How Ceilidh is Used in the Online Writing Center at USU

In the writing center, Ceilidh is used as a medium for students to post their papers so tutors can read the papers and respond to the students' concerns in writing before they meet in cyberspace at a later date using a completely synchronous chat room.

When students meet with the tutors in cyberspace they work with an interface which is divided in half. The top half is the chat room and the bottom half is a Ceilidh page. The student and tutor can open up the student's paper and read it while they are discussing the work in the chat room. They can also cut and paste text from the Ceilidh page to the chat room and comments from the chat room into the document. This allows them to remember which parts to edit and to save a record of the tutor's comments to refer to after they finish the session and begin revision.

Essentially, Ceilidh allowed us to scrap the portion of our online writing center which required e-mail paper exchanges. We had been experiencing formatting and compatibility issues between different email systems when we were using email to exchange papers. However, Ceilidh eliminated these issues and created a central web-based location for tutors to work on students' writing.