Wiki-mediated Writing: design, media, writing strategies and feedback in online text production

Bringing social media arenas, such as wikis, into the classroom invites teaching approaches that engage students in authentic, participatory and creative writing processes. This case study examines the online text production of primary school students in a wiki environment and how the key functionalities for commentary, discussion, logging skills of text and multimodal expression are utilized in practice to develop writing. Exploring the design of assignments and analysing the nature of final texts, writing strategies and feedback reveals an iterative process of writing dominated by strategies of expanding texts with new information and occasional surface editing. The students composed individual narratives on selected themes augmented by drawings, images, speaking avatars and video clips. Feedback was mainly provided by the teachers in the form of encouraging comments and corrective revisions directly in the students’ texts. Peer response was rare, in one project taking the form of discussion posts. Revising indicating increased language awareness was observed among second language learners. Overall, the study demonstrates a tension between instructional design, the affordances of the writing arena and the space for creativity when engaging students in advanced, participatory and reflective composing and revising of texts.

Sketch-based shape exploration using multiscale free-form surface editing

The hierarchical construction of solid models with current computer-aided design systems provide little support in creating and editing free-form surfaces commonly encountered in industrial design. In this work, we propose a new design exploration method that enables sketch-based editing of free-form surface geometries where specific modifications can be applied at different levels of detail. This multilevel detail approach allows the designer to work from existing models and make alterations at coarse and fine representations of the geometry, thereby providing increased conceptual flexibility during modeling. At the heart of our approach lies a multiscale representation of the geometry obtained through a spectral analysis on the discrete free-form surface. This representation is accompanied by a sketch-based surface editing algorithm that enables edits to be made at different levels. The seamless transfer of modifications across different levels of detail facilitates a fluid exploration of the geometry by eliminating the need for a manual specification of the shape hierarchy. We demonstrate our method with several design examples.