Listed here is a selection of current and completed projects intended to demonstrate WIDE’s research and partnerships in the following four areas: digital literacy infrastructure, writing as knowledge work, outreach computing, and international/global composing.
CURRENT PROJECTS
Take Two: A Study of the Co-Creation of Knowledge on Museum Web 2.0 Sites
Take Two is a multi-year study of the impact of Web 2.o technologies on museum learning and practice. The study has two parts: An examination of knowledge-building activities involving Web 2.0 technologies, using the museum blog Science Buzz as a case study. An examination of the impact that Web 2.0 technologies have on museum practice at the Museum of Life Science in North Carolina.
APUE Website Consulting
The Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education (APUE) has asked WIDE for assistance in the development of a system for sharing information with its key audiences (what we used to call a website project). Like many “knowledge organizations, content development responsibilities in APUE are distributed across the organization. Also like many knowledge organizations, “content is one of the key products of the organization.
This project requires us to understand the organization before we can help the organization design a process for working effectively with (and through) its website. In this case, the website includes both a front end (interfaces and an information model) and a back end (a content management solution for maintaining the website). The back end is important because the Associate Provost’s office has no permanent staff with web design and maintenance tasked to them. The back end is focused on enabling multiple writers within the organization to maintain content and not worry about design issues.
Digital Media Composing: An Outreach Research Project
The Information Technology Empowerment Center (V) of Lansing is a nonprofit, collaborative partnership between community, industry, and education. As part of this initiative, we are engaged in an outreach research project focused on teaching digital media composing to middle school students and then tracing what they learn, how they learn, and what relationships this work has to their enjoyment of technology and interest in pursuing more technology intensive work.
Archive 2.0: Re-imagining the MSU Samaritan Archive as a Thriving Social Network
Using a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, WIDE is creating an prototype next-generation archive featuring selections from two of MSU Libraries’ three Isrealite Samaritan Pentateuchs. The project aims to allow biblical scholars, the Samaritan community, and the interested public to access these rare and unique artifacts. The system created for the scrolls will feature state-of-the-art social networking technology allowing users to share annotations and to do interpretive work on the texts collaboratively.
COMPLETED PROJECTS
Advisor’s Manual Development Committee, Michigan State University:
In Fall 2006, Project Manager Jeff Grabill, along with two graduate students, began working with the Advisor’s Manual Development Committee to design an online resource to meet the information needs of advisors at Michigan State University. The goal of the project is to optimize the organization of advising information for specific audience groups in order to ensure the information becomes fully integrated into the practice of advising. Grabill and the graduate students are currently conducting inquiries into the use, and user interactions, with the current advisor’s manual. The results of these inquiries will inform the interface and site designs.
NCTE (National Council Teachers of English):
In our 40 page recommendation report, based on a content audit of www.ncte.org, we offered an assessment of the current site (summer 2005) architecture and content strategy as well as recommendations for improving these. After completing a series of in-depth,broad content analyses, our WIDE research team recorded its observations regarding user experience. Our overall goal was to make recommendations that would allow users to get to destination content faster and accomplish their goals. We therefore urged NCTE to adopt the mantra that: “Our website is not something we have, but something we do for (and with) our members. The view of the WIDE research team held that the ideal service model for NCTE’s website should serve the needs of every distinct user. To that end, we provided a nonexhaustive list of user roles, asking and then imagining: “What do users need to do? We believe that the design team should consider this question carefully, and we provided two general conceptual and navigational/architectural frameworks: rolebased navigation and action-based navigation as conceptual tools with which to design site-wide navigation. In addition to proposing large ideas that imagine answers to the above questions, we also made specific recommendations that helped reduce duplication and clutter in the current main page and interior page layouts. We also pose some difficult questions. The WIDE team easily imagined NCTE’s site as very shortly becoming a source of fresh content, smart commentary, and broad representation of the knowledge base of NCTE members.
Teachers for a New Era
In September 2005, the project leaders for the “Teachers for a New Era (TNE) project contacted two co-directors of the WIDE Research Center about doing a study to determine how the “Teacher Knowledge Standards (TKS)developed by the TNE project team could best be delivered to its intended users — that is, “MSU students preparing for teaching careers, all faculty involved in their disciplinary and pedagogical preparation, K-12 teachers and administrators, and public officials responsible for educational policy (“Teacher Knowledge Standards, Nov.2004, p. 1). The WIDE team conducted a study, focused mainly on interviewing students and teachers in the literacy area of Teacher Education, with the aim, first, of determining how students and teachers in the teacher preparation program actually think about and use standards in their work, and, second, of developing an overall “information model that the TNE project could use to present Teacher Knowledge Standards (TKS) in a way that would make them “useful and usable to their intended users. In addition, the WIDE research team designed a web-based “Literacy Resource Exchange that will serve as a means for teachers and teacher educators to share materials and at the same time allow users to link those materials to the TNE Teacher Knowledge Standards (TKS). The development and expansion of the LRE continues in ongoing stages.First Two Pages of the LRE Functional Specification
MSU’s Affirmative Action (AACM):
The Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center WIDE assisted the office of Affirmative Action Compliance & Monitoring (AACM) at MSU in their efforts to transition to a new content strategy that aligns with the re-design of their website. WIDE conducted two workshops for AACM staff in the Fall of 2005, helping them to produce content types consistent with the information model outlined during the content audit and with best practices of web writing. WIDE will also prepare a final recommendation report based on the assessment research. The report is meant to establish some guidelines for improving the accessibility and navigability of the new site in order to provide a consistent and satisfying user experience as well as promoting strategic reuse of site content.
Career Services and Placement, Michigan State University:
Under the direction of Project Manager Dr. Jeff Grabill, Co-Director of the WIDE Research Center, MSU undergraduate students worked with Career Services and Placement to revise, construct, and user-test a webspace for the MSU community and beyond that would allow employers to connect with potentional employees. The project gave MSU undergraduate student experience working directly with clients, thus preparing them for the workforce.
Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company:
Kendall-Hunt came to WIDE in the Fall of 2004 seeking assistance with a usability evaluation of a web-based course management system called WebCom. They sought feedback from university faculty who were experienced users of similar course management systems (CMS) in order to validate implemented functions as useful and usable, and to discover and prioritize areas for future development, including additional functionality beyond what the current product supported. To satisfy both of these goals, WIDE designed and carried out a series of usability evaluations focusing on four key functional areas of the CMS: creating and managing course content, course delivery, student assessment, course/program assessment. The final report for Kendall- Hunt focused on opportunities to expand and refine WebCom in ways that might differentiate the product from other offerings in the higher- education marketplace.
Michigan State University Libraries:
Each Spring, Co-Director William Hart-Davidson as part of his Advanced Technical Writing course engages professional writing undergraduate and graduate students in outreach service work with library services. During this ongoing working relationship, MSU students evaluate, analyze, and audit various interfaces, content, and content configurations of the MSU library. Each semester, the students first conduct an audit of specific places on the library website and then present their initial recommendations to library staff. After receiving feedback, they then collaboratively construct a recommendation report that is forwarded to the library. Over the past two years, the MSU library has implemented many student recommendations.
