The development of an ESL OWL, or learning how to tutor writing online

This essay describes the development of an ESL OWL by grounding practices in language and literacy pedagogy theory. An initial discussion explores OWLs emulating physical writing center spaces. Two areas of concern are then addressed in meeting the needs of second language writers as they relate to practices and training for online tutoring: error correction—an area of frequent concern to second language writers—and increased interactivity—meeting second language writer expectations and creating autonomous learners. Issues of plagiarism by second language writers are discussed as related to the type of feedback OWL tutors can provide. Highlighted throughout are samples of interactions between tutors and writers that show a process of learning how to create dialogue rather than dictations from the tutor to clean up a single essay.     

Developing sound tutor training for online writing centers: creating productive peer reviewers

It is our experience that tutors trained for face-to-face writing centers are not adequately prepared for the challenges they encounter working with online writing centers. The purpose of our article is to provide an overview—especially for administrators, developers, and tutors new to electronic tutoring environments—of the issues and considerations unique to online tutoring that training programs need to address. In our discussion, we hope to engender enthusiasm for online tutoring by discussing three aspects of online tutoring: appreciating text-only environments, developing procedures for responding online, and creating appropriate roles for online tutors. We offer suggestions about how to address these three aspects in online tutor training, and we suggest that addressing these issues leads to an understanding of the online tutor as a productive peer reviewer.     

Situation Definition and the Online Synchronous Writing Conference

Since the mid 1990's, more and more college and university writing centers have been offering online synchronous writing conferences to students. Writing center researchers have published extensively on how tutors can promote collaboration in online conferences, but comparatively few have used Lev Vygotsky's conception of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) to analyze activity in these conferences or to develop specific methods for working with students in these environments. Using more recent developments in the theory of the ZPD, such as the concept of situation definition, I will discuss how tutors can apply strategies related to the ZPD to promote student learning. By focusing on students’ definitions of rhetorical concepts that often implicitly guide students’ writing processes, tutors can help students improve how they approach their writing tasks. Progress through the ZPD, then, is more related to how students grow their own understanding, rather than on the correcting of students’ texts. I will illustrate this theoretical discussion by presenting examples of two online synchronous writing conferences, and I will describe the implications and possible shortcomings of a method of tutoring that applies the concept of situation definition and the ZPD.     

What we have here is a failure to communicate: the criticality of writing in online instruction

This article addresses how online instructors can improve their email communications with students. The characteristics and demands of online instruction are described and characterized as depending on the instructor’s ability to communicate in writing. A model to guide instructors in their online communications, the Golden Triangles of Online Communication, is presented. The first triangle underscores the criticality of considering (a) the online learning environment context, (b) the learner, and (c) the learning task. The second triangle presents three critical questions that instructors using online communications must quickly answer (a) What is this about? (b) Why should I care? and (c) What am I supposed to do? The Golden Triangles represent an effort to provide assistance to instructors in the difficult task of providing high quality instruction with high student satisfaction in online learning. In the final analysis, we underscore the importance of instructors’ writing skills in effective and appealing online in teaching.     

Communicative practices in an online financial forum during abnormal stock market behavior

We offered a new perspective on communication in computer-mediated environments by examining communicative practices used during discussion in an online financial forum about a listed company that was experiencing abnormal trading behavior. The analysis of communicative practices showed how the linguistic nature of the online forum allowed covert manipulation of inexperienced and unsuspecting forum participants - against all the norms and rules governing online financial forums. Based on our theoretical understanding of communicative practices, we found a discrepancy between the expectations of and the actual divergence from an ideal communicative environment free from distortion and manipulation that is normally assumed to govern online forums. The discrepancy, which remains largely concealed, can be seen as a major factor in the negative implications of online financial forums.     

The Invisible Interface: MS Word in the Writing Center

Writing centers have developed best practices in order to help student writers, most popularly, non-directive tutoring pedagogies, based on the use of paper drafts. These same tutoring protocols have been extended to computer-based face-to-face sessions under the assumption that they will have similar outcomes, which subscribes to the myth of technology as a transparent tool that does not affect the writing that emerges from it. A lack of attention to computers in the writing center extends to the use of word processing programs like MS Word. This article discusses these issues in the context of a case study of one tutor in computer-based tutoring sessions in a writing center. Throughout these sessions, situations arose involving the use of the MS Word interface that affected the nature of the session itself. This case study suggests that computers, and particularly the MS Word program, need to be examined critically to consider how their use corresponds with the mission of the writing center itself. There are a number of strategies that can also help tutors use MS Word in ways that will best serve students’ individual needs.     

Writing Centers and Students with Disabilities: The User-centered Approach,Participatory Design,and Empirical Research as Collaborative Methodologies

This article discusses issues of accessibility and how user-centered and participatory approaches can inform empirical research to guide the Universal Design of virtual spaces and influence writing center efforts for students with disabilities. Because this article describes how to integrate usability/accessibility testing for online and in-person services, it can work as a model for writing centers struggling with the challenges of serving students with disabilities. Toward this end, the article discusses two generations of usability testing on a large, well-established online writing lab (the Purdue OWL), as well as the collaborative projects that emerged between the usability team and campus disabilities services as a result of this testing. The article concludes with heuristics and generative questions that may assist readers in developing similar projects tailored to their own contexts.     

Email small group peer review revisited

Attention to email exchanged among a small group of student peers supercedes discussion of networked computer labs and is distinguished from research on collaborative classroom work in general, on online peer tutoring in writing centers, on email communication in online professional writing courses, and on online discourse in general. Email peer response within small groups is different from larger-scale, one-to-many computer-based communication tools (CBCT) on class mailing lists, bulletin boards, blogs, and wikis on the one hand and smaller-scale, one-to-one email exchange between an individual student and a peer tutor on the other hand. The benefits of assignments that require small groups to respond electronically and asynchronously to each other's drafts are analyzed and illustrated: rhetorical/thematic, discursive/environmental, technological, logistical/time management. The practicalities of students’ exchange of drafts, deadlines, and other guidelines are explained and illustrated in typical student email responses and model instructor handouts.     

Usability Research in the Writing Lab: Sustaining Discourse and Pedagogy

Redesigning Purdue's Online Writing Lab (OWL) presented the opportunity for collaboration among Writing Center and Professional Writing Program members. While the article briefly describes the OWL redesign process, the argument focuses on collaboration and presents a model for sustainable intraprogram collaboration. Following Hawhee, usability research is defined as “invention-in-the-middle,” which offers a model for understanding research process as part of the infrastructure of new media instruction as described by DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill. This article offers four stakeholder perspectives on the process of participatory technology design: of writing center administrators, graduate students, technical writing practitioners, and writing program graduate faculty members. The model asserted by this article presents a dynamic understanding of expertise and of fluidity in the roles of participants. Collaborative usability research, seen as invention-in-the-middle, contributes both to long-term sustainability of technological artifacts as well as the discursive interactions among stakeholders whose work supports these artifacts.     

“It wasn’t me,was it?” Plagiarism and the Web

Issues of plagiarism are complex, and made all the more complicated by students’ increasing use of the World Wide Web as a research space. In this article, we describe several situations we faced as teachers in writing-intensive classrooms—experiences common to most teachers of writing. We share these examples to explore how issues related to plagiarism and its effects are both reproduced and change in new research spaces. We also share these stories to discuss how we can best handle plagiarism in first-year writing classrooms and how we can best equip students with the tools necessary to do appropriate research—both online and offline.     

Computer-mediated communication in collaborative writing

The purpose of this study was to determine if using computers to communicate during group writing tasks is an effective mode of communication. Three-person teams wrote term papers in one of three conditions: face-to-face (FTF), synchronous computer-mediated communication (Netmeeting), or email. The participants were given 6 weeks to complete the task. Product differences showed only that email groups produced shorter rough drafts than FTF groups, indicating the rough draft was not as well thought out in the email groups. Process measures demonstrated that, overall, communication styles that afforded interactivity were utilized effectively in a collaborative writing setting. Furthermore, lack of expressiveness did not appear to deter groupwork. The results suggest that email alone may not be an appropriate setting for writing collaboratively; whereas teams in a synchronous computer-mediated communication setting, such as Netmeeting, should be able to produce quality work satisfactorily.     

Integrating ICT into second language education in a vocational high school

Abstract This study investigated the potential impacts of integrating the Internet into an English as a second language class in a vocational senior high school in Taiwan. Twenty-nine students and a young male English teacher were involved. It was found that the students overall had a positive perception toward using Internet tools. This study indicated that the integration of information communication technology on the Internet with English facilitated the creation of a virtual environment that transformed learning from a traditional passive experience to one of discovery, exploration, and excitement in a less stressful setting. The study revealed that a computer-mediated communication environment could lower students' psychological barriers to enable them to express their opinions freely and to communicate actively on the Internet and that it could also enhance their critical thinking, problem-solving and communication skills through online activities or class homepage construction. An individual case study further revealed that a task-oriented English tutoring strategy in association with email communication could motivate the student's writing competence but the student's language proficiency and grammatical accuracy did not improve. Finally, based on the findings, recommendations for future studies are made.     

Prompting authentic blogging practice in an online graduate course

Blogging is characterized by an individual exploration of ideas of personal interest through frequent online posts, documenting ideas as they emerge over time. Community emerges as bloggers read and link across blogs, based on shared interests. Blogs have gained acceptance in higher education for a variety of instructional activities, among which, reflective journal writing is popular. In this study, we examine a project in which blogs were implemented within an online graduate course in order to create opportunities for students to reflect on their academic, professional and personal interests, with the goal of establishing consistent blogging that exhibits the timely, frequent and interest-driven practices of blogging practices outside educational contexts. Students enrolled in an online graduate course maintained individual blogs in which they were prompted to write about their interests and experiences as graduate students. Through an analysis of the patterns of prompt use and blog content, as well as data from a post-course survey and an online discussion, we explore how to support student engagement with blogging practice within an educational setting. Findings suggest that frequency of writing, topic resonance with the students own interests, and the timeliness of entries were key factors in scaffolding writing that aligns with blogging practice. By focusing on writing as characterized by authentic blogging practice, this study contributes to an understanding of how to harness the unique communicative elements of the blog in post-secondary settings.     

A closer look on social presence as a causing factor in computer-mediated collaboration

So far, research in computer-mediated collaboration has investigated various factors influencing the amount of social presence experienced in online settings. This experimental study broadens the perspective and investigates social presence as a causing factor on participants’ perception on task, medium and collaboration. Therefore an experiment with between subject design was conducted, with manipulation of three different levels of social presence: Full (f2f), medium online and low social presence (each n = 20). Participants had to solve an online puzzle in dyads.Findings mainly confirm a favourable influence of social presence on the perception of task and collaboration. Additionally, this study supports the importance of considering the reciprocal nature of social presence.     

Rethinking Authenticity: Voice and Feedback in Media Discourse

As authentic communicative practices, news writing and media discourse have the potential to serve as pedagogical tools for foreign language students to explore content of interest. This study analyzed university students’ media discourse in the virtual world of Second Life and subsequent revisions of their works in progress with respect to (1) journalistic headlines, (2) journalistic vocabulary, (3) journalistic organization, and (4) journalistic style. The results have revealed connections between voice and composition—that is, exchanging and sharing true thoughts and feelings while maintaining a self-image facilitated more concise, engaging, clear, and relevant news writing from new or different perspectives. Participants’ actions, perceptions, and movements also facilitated a better understanding of communicative practices specific to the virtual world. The results suggest that we should rethink authenticity in terms of content, contexts, purposes, and audiences to design computer-mediated collaborative learning tasks and support students’ authentic engagement of peers or other international speakers in lingua franca communication. This study may shed light on the future use of new media literacy and playful peer discourse in foreign language writing.     

SOA-enabled compliance management: instrumenting, assessing, and analyzing service-based business processes

Facilitating compliance management, that is, assisting a company’s management in conforming to laws, regulations, standards, contracts, and policies, is a hot but non-trivial task. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) has evolved traditional, manual business practices into modern, service-based IT practices that ease part of the problem: the systematic definition and execution of business processes. This, in turn, facilitates the online monitoring of system behaviors and the enforcement of allowed behaviors—all ingredients that can be used to assist compliance management on the fly during process execution. In this paper, instead of focusing on monitoring and runtime enforcement of rules or constraints, we strive for an alternative approach to compliance management in SOAs that aims at assessing and improving compliance. We propose two ingredients: (i) a model and tool to design compliant service-based processes and to instrument them in order to generate evidence of how they are executed and (ii) a reporting and analysis suite to create awareness of a company’s compliance state and to enable understanding why and where compliance violations have occurred. Together, these ingredients result in an approach that is close to how the real stakeholders—compliance experts and auditors—actually assess the state of compliance in practice and that is less intrusive than enforcing compliance.     

Students’ perceptions of collaboration, self-regulated learning, and information seeking in the context of Internet-based learning and traditional learning

This study aims to investigate students’ perceptions of three aspects of learning - collaboration, self-regulated learning (SRL), and information seeking (IS) in both Internet-based and traditional face-to-face learning contexts. A multi-dimensional questionnaire was designed to evaluate each aspect in terms of perceived capability, experience, and interest. The analyses explore (1) potential differences of students’ perceptions between Internet-based and face-to-face learning environments and (2) potential differences in the three aspects in relation to learners’ attributes and the use of the Internet and enrollment in online courses. This study surveyed students in a higher education institute who had had experiences with Internet-based and face-to-face learning. The results showed that students perceived higher levels of collaboration (capability only), SRL (capability and experience) and IS (capability, interest, and experience) in Internet-based learning than in traditional learning environments. In terms of students’ education level, graduate students perceived higher levels of capabilities and interests in some of the aspects, than undergraduate students. In addition, for Internet-based learning, significant differences in collaboration and SRL were found derived from time spent on the Internet related to learning; and students’ perceptions of collaboration, SRL, and IS were all positively correlated to students’ online course-taking experience. Implications for online learning practices and instructor’s facilitation are discussed.     

The perils of creating a class Web site: it was the best of times,it was the …

This article explains the visual and computing demands of Web-site authoring in a junior level, undergraduate honors course at a large public university. We argue that the students in this course—highly literate and skilled in the production of conventional printed academic writing—performed much like basic writers when challenged with acquiring a broad set of new visual and computer literacy skills. We argue for the value of the illustrated essay as a halfway point for connecting our expectations of Web site authoring to students’ previous experiences with the production of printed academic discourse.