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Home » Archives » Fall 2008 (Volume 6 Issue 1) - Technology in Today's Writing Center
Allied Forces: Students, Writing Tutors, and a Collaboration Station Fall 2008 / Focus
by Claudine Griggs, Rhode Island College
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Claudine Griggs Jeremiah Dyehouse, Assistant Professor at the University of Rhode Island and Director of the Writing Center, is heading up a research project to examine how new technology affects student writers, their writing process, and learning interactions among participants and tutors. The project hardware, dubbed the “Collaboration Station” and funded by URI’s Writing Program and College of Liberal Arts, is essentially a single computer/word processor that incorporates two linked keyboards, monitors, and workstations to provide a double window into one piece of writing. Thus, when a student retrieves an electronic version of her paper, the Writing Center tutor and client can simultaneously read, highlight, discuss, and edit that paper from two different screens. Professor Dyehouse, along with URI’s Writing and Rhetoric faculty and graduate students, will collect data regarding instructional sessions at the Collaboration Station to consider how the interactions differ from traditional tutoring methods. My purpose here is simply to describe this technology and my experience with it.
We seemed to shift our roles from tutor and student to colleagues discussing text and ideas, and the technology helped to facilitate a more egalitarian conversation through what I casually referred to as my "distant proximity." I am a writer and an adjunct instructor at Rhode Island College; however, through a temporary faculty appointment during 2007-08 with the URI Writing Program, I was able to work with students in the Writing Center and at the Collaboration Station. The process has been revealing. At first, I was