This afternoon's discussion ended with a commitment to turn the wiki into a comprehensive site that can be presented to the writing center community as a link on the IWCA website. The wiki is going to have information on the choices that writing center professionals need to consider in the process of setting up a writing center: whether to go open-source or commercial, how to communicate with in-house IT people, and how to evaluate the usability and accessibility of an online writing environment. I agreed to add a bibliography to the wiki because I am already gathering a collection of relevant resources for a literature review.
On a side note, I was really surprised when the discussion touched on whether a writing center should help improve students' grades. An idea was expressed that it wasn't our business if students integrate feedback into their writing. (My memory of that part of the conversation might be a little sketchy, I admit.) Now,I recognize this school of thought that exists in writing centers (that we are trying to make better writers, not better writing), but I strongly believe that studies of how students use our feedback are relevant if not critical to determining how we design online tutoring environments and train the tutors that work in them. Matt and I are talking a lot about this and we need to realize that we can look for the effectiveness of our practices in places other than grades. We can look at how students change their attitudes toward writing and feel like a part of the academic community. Just as we need to be open to multiple forms of assessment of writing centers, we need to determine different ways of assessing the work of the writing center. And maybe these online tools that can store student submissions and the tutors' comments can be integrated into a portfolio system.
Before we left we also discussed research questions for evaluating online writing centers. Nearly everyone mentioned the necessity to carry out qualitative research that can give us the student's perspective on the tutoring process. How do students use the feedback they receive? Do online tutorials cause students to have a more positive affect toward the writing process? This can be gathered from interviews and analysis of documents (including transcripts of tutorials).
Saturday, June 16, 2007
OWLs, Interfaces, and Policies
People's Writing Centers
These WC people talk about having a wide variety of systems that foster synchronous tutoring. UNC-Chapel Hill has a system that was written by the instructional-technology office; students login to submit papers and they always have access to their submissions and the feedback they receive from tutors. They do not advertise this service because they would not be able to handle a deluge of students seeking help in the online system. The director of this WC manages the system because she does not have resources to maintain it. However, since the technology office built it they are going to help her share it with U. of Iowa.
U of Minnesota has document sharing service for the asynchronous and synchronous tutoring. At this institution, the tutors read the submissions before the synchronous session. The interface is user-friendly, too. At the end of a line you will see a green check when a participant is finished with the message and is ready for a reply. A student worker (!!!) built this system with Java. The tutor can search the online submission, too. Somtimes the tutors look up the students on Facebook to learn about who they are working with. The synchronous portion of the tutorial is mandatory; the student must show up for the chat tutorial. With MySWS the students are going to be able to keep copies of students' work. *Both tutor and student can get into the uploaded document and insert comments.
At Oklahoma, they have a website where they can make an appointment, and they can submit a paper. They cut and paste their paper into a web form. Trillian is the client they are using.
At Iowa we have e-mail tutoring. Form is filled out in the website. Students get e-mail to respond to and attach their message. Consultant's response in the document. We use a commenting letter that precedes the document itself; tutors also insert marginal comments with the commenting feature. It is called the E-mail Tutoring Program, but Matt is trying to call it the Online Tutoring Program.
One possible problem with e-tutoring is that the commenting feature is so easy touse that it's easy to overdo it and provide too many comments that can overwhelm the students. Purdue's new system is going to put papers into PDF so tutors will only provide a long text comment. This way, the tutors keep their hands off the paper.
One issue: OWLs need to tell students what kinds ofinforamation we are holding onto and how we might use that information. After all, we are going to be keeping student work for a long time.
The Ideal World
People would like to see some place where writing groups can gather. People can meet together and have their work stored.
Would like to have video options where cameras can show the student working on a draft.
Digital Writing Environment OWLs
Social Presence must be present in this environment in order to negotiate meaning.
Knowing your audience only through their writing can be a big strength because it highlights the importance of communication
Can I become a partner with the library's online services and invite their tutor into a chat room with me and a client. In my ideal world the online writing center is going to partner heavily with the library.
Check out 43things.com for the social networking site. Tutors at University of Manitoba use a similar service to contact people who say that they need help with certain areas of writing.
Could you formcommunities of writers in the way that gamers in 3-D worlds build communities. Are Writing Centers going to be in these worlds with tutor avatars??
The Daedalus Group
This company provides a tool for students who are generating ideas for their writing topics. It's developed in .NET. Can this tool be used online by students in a way that leads them to the writing center? Is using this tool infringing on the territory of instructors? But maybe instructors would want to have access to such a tool. This tool provides a citation manager like Bedford Bibliographer, which is free.
Usability and Accessibility
A university may have guidelines for your website to make it accessible. You can use the W3C to find guidelines about usability and accessibility. Looking at it in a broad sense, the standards for W3C might not mean true accessibility. (Purdue, for example, needs to consider developing nations with old modems.)
We want to generate questions to
These WC people talk about having a wide variety of systems that foster synchronous tutoring. UNC-Chapel Hill has a system that was written by the instructional-technology office; students login to submit papers and they always have access to their submissions and the feedback they receive from tutors. They do not advertise this service because they would not be able to handle a deluge of students seeking help in the online system. The director of this WC manages the system because she does not have resources to maintain it. However, since the technology office built it they are going to help her share it with U. of Iowa.
U of Minnesota has document sharing service for the asynchronous and synchronous tutoring. At this institution, the tutors read the submissions before the synchronous session. The interface is user-friendly, too. At the end of a line you will see a green check when a participant is finished with the message and is ready for a reply. A student worker (!!!) built this system with Java. The tutor can search the online submission, too. Somtimes the tutors look up the students on Facebook to learn about who they are working with. The synchronous portion of the tutorial is mandatory; the student must show up for the chat tutorial. With MySWS the students are going to be able to keep copies of students' work. *Both tutor and student can get into the uploaded document and insert comments.
At Oklahoma, they have a website where they can make an appointment, and they can submit a paper. They cut and paste their paper into a web form. Trillian is the client they are using.
At Iowa we have e-mail tutoring. Form is filled out in the website. Students get e-mail to respond to and attach their message. Consultant's response in the document. We use a commenting letter that precedes the document itself; tutors also insert marginal comments with the commenting feature. It is called the E-mail Tutoring Program, but Matt is trying to call it the Online Tutoring Program.
One possible problem with e-tutoring is that the commenting feature is so easy touse that it's easy to overdo it and provide too many comments that can overwhelm the students. Purdue's new system is going to put papers into PDF so tutors will only provide a long text comment. This way, the tutors keep their hands off the paper.
One issue: OWLs need to tell students what kinds ofinforamation we are holding onto and how we might use that information. After all, we are going to be keeping student work for a long time.
The Ideal World
People would like to see some place where writing groups can gather. People can meet together and have their work stored.
Would like to have video options where cameras can show the student working on a draft.
Digital Writing Environment OWLs
Social Presence must be present in this environment in order to negotiate meaning.
Knowing your audience only through their writing can be a big strength because it highlights the importance of communication
Can I become a partner with the library's online services and invite their tutor into a chat room with me and a client. In my ideal world the online writing center is going to partner heavily with the library.
Check out 43things.com for the social networking site. Tutors at University of Manitoba use a similar service to contact people who say that they need help with certain areas of writing.
Could you formcommunities of writers in the way that gamers in 3-D worlds build communities. Are Writing Centers going to be in these worlds with tutor avatars??
The Daedalus Group
This company provides a tool for students who are generating ideas for their writing topics. It's developed in .NET. Can this tool be used online by students in a way that leads them to the writing center? Is using this tool infringing on the territory of instructors? But maybe instructors would want to have access to such a tool. This tool provides a citation manager like Bedford Bibliographer, which is free.
Usability and Accessibility
A university may have guidelines for your website to make it accessible. You can use the W3C to find guidelines about usability and accessibility. Looking at it in a broad sense, the standards for W3C might not mean true accessibility. (Purdue, for example, needs to consider developing nations with old modems.)
We want to generate questions to
Online vs. F2F Dichotomy
One of the recurring themes is that we should avoid dichotomizing online and f2f tutoring. Online tutoring can't be seen as the solution to problems with f2f model, and neither should f2f tutoring be seen as the standard to which online tutoring should be held. Online tutoring is going to provide tutors and students with different capabilities, and the f2f model may not be able to explain just what is happening in certain situations. Mitch mentioned that asynchronous tutoring demands that he be more precise in his responses because his response is a written one that he has time to organize; in a f2f conference he is coming up with ideas quickly and may say things that are not thought out (something I do, too). But even though I trying not to dichotomize online and f2f tutoring, I am remembering how people have said that asynchronous tutoring allows them to do things that just aren't possible in f2f tutoring. Matt, for example, said that he can work with a student on a long piece of writing because he can read it and write his response when he's ready. (However, this began a discussion about whether you can spend too much time with one student's paper in the asynchronous format.) Another writing center director, Kirsten, said that the strengths of online tutoring shouldn't necessarily be transferred to f2f sessions. Even though her students often prefer that the tutors have read their essay before they show up for the synchronous tutoring session, Kirsten does not want to have f2f tutors read students' essays before the session. (But, then again, why not have tutors do this?)
It's inevitable, perhaps, that as we foray into tutoring in online environments that we look back at our f2f tutoring and wonder whether we can apply our new ideas to our work in brick-and-mortar writing centers... Maybe if we don't dichotomize these two approaches, we can at least admit that each approach may appeal to different kinds of learners (and tutors, too!).
It's inevitable, perhaps, that as we foray into tutoring in online environments that we look back at our f2f tutoring and wonder whether we can apply our new ideas to our work in brick-and-mortar writing centers... Maybe if we don't dichotomize these two approaches, we can at least admit that each approach may appeal to different kinds of learners (and tutors, too!).
Friday, June 15, 2007
Recap of Day 1 (Part 1)
WOW! This day was amazing. The staff at the Texas A&M Writing Center has been solicitous and professional from the very start. Brady Creel, the WC's communications consultant, picked me up from the airport and the WC director (Valerie Balester), associate director (Candace ???), and Brady took several of us to dinner. At dinner we talked about what we do in our respective writing centers and chatted about the flight delays (a series of storms delayed several people). I learned that Shareen, the director of the writing center at National University, directs a purely online writing center where the tutors use an online conferencing system (iLink) to work with students all across California. I also met Brian Benson, a program assistant at the University of Oklahoma writing center, who tutors and fixes computers and is even going to help the director move on Sunday. In short, I have met a variety of interesting people who have direct or work in a lot of different centers.
I want to talk about our discussions some more. Today we spent a lot of time talking about what we do at our centers, what we want to do, and what our institutions enable us to do in our outreach to students. I will get more into this later... time for dinner.
I want to talk about our discussions some more. Today we spent a lot of time talking about what we do at our centers, what we want to do, and what our institutions enable us to do in our outreach to students. I will get more into this later... time for dinner.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Pre-Conference Post
Well, I'm looking forward to the conference beginning tomorrow. I was reading Wiring the Writing Center (edited by Eric Hobson) and came across an anecdote in which a writing center director observed a tutor working online with a student who was in another room in the writing center. The student later told the director that he knew he could skip out of the tutorial when he wanted to without seeming rude. Good grief! I think about how instant-message tutoring might reach out to people who need help, but students will inevitably see their own benefits.
I learned that the President of Daedalus Corp. will be at this meeting. This company sells a "suite of collaborative tools for writing and critical thinking." Daedalus's website. I believe they are the only vendors at this conference. Their tool enables class's to work in an online collaborative environment. I am sure the schools use a variety of products from open-source applications to proprietary software.
I learned that the President of Daedalus Corp. will be at this meeting. This company sells a "suite of collaborative tools for writing and critical thinking." Daedalus's website. I believe they are the only vendors at this conference. Their tool enables class's to work in an online collaborative environment. I am sure the schools use a variety of products from open-source applications to proprietary software.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
a rough history
From the summit wiki:
The University of Iowa: We offer asynchronous e-mail tutoring. Students complete an online questionnaire, receive an automatically generated e-mail with their responses to the questionnaire, and reply to this e-mail with an attached draft. We read the whole draft, offer comments both in a letter and inserted into the text, and invite students to send subsequent drafts. An iteration of this same system has been in place since 2001, and it served us nicely early on when the volume of submissions was low. We have since outgrown it, and are in the late planning stages of our goal to build its replacement. We plan to keep the asynchronous, full text model, but we also hope to design the system in such a way that it encourages multiple submissions by the same author and of the same text. We see teaching opportunities in a well-designed online tutoring system that will benefit face-to-face tutoring as well. The idea of an online writing environment suggests new ways for the Writing Center to move beyond its walls. You can look at the old system and send me a draft of something you’re writing by visiting http://www.uiowa.edu/~writingc/emailTutorForm.htm.
The University of Iowa: We offer asynchronous e-mail tutoring. Students complete an online questionnaire, receive an automatically generated e-mail with their responses to the questionnaire, and reply to this e-mail with an attached draft. We read the whole draft, offer comments both in a letter and inserted into the text, and invite students to send subsequent drafts. An iteration of this same system has been in place since 2001, and it served us nicely early on when the volume of submissions was low. We have since outgrown it, and are in the late planning stages of our goal to build its replacement. We plan to keep the asynchronous, full text model, but we also hope to design the system in such a way that it encourages multiple submissions by the same author and of the same text. We see teaching opportunities in a well-designed online tutoring system that will benefit face-to-face tutoring as well. The idea of an online writing environment suggests new ways for the Writing Center to move beyond its walls. You can look at the old system and send me a draft of something you’re writing by visiting http://www.uiowa.edu/~writingc/emailTutorForm.htm.
some of my hopes for the summit
A rephrased version of my posting on the summit wiki:
Seeing the ideas for the agenda at College Station has confirmed for me that writing center work, online included, is in many ways unique from one institution to the next. I’d like to discuss how our technology needs and wants can both best accommodate unique institutional needs and be used in conversation with one another for furthering scholarship, exploring best practices, and making more empirical arguments (supported by good data) for the value of our work.
In terms of scholarship, our different approaches to online tutoring offer opportunities for a multitude of collaborative, comparative studies.
Regarding best practices, it would be helpful to have a frank discussion of successful innovations and not-so-successful attempts so that our students benefit from our collective experience.
And, as I imagine the design of our forthcoming online system, I am very interested in learning more about how to gather and structure good data for all sorts of purposes, including demonstrating empirically the worth of our work with students.
Seeing the ideas for the agenda at College Station has confirmed for me that writing center work, online included, is in many ways unique from one institution to the next. I’d like to discuss how our technology needs and wants can both best accommodate unique institutional needs and be used in conversation with one another for furthering scholarship, exploring best practices, and making more empirical arguments (supported by good data) for the value of our work.
In terms of scholarship, our different approaches to online tutoring offer opportunities for a multitude of collaborative, comparative studies.
Regarding best practices, it would be helpful to have a frank discussion of successful innovations and not-so-successful attempts so that our students benefit from our collective experience.
And, as I imagine the design of our forthcoming online system, I am very interested in learning more about how to gather and structure good data for all sorts of purposes, including demonstrating empirically the worth of our work with students.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Funded!
Matt here. Note: my screen name is Gillymonster.
I have been out of town and have been mentally and physically away from the Writing Center for the past week. I need to review the summit objectives and contribute my thoughts to its wiki. Maybe Sam has already posted to the summit wiki?
But I also have news: we are funded through the Student Computing Fee to build our revised e-mail tutoring system and new scheduling tool. I submitted the proposal in March. Today I was notified that we received a two-year, $24,000 grant to buy servers, computers, and ATS programming time. Great news!
That's what's up. More soon.
I have been out of town and have been mentally and physically away from the Writing Center for the past week. I need to review the summit objectives and contribute my thoughts to its wiki. Maybe Sam has already posted to the summit wiki?
But I also have news: we are funded through the Student Computing Fee to build our revised e-mail tutoring system and new scheduling tool. I submitted the proposal in March. Today I was notified that we received a two-year, $24,000 grant to buy servers, computers, and ATS programming time. Great news!
That's what's up. More soon.
Welcome!
Matt (the writing center's email tutor and program assistant) and I will be blogging about the OWL/Writing Center Technology Summit at Texas A&M. Please visit our blog to see our thoughts on the discussions at the conference.
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