General considerations:

Step-by-Step Instructions:

Cheat-Sheets:

Even if the computer classroom offered only word processing and overhead projection, it would be a productive environment in which to teach, but certain specialized tools add new dimensions to what students and teachers can achieve. In the late 1980's a group of graduate students at University of Texas developed the programs that became Daedalus, a suite of applications that allow for local-network electronic mail, electronic conferencing, and customizable prompted freewriting routines. The UC Davis Composition program served as a beta-test site for the earliest versions of Daedalus, and we have been using it ever since, though not always at a high level of sophistication. Some of the features are not well documented, or were not well implemented on our networks, and one

of my intentions in writing this manual is to stimulate more interest and dexterity in the use of these powerful classroom tools.

 The Daedalus Group is a useful place to browse and discover nuggets of pedagogical and technological support. Daedalus also maintains a listserv called "Daedalus TEACH" for teachers with questions, and the archives of this list are large and worth examining; see the Web site for details. The Daedalus group and its adherents sometimes go overboard in their panegyrics to an ideal decentralized "student-centered classroom"; the reality is (as always) a mixture of positives and negatives. One need not change style to benefit from Daedalus, and I firmly believe that graduate seminars and discussion sections could profit from regular Daedalus-modulated interactions.

 This edition of the manual will only address one major module of the Daedalus suite: InterChange, the on-line discussion program; Daedalus Write, the word processor module, will be discussed in passing, and I am hoping to include appendices on Invent and Respond as instructors contribute more material. The following sections describe InterChange and some of its possibilities as a teaching tool; the manual then gives instructors directions for launching the program. These directions are lifted liberally from the cheat-sheets available in instructors' resource files, with annotations and handy-hints added as well. Feel free to copy them and customize as needed.

Daedalus InterChange is a program that mimics other on-line chat or discussion environments, but it runs over a local network, and with some unique pedagogical advantages. Precursors of this synchronous-conferencing software were contained in many versions of multi-user Unix systems, and held some appeal for early distance-education enthusiasts. Whereas Internet Relay Chat (IRC) used the Internet and is essentially line-based and command-driven, InterChange is a more structured and slightly more user-friendly environment in which to run discussions. It also has certain advantages over MOOs and MUDs, although as these continue to evolve as teaching tools subsequent editions of this Guide will address them.

 Other classroom applications are now available commercially, including Commonspace, Norton Connect, and Aspects; a useful bibliography and comparison is available from Epiphany Project (which has much of interest).

Because DIWE is a suite of programs, one must first launch the application, log in with a name, and navigate through a couple of pull-down menus to reach InterChange. The InterChange screen is split into a discussion space and a scratchpad, with a "Send" button below:

Participants type in and edit their contributions, then click on the Send button, whereupon their message goes out into the local network to the server, to be displayed in the discussion-space window of all the computers that have logged into that conference. Depending on the loads on the network and the speed and number of connected individual machines, the comments scroll down into students' viewing screens within a few seconds of being sent.

Note: Because Daedalus depends on modules running on the student computers and a large chunk running on the classroom server (which stacks and keeps track of individual messages), poor network performance can compromise the speed of feedback and the quality of interaction. That said, the program has definite benefits and is well worth exploring for all teachers.

InterChange provides a good opportunity for on-line discussion of all kinds, for the class as a whole or for many smaller groups. Unlike oral discussions, no one can hide, everyone must participate; because the transcript contains names with each entry, the instructor has a written record. As with any mode of discussion, the more tightly an instructor focuses the discourse (and makes the goals clear), the better the discussion will be.

 My own experience with Daedalus was quite mixed until I learned this basic fact: amorphous discussion prompts like "What are your reactions to this essay?" or "Do you agree with the author's views?" led to rambling and unproductive InterChange sessions. More disturbingly, the spontaneity of the computer writing mode can produce distracting off-the-cuff remarks, and can even encourage "witticisms" that verge into chatter and idiocy. It's perfect evidence (as if we needed it) that computerization on its own does not improve the quality of writing: unless we plant and nourish the thinking and revision practices of good writers, we won't see significant improvement.

 Instructors must strike a balance between using the InterChange format to encourage composing and sharing of ideas, and using it to help students refine and polish their writing. While the spontaneity of instant text creation can be liberating, sometimes it's best to cultivate shorter but more highly-worked submissions, or to use the discussion space in lieu of the chalkboard to post sentences or paragraphs prepared outside of class. For example, I often ask for a single sentence that articulates the strengths and weaknesses of a piece, thus encouraging subordinated and coordinated sentences. Phrase the question carefully, and tell your students not to send immediately; wait five minutes, then stagger the submissions (row by row or section by section works fine--you just don't want to overload the network and get plaintive beeps as messages collide).

 In fact, my breakthrough with Daedalus InterChange came by way of a profoundly deaf student in a Legal Writing class; her sign-language interpreters had a heck of a time keeping up with me, but the first time we used InterChange her teletype-trained fingers flew over the keyboard. She came up to me in tears after class and said, through her interpreters, that this was the first time in her fifteen years of schooling that she had participated as an equal in a regular classroom. From then on I developed ways to integrate quick Daedalus sessions into nearly every class period, and rely heavily on it now.

Emphasizing the need for editing--getting out of the first-and-final-draft trap--can improve individual submissions. If it's indicated, the instructor can quickly move around the room, to verify that students are on task or to provide encouragement; students can do the same thing for each other. The work itself can also prompt further discussion: students can scroll the list themselves and comment, or an instructor can turn on the overhead display, and move quickly through the list of sentences, calling attention to particularly promising ones and soliciting student explanations. As a practical point, that "quickly" is worth emphasizing: when you have to turn the lights down to make the display readable, you always run the risk of losing students either to daydreaming, sleeping, or e-mail reading!

 Another follow-up technique that I use is to have students choose what they think is the best sentence of the bunch, and explain why. This can in turn lend itself to an effective comparison exercise, encouraging useful coordinated structures like "X does something well, but Y does this other thing more effectively because of its Z."

 Toggling between word-processor and InterChange

Once a contribution is sent to the conference, it disappears from the scratchpad and cannot be edited; to encourage recursive techniques you should encourage students to do some editing in a word-processing window (Word or Daedalus Write), and toggle back and forth into the discussion, copying and pasting submissions while keeping their original for future reference and revision. As elsewhere, demonstrating this technique of using multiple windows (using the overhead projection screen) can be a useful discussion starter.

Just about all sentence exercises easily adapt to the InterChange format. As with any of the activities described here, there are clear economies of scale and familiarity at work: the more frequently you demand that students do a particular operation, the less time you will waste explaining it. I have run courses where virtually every class session featured a fast InterChange component, ranging from difficult sentence-construction exercises to quick summary / response drills to extended debates on either side of a legal issue.

Exercises can be set up in advance, with a set of sentences either taken home or handed out in class. That way, students do all the sentences on their own time, and you have them submit one at a time to the conference. In the time it takes to type the sentences and do last-minute revision (always a good tie-in to a grammar point you make before the Daedalus session), you can roam the room and verify which students have actually done the exercise beforehand (as homework) and which of them are madly trying to catch up.

The logistical problems of having each student read twenty other submissions, with the scrolling screen and time-lag barriers added, can make large-scale InterChange sessions less than optimal, but there are various ways to mitigate these effects. In classrooms whose physical configurations allow it (where there is enough space for several students to gather around one machine), groups can work well in this setting: besides getting students to work together and talk about writing, consolidating into teams of two or three can reduce the number of submissions to a more manageable level, and ease the load on the network.

 Multiple conferences and group work

Group interaction of a different kind can also work well in the InterChange environment, as Joe Aimone has pointed out:

"I have used the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment for several years in composition and literature classes. One of the key problems in a use of the Daedalus system's "InterChange" feature for class discussions is a result of the asynchrony of writing: students get bored waiting for the next comment, and perhaps as a result produce several of their own and send them simultaneously, scattering the thread of the discussion to the winds. Discipline can break down, as students are less on-task, and the discussion degenerates.

"One partial remedy to the chaos is to use small groups in parallel, reducing the barrage of information students see in their groups. This solution raises the boredom quotient, however, as students twiddle their thumbs waiting for the next comment to appear; and even a group of three or four can fly apart at the discursive seams.

"An additional wrinkle to this strategy can help small groups function better. Assign three or four groups of three or four students to the same text or topic to discuss. Allow members of those groups to read all the groups with the same topic, but only let them write for one. Students "surf" between groups, reading what several people have to say at the speed of reading, but only produce responses to one group, narrowing the writing requirement to correspond with the slower speed of writing.

"For example, I have a class of 25 students workshop two student argumentative essay papers, in sets of three groups of four students. I assign each student one of four critical tasks: to critique the logical features of the paper, to critique the use of pathos, to critique the use of ethos, and to critique prose style. The student papers are available in "InterChange" Sessions, and I initiate eight more "InterChange" sessions, one for each group. (Four groups for each paper.) I have the students subscribe to all the groups that will discuss the paper they are assigned to.

"I ask students to read the paper assigned to their group and compose a brief but substantial comment in a text window separate from the "InterChange" windows they have subscribed to, a comment directed to whichever critical task they have been assigned. I give them about five minutes to compose these comments, then I ask the "Logic" critics to paste and send their comments to the InterChange sessions for their groups, to start discussion. I ask all the students then to begin reading all the groups they have been assigned to, and to respond in their primary groups. I urge them to reflect upon what goes on in the groups they only read, and even to import topics and ideas from them.

"The result is a contrapuntal discussion, with the students fully occupied keeping up reading with four groups and writing coherently for one. In the transcripts you will see two discussions held in parallel, workshopping the same student paper. I provide copies of the transcripts for the student who wrote the paper discussed, to use in revision."

If the conferences themselves vanished into the ether, the Daedalus InterChange program would still be useful; however, the stack of submissions, keyed to individual names, can be saved or "compacted" into a text file, and distributed or edited. To compact an InterChange conference, be sure that all submissions have been sent in; then pull down the Utilities menu and select "Compact InterChange."

You will be prompted to select which conference to compact:

Note that if the "close the session" box has an X in it, the conference will be removed from the server as soon as you invoke the "compact" command; leave the box un-checked if you want the dialog to continue after you've compacted what has been submitted thus far. See below for tips on dealing with glitches.

Highlight your choice; you can place the transcript on your own floppy disk or hard disk, and from there you can transfer it to your own Pick-Up folder as desired.

Note: in Daedalus 1.2, anyone can compact the InterChange, which can bring a discussion to a grinding halt because the program's record-keeping is interrupted. If you suddenly are unable to send more messages to a conference, this may be the reason. Don't panic. You can have students transfer their existing submissions to a different conference--Main, for example--and carry on, but it is frustrating.

If you are fortunate, the transcript has been saved to one of your students' hard drives, and you can get it; if they have canceled the compacting, but tied up the conference, your discussion may be unrecoverably gone. I have found that my usual warnings about maintaining a cooperative and respectful classroom prevent this next level of vandalism just as they tone down the possibilities of "electronic spitwads" and disrespectful InterChange commentary, but to an extent the computer is a Pandora's box that some cannot resist.

Daedalus attempted to prevent this inadvertent or intentional sabotage in subsequent versions, as part of their class-management front end that required students and teachers to log in and join particular classes with particular privileges. In newer versions only registered teachers have the privileges to compact conferences, but the upgrade requires significantly higher amounts of administrator time and electronic red tape, so we are forced to balance out the possible problems of the earlier version.

 Coping with network crashes

Because the program requires a functioning local network, you may one day have a massive crash that cripples the file-sharing capabilities of the classroom while leaving individual machines running. In this event, be flexible enough to move students around the room, from computer to computer, to see each other's work in progress, rather than depending on the computers to do it. This is a useful principle to keep in mind whenever you are teaching in a computer classroom: the equipment has become complicated enough that we sometimes lose sight of simple work-arounds!

 Annotating transcripts and follow-up exercises

Annotating the transcripts can be a useful follow-up for future discussion: you can take the transcript home, open it with your word processing program, interleave your comments and suggestions for individual students, and then distribute the augmented file to your class for follow-up. You can also sort comments by participant, or group them by some other criterion. This is particularly useful in showing how the same assignment can generate lots of different and legitimate theses, or how the same grammatical challenge can produce many different improved versions. Another use of discussion transcripts comes in handy when I am teaching fair quotation: give each group a transcript and have them write a summary or set of minutes; students who might butcher an anonymous author's prose (or intent) get very testy when they feel they are being misquoted or misrepresented!

 For more examples, see Computers in Composition .

I have found that good sentence work often requires a combination of routines: students pick up an exercise from the Pick-Up folder, copy it to their own diskettes, execute the tasks, and then take particular sentences and share them with the rest of the class in a Daedalus discussion. The developers of Daedalus realized this, and integrated this into subsequent versions of the package. In version 1.3, each instructor and each group of students are electronically registered in classes; everyone logs in, and if an instructor wants to "post" an assignment that appears each time one of her students launches Daedalus, that exercise or question set automatically opens in a Daedalus Write word-processing window. Unfortunately, this feature adds another layer of administrative hassle each quarter, along with another set of passwords to remember, so we have been slow to adopt the upgraded program.

In a recent English 104A (Technical Writing) course, I had teams of students write out "cheat sheets" for this combination of tasks, and promised that the two best ones would go into this Instructor's Guide, to be used by faculty and students. They appear at the end of this chapter, and can be photocopied and used.

The program is actually quite persnickety about having two names separated by a space in there, so don't try to give just one name:

From the main screen the various Daedalus modules are all available; some have keyboard shortcuts (command keys), while others require navigation through menus:

Note: if you or a student mistakenly tries to launch the Daedalus package by double-clicking on the icon on the file server instead launching from the hard drive, the following message will appear:

 A student who has launched the program without server access will not be able to join an InterChange conference. Attempting to do so will bring only a plaintive Mac error beep and a message like the one below:

Here's what probably happened. Launching Daedalus without access to the file server prompted the following warning--but the program seemed to launch afterward!

If this person clicked on "Open," the normal Daedalus entry prompt appeared, but this is deceptive. Because the "Daedalus Preferences" file is obtained only from the file server, the program tries to find it, can't, and opens as best it can. Even selecting "InterChange" from under the Activities menu will seem to work, at least as far as getting a screen with a "Main" conference seemingly open; however, when the student tries to send a message to the conference, frustration ensues.

Solution: have the student save his/her entry after pasting it from the InterChange into a Daedalus Write window, then login again, properly.

 Troubleshooting tip: Sending to a compacted conference

Please note that when a student tries to send to a conference that has just been closed, and thus no longer exists, the only notification is a Mac warning tone--and the message does not disappear from the scratchpad part of the screen. As discussed earlier, you can have students select, copy and paste their scratchpads into the Main conference (or you can try opening a new conference with exactly the same name as the old one, and see whether the server can be fooled).

 As of this writing, we are working with IT-Labs to have the default setting changed so that compacting an InterChange conference does not close the conference, but only saves a transcript of what has gone on up to that point.

Updated step-by-step cheat-sheets for faculty and students are usually distributed by the Computers in Composition Coordinator at the beginning of the quarter, and will also be on the Web. The next two pages contain tried-and-true "Cheatsheets" for both instructors and students; photocopying the student one is a quick way to get your students going with a Daedalus InterChange.

Creating a Conference (Instructor only):

o Move pointer to hard drive icon and open it (double click) OR pull down "Programs" sub-menu from under the Apple menu and select "Daedalus"

o Move pointer to "Daedalus 1.2" application icon and double-click

o Type your first and last name when prompted, and click on OK. An "Untitled" window will appear--this is a Daedalus Write text-editing window.

o Pull down the "Activity" menu and select "Daedalus InterChange"

o Pull down the "InterChange" menu and select "Create a conference"

o Type in the name of your conference--e.g., "Stenzel's 102 Discussion"

o Now you have created that conference, and joined it automatically. The screen is divided in two, with the title bar reading "Stenzel's 102 Discussion." The lower part is the contributor's scratchpad with cursor blinking, the upper part is the group space. Contributors type in their comments and then click on the "Send" button to send their message to the group, where it appears fairly soon. The scroll bar at the right edge allows you to scroll up and down the discussion. Once you've finished the discussion, tell your students to stop typing, quit the program, and log out.

Possible glitches:

o If everyone sends at once, the resulting traffic can temporarily overwhelm the network; Macs respond with a plaintive "beep" and the scratchpad material stays in its box instead of going to the group. Sometimes a "disk error" warning box appears, sometimes not; if it does, click on OK. Have smaller groups of students send, staggering the load; usually, the scratchpad will clear when the message goes. Not surprisingly, it doesn't help to have lots of students try to send lots of messages lots of times.

 o If a student (or instructor!) tries to launch Daedalus by clicking on an icon inside the Applications folder of the file server instead of the hard drive, a copyright message will appear (on the order of "This program is licensed to only 30 users, and launching it will exceed that limit"). Be sure people have nothing to do with the file-server end of things, but instead launch from individual hard drives.

Compacting a conference / creating a transcript of it (Instructor only):

 Pull down the "Utilities" menu and select "Compact Conference" You will be prompted for a name, with the default being "Transcript." I usually name my conferences logically--"Transcript of Stenzel Feb 2 class." Click on OK.

 The transcript is a text file saved (by default) to the hard drive. Place it in your floppy or in your class folder on the server. You'll want to open it as a Word document before sending it to students or editing it yourself--launch Word, click on "Open" under the "File" menu, and open the file. Otherwise, if you simply double-click on the icon it may open using the Daedalus editor, which is usually not what you want.

This instruction sheet shows how to join an InterChange conference called "[name]." Your instructor will tell you the name of the conference you will be joining.

 To join the Daedalus InterChange Conference called "[name]," you must launch the Daedalus application, type in your name, select the InterChange activity, select "Join a conference," and join the conference called "[name]."

 Here are the steps:

 o Move pointer to hard drive icon ["IR Mac," for example] and double click; OR pull down "Programs" sub-menu from under the Apple menu and select "Daedalus"

[o Move pointer to "Daedalus 1.2" application icon and double click]

 o Type your first and last name when prompted, and click on OK

 o Pull down the "Activity" menu and select "Daedalus InterChange"

 o Pull down "InterChange" menu and select "Join a conference"; a list should appear

 o Using the pointer, scroll down to highlight "[name]" and click on OK

 o Now you have joined the conference. The screen is divided in two, with the title bar reading "[name]." The lower part is your own scratchpad, the upper part is the group space, the "Send" button transfers your contribution to the group.

 o Type in your contribution. Note that you can use the mouse to move around your scratchpad, and note that the word-wrap function makes typing fairly easy.

o Click on "Send" when you are done. After a brief delay, your message appears with your name in the group space. The scroll bar at the right edge allows you to scroll up and down the discussion.

 o At the end of the session, select "Quit" from the File menu, and log out as usual.

 Please note two important points about Daedalus:

 1. When you first invoke the Daedalus program, you will see an "Untitled" window, which is a blank document. If you wish, you can type draft in here using Daedalus' built-in word processor, Daedalus Write, and copy-and-paste material from the Untitled window into InterChange. You can also use the File sub-menu of Daedalus Write to open a text document you created with another word processor. Daedalus will not directly open MS Word documents, however--you have to remember to use the save-as text option.

2 When you first invoke the InterChange module, you'll find yourself in a conference called "Main." You don't want to be in this conference; join the appropriately named conference that your instructor has created for that day.

This documentation was created by the team of Robyn Hamlin, Bill Brier, and Linda Wong, as an exercise for my English 104A (Reports / Tech Writing) class in Fall 1997.

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