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(Re)Wiring Ourselves:
The Electrical and Pedagogical Evolution of a Writing Center |
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The number of electrical
circuits in a house determines how many electrical appliances you can
use conveniently and safely. |
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One of the major reasons we wanted to revive online consulting was the student population at Boise State. The university is primarily a commuter school, and many of our students can be described in Dickie Selfe’s words:
We recognized the burden in 2003-2004, when many of the evaluation sheets we passed out to writers were returned with requests for “more hours” or for us to “open earlier.” Already we were open fifty-eight hours a week, and more hours would tax our consultants’ schedules. In a sense, the Boise State Writing Center had a “reverse access” problem. Hobson (1998) rightly cautions writing center staffs to remember that “not every center’s clientele have access to the technology needed” (p. xv), but we felt we did not need to worry as much about who can reach a computer terminal as we did about who can reach campus (see also Gardner 2000, Kinkead 1987). Many of our students have access to a computer at work, if not at home.1 This is not to dismiss concerns about access to technology, but rather to consider them in light of our context. As Harris and Pemberton (1995) claim, “At institutions with large populations of commuting students, a service that offers opportunities to interact with tutors at their convenience may be the most useful emphasis—if those communicating students have online access” (p. 155). The student population at Boise State, though, had not changed exceedingly much from five years before, when very few of our students took advantage of online consulting. Why would it be any different this time? Good question. To be honest, we did not know if it would be different. Rather, we hoped. And we planned. Neither of us wanted to simply re-start the same service as before, and we knew, as Harris and Pemberton caution, that “planning and shaping of effective, user-friendly OWLs takes considerable thought and energy” (p. 145). How could we make this version of Boise State’s online consulting service as successful as it could be? Given that several centers have experimented with online consulting over the past decade (and longer), many of the questions we needed to ask had been asked before. So we looked to others for advice. One thing we well knew was that our online consultations would be different than those we conducted face to face. Monroe (1998) tells of how she first believed her center’s electronic consultations would be “simply an extension” of its normal peer tutoring activities; but she and her consultants quickly found that such conferences have their “own look-and-feel” (p. 3). Mabrito (2000) is especially helpful in giving a quick overview of the concerns facing centers that choose to consult electronically:
Obviously we wanted our online service to be easy, efficient, and productive for our writers, and knew we had to pay attention to the differences engendered by this type of consultation. We also knew about the warnings given to those who would seek to expand the use of technology in the writing center. Carino (1998) says to “remain vigilant against the intoxication of our enthusiasm” (p. 193) when considering our use of computers in a center, and Lerner (1998) cautions of the “seductive appeal of technology” and urges us to “remind ourselves of what our goals are for student learning and how we believe that learning to be best enabled” (p. 136). In terms of e-mail consultations themselves, many have worried about the loss of conversation between writer and reader (Carlson & Apperson-Williams, 2000; Castner, 2000; Harris & Pemberton, 1995; Spooner, 1994). As one article asks chillingly, “What happens as tutors respond through a faceless, expressionless computer screen?” (Carlson & Apperson-Williams, 2000, p. 129). We were further concerned as we heard responses to our plan: those who did not work in the Center (administrators, department colleagues) were generally enthused about it; our consultants were less certain about things. Were we about to put cracks in our own foundation? As we talked over our plans to (re)wire our center, we divided our concerns into three categories, or circuits: technology, administration, and pedagogy. Those concerns aligned with three major questions: How can we design the most efficient, accessible web site for our service? How can we schedule e-mail consultations so as to utilize our consultants’ hours without infringing on their face-to-face sessions? How can we best respond to the essays we receive through e-mail? There were other questions that branched off from these three—for example, we knew that when designing our website we would need to factor in cost, and we knew that our scheduling concerns would arise only if we were able to notify enough writers that the service existed, and we knew that the best responses to essays would be written by consultants committed to and understanding of the online procedure—but these three served as guideposts for us. 2 And certainly we understand that concerns over online consulting in a writing center do not separate quite so easily, that questions of technology, administration, and pedagogy can (and did) overlap and intertwine. But for the purposes of this essay, we will pretend that each circuit is relatively free and clear of the others—and electricians do want to take care that they do not cross their wires. Also, we place great importance on the third circuit, that of pedagogy, asking not only how we responded to essays, but how we responded to consultants as they learned they would be working in a different medium. For us, the pedagogy issue has been the most engaging and the most challenging. This past year has reminded us that even though we might wish to revise a center by plugging in a monitor or opening up a new web site, the most important wiring work we do is with the people who ultimately respond to writers. Their systems are the ones that matter most.
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