Designing Web-Based Applications for 21st Century Writing Classrooms

Abstract

Reviews the book, Designing web-based applications for 21st Century writing classrooms by George Pullman and Baotong Gu (2014). For writing instructors who bring this technical expertise to the text and who share its assumption about technology and environment, this book is an important new resource. It provides an overview of web based application design that is technologically sound and pedagogically cohesive. For these courses and programs, the book's chapter authors have developed an impressive array of web-based applications. The book's editors have divided these applications into three categories: (1) writing environments; (2) individual, standalone applications; and (3) open-source modifications. The book has few drawbacks, and several admirable strengths. On the one hand, the organization of the book is not as clear as it perhaps could be. This issue of technical knowledge brings up another potential concern about the book. The collection covers an impressive number of homemade applications created by writing instructors who saw pedagogical issues they wanted to address through the best technical means possible. Thus, the collection is less a manual than a heuristic that does not show "how to" create web applications but demonstrates what writing instructors can do with these applications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved)