from the (writing) center to the edge: moving writers along the internet

From the (Writing) Center to the Edge: Moving Writers along the InternetAuthor(s): Muriel HarrisSource: The Clearing House, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Sep. - Oct., 1995), pp. 21-23Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30185851 .

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From the (Writing) Center

to the Edge: Moving Writers Along the Internet

MURIEL HARRIS

T he Internet, an electronic network linking computers throughout the world, invites teachers to explore its

uses for writing instruction because it is a text-based environment. Users communicate by writing messages that trav- el out onto the Internet, read the prose in its vast pool of resources, and gather information from those resources for their own writing. In high schools and colleges, new Inter- net environments for students who are writing in many fields have proliferated, and they continue to develop almost as fast as the Internet is developing. Among these diverse environments are the various shapes and services of on-line writing centers at both the secondary and postsec- ondary level. Because writing centers focus on one-to-one interaction with writers and because they invite collabora- tion and dialogue about writing as part of their tutorial approach, on-line programs developed in various writing centers are continuing this emphasis as they reach out to writers in new ways.

An overview here of some of the new developments in on-line writing centers will indicate both the variety of ways that writers can use the Internet and the diversity of the approaches being developed in various writing centers-including e-mail services, on-line discussion groups and bulletin boards, real-time conversational opportunities, and resources writers can use as they write. Although there are far more programs taking shape than are described here, the ones I will discuss are representative of the directions being taken in writing centers across the country. To learn more about each program, use its Internet address found in the resources list at the end of this article. For schools not yet part of the 24 percent of K-12 schools using the Inter- net (Survey finds 1995), Robert Doty (1995) notes that

Muriel Harris is a professor of English and director of the Writing Lab at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indi- ana. She also edits the Writing Lab Newsletter.

many states provide funds that allow teachers to obtain free Internet access. Doty's article also lists educational state networks that provide Internet access.

E-mail: Interacting with Other Writers E-mail permits students to discuss their writing with

writing center tutors without having to appear in the center. In the writing center at the State University of New York in Albany, Dave Coogan (1994) has developed an electronic writing center based on e-mail as a virtual place where students can send their texts and their questions and have tutors write back. Coogan calls this "epistolary education," explaining that he began the service "as a way to get more writing into the writing tutorial-to infuse the act of writing with the sound of talking and the act of talking with the for- mality of writing." Coogan, who has developed handouts on how to use the service and how to send papers via e-mail, has found that despite problems such as incompatibility between computers and varying levels of student computer literacy, there is an audience of writers at his university interested in carrying on e-mail conversations about their writing.

Similarly, at Purdue University, our Writing Lab has an e- mail service as part of its OWL (On-line Writing Lab), which was begun in part as an outreach project to provide students with yet another way to reach tutors. At an institu- tion with large numbers of students who are writing in computer labs at far reaches of the campus, in residence halls with connections to the computing center, or in off-campus housing with individual modems, coming to the Writing Lab to talk to a tutor or get a writing skills handout at the hours the lab is open is not always easy or even possible. Commuters, part-time students, and students with physical disabilities face the same problems. Moreover, OWL permits the writing lab's resources to be accessible at hours when the tutors are not. Students writing a paper at mid- night on a Sunday evening (a popular time, especially when the paper is due on Monday morning) who need to check a

21



22 The Clearing House September/October 1995

rule of punctuation or who want some advice on writing more concisely or who have a question about bibliographi- cal format can send an e-mail request for any of over one hundred on-line handouts and read (or download) what they need. Students can also e-mail questions to tutors, though answers may not come back for twenty-four hours or so.

E-mail tutorial services have obvious benefits: they stim- ulate writers to talk in writing, as Coogan notes, and they make writing centers and their tutors and instructional handouts more accessible. Students are also learning to ask better questions, questions that are more precise, more con- textualized, in the absence of the usual face-to-face tutorial conversation where questions are clarified. Opportunities also exist for tutors in different writing centers to meet on- line and talk about tutoring. The high school tutors in the McCallie School's writing center in Chattanooga have joined the discussion on WCenter, the electronic bulletin board for writing center specialists, and on another electronic bulletin board, writingc, tutors can meet and talk about tutoring writing as well as about their own writing.

But there are major concerns about e-mail services as well. One very real problem is the possibility that the tutor's message will be appropriated into a student's text- a task easily accomplished when the tutor's response is in the form of written text-and the temptation to ship a paper to an on-line service for proofreading is as real as it is when students come into the center hoping for such editorial work. Because writing center tutors focus on helping with students' writing processes (planning, organizing, drafting, revising) and do not emphasize working with sentence- level corrections in grammar and mechanics, a very real danger exists that an on-line service can become nothing more than a grammar hot line. Many tutors in writing centers also voice concern that the on-line environment cannot

duplicate the power of personal interaction. Certainly, attempts to replicate the face-to-face tutorial setting in an electronic, text-oriented environment can lead to frustration and defeat as on-line writing center planners find them- selves unable to simulate all the characteristics of an effec- tive tutorial. Instead, on-line writing environments need to focus on the strengths of the technology and to be struc- tured to take advantages of those strengths.

Yet another concern is that on the Internet any user any- where can connect to the service. At Purdue, we attempt to answer questions sent by government employees, high school students in British Columbia, students learning Eng- lish in Hong Kong, teachers in California, and so on. Pri- marily, though, the thousands of users of our e-mail service are far more interested in sending for copies of our writing- skills and r6sum6 handouts, which go out by means of an automatic server. With our small tutorial staff, we cannot adequately respond to outside questions, though, and must give priority to our own students. Any writing center mak- ing an e-mail service available on the Internet must decide how available it will be to outside requests for help.

MOOs: Interacting in Real Time

Another way to meet writers on-line is in the MOO (Multi-User Object Oriented) environment, a virtual world described by Jennifer Jordan-Henley and Barry Maid (1995) as a computer space available for people to meet in cyberspace and hold synchronous text-based discussions. Users decide on a time and place, connect via their computers to that virtual space (often a room in a large MOO), and talk via text. Jordan-Henley's students at Roane State Community College in Tennessee needed writing consultants to help them with their writing, and Maid at the Uni- versity of Arkansas in Little Rock had students who needed teaching and consultation experience-thus, the creation of a MOO, where writers in Tennessee and consultants in Arkansas could meet on-line and talk about the writers' papers. A number of rationales exist for this project, including the opportunity for students to meet people across dis- tances whom they would not otherwise interact with, to learn about using the Internet, to enhance computer key- boarding skills, and to practice communication strategies in writing as students and tutors discuss the students' papers.

Yet another MOO configuration is the Online Writery developed at the Missouri University Writing Lab by Eric Crump. The Online Writery has communication and information resources in its e-mail, MOO, and World Wide Web environments. In the two MOOs in the writery, writers have real-time access to a staff of student assistants-on-line all

day and into the evening during the week as well as Sunday evenings-who talk with anyone who happens by via e- mail or shows up on either of the MOOs. Their World Wide Web page accepts creative work of all kinds, including essays, fiction, poetry, or graphic arts. Crump's goal in the MOO environments is not to talk about how to develop and fix a paper about a particular subject. Instead, the emphasis is on real-time conversation about issues that are important to writers. Conversation itself is the thing, not a means to an end (Crump 1994b). As Crump explains it, e-mail services primarily help students to produce print products. On- line resources are employed in the service of that goal rather than being exploited for their own capabilities. The Online Writery is set up primarily to conduct written conversation on-line (Crump 1994a).

Gophers and the World Wide Web

Some see the Internet as a network that makes the global village a reality, instantly connecting all of us with vast repositories of information around the world that we can dip into with a click of the computer mouse. In Gopher sites, which are linked to an international network of text- based servers and data bases that can be accessed by a com- mon system of commands, all information is text-based, so students can read prose sources of information. On the World Wide Web, which adds more visually and aurally compelling components of imagery, video, and sound as well as hypertext links from site to site, students can read



Vol. 69, No. 1 Writers on the Internet 23

and hear information presented in multimedia formats. Thus, on the Internet, students can see the latest weather maps from NASA, read the text of a speech delivered that morning on the floor of the House of Representatives, view a current art exhibit at the Louvre, browse through fact sheets on endangered species, check library catalogs around the world, or use any of the most widely used word and phrase search tools (which work like similar ones in on-line library catalogs) to find information on the Internet. In short, students searching for information for research papers in many areas of study can learn to become profi- cient members of the global information infrastructure. In fact, to be productive members of our increasingly information-rich society, students must learn how to acquire information from the Internet in order not to be relegated to the other tier of society, the "information poor."

A student's introduction to all this, however, can be over- whelming. The Internet has no index to its sources and is expanding too fast for anyone to keep track of every new site being added. Some commercial Internet providers for K-12 are marketing their services on the basis of having gathered preselected material, and statewide educational organizations are working to make information accessible for teachers.

Writing centers developing Gopher and World Wide Web sites are building easy access ramps to the Internet with collections of starting places for students to begin their research. These Gopher and World Wide Web sites may include writing instruction materials as well. At the Uni- versity of Illinois, for example, the writing center has an on-line handbook of instructional handouts on bibliograph- ic format and other topics that reside on the university Gopher. In Purdue's OWL, there is both a Gopher and a World Wide Web. The Gopher site links students to its instructional handouts that can be read on-line or downloaded, connects them to search tools such as Archie and Veronica and other popular Gopher searching tools, and links them to a vast array of information arranged mainly by general topics, such as literature, health, and science, as well as to on-line library catalogs, including that of the Library of Congress. The Purdue OWL's World Wide Web page is similar in that students can read instructional handouts on-line as well as link to search tools and sources of information. Because the World Wide Web is rapidly expanding and becoming the fastest growing aspect of the Internet, sources of information are far richer and more diverse (though Gopher sites can be reached through the Web also and appear in their text-based format). For example, the White House page on the World Wide Web has sections of general interest, such as visual and prose tours of the White House and its most famous residents as well as sections where users will find information about the work of each of the cabinet offices and about federal agencies

and commissions. The CIA World Wide Web site has general information about all countries in the world (size, crops, exports, and so forth), and the United Nations Web site has reports on the U.N.'s international efforts.

The Intemrnet has great potential as an educational tool in writing centers, and, as the taxonomy of options and issues discussed in Harris and Pemberton (forthcoming) indicates, writing centers are exploring a variety of ways in which one-to-one interaction can be enhanced through on-line resources. The flexibility of writing centers both to adapt to their particular institutions and to explore new options outside of standard curricula has given them a freedom to shape new environments for writers. As the Internet grows and develops, on-line writing centers will take on new shapes and provide learning environments for writers in ways we cannot yet predict.

REFERENCES

Coogan, D. 1994. OWL's. WCenter ([email protected]) 20 December.

Crump, E. 1994a. The yellow-bellied, horn-billed WIOLE. WCenter (list- [email protected]) 20 December (9:57 P.M.)

- . 1994b. The yellow-bellied, horn-billed WIOLE. Wcenter (list- [email protected]) 20 December (11:09 P.M.)

Doty, R. 1995. Teacher's aid. Internet World (March) 75-77. Harris, M., and M. Pemberton. Forthcoming. On-line writing labs

(OWLs): A taxonomy of options and issues. Computers and Composi- tion.

Jordan-Henley, J., and B. Maid. 1995. MOOving along the information superhighway: Writing centers in cyberspace. Writing Lab Newsletter 19(5): 1-6.

Survey finds Internet, CD-ROM use in schools significant. 1995. Printout (February/March): 1.

RESOURCES

The Online Writery: A virtual environment for writers e-mail to: [email protected] URL http://www.missouri.edu/-wleric/writery.html

Purdue University OWL (On-line Writing Lab) To request the help menu and an index of on-line handouts: e-mail to: [email protected] subject line: owl-request message: send help/send index Gopher owl.trc.purdue.edu URL http://owl.trc.purdue.edu/

State University of New York-Albany Writing Center e-mail to: writing@albnyvms. bitnet

University of Illinois' Writers' Workshop On-line Handbook Gopher //gopher.uiuc.edu/l 1/

WCenter: An electronic bulletin board for discussion of writing center issues

To subscribe, send e-mail to: [email protected] (no subject line) message: subscribe wcenter <your name>

writingc: An electronic bulletin board for tutors to discuss writing center issues

To subscribe, send e-mail to: [email protected] (no subject line) message: subscribe writingc <your name>



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