Write With the World

Barry Bakin talks to Ruth Vilmi, founder of the International Writing Exchange Project.

BB: You are perhaps most well known for your work as developer and manager of the International Writing Exchange Project http://www.ruthvilmi.net/hut/ Autumn1998/iwe.html in which students from around the world can practice writing skills as part of an international online class. In the class, students submit writing samples, read the work of other students, and give and get reactions to their own work and the work of the other participants. How did this project come about and how has it grown since its inception? How many participants are actively involved now?
RV: My boss at the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT), Marja Renkonen, participated in an email project between three universities, in Finland, the Czech Republic and the US, in Spring 1993, with six students from each university. I followed the project and saw just how motivated the students were. I decided to try something similar myself later that year with 240 students, 80 HUT students and the rest from the US, Canada and Japan. The numbers and universities involved have fluctuated, largely dependent on whether or not I have involved my own students and on the technology available. [You can see universities involved in the project at http://www.ruthvilmi.net/hut/ Image/universities.gif. The numbers decline if I am not active myself, or if I get frustrated with technical problems. In early 1999, I tried a course where both upper secondary school students and university undergraduates took part. A schoolteacher, Ilpo Halonen, is helping me to develop this course, now called Discuss ICT. We expect participants from Finland, Sweden, Namibia and perhaps Cyprus. We're about to start using a new discussion forum now, Boardmaster, as the program we were using, made by a HUT student, presented some difficulties in use. We're expecting many students from Korea, Japan and France now, as well as my classes in Finland.
BB: Visitors to the site will see that there is quite an extensive list of tasks and components to be completed during the course of the project. What is involved with the organization of such an intensive online course? How does it differ from more traditional campus based courses?
RV: In recent years, a lot of my time has been consumed in trying to develop my own program in Java for handling and sorting the mail. This summer, with no deadline in view, and an abundance of new software for discussion forums, I found a suitable program and started customizing it. This should make administration a bit easier, and the students should enjoy the user-friendly interface. The other main task is producing and updating the handout [http://www. ruthvilmi.net/hut/Autumn2000/iwe.html], selecting the topics, seeing that the forms work (on a new server everything has to be changed) and fixing dead links on, for example, my Language Help pages. The main difference for me is that I need to do a lot of technical tasks that other teachers don't need to do. It also gives me a chance to try new things and to make lots of Net friends. It's more time-consuming than traditional cour-ses, but it suits the needs of more and more HUT students nowadays.
BB: Your homepage reveals that you teach on-line courses for students at the Helsinki University of Technology. Do you still teach traditional "stand-up" courses? How do students react to the on-line delivery of instruction and are students satisfied with an on-line class?
RV: In 1993, students found online courses very exciting, but also very time-consuming and frustrating, due to the developing technology. A few years ago the interest dwindled, partly due to the fact that the two students who had been helping me at HUT graduated and I found it too difficult to manage alone. In the autumn of 1997, I ask-ed Douglas Moessel at Missouri University to take over for a while. Later I found volunteer students again and de-cided to continue. I do still teach in the classroom, but the courses always include an on-line writing component. I think perhaps it's ideal to do it this way, with some meetings in the local classroom and some online meetings with global students and teachers. I've been teaching online courses to a few distance learning students at HUT, and have had one full online class in recent years. After each course, the students post their evaluations, which can be read at: http:// www.ruthvilmi.net/hut/Autumn2000/iwe.html. I had one unexpected complaint in the oral evaluations last year - many students said the writing module (6 weeks) had been too short! Earlier, students had complained that it was too demanding. They do all see the value of writing for a global audience though, and exchanging ideas with international students, rather than just writing to their local teacher. I don't remember them ever complaining about the lack of face-to-face teaching. They do get a chance to "meet" in a virtual classroom.
BB: What sort of results have you been able to document or observe since the course started?
RV: I archive all the students' work, and topics for new rounds are based on their popularity in previous rounds. Recently, students said that the length of the articles I required (500 words) was too long, so I am bearing that in mind now. Linda Mak of Hong Kong University, and Jane Hoelker of Pusan University, Korea, have done research on the project. The results point out that those students who write for two rounds (two 6-week modules) show definite improvement, not only in complexity of structures used, but also in quantity of writing.
BB: There is a great deal of work on your part involved in the development and management of the International Writing Exchange. Is the time that you spend on it officially part of your teaching responsibilities?
RV: It has always been seen as my hobby. I've been lucky to receive help from voluntary students at HUT, and from student software projects in the IT (Instructional Tech-nology) department. I have been supporting the courses financially myself. Last year, for the first time I taught the IWE as a distance learning course (with no classroom component) so I was paid for teaching the course as part of my regular salary. Over the last few years too, I have spent some of the classroom time on line. In the early days this was totally impossible.
BB: Tell me a little bit about how you began to incorporate using computers and using the Internet into your classes. Many instructors experience resistance from students or their administration.
RV: I started by letting the students demonstrate programs on the Apple IIE, and by following the BBC video program, Making the Most of the Micro, with a small advanced group for electrical engineering students. They loved it. I also tried to form a club for students and teachers so the students could show us programs and practice foreign languages at the same time. The students loved it, but the authorities didn't. I tried this again some years ago, but the teachers resisted. The email projects were very hard in the early years, with resistance on every side locally, apart from the computer center, which always supported me. The students found the work too time-consuming, especially when they couldn't find suitable computers to work on. I was told that I was causing chaos in the Language Center. This has changed. The Language Center now has two multimedia labs and a self-access lab.
BB: You have acquired quite a bit of technological skills in the course of developing the IWE and your other web-based activities. What would you recommend to ESL instructors who would like to develop technical or programming skills?
RV: I acquired mine from technical students who sat by my side. I would not really recommend this for other teachers. The students used Unix and were totally against my using any WYSIWYG (“What you see is what you get”) HTML editors or user-friendly programs. I would advise others to choose some user-friendly software. There are many sites nowadays with advice for teachers. I've collected a few of them. A list of such sites can be found at [http://www. ruthvilmi.net/hut/TechHelp/].
BB: Another one of your well-known projects is the Xercise engine. Just what is the Xercise engine?
RV: It's an authoring tool in Java for making interactive exercises to be published on the Web. I have used it for encouraging students to produce their own materials, but it's also intended for teachers to produce educational materials with. The structure is similar to that of an adventure game, so teachers can allow their students to follow various paths, according to the results of the exercises. It's platform independent, and contains 4 basic exercise types at the moment. I am developing it now and am confident that it will become a very special tool for teachers.
BB: What directions are you moving into with your online teaching projects?
RV: I believe that the market is now ripe for the methods of teaching that I have been developing on the Internet since 1993. Employees travel widely in most large companies, and are not able to meet regularly in a conventional classroom. The same is true of many of my students at HUT. Also, students nowadays realize the importance of having a global audience, rather than merely submitting assignments to their teacher. In spring 2001, I'll be running my first commercial online courses, for a Finnish company. They'll be Web-based courses on Technical English. But all the activities on my "playground" at www.ruthvilmi.net are still offered free of charge. By founding my own company, Ruth Vilmi Online Education Ltd, [www.writeit.to] and working on my own server, I am no longer limited by university (security) regulations. I now have the freedom to develop the software and materials I have always dreamed of for enhancing Web-based language learning courses.
BB: On your homepage you have a link to your "own banknote" and an image of a very official and authentic looking 100 mark note. Is that a gag or are you a national figure in Finland?
RV: It’s a gag, done by a couple of favorite students many years ago. I'm certainly no national figure, though colleagues do complain about people asking them whether they know Ruth Vilmi whenever they say they come from Finland!