POCKET REVIEW / INTRODUCTION FOR TAKING FLIGHT WITH OWLS
Taking Flight with OWLs: Examining Electronic Writing Center Work
Notes on external linksJames A. Inman and Donna N. Sewell, Eds.
Erlbaum 2000
ISBN 0805831711 $27.50 (paper) 240 pp.Reviewed by Christopher W. Dean
The University of New Hampshire
Before I started writing my review of Taking Flight with OWLs: Examining Electronic Writing Center Work, I had what I now consider to be a good omen. Or, at the very least, an almost transcendent moment of metaphor.
I was walking my dog Muggs through the bitter New Hampshire morning, and, while trying to think of some way to start this review, I heard an owl. Muggs and I stopped and strained to hear echoing call of this invisible animal-or was it animals? It was really impossible to tell, the owl's voice being an echo of the owl's own voice.
As Muggs and I turned away, I silently thanked my hooting friend. It had not only given me a lead for this review, it gave me a metaphor to talking about Taking Flight with OWLs.
This fine collection of 35 voices across 20 individually and collectively written chapters is one of the more coherent collections of writing about writing centers that I've read. And while each of the voices represented in the 20 chapters are clear and distinct, there are important ways in which they echo each other.
Woven through the text of Taking Flight with OWLs are concerns about OWLs of the past, the present shape and state of OWLs, and OWLs of the future. However, Taking Flight with OWLs is not a simple history of OWLs; it begins to dig into theoretical issues-into issues of praxis. Like Kurt Kearcher and Stuart Blythe's pieces in the outstanding book Wiring the Writing Center, a number of pieces in Taking Flight with OWLs move past a report of past experience and into examining some of the theoretical issues concerned with the construction and maintenance of OWLs-and with the sort of knowledge that OWLs might generate about writing center and composition theory and practice. The five sections of Taking Flight with OWLs reveal this move towards theorizing practice, and a concomitant turn toward practical theorizing.
In both a brief preface and introduction James Inman and Donna Sewell outline the shape of their book and state what seems like its overriding purpose: to "move beyond anecdotal evidence for implementing computer technology in writing centers, presenting carefully considered studies that theorize the move to computer technology and examine technology uses in practice" (xix). This is what the rest of the book attempts, and in large part succeeds, in doing.
The first section of chapters, entitled "Toward a Definition and Context for Electronic Writing Center Work," moves from Mark Shadle's excellent overview of the current state and immediate history of OWLs (check out some of the research work that Shadle did at http://www.eou.edu/~mshadle/stipend97.html) to Randall Beebe and Mary Bonevelle's work, which begins to create a theory of technology based writing center and composition theorizing that takes into account insight from actual practice, especially tutor's insights. In between are "OWLs in Theory and Practice: A Director's Perspective," which deals both with the larger history of OWLS and the growth of Lady Falls Brown's OWL at Texas Tech, and "Language Learning in Networked Writing Labs: A View from Asia," in which Andy Curtis and Tim Roskams discuss teaching ESL in a networked writing lab.What strikes me as interesting about this section is that it creates a solid structure for the the remainder of the text to rest on; it provides the reader with a historical reading of OWLs that delves, particularly in Shadle, Beebe, and Bonevelle's work, into what exactly an OWL is.
In the section "Narratives of Experience," the only real fault of the collection becomes evident: a certain lack of sprawl. By sprawl I don't mean the inexorable march of Walmarts and strip malls into every hamlet, town, and city in America. I'm not talking about the mini-malling of America. What I'm talking about is the fact that, most likely due to the constraints of paper-based publishing, 20 separately written chapters, all on diverse subjects, are forced to live in a scant 233 pages. I got the feeling, in a couple of places, that the authors in "Narratives of Experience" had to excise a great deal of qualitative research that would have rendered a fuller picture of places like the Weber State Online Writing Center, the Michigan State University Online Writing Center, the Online Writing Center at the University of Nevada Reno, the WSU OWL, and the Cyberspace Writing Center Consultation Project. That said, there is much to learn from these narratives, particularly if you, like me, are trying to construct an online writing center (if you're at all interested in my attempt, click here) that will allow physically absent students to connect with tutors. In fact, the narratives describing the birth of the WSU OWL and the MSU OWL reminded me of several things that I need to keep in mind: from WSU's experience, the fact that every OWL webmaster will be torn between the desire to write a technically beautiful page and one that everyone can use, and from MSU's experience the idea that we must examine our writing center practices and "how they fit our philosophy" of what a writing center-real or virtual-should be(73).
The next section of Taking Flight With OWLs looks at what could be the most philosophically difficult online practice that OWLs engage in: asynchronous tutoring. Asynchronous peer-tutoring is philosophically difficult-as the authors of section three, "Asynchronous Electronic Tutoring," point out-because writing centers have traditionally been places where writers meet, face to face, to discuss writing. If this is the model of real-time based writing centers-the one on one conference-then how can one reconcile using e-mail, asp programmed OWLs, and BBS-like systems to have tutors respond to a writer who doesn't sit down with them at a table-either in the real or virtual realm?
All the chapters of this section deal in some way with this issue, and what's interesting is the progression. Joannna Castner, in "The Asynchronous, Online Writing Session: A Two-Way Stab in the Dark?" expresses deep concerns about asynchronous tutoring-suggesting even that "perhaps clients should only participate in e-mail sessions if they cannot participate in synchronous sessions or if consultants work with instructors to establish plenty of time for revision" (127). From this cautious reading of the value of asynchronous tutoring, we move to David Carlson and Eileen Apperson-Williams' careful and engaging study, "The Anxieties of Distance: Online Tutors Reflect,"of two tutors-one who found asynchronous peer-tutoring terribly difficult and one who found it enabling. Finally we end with Mark Mabrito's piece, "Email Tutoring and Apprehensive Writers: What Research Tells Us." In this piece Mabrito, quoting Daly and Miller (1975), argues that "high apprehensive writers" might profit from an environment where there is more "psychological distance" between the writing and her work. So, if we follow the progression of the chapters, we move from a reading of asynchronous peer-tutoring that questions, at least at certain times, the need for asynchronous tutoring to a chapter that endorses the use of asynchronous writing to reach a group of students writing centers may not have been reaching before.
The fourth section of Taking Flight With OWLs moves away from the philosophically difficult question of what happens when students and writing center tutors can't meet in real time and takes up the question of what happens when they meet in real time, but in a virtual place. The range of software and hardware that the authors of this section describe is impressive. Jamie Thurber describes how the University of Alaska at Fairbanks used Microsoft's NetMeeting to provide writing center service at a school where "40% of residents live away from the main campuses," and often times are separated from the physically embodied writing center by hundreds of miles (151). Jake Shewmake and Jason Lambert describe how they used a split screen approach to combine chat and a discussion forum program, called Ceilidh, to allow students to both chat and work closely on a text. And finally both Joel English, in "Putting the OO in MOO: Employing Environmental Interaction," and Jane Love, in "Ethics, Plugged and Unplugged: The Pedagogy of Disorderly Conduct," discuss what it means to conference in a MOO. Just as the technology is different, there is a difference between the pieces written about MOOs, Love and English's pieces, and those written about other ways of synchronous learning. The pieces on MOOs tend dig slightly deeper into theoretical concerns than do the other two pieces in this section; with the MOO pieces theorizing more on what living in a virtual world might mean in terms of peer-tutor activity and ethics. This is not to say that Shewmake, Lambert and Thurber don't deal with theoretical issues; they simply aren't foregrounded in the same way that pieces on MOOs are.
Theory is the foreground, and the background, of the last section of Taking Flight With OWLs. In this section, "Looking to the Future," everything from expanding community-writing center partnerships to creating "Interversity" is discussed, and thus it is hard to really arrive at any sort of collective theme for this section. However, in a rough and only marginally accurate way, one could say that three chapters--"Making Up Tomorrow's Agenda and Shopping Lists Today: Preparing for Future Technologies in Writing Centers," "Centering in the Distance: Writing Centers, Inquiry, and Technology," and "The Near and Distant Futures of OWL and the Writing Center," present an attempt to tie OWL practice to what has happened before, both in OWLs and physically embodied writing centers. Muriel Harris, Gail Cummins, and the group of Barbara J. Monroe, Rebecca Rickly, William Condon, and Wayne Butler all seem interested in building upon current OWL and writing center practice, with the group of Monroe, Rickly, Condon, and Butler most clearly summarizing the consensus (if such a thing exists of this group): "We must move outward, with all the responsibility that comes increased visibility, but we must continue to look inward as well, examining our goals, our mission, who we are, and who we would like to become" (222).
The other piece in "Looking to the Future" is a voice that is not as much about reflection as it is about forward movement. In "How Many Technoprovocateurs Does It Take to Create Interversity" Eric Crump (the web-maven of NCTE and general technoprovocateur) claims that "It's time to take our collective feet off the brakes so we can get beyond the well-known world of education and into the world of the other side" (233). In this last chapter, Crump foretells the death of the traditional classroom, the ebbing of institutional hierarchies, and the creating of a multi-geographic Interversity-"a mooshing of Internet and university, meant to suggest the convergence of the two social institutions, hopefully to the benefit of both and to the benefit of us" (230)!
As I read Crump's piece, I couldn't help but think two things. First, is there a dark side to this Interversity-to this world where the particular classroom is no more? Second, if Crump's right, then what sort of OWL are we going to have flying around the Internet?
Of course I couldn't answer those questions, and if I did you'd probably be paying $200 an hour for my wisdom, rather than reading it here on the "free" web. Still, these are interesting questions to ponder, and they're the sort of questions that Taking Flight With OWLs: Examining Electronic Writing Center Work ask and address with great breadth and elan. I'm thankful that we have Taking Flight with OWLs, that we have this multitude of voices hooting about what it means to be an OWL.
Wiring the Writing Center links to Utah State University Press.
Whenever possible in this page, I try to direct you to the homepages of the authors-or at least the homepages of their institutions, departments or writing centers, so that you can get a sense of their institutional contexts and concerns.
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