Wiring the Writing Center

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.................................................................................................................................................VIIINTRODUCTION Straddling the Virtual Fence Eric H. Hobson......................................................................................................ixONE The Look and Feel of the OWL Conference Barbara Monroe...............................................................................................3TWO Email "Tutoring" as Collaborative Writing David Coogan...............................................................................................25THREE Reflection and Responsibility in (Cyber) Tutor Training: Seeing Ourselves Clearly on and off the Screen Rebecca Rickly...............................44FOUR WAC on the Web: Writing Center Outreach to Teachers of Writing Intensive Courses Sara Kimball........................................................62FIVE Have You Visited Your Online Writing Center Today?: Learning, Writing, and Teaching Online at a Community College Clinton Gardner.....................75SIX The Other WWW: Using Intranets to Reconfigure the Who, When and Where of Network Supported Writing Instruction Kurt P. Kearcher.......................85SEVEN Wiring a Usable Center: Usability Research and Writing Center Practice Stuart Blythe.................................................................103EIGHT Drill Pads, Teaching Machines, and Programmed Texts: Origins of Instructional Technology in Writing Centers Neal Lerner..............................119NINE Virtual High School Writing Centers: A Spectrum of Possibilities Pamela B. Childers, Jeannette Jordan, James K. Upton................................137TEN The Community College Mission and the Electronic Writing Center Ellen Mohr...........................................................................151ELEVEN Random Memories of the Virtual Writing Center: The Modes-to-Nodes Problem Ray Wallace................................................................163TWELVE Computers in the Writing Center: A Cautionary History Peter Carino...................................................................................171THIRTEEN UnfURLed: 20 Writing Center Sites to Visit on the Information Highway Bruce Pegg.....................................................................197FOURTEEN Computers and Writing Centers: An Annotated Bibliography Steve Sherwood..............................................................................216WORKS CITED.....................................................................................................................................................231CONTRIBUTORS....................................................................................................................................................242INDEX...........................................................................................................................................................246

Chapter One

Barbara Monroe

The Online Writing and Learning (OWL) at the University of Michigan grew out of our face-to-face (f2f) peer tutoring program in many ways. Although our OWL website includes links to other OWLs that offer electronic handouts, our primary purpose is to respond to writers' needs, online, person-to-person. Like many OWLs, our online tutorial is technically conducted by means of asynchronous electronic mail, which clients can also access through the web. When we first decided to offer writing conferences online in 1994, we saw this move as simply an extension of our peer tutoring program. Not surprisingly, then, our online and f2f tutorials are close kin, borne of the same principles and practices. Our writing conference, both online and off, is based on a one-to-one, rather than one-to-many, instructional model and a collateral power relationship: peer-to-peer rather than a teacher-to-student. Consistent with that rationale, our OWL and f2f conference use the same activities, such as conducting diagnostic work and establishing conference priorities. Our tutors also worry about the same pedagogical issues, such as finding ways to engage clients as collaborative partners in the conference enterprise. And both OWL and f2f tutors work within the same constraints inherent to our walk-in program: our tutors can not count on seeing the same clients or the same paper assignment again, and so their conferences attempt to be comprehensive and specific at the same time.

But a key point of difference is that an OWL conference is a written artifact with its own look-and-feel, and as such, can be productively described and analyzed as a genre unto itself. Largely through trial and error, and verified by client feedback studies as part of our training seminar, our tutors have developed what we believe is an effective online pedagogy, specific to an asynchronous electronic environment. While the formal features of the OWL conference have stabilized over the past three years, each OWL conference reflects a tutor's own persona and conferencing style. The centripetal trends of our OWL conference give it shape as a genre; individual tutors's variations on that form suggest the centrifugal pull on that genre, very much in a Bakhtinian sense. As a genre onto itself, the OWL conference can be productively described and analyzed. At first glance, the OWL conference has a standard shape, but a closer look reveals a wide range of discursive practices at play within that formal framework.

THE LOOK OF AN OWL CONFERENCE

The actual procedure of our online tutorial is not unlike that of our f2f service. The OWL conference begins when a client first "comes in" (by way of our webbed OWL) and fills out a mailform (http://www.lsa.umich.edu/ecb/OWL/ mailform.html). This form asks the client to identify what year student he is, what class the paper is for, and when it is due - information that gives the tutor a context for the conference. The mailform page also asks the client to explain the assignment and identify what kind of help he is seeking before asking him to copy, paste, and submit his paper. The tutor reads the paper through and thoroughly, usually more than once, before writing a response and sending the "conference" back to the client. Within 48 hours (as per our policy), usually much sooner, a client receives a "conference" from the tutor in the form of a personal email message, signed with a first name, a thoughtful, friendly, well-composed response from an experienced reader and accomplished writer in her own right. This is what a conference might look like to the client:

Hi Curtis-

[1] My name is Sean and I'm an ECB OWL tutor. I've read your paper, and I have some suggestions for you. I guess I'll give my general feedback and then my specifics. My specific stuff will be set off ***Like This***

Generally, I think you've got a nice, picturesque little tableau here: pretty well detailed, and certainly very pretty. If you're trying to think of avenues for expansion of the material, there are a couple of things I can suggest:

One thing to think about is a sort of narrative. I understand that this is not a specifically narrative essay, but there is an observer who is describing this scene. Why is this the scene...