Generating New Theory for Online Writing Instruction (OWI)

Challenging My Assumptions

In this node, I use narrative to share and contextualize some of my experiences in learning and questioning the online environment. To some degree, these experiences are similar to other practitioners’ stories about their own growth, development, and questions related to online writing instruction [OWI] (Boiarsky, 1990; Schroeder and Boe, 1990; Coogan, 1995; Gardner, 1998; Weeks, 2000; Thomas, Hara, and DeVoss, 2000; Colpo, Fullmer, and Lucas, 2000; Miraglia and Norris, 2000; and Jordan-Henley and Maid, 2000).

My early growth as a computer user was labored and slow, and I never imagined that I would become a user of advanced network technologies.  Making a transition from using the typewriter to mastering the computer’s word processing capabilities was an unnatural process for me back in 1990.  For one thing, I initially felt compelled to learn to use computers not from a felt-sense or interest, but from a pragmatic need to keep my job as a college teacher and a desire to advance as a professional.  To make the transition, I had to learn an entirely new technology of which I was suspicious, not least because I doubted my own ability to master it.  I had never even learned all of the electronic features of my typewriter when I exchanged that tool for a machine that required one 5 ½” floppy disk to boot up, another to load a DOS-based WordPerfect, and another to spell check.  My vocabulary increased in bits and bytes and often I swore like a sailor in abject frustration.  Eventually, though, I began to see a benefit to word processing for my writing, where now my fingers can type almost as quickly as my mind can think.

Once I had made that uncomfortable transition, I began to think about computer applications for college-level writing instruction.  As an experienced teacher but a novice graduate student in rhetoric and composition in 1993, I first began to explore my own questions about OWI.  I soon found that much of the literature was inadequate for helping me to answer those questions.  Realizing that my needs probably reflected those of other professionals, I understood that my research agenda into OWI could contribute, if modestly, to our collective knowledge.

My initial approach to OWI was skepticism toward the sweeping claims that some researchers and practitioners made in favor of using computers to teach writing.  Spurred by my curiosity about those claims, I piloted computer-mediated communication (CMC) for The Catholic University of America's English Department. I researched and selected the software, read all the articles I could find, and taught in a networked computer classroom.  With a partner teacher, I developed some new instructional practices and carefully observed my students' behavior and writing in the CMC environment.  Reporting to my Writing Program Director, I thought about the implications for CMC at programmatic levels and assisted her by training other teachers to begin their work in this medium. 

In order to integrate these experiences into my teaching repertoire, I had to confront my biases and assumptions about writing instruction and how I approached students in the traditional face-to-face (f2f) environment.  My most significant bias was that I believed that f2f interaction was vital to helping students develop their writing; I could not imagine how using a computer to mediate that communication would help students as well as I or their peers could in live interactions.  But, the benefits of confronting my bias, I learned, were that I could ask tough questions and then develop research that would force me to move as far from those biases as possible—until they either were disproved or proven. 

At the root of my problem was whether I thought there was anything distinctively different about working in the CMC environment and what, if anything, I might need to change to work with students using CMC.  My initial hunch was that there was no significant difference and that the claims that researchers were making for CMC’s value might not be supportable, since many of the claims were supported anecdotally rather than empirically (Barker and Kemp, 1990; Cyganowski, 1990; Boiarsky, 1990; Spitzer; 1990; Selfe, 1992; Faigley; 1992, Tuman, 1992; and Wyche-Smith, 1995).  The next logical step for me was to challenge my own position by developing my dissertation research around CMC.

I conducted a comparative study of the influence that peer response group talk has on revision when the talk occurred both f2f and using CMC (Hewett, 1998, 2000).  The form of CMC was a text-sharing and asynchronous chat medium (Norton’s Textra Connect for DOS.  The study, a practice-based naturalistic inquiry, involved linguistic analysis of talk transcripts from both media, rhetorical and textual analyses of the peer-reviewed writing-in-progress, and individual/group interviews.  My study sampled a small group and cannot be broadly generalized.  However, its systematic, naturalistic, and empirical focus suggests ways to explore further how to help students use asynchronous CMC to develop their writing, as well as how to discern areas to study about uses of synchronous CMC. 

This study did not support my initial hunch that using f2f and CMC to talk about and revise writing are essentially the same, although it did present at least one intuitively expected finding.

• First, not surprisingly, I learned that students do make use of peer response feedback and conversation in both the f2f and CMC environments.  The implication is that CMC has a potential to teach writing (from peer to peer and from expert to novice) like that of f2f peer response group work and that we should continue efforts to tap this medium for OWI.

• Second, interviews with students revealed that they believed they used each other's feedback less than textual analyses of their writing reveal that they did. The implication is that even qualitative evidence, such as interview responses, regarding the efficacy of any writing instruction should be suspect unless verified with other empirical data.

• Third, and most important for my research questions, I found that student feedback had a different quality when they talked synchronously in the traditional f2f and asynchronously in the CMC environments.  Students offered more directive, locally focused feedback in the CMC environment and more abstract, globally focused feedback when talking in the f2f environment.  The implications are several:
  • The asynchronous environment may naturally support a less flexible, give-and-take discussion than a f2f environment;
  • Students may need assistance in learning to use the asynchronous environment to develop ideas together when sharing their writing; and
  • Synchronous CMC media may present different possibilities for sharing writing and idea development.
• A fourth finding was that students used the feedback in different ways when their writing was shared in the f2f and the CMC environments, leading them to appropriate the ideas generated together more fluidly when they discussed their writing f2f than when they discussed it using the asynchronous CMC of Connect.  One of the implications of this finding is that we need to interrogate what I believe to be a conflicting notion about collaborative learning often expressed in education and composition-based literature: that students should collaborate with each other and with teachers/tutors, but that they should not appropriate or use directly the words generated during that collaboration (see Spiegelman, 1998 for further discussion).  From my study, I began to see that when students collaborate to generate ideas, they might feel freer to appropriate group-generated ideas when they talk orally than when they talk textually, an issue that has prompted me to challenge my perception of collaborative learning, a stance most often associated with Social Constructivism.  I consider this particular implication in the review of OWI-based literature.

Although I have retained my skepticism about working with the online media—a necessary stance for critical questioning—the implications of my study have influenced my subsequent thinking about OWI and learning. 

After completing my doctoral work, I began to work with computers at the writing program level, first in terms of continuing the use of CMC in composition classes and training other teachers to use CMC with the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment in their classrooms.  Then I developed a prototype online writing lab (OWL) for the Community College of Baltimore County, designed to some degree on Clint Gardner's (1998) model. My goal was to enlarge the writing center's scope to be more inclusive for a community college population of commuter and nontraditional students who cannot always access the traditional writing center, but who deserve opportunities to use its resources. 

In particular, I hoped that the OWL would support the writing center mission as integrally as the writing center supported the writing program's mission.  Although educators have important concerns as to whether a writing center might “belong” to an English Department or to another, more centralized program such as a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program (Carino, 2001; Haviland, Fye, and Colby, 2001), my vision here purposefully sidesteps that issue as one for another day’s debate.  In my view, a writing center resides at the center of the writing program, wherever that writing program resides within an institution.  The writing program, using both f2f and CMC, can encompass various levels and genres of writing, and attends to interdisciplinary writing.  Like the hub of a wheel, the writing center supports the writing program.  The OWL, which is the writing center’s primary link to OWI, is like a ball bearing inside that hub, integral to its work.  Using this analogy, sound OWI and other distance instructional opportunities can support a writing program’s mission theoretically and practically.  What exactly comprises sound OWI, however, has not yet been identified, a good reason for adopting a theory-generating stance, as this webtext asserts.

Of course, all educators and scholars have some theoretical biases that guide their practices.  One of my biases is outlined above: I think that writing center work is central to the functioning of any healthy writing program, and I think that OWLs, by their nature as OWI, can support and expand writing center work beyond both brick-and-mortar boundaries and current instructional and theoretical boundaries.  Another of my biases as a writing program and writing center director, as well as a teacher, is that an eclectic mix of theoretical constructs is necessary to teaching that creates student-centered engagement.  Thus, I keep a broad array of tools in my rhetorical toolbox, if you will.  For different teaching situations and goals, I see applications in various theoretical tenets, or schools of thought, such as the collaboration of Social Constructivism, the personal ownership of Expressivism, the audience and purpose-based focus of Neo-Classicism, as well as the correctness focus of the Current Traditional, among others.  The last one, of course, is the most risky theoretical construct to admit of any value, yet I cannot dismiss the apparent need that some students have at different times to receive direct and critically focused instruction.  Thus, my bias toward an eclectic approach to the unknown in writing instruction necessarily will be apparent in this webtext. 

Nearly two years ago, I was offered an unusually rich opportunity to expand my knowledge and skills by developing a self-contained writing program for SMARTHINKING's OWL. This OWL would be a private, for-profit online learning support program for post-secondary students.  I took this job because it placed me in the position of developing a large scale OWL that would engage professional tutors who trained, interacted, and worked entirely online and at a distance.  This initiative was new, something that had never been done in higher education, and necessarily made me test my assumptions about what might work in distance OWI.  Taking the job was a bit frightening, as I quickly discovered that an educational initiative in a for-profit situation is devalued by many skeptical academics as both inferior and a territorial encroachment.

As OWL Coordinator, I developed a principle-centered writing program with what I considered to be appropriate tenets of contemporary writing instruction:

1. The OWL's mission would be to coach and teach students, not fix papers or give answers.

2. It would attend to the most basic rhetorical principles in terms of addressing first the writer's audience and purpose and second to the higher order over the lower order writing issues.  This principle would always give tutors some practical starting or fallback position, even with the most challenging of student writing problems.

3. Finally, the OWL’s affective environment would encourage an open-minded, yet skeptical, stance regarding online learning support.  The purpose was to develop a collaborative culture that pushes known boundaries, yet acknowledges how little we actually know about the efficacy of any writing instruction: f2f, CMC, or online asynchronous or synchronous tutorials.

For students, a SMARTHINKING, Inc.™ OWL interaction can occur in three basic ways. One type of interaction is an asynchronous essay exchange, where tutors review essays and coach students by providing embedded local commentary and global end commentary about writing issues that students raise in their submission forms, as well as those issues the tutors believe need to be addressed.  Another type of interaction is synchronous, using a real-time whiteboard with chat capabilities.  In the whiteboard classrooms, students are coached on early writing process issues such as idea generation and organization, as well as on sentence-level issues like grammar and mechanics.  A third type of interaction occurs with the computer and not a human, when students access and respond to interactive writing instruction modules. 

Behind the scenes, the tutors interact among themselves through near-real time chat and an asynchronous listserv.  Perhaps most important to developing their professional practices and to investigating their own assumptions, tutors have access to each other’s archived interactions, which enables them to evaluate and review both their own and each other’s work in this new environment.  Thus, a culture of mutual and self-reflection exists that is rich with potential for questioning and understanding OWI in new ways.  The extended tutor listserv discussion provided in this webtext is an example of this culture. In this node, tutors explore theoretical and practical issues relevant to synchronous whiteboard tutorials.  Their exchange demonstrates how a highly collaborative, critical environment invites professionals from different institutional backgrounds to develop and question their practices based both on theory and common experiences.

Developing and coordinating the SMARTHINKING, Inc.™ Writing Program and OWL required that I continue to challenge my assumptions about the prevailing and popular theories that ground contemporary OWI discussions.  These experiences have profoundly influenced my thinking and questions about OWI. I have come to think that something happens in the online learning environment that is distinctive from the f2f one—but I still am not sure exactly what these distinctions are.  Neither am I sure whether and how OWI is efficacious.  In fact, the more deeply I go into this investigation of OWI, the further I go from being able to use the current theory and literature to help me understand my questions.