This column is reprinted from the Technology department of the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy (JAAL). It contains the following sections:

• Editor's Message (from department editor Bertram Bruce)
• Issue of the Month
• Other Views
• Literacy Webpage of the Month
• References
• Glossary

In the age of the Internet, it is easy to equate technology with surfing the Web, but there are many other forms of technology, even specifically of digital electronic technologies, that play important roles in the development and practices of literacy. One of these is the online writing center. Some versions of online writing centers are akin to the online chat rooms to which many teenagers devote much of their after-school time.

Online, real-time, or synchronous communication has a long tradition in computer systems for education, going back at least to the PLATO system in the 1960s. But, in its earliest manifestations, online communication, whether real-time (as in an online chat) or asynchronous (like e-mail), was not considered directly educational. It was a fun part of the system to be used after the real learning had been accomplished. Today, however, both of these forms are seeing wide use as legitimate media for learning.

Proponents of online writing centers find value in the enthusiasm of participants and the fact that participation in the center means extensive reading and writing. Many instructors see great benefits in the writing and reading exhibited in the centers, yet others question their value or highlight problems. These diverse views suggest that we need to explore more deeply to discover exactly what happens online.

In our investigation of technology and literacy this month, we are led by Kevin Leander, a former secondary school English teacher now teaching at a university in the United States. Kevin has done in-depth studies of literacy in high school and college settings. His research has revealed the complex interplay of technologies, physical space, discourse, and social interaction in everyday learning settings.

-- Bertram Bruce

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online

Feminist geographer Linda McDowell (1997) suggested that it might be more productive to think of our contemporary relations to localized place as “reterritorialized” rather than “deterritorialized.” For example, rather than imagining in cyberspace that we have been somehow stripped clean of our local relations to physical place, it may be more productive to ask how relations to cyberspaces and physical places have been renegotiated and rearranged. How might we describe these new place-like ensembles? Still more important for our purposes, how do we understand literate practices “situated” within them? To address the issue of place and literate practices I focus here on the development of online writing centers (often called OWLs, for Online Writing Laboratories). In their multiple relations to cyberspaces and physical places, as well as to institutional and cultural practices, online writing centers offer a unique opportunity to consider the complex knot of place and practice.

While researchers have raised a myriad of issues regarding the management of consultants, schedules, network technologies, and student papers in the development of online writing centers (e.g., Harris & Pemberton, 1995; Healy, 1995), the concerns voiced in this column are somewhat different. Here, I'll consider online writing centers as a particular case, in order to make some initial observations about the codevelopments of place and literate practices with the developments of new online technologies. What does the development of online writing centers show us about the creation of “new” spaces for literacy? Here are some interpretations:

The proliferation of the online writing center

As of mid-September 1999, there were 278 online writing centers linked to the National Writing Centers Association website at http://departments.colgate.edu/diw/NWCA.html. This site catalogues primarily centers based in the U.S. and chiefly those associated with higher education. The proliferation of online writing centers is noteworthy when we consider how they, like the persons and courses of study they serve, are deeply connected with the construction of institutional identity. One can imagine, for instance, that the production of many fewer, yet superior, online writing centers as collaborations across universities, schools, and writing groups of various sorts might be a better use of institutional resources and cyberspace.

If the institutional import of having one's own online writing center presence were lessened, perhaps the State University of New York (SUNY) Albany's online writing center and that of Broome Community College (Binghampton, New York) at http://www.sunybroome.edu/~writecenter/ would be “de-centered” in cyberspace and share an online writing center, rather than being two of nine online writing centers in the SUNY system. Yet, the current development of online writing centers appears to be deeply tied up with the felt need for “presencing” oneself and one's institution on the Web (as well as with hybrid relations to material centers, discussed later). For institutional visibility, an online writing center is arguably more important than its offline counterpart.

The proliferation of online writing centers should not necessarily be taken as an indication of a vast degree of diversity among them. While I will attempt to highlight their diversity, at the same time I am struck by how the online writing center has become stabilized or durable as a cultural form. In what might be called the “genrification” of the online writing center, a set of common characteristics across writing centers has rapidly developed. Most online writing centers, for instance, have information about their offline counterparts' basic services (e.g., location, scheduling, staffing); most include links to general writing resources such as the Hypertext Webster Gateway for accessing various online dictionaries, Roget's Thesaurus, or the Columbia Guide to Online Style; many contain “handouts” of various sorts related to writing and grammar problems and issues; and a growing number include e-mail links that permit students to submit their papers for online tutoring.

Like personal or university homepages, the online writing center is a text subject to a powerful centripetal pull to become like many others in form, function, and content. This “genrification” also operates, of course, at the level of hyperlinked resources. As a high value is often placed on writing centers with the largest number of student handouts (e.g., as is evident in Bruce Pegg's [1998] helpful online writing center guide at http://sticky.usu.edu/~usupress/individl/wirech13.pdf), these centers and their handouts become constructed as more central centers to other more peripheral centers that develop in (linked) relation to them. Nevertheless, it is still possible for student writers to connect to 70 different grammar hotlines by e-mail or telephone across the U.S.

Hybrid relations of online and offline writing centers

Within the online writing center based at Salt Lake Community College, Redwood Campus (Salt Lake City, Utah), there is a Webcam that peers into the space of the physical, offline writing center at the same institution. When I clicked on the Webcam, I was a voyeur of room AD 218 and able to watch the back of one student writing at a table; get a silent side profile of two other students talking at another table in the distance; and see someone come from off camera, stage left to stage right, to retrieve something from a filing cabinet. Around the periphery of this cam-view are hyperlinked resources on the Web page. Some resources are based on local activity, such as a schedule of writing advisors at three locations on campus, and many are more distant. I followed a link, for example, to the National Writing Project, where I learned of an online conference with writer and teacher Donald Murray. SLCC's Webcam as an online entree to an offline world, and its textual positioning with respect to a large array of more local and distant activity, is a good metaphor of the hybridization of the writing center across online and offline spaces.

Such hybrid relations are ubiquitous. At the Colorado State University Writing Center (Fort Collins), for instance, a student needing guidance on research may select links to the CSU's Morgan Library, where in mid-September of 1999 a librarian offered a face-to-face workshop in Room 165 on Finding Full Text Articles Fast; he or she may likewise consult an online guide to Using the Library of Congress. It is tempting to consider these hybrid relations as unidirectional, where the online writing center is based upon and extends its offline referent.

Yet, returning to the example of the Webcam at Salt Lake Community College, consider how the presence of an online camera constructs the writing space and activity of the students within the center. How are writing, having conferences, and drafting shaped when they are made more or less visible to a dispersed Internet public? As a more mundane example, how are writing handouts developed when they are produced for mass audiences via online distribution, rather than for more local ones? Finally, how might face-to-face tutoring relations develop when tutors are also working in online communication and hybridizing their practices across this activity?

There has been a certain amount of anxiety within the online writing center literature over the threat of physical writing centers being taken over by online centers for reasons of institutional efficiency (e.g., Stuart Blythe's piece in the first issue of Kairos, an online journal for “teachers of writing in webbed environments”). While such anxiety may be warranted, particularly when we consider the market-driven motivations of much of distance education, when we view it from the perspective of the locations writers themselves select, we end up with a form of development that is much more complex than replacement. For instance, the Dakota State University Online Writing Lab (Madison, South Dakota) started as an online center alone, with no offline counterpart, with the expressed purpose of better serving students in remote locations. While a physical writing center does not yet exist at DSU, at the same time writing consultants often meet face to face with formerly online students on campus (E. Johnson, personal communication, September 13, 1999). A similar relation was evident in a distance writing-tutoring project between graduate students at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the Oak Ridge Campus of Roane State Community College in Tennessee. While none of the community college students in the project used the writing center prior to the distance project, following it many of them repositioned themselves in the school's physical writing center for study, including online and offline work on its computers.

Relation of the online writing center to the classroom

What kinds of relations are being shaped with respect to the classroom in online writing centers? What ought such relations to be? We might expect that “de-centering” the writing center in cyberspace might make it more inviting to students reluctant to enter an offline, physical space. Conversations within the center might be less directly implicated in institutional hierarchy, as the institution might be backgrounded within these conversations and spaces. Could writing theorist Stephen North's early student-centered vision of the physical writing center be even better realized online: “In short, we are not here to serve, supplement, back up, complement, reinforce, or otherwise be defined by any external curriculum” (in Healy, 1995, p. 185)? Might the movement into cyberspace make the writing center somewhat more of a “semiautonomous space” (Healy, 1995; Kali & Trimbur, 1987) with respect to the institution, classrooms, and the curriculum? If so, toward what end?

The relation of the offline or online writing center to its institutional home is a pivotal issue for its development. A commonplace positioning of the “center” is between the student and the classroom. The space of the center permits the student to move toward some better formulation of an “ideal text” (Knoblauch & Brannon, 1984), mediating for the respective professor and course. However, if the writing center is to provide some kind of leadership in writing practices and theory, if it serves a purpose of helping students not only to engage in disciplinary discourses but also to critique those discourses, and if the center connects students to conversations about writing that extend well beyond particular institutional course structures, then something akin to a more semiautonomous space makes sense. Perhaps at issue is not merely the value of autonomy or agency, but the way in which such autonomy is imagined.

As a construct, the semiautonomy of the writing center space and its practices need not be imagined as a semipermeable barrier between the student and the “external curriculum,” but as “de-centering” from the institution through powerful connections to other sociocultural spaces and practices extending well beyond it. The center space in this relation has been conceived by Eric Crump as a “technoprovacateur” whose role is to facilitate student participation in increasingly broad literate networks (with a large dash of fun), rather than simply to permit passage to a designated classroom space.

In sum, while it seems like a good thing for the online writing center to have a link that leads a student to the criteria for making a Disease Education Poster in Microbiology 300, at the same time it is worrisome to imagine that online writing centers could construct themselves as mere clearinghouses for writing assignments constructed by faculty, high-tech mediators of the student dorm space and the classroom space.

To get an indication of how current online writing centers are expanding space and practice, consider the meanings of writing within them. Across the vast array of online writing centers, one generally finds that they are primarily engaged with the relatively narrow line of generic practices associated with academic literacies: argumentation and research, a regular but small stream of personal essays, résumés, cover letters, and the like, and a still smaller trickle of creative writing. Of course, none of this should come as a surprise, and we may well argue that online writing centers would be remiss not to support students with what J. Paul Johnson dubs traditional academic “papertext” or “a technological-epistemological product which locates the writer as a rational, stable subject and presents the text as a coherent, printed totality” (see http://www.english.ttu.edu/Kairos/1.1/3.html). The significant mainstay of writing centers has been to offer sound advice about academic prose with a personal touch:

A thesis statement is one of the greatest unifying aspects of a paper. It should act as mortar, holding together the various bricks of a paper, summarizing the main point of the paper “in a nutshell,” and pointing toward the paper's development. Often a thesis statement will be expressed in a sentence or two; be sure to check with your professor for any particular requirements in your class -- some professors prefer a more subtle approach! (See http://www.richmond.edu/~writing/wweb/thesis.html).

Yet how would writing be conceived, and the writing space of the online center be transformed, if as Johnson suggests we were to disrupt the notion “that the proscenium classroom is the only valid context for writing”? What if online writing centers became academic leaders as spaces for the advancement of multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996)? Consider this shift as represented in the publication procedures for the online Journal of Computer Mediated Communication at http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/submiss.html:

Articles submitted may be of any length. Articles may be written in any format. Articles may contain any combination of text, tables, graphics, animation, or audio component. JCMC editors will make every possible effort to accommodate presentation formats.

Were even some writing conceived closer to this formulation of representation, imagine the potential transformations of space and practice both within the online writing center (in terms of resources, expertise, archived media files, technical tools, electronic spaces) and with respect to the cultural networks in which the online center participates.

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online

Transforming space and practice in online writing centers

Teaching research and reflections are beginning to suggest ways in which the online environment changes the relation between the writer and the writing consultant. For example, drawing upon an extended example of interactions with a student, David Coogan discusses the potential for the online conference to “break down the barriers between academic writing and conference talk” and, hence, “turn papers into acts of communication.” “E-mail communication,” writes Coogan, “doesn't try to deconstruct a text, it tries to latch on -- to connect to a text.” Of course, the pedagogic practice of making connections through response, thus using the student text as a turn at talk in a larger conversation, is not restricted to online communication. At the same time, the practice of dialogue afforded by e-mail computer programs and by social use suggests how the online space supports a dialogic, open relation to the writer's text as it is put into circulation.

Still more intriguing relations of space and practice, though, are attempts at weakening the one-tutor-one-writer model of writing center practice and attempts to convert one-on-one dialogues into “multilogues” and to unbound their respective spaces. In this regard, of particular interest are the online writing spaces being developed at the University of Missouri-Columbia. The Online Writery at http://web.missouri.edu/~writery/ contains within it differently structured cyberspaces for writing and response, including a Writery Café, which is dubbed by the site as a “conversation coffeehouse for writers,” an “open environment in which to discuss writing in any form.” Technically speaking, the Writery Café is just a simple archived newsgroup, which permits writers to post, for example, papers, questions, quips, or comments. After participating as a lurker in the Café for 2 weeks, I became fascinated with how the space destabilized tutor/tutee or consultant/student relations. An official staff member of the space was linked as a resource, but was weakly present within the list, where participants from wide geographical spaces (e.g., Australia, the U.K., the U.S.) shifted roles between sharing writing, apologizing for being late to respond, prompting each other to write more prose and less poetry, setting up contests for the list, and so on. Submitted pieces would often result in a long string of responses from the distributed group; amid this conversation the respective authors would offer response to other pieces of writing as part of the multilogue. (For a more expansive version of the Writery Café with many writing resources, check out http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/ for the trAce Online Writing Community.

A similar widely distributed participant base, and a dynamic of shifting writer/respondent roles, is also evident in the Online Writery's forums, which use HyperNews and permit users to post texts and comments without leaving a common Web space. Notably, the topics of the three forums for threaded posting and discussion are Poetry, Fiction, and an H(tml) HELP Forum. An HTML help forum appears a deliberate movement to include Web-based representation as a form of literacy (rather than simply a new medium for the “papertext”), and learning about technology as a significant aspect of the writing process. The forum reflects how literacy space, representation form, and tutoring practice relations may develop in dynamic relation to one another.

How accessible are online writing centers?

One argument for the development of online writing centers is that they greatly expand accessibility. The online construction “deterritorializes” the spatial and temporal dynamics of the writing center, permitting writers access any time, anywhere. Demonstration projects have also made evident how writing centers and associated tutoring programs can bring together consultants and writers who would otherwise not interact, such as graduate students at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and community college students at Roane State Community College, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. (See Jordan-Henley, J., & Maid, B.M. [1995]. Tutoring in cyberspace: Student impact and college/university collaboration. Computers and Composition, 12, 211-218.)

Yet, despite these possibilities, we still need to raise important questions about how access is constructed within cyberspace. As with any Internet resource, online writing centers are implicated in a number of equity issues with respect to access (see, for example, this column, February and March, 1999). Yet there are also more specific access issues of concern with these literacy resources. In particular, how do online writing centers structure access for non-native speakers of English who represent a large part of their clientele? While many English as a Second Language students may be able to use resources developed for native English speakers, others will not. Suzan Moody's review of ESL resource and access issues at eight large online writing centers revealed that the greatest number of resources concerned English grammar. Only half of the centers provided information for ESL students on how to write essays. While some of the resources on writing and grammar are written for students of limited English proficiency, Moody urges that more explanatory material and models of writing need to be developed that pay special attention, among other issues, to simple explanation, vocabulary choice, and accessible sentence constructions. Such development is all the more critical for non-native speakers of English when we consider the many proxemic, embodied, and other subtle verbal and nonverbal forms of communication that are either absent or reconfigured within computer-mediated communication.

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online

Lingua MOO is an Internet-based learning, research, and collaboration environment developed by Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune at the University of Texas, Dallas. Unlike most of the online writing center media discussed above, a MOO is a synchronous learning environment, where people interact in real time, representing themselves as characters in a shared virtual space. Advocates of synchronous participation often point to the enhanced sense of community building in sharing real time (and space).

Moreover, within the MOO participants not only are able to move among online spaces, they also are able to create such spaces themselves. As programs, MOOs permit users to construct virtual “rooms” for interaction, rooms that also store and post various texts and objects. Thus, unlike the offline or online writing center that invites students into an already stable space, the MOO is a malleable set of space/text relations. Lingua MOO describes itself, in this regard, as a “new archi/TEXTural community...where writing IS the landscape.” The MOO is a powerful resource for exploring the complex dynamics of literacy, place, and identity.

The Lingua MOO homepage contains a host of links to resources and educational projects related to MOOs, but most important is a gateway to the Lingua MOO environment, where visitors can log in and participate as guests. Of particular technical interest at Lingua MOO is a new interface recently developed. Unlike Telnet-type systems and the demands that they place upon users to memorize a host of commands, the new enCore Xpress MOO interface is a movement toward a point-and-click mode of interaction, opening up MOO-based interaction for a broader range of participants and uses.

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online

Harris, M., & Pemberton, M. (1995). Online writing labs (OWLs): A taxonomy of options and issues. Computers and Composition, 12, 145-159.
Back

Healy, D. (1995). From place to space: Perceptual and administrative issues in the online writing center. Computers and Composition, 12, 183-193.
Back (1st citation)
Back (subsequent citations)

Kali, H., & Trimbur, J. (1987). The politics of peer tutoring. Writing Program Administration, 11(1-2), 5-12.
Back

Knoblauch, C.H., & Brannon, L. (1984). Rhetorical traditions and the teaching of writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.
Back

McDowell, L. (Ed.). (1997). Undoing place? A geographical reader. New York: Arnold.
Back

New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92.
Back

Pegg, B. (1998). UnfURLed: 20 writing center sites to visit on the information highway. In E.H. Hobson (Ed.), Wiring the writing center (pp. 197-215). Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.
Back

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online

Deterritorialized -- stripped from a relation to local place.
Back

Forum -- an online discussion group, sometimes called a newsgroup or a conference. Web-based forums are often archived, so that participants can follow and post to past and current threads.
Back

MOO -- an acronym for MUD, Object Oriented. A MUD is a Multiple-User Dimension (also Domain, Dungeon, or Dialogue), a computer database that permits multiple users to log in by Telnet and interact in real time. In MOOs, users can also create, manipulate, and move among virtual objects (including rooms).
Back

Reterritorialized -- a dynamic and complex relation to developing spaces.
Back

Telnet -- a program that allows a personal computer to link to another computer, via the Internet or other network. Telnet has a history of being used for connecting smaller machines to larger mainframe computers, but is currently used to remotely access and control computer servers of all size via the Internet.
Back

Webcam -- a simple digital camera for transmitting real-time digital images (usually at speeds much slower than video) over the Internet.
Back

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online

Leander teaches language and literacy courses in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. E-mail: kevin.leander@vanderbilt.edu. Mail: Box 330, Peabody College, Nashville, TN 37203, USA.

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online