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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
unimpressed when Dyehouse described the technology. My silent response was, “Writing moves ideas out of one’s head and onto paper. With or without a computer, the process is essentially the same.” I still believe this, but writing and teaching are different, and I was amazed that the Collaboration Station led me though its operating system at my first “accidental” collaboration on November 1, 2007, when a student who had revised but not printed her paper asked to electronically retrieve the updated version. The nearest computer was the Collaboration Station, so that’s where we landed. As we began to review the essay, I peered around the student’s shoulders, pointed with my finger at her monitor, and read sections out loud for discussion. A few minutes later I noticed that the second screen contained the same play-by-play information, so I moved to the sidecar with its twin keyboard and mouse, using the interactive cursor to direct attention to pertinent issues: a run-on sentence or comma splice, problematic verb constructions, a vague thesis or conclusion, soggy generalizations, improper documentation format, logical contradictions, etc. At one moment, I highlighted a section of her paper and said, “This might need work. What do you think?” 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.”
Thus far, I have worked with six or seven students at the Collaboration Station, and in every instance the writer asked to remain at the computer after our appointment. One immediate consequence (for me) was a reduced stress level in the overall interaction: no craning my neck to read the monitor, no hijacking the student’s keyboard to offer a written suggestion as sometimes happens on a student laptop, no hovering over the student’s left shoulder, right shoulder, or head like a helicopter tutor. This was writer-to-writer hobnobbing. The student seemed happy. The tutor was thrilled. When I had other appointments at the Collaboration Station, students appeared to quickly re-engage with their own papers during the sessions. And even young techno-savants were sometimes surprised upon introduction to the system. One freshman exclaimed, “Wow! We can both see this!” Thus far, I have worked with six or seven students at the Collaboration Station, and in every instance the writer asked to remain at the computer after our appointment. In fact, I gently reprimanded one woman who held onto the keyboard an additional two hours even when she was supposed to go to class. She insisted, “I just had to get those ideas down before I forgot!” That’s engagement of the third kind. Still, despite the successes with students on the Collaboration Station, there were initial problems with the operating technology. The prototype unit, activated for Fall 2007, used dual computers, modified software, and a Y-cable to split a dominant signal and send it to each screen. But when the system went to sleep, the program would not come back on line without manually disconnecting and reconnecting the Y-cable. And more often, students who wanted to use independent computers would simply disconnect the splitter so they could work on different projects. Further, it seemed that my initial discounting of the technology was sometimes shared by others until they understood how the system could be used. One afternoon, I watched a group of five students discover the system in much the same way I did during my initial
“accidental” session. They were working on a collaborative project and were crowded around a single screen and keyboard until one writer noticed that he could sit at the second work station, read the same draft paper, and discuss it with the group. So again I was impressed that the technology seemed to be self-guiding and writer friendly; nonetheless, to eliminate some of the initial operating problems, Professor Dyehouse obtained additional hardware during winter break 2007/08 to drive the system from a single CPU. The Collaboration Station has since come alive each day without misadventure, and its cyclopean nerve center can no longer be disconnected or reconnected as separate systems when students are struck with the notion that two computers would be better than one. The research around the URI Collaboration Station is continuing though I left my temporary Writing Center post in May 2008. I do not want to draw too many conclusions based upon my brief experience with this new technology, but I am interested to see what Professor Dyehouse and his colleagues might discover. I expect and hope to see a more detailed analysis from the URI Writing Program based upon multiple sessions with multiple tutors and students over a longer period of time. And while I believe that the writing process– shaping and reshaping ideas on paper or in a computer–is more engaging than any supportive technology, there might be a breath of magic in a conjoined workspace that seems to help students and tutors work together comfortably and productively. I wish we had one at Rhode Island College. No, I wish we had two. ____________________
Claudine Griggs is a lecturer at Rhode Island College, and she has worked in the Writing Centers at Soka University and the University of Rhode Island. Her publications include three nonfiction books and about a dozen articles. ‹ A Snapshot of an Evolving Writing Center into a Bilingual Service
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