Hello class!

I’m going to start by offering you a quiz, because who doesn’t love quizzes when they are fun with pictures?

Here is my result: Lykorgos, the adventure wolf

You enjoy adventure and are open to new experiences and ways of thinking. You are good at working with others because you like to hear new ideas and perspectives, and are willing to try out different approaches to seeking answers and solving problems. You dislike conflict, and are attuned to matters of justice. Friends depend upon your willingness to listen and come to you for advice. Writing strength: analysis, legal writing, fiction, scripts, analogy, collaborative compositions.

This quiz was part of the to-date biggest multimodal project I’ve been involved with, which is WOLFIE (Writer’s Online Learning Forum and Information literacy Environment), a social network for our writing students (feel free to sign up and check it out–we use it mainly at the moment with our undergraduates, but it has potential for a bigger target audience). You can sign in with your Net ID and create a profile. (If you are teaching on campus and want to use this with your students, you can–I’d be glad to orient you.) WOLFIE is a WordPress blog, like this one, although obviously it’s a different type of blog–a multiuser blog that has many working parts and allows for the issuance of badges for various accomplishments.

Dr. Kristina Lucenko and I create the quiz above. It was a lot of fun, made possible for two people who don’t have a background in serious coding (I took computer programming courses in high school, when BASIC was just a twinkle in Bill Gates’ eye, but that hardly counts) by the work of many other coders who have invented add-ons and apps to allow the development of web objects like Playbuzz quizzes that can be integrated into a WordPress blog. This quiz is the first step to achieving a badge on WOLFIE called “Way of the Wolf.”

I took the quiz multiple times while developing it, and after, and I usually get this result, so like the sorting hat in Harry Potter, it must be me. It’s a pretty good fit, I think.

WOLFIE was begun in 2015 and launched in 2016, and currently is going through the throes of puberty–while it isn’t exactly viral, and that in part because it is limited to Stony Brook for a variety of reason, it’s starting to burst at the seams at bit. We have around 800 registered users (many are not active) and a great deal of content, including a big photo library because of all the images that have been uploaded. It’s run by three people–myself, Kristina, and Darren Chase, who is our master WordPress guru of the group–and all of us have many more projects going on than WOLFIE. So WOLFIE is a kind of master example of the challenges of maintaining a good user experience. The latest group of students to use it really seem to grok it–and I wonder if that means WOLFIE will take off over time, but also, that means expectations for a great user experience will rise.