AWESOME Computing: Using Corpus Data to Tailor a Community Environment for Dissertation Writing

Abstract

This demonstration will present a novel community environment ‘AWESOME Dissertation Environment (ADE)’ which uses semantic wikis to implement the pedagogical approach of ‘social scaffolding’. ADE was developed within an interdisciplinary UK research project called AWESOME (Academic Writing Empowered by Social Online Mediated Environments) which involved the universities of Leeds, Coventry and Bangor. The environment was instantiated in several domains: Education, Fashion and Design, Philosophy and Religious Studies, and an Academic Writing Centre. Following both the encouraging feedback from the trial instantiations and the challenges faced in deploying the environment in practice, we conducted a second stage of the project which aimed at adapting the ADE to dissertation writing in computing. Following the lessons learnt from the first stage, we now performed a systematic approach to tailor the existing community environment to meet dissertation writing needs in a specific domain and in a particular educational practice.