Electronic Quills centers on the words and experiences of teachers and students who used QUILL — a software package developed by the authors to aid in writing instruction. It looks in detail at the stories of these early users and considers questions relevant for other teachers, students, researchers, and developers of educational innovations. Questions posed include:

• What does it mean to develop an environment for literacy in an actual classroom?
• How can a teacher create an environment in which students work together toward meaningful goals?
• How can a teacher promote the rich communication so necessary for developing language?
• What is the role of technology in the practice and development of literacy?

The examination of the QUILL experiences provides a fuller and more revealing account of what it meant to use QUILL than would have been possible through standard evaluation techniques. At the same time, the focus on the particulars also finds analogues in analyses of similar pieces of open-ended software or educational innovations in general.

APA format citation: Bruce, B. C., & Rubin, A. D. (1993). Electronic Quills: A situated evaluation of using computers for writing in classrooms. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

1. Introduction
2. Contexts for Literacy Development
3. QUILL: A System to Support Literacy Development
4. The Alaska Context (by Carol Barnhart)
5. Alternate Realizations of Purposeful Writing. Adapted as

   Rubin, A., & Bruce, B. (1990). Alternate realizations of purpose in computer-supported writing. Theory into Practice, 29, 256-263.

6. Revision
7. The Alaska QUILL Network: Fostering a Teacher Community Through Telecommunication
8. Situated Evaluation
9. Conclusion

The QUILL software was designed to help in the creation of functional learning environments that involved extensive writing and reading. It had many features that addressed one or more of our six pedagogical goals. It ran on an Apple II+ or Apple IIe computer with 64K bytes of memory and required two floppy disk drives, a monochrome monitor, an 80-character, upper and lower case card, and a printer. Students used the printer to obtain copies of the texts they wrote to take home, to show their teachers and friends, or to do projects such as a class newspaper. At the time of QUlLL's development, even this use of a printer was an innovation, as connecting a computer to a printer was not universally considered necessary, even for writing activities. The version of QUILL presented to teachers in Alaska included activities in which their students could send electronic messages to students in other schools both inside and outside of Alaska. For these, teachers needed a modem to connect the computer to a telephone line, a way to pay telephone charges, and access to a computer network.

QUILL comprised four interrelated programs. Writer's Assistant was a general word processing program that was never invoked by name but was accessed indirectly by any function in PLANNER, LIBRARY, or MAILBAG, such as "seeing" someone else's text in the LIBRARY. PLANNER was a tool that helped students organize ideas for writing, then share their newly created organizing tools. LIBRARY was a writing environment in which students could make their writing accessible to others by storing it with the full authors' names, the full title, and keywords indicating topic, genre, or other characteristics of the piece. MAILBAG was an in-class message system in which students could send messages to other students, the teacher, small groups, or a bulletin board. Students decided which program to use according to their purpose for writing and chose it from the following computer menu.

This iLab allows you to see a partial version of the Quill system. LIBRARY and MAILBAG work approximately the same way as they did in Quill. PLANNER here requires you to add a new brick or inquiry unit.