The WIDE Research Center investigates how digital technologies — such as the networked personal computer, the Internet and World Wide Web, and computer-based classrooms and workplaces — change the processes, products, and contexts for writing, particularly in organizational and collaborative composing contexts.

How can WIDE Work with You?

Communications Consulting

• Assess your organization's writing practices and goals and recommend improvements in training, technology use, and meeting customer and client needs.
  
  
• Offer workshops, training materials, and technology roadmaps tailored to your organization's communication needs.
  

Research Partnerships

• Collaborate with academic units and community organizations to carry out projects that advance knowledge about digital writing and that have real world impact.
  
  
• Participate in projects that demand expertise in text analysis, qualitative organizational studies, community and participatory design, usability, and information modeling.
  
  
• Designing and developing tools that support writing and knowledge making.

Teaching with Innovative Writing Technologies

• Provide workshops and consulting for faculty who want to intergrate cutting-edge writing technologies into their classrooms.
  
  
• Provide support for piloting innovative pedagogies using cutting-edge writing tools, allowing you to develop proof-of-concept materials.
  

 

Our Chief Research Questions are the Following:

• What are the processes of digital composing?
  
  
• What are the practices for writing with digital technologies and for digital environments?
  
  
• How do we enable the capacity for communities, organizations, and individuals to write/communicate more effectively in digital environments?
  
  
• What is the relationship of writing and communication to knowledge work and to the knowledge economy? How can writing/communication practices aid economic development, particularly in an information economy?
  

Our Goals Are:

1. To help establish MSU at the forefront of digital writing innovation and as a leader in preparing students for the knowledge economy.
   
   
2. To support MSU faculty doing interdisciplinary research on digital information, knowledge work, community & culture.
   
   
3. To partner with business, industry, government, education, and community organizations to help them design and distribute information for clients, customers, students, and the public and by helping them design writing tools to assist that work.
   

Where are we Headed?

• Digital Literacy Infrastructure
  —> Making/designing tools to help people write/work
  
  
• Writing as Knowledge Work
  —> Understanding the role of writing in the digital information economy
  
  
• Outreach Computing
  —> Designing digital spaces to help community organizations and to promote citizenship
  
  
• International/Global Composing
  —> Understanding digital composing and designing writing tools to support composing, across/between cultures and countries
  
  

THIS WEBSITE

This website is powered by plone. The WIDE Research Center selected plone as its Content Management System because of plone's versatility.

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

The WIDE Center selected an Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License for its website.

WIDE CENTER DIRECTORS

The WIDE Research Center Directors are Jeff Grabill, PhD, William Hart-Davidson,PhD, and James E. Porter, PhD. In addition to serving as Co-Directors of WIDE, these individuals also hold teaching appointments in Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University.

EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES

For further information please visit http://www.wide.msu.edu/employment

SPONSORSHIP

The WIDE Research Center is funded and co-sponsored by the MSU Foundation and the College of Arts & Letters.