Written by Karen Kalteissen and Heather Robinson and published in the April 2009 Writing Lab Newsletter, this article speaks to some of the concerns I've heard from you regarding our online tutoring. The main concern appears to be that it's too easy to become a proofreader online. I've also struggled with this.
Fatima Salemassi created this online system for us, and she emphasized the importance of requiring our online students to specify which aspect of their paper they wanted us to focus on. I believe that she did this to promote metacognition ("knowing about knowing") in our online writers. It's something comp professors do when they assign reflective letters with portfolios. The research reveals, again and again, that when writers think about their own writing, they become better writers.
We moved to live online tutoring because it reflects the Writing Center's philosophy of interaction with students. We don't want them to e-mail their drafts to us and passively wait for a response. Successful tutoring is a social activity, a back-and-forth, and we were missing that with our old system.
But live online tutoring has some drawbacks, too, as we're finding. We're a creative bunch--how can we address these drawbacks? This article seems to indicate that combining live tutoring and e-mail works best. What do you think about that? And how do we cope with those "uncomfortable silences"?
Thursday, February 17, 2011
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