''Quill'' is a suite of
software tools. It was published by
D.C. Heath and Company
D.C. Heath and Company was an American publishing company located at 125 Spring Street in Lexington, Massachusetts, specializing in textbooks.
History
The company was founded in Boston by Edwin Ginn and Daniel Collamore Heath in 1885.D.C Heath ...
, in
Lexington, MA
Lexington is a suburban town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is 10 miles (16 km) from Downtown Boston. The population was 34,454 as of the 2020 census. The area was originally inhabited by Native Americans, and was firs ...
,
USA
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...
.
The Quill software was designed and developed in 1982-84 by a team led by
Bertram Bruce and Andee Rubin. Its purpose was to help in the creation of functional learning environments that involved extensive writing and reading. It had many features that addressed one or more of six pedagogical goals: Encourage writing for peers; develop writing skill in the context of meaningful communication with real audiences; encourage feedback from others; provide motivation to read the writing of others; facilitate revision; and help with the mechanics of writing.
Reviews
The complete system, including the software, the ''Quill Teacher's Guide'', and other support materials, was validated by the Joint Dissemination Review Panel of the
U.S Department of Education in March 1984.
The software had positive reviews in ''Computers, Reading and Language Arts'', ''The New York Times'', ''The Boston Globe'', ''Popular Computing'', ''Harvard University Gazette'', ''Electronic Learning'', ''Teaching and Computers'', ''Informatica Oggi'', ''English Journal'', ''Early Years/K-8, Computer Update'', ''Classroom Computer Learning'', ''The Computing Teacher'', ''Language Arts'', ''Today's Education'', and many other publications.
Hardware
Quill ran on
Apple II+
The Apple II (stylized as ) is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products. It was designed primarily by Steve Wozniak; Jerry Manock developed the design of Apple II's foam-m ...
and
Apple IIe computers with 64K bytes of
memory and required two
floppy disk
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...
drives, a
monochrome monitor, an 80-character, upper and lower case card, and a printer.
Software components
Quill comprised four interrelated programs. ''Writer’s Assistant'' was a general
word processor that could be used independently. However, within ''Quill'' it was not invoked by name but accessed indirectly by functions in ''PLANNER'', ''LIBRARY'', or ''MAILBAG'', such as “seeing” someone else’s text in the ''LIBRARY''. Students decided which program to use according to their purpose for writing.
[{{cite journal, last1=Rubin, first1=Andee, last2=Bruce, first2=Bertram C., title=Alternate realizations of purpose in computer-supported writing, journal=Theory into Practice, date=1990, volume=29, issue=4, pages=256–263, doi=10.1080/00405849009543463, hdl=2142/17758, hdl-access=free]
''PLANNER'' was a tool that helped students organize ideas for writing, then share their newly created organizing tools. ''LIBRARY'' was a writing environment in which students could make their writing accessible to others by storing it with the full authors’ names, the full title, and keywords indicating topic, genre, or other characteristics of the piece. ''MAILBAG'' was an in-class
email system in which students could send messages to other students, the teacher, small groups, or a bulletin board. Those messages could be forwarded to other classrooms using a variety of networking tools available at the time.
References
Language learning software