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.