CW2001 Program - Computers and Writing

Program Highlights
Friday Morning
Dennis Bennett
The Speakeasy Studio Café
The Speakeasy Studio Café (SSC) was collaboratively designed and
programmed by compositionists, learning technologies specialists,
and educators at Washington State University. It is a flexible,
interactive online space designed to enable the formation of
community independent of the constraints of time and place. The
vision from which this environment was born sprang from the minds
of educators who have used (and continue to use) the SSC to facilitate
interaction between students in classes at the university level. However,
the space itself makes no nod to traditional classroom metaphors.
The intent behind its Café metaphor is to create an environment
that encourages intellectual discussion and debate in an informal
atmosphere where ideas and conversation abound and where
students can work together to explore and analyze course material.
The whole SSC community encompasses over 63 neighborhoods, which
generally correspond to campuses, universities, or colleges using the
space. Each class or other collaborative group has its own Studio where
students in a class, for instance, would go first in order to access their
activities and resources. Each Studio has a Café area where members
can go to participate in events (roughly equivalent to units in a syllabus
or discussion topics). The actual interaction occurs at tables, where
the studio’s members can engage in either asynchronous (threaded
discussion) or synchronous (chatroom) conversations. Each studio
also has its own resource library where any member can post and
describe Web resources for others to see, and a user profile area
where members can use an HTML form to generate a simple Web
page about themselves.
As of Fall 2000, over 21,000 users in the United States and beyond
had used the SSC. The SSC has been available, free of charge for any
non-profit educational use.
Computers & Writing 2001
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