Above is a screenshot of the writing prompts Longo and her students embedded in a Croquet landscape to explore collaborative writing strategies. The four squares are studios or portals to different rooms or environments.

The top image is a screenshot of a portal students in Breuch's class used to enter different Croquet landscapes. After clicking one of the icons above it, they could move their avatars into the underwater world pictured in the second image. Their avatars then changed into fish.

The screenshots above are of the mindmap Breuch's students created to brainstorm ideas about how Croquet could be used in an educational environment. The dark brown object in the center is a book Breuch first placed in the landscape to initiate the assignment. Students then added annotations to it; the text in the foreground describes how such embedded objects might be used in a writing classroom.

Above is a screenshot of the mindmap Breuch's students created with a jabberwocky avatar facing an Alice avatar. In the future, avatars in Croquet will be able to engage in chat and audio discussions.

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Using Croquet to Teach Writing Interview

Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch and Bernadette Longo, both professors in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of Minnesota, used Croquet, an open-source computer software environment that combines 3D with 2D software, to explore how it might support teaching and learning and impact the writing process. In the traditional composition class the writing process is for the most part individualized, especially during the research and idea formulation stage. Breuch and Longo explored how writers can use Croquet to collaborate with each other during this stage, and also discovered other ways using the tool can transform the writing and teaching of writing process. We asked them about their experiences.

Goals

Longo

Bernadette Longo and her students began using it to redesign the Online Writing Center.

Longo explained, "I've been teaching an information design course this semester. The information design question we've addressed is, "How can Croquet be used to redesign the Online Writing Center?" Croquet designers had asked us to focus on how they could design in social aspects and collaboration aspects into the interface because, as they said, we can design eye candy all day long, that's not hard--what we don't know about is the social stuff. So that's what we were focusing on. . . . We reviewed online writing centers and also read about social constructivist theory of communication and writing. Now we're asking, how can Croquet be used to support learning [across the disciplines], and to support people with various learning styles?"

Breuch

Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch and her students used Croquet to explore how the class environment changes due to the use of a different medium (online as opposed to face-to-face).

Breuch said, "The plan was to integrate Croquet into my graduate seminar on teaching and designing hybrid courses. The whole course involved thinking about how going online remediates a face-to-face class, so to speak. [Croquet] fit very well, we couldn't pass up the opportunity."

Technology Strategies

Longo

Longo and her students decided to explore collaborative writing strategies by embedding writing prompts in the Croquet landscape so students could go into the introduction, body, and other parts of an essay and move text around.

In Longo's words, "these 'studios' as we're now thinking of these places, [offer] a schematic for teaching and experiencing argumentation as kind of a 3D object rather than a scroll. I think the page in Microsoft Word is still a scroll, even though they've got these page breaks, we think of it as this long scroll. You know Jack Kerouc wrote On the Road on this big scroll. Once it was on this scroll, the purpose was not to revise it. I think that same metaphor operates with the Microsoft Word screen--it does not stimulate us to move things around in pieces, in fact quite the opposite: [it encourages students to] cut and paste . . . on very superficial level."

Croquet, on the other hand, encourages students to think about their writing as spatially distinct pieces that can be edited, shuffled, and rearranged, and this is a significant shift, according to Longo: "I think the context [surrounding the pieces of text] is extremely important. For example, if you drew a strawberry and you put that strawberry in a strawberry patch, you would think about [that object] differently and assign different concepts to it than if you put the strawberry on a piece of shortcake or something."

Breuch

Breuch and her students created two activities to help new users learn to use the Croquet interface, a scavenger hunt and brainstorming environment.

Breuch explained the scavenger hunt was based on the theme of Alice in Wonderland. "Students had to find objects, manipulate objects, and learn how to jump from one world to the next. [The Croquet support team] brought four computers; the six students in my class formed teams of three and worked together in pairs at a computer. There was a jabberwocky team, an Alice team, and a white rabbit team [named for the three avatars]. Each team took its own path through the scavenger hunt. That was really an experimental day."

The second activity was to have students collaboratively explore or brainstorm ideas about how Croquet could be used in an educational environment. According to Breuch, "They had to visit all the worlds--there's under water, there's outer space, there was a natural world and then the pavilion. Then they had to brainstorm using the annotations tool; they created a collaborative idea map. They could all contribute, they could all change one another's annotations. So they started brainstorming and creating annotations--it led to this 3D idea map that blew my mind. When you saw it, it was really quite neat."

Outcomes

Both Longo and Breuch discovered that using Croquet transformed the way they and their students viewed writing.

First, it enabled students not only to view writing as objects embedded in a landscape, but to interact with these objects and each other in very new ways.

Longo said, "Technology is really just a piece of it. As Mark says, it's not even the most difficult piece. Making the interface is relatively easy compared with figuring out how to make it usable. Initially the students were saying, we don't need 3D because it is difficult and it's new and it's scary and it's not intuitive yet. But as we have kept coming back to it we have gotten more comfortable with the whole idea. Yesterday while we were looking at it I thought, this is looking kind of normal to me . . . I realized how far I've come in one year from thinking I've never seen anything like this ever, you know, this is really blowing my mind!

Further, it enabled them to think about writing as something more than just working with text. Evidence could be presented as a simulation, for example, rather than just a written report.

Breuch said, "It's making me think that writing is more than text. Mind blowing! Writing is more than text. This is coming from a conservative person who is very tied to text. But communication is taking place not just through oral, written, and visual media . . . but also through animations, and movies. Writing is more than text. That is just mind blowing.

Longo added, "Especially when you think of [writing in] the sciences. A simulation of a physics problem [produces] so much information that in order to actually write the lab report you have to ditch or jettison most of the information because you can't deal with it all. The step between the actual experiment or simulation and the reporting of it [results in] a huge reduction of information. Croquet offers us the possibility [of] retain[ing] so much more information in reporting the outcome."

"I think you're on to something there. There's something that distinguishes writing from other forms of communication and I think it's documentation--the reporting process. That's what Croquet allows us to do [with annotations]. That to me is radical; that's what technology can contribute," Breuch concluded.

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