Machines That Help Students Write and Think:
PIM Freeware In the Computer-Assisted Writing Classroom

by Daniel J. Weinstein, Ph.D.

In this essay I describe how my use of graphic organizers in my college writing courses (courses I teach in computer-equipped classrooms) has evolved into a proposed integration of Personal Information Management freeware into those courses. Two concepts are central to this account: the concept of partitioning, by which I mean the separation of moments in the writing process for the purpose of focusing student attention on the cognitive operations at work in that moment, and the concept of archiving, by which I mean the organized storage of a student's raw writing for later use. The use of PIMs facilitates these practices.

Personal Information Managers, or PIMs, are computer programs that flexibly organize textual and graphical information for convenient search and recall (as through keywords). Basic PIMs are computerized filing systems (a computerized address book is one kind of PIM), but more elaborate PIMs also incorporate text editing, image editing and communication functions, such as integrated email and networking software.

Strangers to the corporate culture where PIMs are prevalent may see PIMs as superfluous accoutrements on par with pen-sized digital sound recorders. But PIMs do have uses beyond the boardroom. In fact, one venue where they can be particularly useful is the computer-assisted writing classroom.

Last fall (2000), while searching the World Wide Web for graphic organizers for my writing students, I stumbled onto PIMs. I had become interested in conventional graphic organizers (printed tables and diagrams meant to help students elaborate and organize their critical writing) through articles such as one in the fall, 2000 issue of American Educator. This article told the story of middle school students who used tables to help them develop expository paragraphs (fig 1). Since my own college-level students were having many of the same problems as the sixth graders in the article (writing anxiety, inadequate development of ideas, a tentative grasp of narrative design, and, in general, a poor understanding of what it means to do extended intellectual work), I hoped the simple tables shown in this article (tables I made easily expandable by inserting them into the Word documents my students used) would focus my students' attention on one bit of their writing at a time. This partitioning, I thought, might ease the anxiety of those who were anxious, extend the analyses of those who were already analytical, and help all my students take a more playful and experimental attitude toward their conceptual writing.

Another reason I had for bringing graphic organizers into the classroom was to help myself keep track of my student's writing and thinking so I could guide them and answer their questions appropriately. That semester I had twenty-six students in each of two English 101 classes, almost every one of whom seemed to benefit most from individual attention I gave them during class. It seemed to me that by spending more time on prewriting with tables and limiting students' in-class writing to small, pointed bits of text which I could quickly absorb as I looked over their shoulders, I could improve the chances that the exchanges we had as I walked around our computer lab would be substantive.

fig 1

The results of my table experiment were favorable. Roughly half my students reported that having the table to lean on helped them relax, identify ideas, support their ideas with reasoning and examples, and pay attention to details of narrative structure, all because it helped them to focus on developing one aspect of their writing at a time. Encouraged by this response, I instructed those students who felt no benefit from the tables to use them at their own discretion. At the end of the fall semester, approximately one third of each class still used a table at some stage of their writing process.