The Look and Feel of the OWL Conference (1998)

Keywords

asynchronous, written feedback, in-text feedback, best/effective practices, genre, pedagogy, program description, technology, transfer

First Paragraph

The Online Writing and Learning (OWL) at the University of Michigan grew out of our face-to-face (f2f) peer tutoring program in many ways. Although our OWL website includes links to other OWLs that offer electronic handouts, our primary purpose is to respond to writers’ needs, online, person-to-person. Like many OWLs, our online tutorial is technically conducted by means of asynchronous electronic mail, which clients can also access through the web. When we first decided to offer writing conferences online in 1994, we saw this move as simply an extension of our peer tutoring program. Not surprisingly, then, our online and f2f tutorials are close kin, borne of the same principles and practices. Our writing conference, both online and off, is based on a one-to-one, rather than one-to-many, instructional model and a collateral power relationship: peer-to-peer rather than a teacher-to-student. Consistent with that rationale, our OWL and f2f conference use the same activities, such as conducting diagnostic work and establishing conference priorities. Our tutors also worry about the same pedagogical issues, such as finding ways to engage clients as collaborative partners in the conference enterprise. And both OWL and f2f tutors work within the same constraints inherent to our walk-in program: our tutors can not count on seeing the same clients or the same paper assignment again, and so their conferences attempt to be comprehensive and specific at the same time

Citation Information

Type of Source: Book Article

Author: Barbara Monroe

Year of Publication: 1998

Title:The Look and Feel of the OWL Conference

Publication: Wiring the Writing Center (edited by Eric H. Hobson)

Page Range: 3-24