X 3120 or, better yet, send me an e-mail at vdgriff@sfsu.edu.

Elizabeth Sommers:What do you wish you knew when you started? What will you do differently next time?

Ilona Vandergriff: Using RESPOND in a collaborative manner, as one of the students in the class suggested. Two students could work on revising an essay together. Takes the loneliness out of working with computers! It's also useful to hand out paper copies of the drafts because the screen does not show the entire text at one time. This is problematic when working on the macrostructure.

Finding a better way of integrating INTERCHANGE: I still think it's a great tool. I am going to try it out once in my Intermediate German Conversation course this semester. Let's see what these students do with it.

For each assigned essay we had only one computer session scheduled. In other words, with any given essay students only worked on it once in the computer classroom, the other stages completed "traditionally": in the regular classroom and at home. Next time I teach this class, I'd like to work with INTERCHANGE, INVENT and RESPOND on one essay and let the individual student take it through all the stages.

Elizabeth Sommers: What surprised you the most?

Ilona Vandergriff: That I felt like a fairly competent DAEDALUS INTEGRATED WRITING ENVIRONMENT (DIWE) facilitator, even though I had just become familiar with the program (and the computer classroom!) myself.