Introduction to a class-based online writing environment: GWrit (Game of Writing)

How can we test gamification and social learning in online writing environments? This paper will present an online writing environment, GWrit (Game of Writing), where students can comment on each other’s writing and where... [ view full abstract ]

How can we test gamification and social learning in online writing environments? This paper will present an online writing environment, GWrit (Game of Writing), where students can comment on each other’s writing and where they get rewards for on task activity (gamification). GWrit has been developed by the Arts Resource Centre team at the University of Alberta over the past two years and has been used with hundreds of students. This paper brings together research on GWrit from the following perspectives: gamification, interaction, user habits, and evaluation.
In the presentation we will first, provide a straightforward demonstration of GWrit from the user’s perspective. Second, we will turn to the way the system was designed to support experimenting with gamification and show the gamification rule editing environment we are developing. Third, we will discuss the ways we are evaluating the interface of GWrit using Cognitive Walkthrough and Heuristic evaluation approaches. We will also look at user behavior based on Google Analytics and compare this to the behavior expected and desired.
Finally, we will discuss the social commenting system which is the pedagogical innovation behind GWrit. We have created an environment where students have to comment on each other’s writings learning to be better critics of their own. We will discuss what preliminary course statistics tell us about the effectiveness of GWrit. We will also look at how GWrit tries to model other aspects of writing best practices.