This page serves as a database for OWC-related scholarship. You can filter results by using the tags below or the search bar to the right.
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When I first started thinking about sophistry, I had trouble understanding the vehemently low regard in which their contemporaries held the sophists. In trying to wrap my brain around the sophistic reputation, I found myself looking for the sophists’ contemporary parallel and in so doing, I recalled my own consternation regarding the ever-expanding field of online education.
Keywords: asynchronous, synchronous, email, video chat, accessibility, grand narrative, group tutoring, online instruction, pedagogy, relationships, student perspectives, talk, training
In preparing peer tutors for responding to student writers in an asynchronous Online Writing Lab (OWL), writing center administrators must engage tutors in activities that focus on writing about students’ writing rather than talking face-to-face with writers.
This study directly compares face-to-face writing center consultations with two closely related variations of Online Writing Instruction (OWI). Although the study takes place in a busy, dynamic writing center, the authors try to make their comparisons as systematic as possible so they can better foreground some of the benefits and disadvantages of various conferencing environments.
I’ve gotten hung up on the word asynchronous: I’d like writing centers to stop using it, and I would like them to stop believing the things they must believe if they take the label “asynchronous” seriously.
Writing centers can help multilingual students who hear many varieties of World Englishes and need to learn to write academic English, but in order to do this, writing center directors must guide their tutors on questions such as the following: In a digital environment, how can tutors engage L2 students in dialogs that are productive for academic writing? How can online tutors overcome comparisons that pit the many varieties of students’ writing against a hegemonic “ideal text”? What are the alternatives for responding to perceived errors of form?
When writers come through the doors of the Main Writing Center (WC) at UW-Madison, it’s worth considering how we instructors can process many bits of information about them.
Researchers from Kaplan University present findings from a media-rich feedback pilot program that targets students from developmental writing courses. One study of student reactions reveals how screencasting feedback encouraged more formative, holistic feedback and students’ awareness of writing process, audience, and revision.
This study highlights the writing difficulty of tertiary students in ESL or EFL contexts. It describes two successful innovations, writing center and online writing lab, initiated by North American institutions of higher learning to intervene in the writing crisis.
Only recently has the community problematized space, moving the dialogue from what a center should do to what it means when a center does. In this critical vein, we approach our review of writing centers as spaces that impact their participants. Our treatment of writing center spaces follows a continuum. We move from the material, tangible, physical writing center to the more ethereal, digital space. We explore what it means to occupy a particular space and what identity constructions are possible in our physical and digital spaces.