OWLs, Collaboration and Community

Godbee, Beth. “Community Building in Online Writing Centers.” Praxis 2.2 (2005): 5 pp. Oct. 2008.

Online tutorials can only strengthen writing center activities if they facilitate the growth of community. This can be done by exploiting their potential for networking and using tutoring practices that promote collaboration. Such communities promote democracy in education for they are more inclusive. They reduce the golf between the production and consumption of texts in that the interactive, dynamic nature of online texts encourages readers to be a part of their creation. They also allow students to see that writing is a social and community activity that fosters collaboration. OWLs also eliminate the historical debate over writing center location by decentralizing them. Conferences are not purely instrumental for they do not simply re-produce the f2f tutorial. Synchronous online tutorials provide a hypermediated environment that encourages collaboration. There is a need to take full advantage of this collaborative environment and move from the one to one model that limits interaction towards a collaborative model that incorporates work-shopping and small group sessions. Online tutorials also reduce the view that power is focused in the tutor. They also force writers to become more aware of the writing process in that they must write online. This writer adopts a very positive view of online tutorials. In contrast to other writers who argue that the online tutorial undermines collaboration that is so important to writing center tutoring, she explores the way in which online tutorials can promote and enhance collaboration. She also extends the notion of collaboration, which has been primarily viewed as collaboration between tutor and student, to include the idea of community collaboration. In so doing, she seems to hold an instrumental theory of technology.