Winding Down

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).