The RSCC
Online Writing Lab

MOOving Along the Information Superhighway:
Writing Centers in Cyberspace

by Jennifer Jordan-Henley and Barry M. Maid

This document may be used according to the Fair Use Doctrine as long as it is done entirely with all attributions to the authors and the Writing Lab Newsletter. Commercial distribution is strictly prohibited. It appeared in the January 1995 issue (19:5, 1-6). For further information on subscriptions and manuscript submissions, send inquiries to: http://owl.trc.purdue.edu/Files/newsletter.html or e-mail to: Mary Jo Turley
Send regular mail to: Muriel Harris, editor, Writing Lab Newsletter, Department of English, 1356 Heavilon Hall, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-1356. The authors may be contacted at:Jennifer Jordan-Henley and Barry M. Maid
It has always seemed to us that all writing takes place in a kind of virtual reality involving one's vision, one's ideas, and one's voice. When viewed in this manner, creating a writing center in Cyberspace is not a particularly alien concept.
Like many writing instructors, we believe that while the ability to use one's imagination and to whittle words into distinct meanings has often been seen as either a gift or as something we hammer into students by rote repetition, it is neither. It is an unfolding process, highly personal in nature and bound closely to motivation and purpose. The process can be imaginative and free-flowing, or dull and restrictive. Success is up to both the instructor and the student.
It is, however, the instructor's responsibility to discover methods of allowing a student the opportunity to flourish and make choices. And Cyberspace offers the instructor another method of tapping the sometimes illusive reservoir of imagination and motivation.
Early this year, the two of us met in Cyberspace and realized that our schools and interests were a good match for creating a Cyberspace project. Barry, an associate professor at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, had graduate students who needed teaching and consultation experience. Jennifer, as director of the writing center at the Oak Ridge branch of Roane State Community College in Tennessee, had undergraduate students who needed writing consultants, but no graduate students or even upper-division students to help.
This article describes the pilot project of the Cyberspace Writing Center Consultation Project, which brings our students together using the Internet.

The Project

The idea is simple; the community college students at RSCC e-mail their class essays to graduate students at UALR. The graduate students give a written consultation, e-mailing the essays back to the community college students for revision. A meeting time is also set up for a one-on-one consultation at a Cyberspace writing center. At this writing center, the two students can meet with privacy and discuss the paper in more detail after the RSCC student has had a chance to look it over and formulate questions.
While the idea is simple, we found the process complex. We had to learn rudimentary programming in order to build the Centers, write instructional handouts for our students, learn to post to gophers, and schedule two classes across time zones.

Background

We began our dabbling in Cyberspace almost simultaneously. Unexpected release time had given us both a semester to explore the Internet. Like many of the readers of WCenter, we became familiar with each other's names and philosophy through the list, finally meeting at one of the Tuesday Night Cafe discussions hosted on-line by Tari Fanderclai and Greg Sierling at MediaMOO.
What interested us both then, and still does today, were the possibilities of Cyberspace, both for us and for our students. We wondered what this vast amount of communication and on-line availability of research resources would do to education, to the individual, and to writing, in particular. As we noticed that our own method of dialogue began to change in subtle ways, we wondered in what way the Internet would strengthen or weaken writing style.
MediaMOO, where we began our learning process, is a computer space located at MIT that is available for people to meet and hold synchronous discussions. Similar spaces are used for our writing centers at other locations. A MOO is a Multi-user dimension (M), Object Oriented (OO), that is text based and allows for the manipulation of virtual objects. MediaMOO itself is composed almost exclusively of media and writing professionals.
But not all MOOs are so professional, and MUDs, in particular, have been the focus of debate, in part because they originated as little more than sophisticated Internet games and were often not viewed as a serious workplace. Computer-mediated communication takes place in a variety of locations and for a variety of reasons, including recreational ones far removed from an academic environment. We believe, however, that it is limiting to judge all computer environments in the same way. To use the argument that MUDs have been abused (or could be) as a justification for keeping students off the Internet is akin to telling them they cannot use a telephone because they might just make or be exposed to an obscene phone call.
To create and use available technology to enhance the teaching environment is our purpose, and we feel that it is projects such as this that give students access into a technological world and help to define the medium as an acceptable alternative to traditional classroom teaching.

Possibilities and Rationale

Among the many arguments for using Cyberspace in classrooms are those of Tari Fanderclai of the University of Louisville, who uses MUDs primarily because they offer that alternative. "MUDs provide my students with contact with people from all over, bringing the viewpoints of other cultures and subcultures into our little world," Fanderclai states.
Students get to try on new ideas, new ways of being, new ways of interacting. Combined with e-mail, MUDs let us collaborate with people we'd otherwise never even meet. . . . And MUDs disrupt the hierarchy of the traditional classroom, giving students more power and responsibility and a chance to learn to use it wisely in order to accomplish what we need to accomplish.
These are some of the broader issues relating to teaching in Cyberspace. And it is worth noting that many of Fanderclai's arguments also pertain to the traditional writing center, which is often based on the idea of collaboration, student responsibility, and the sharing of power.
But the rationale for the project extends further. We would add that students become more proficient with computers, software, and keyboarding, all skills that will serve them well in the future. They become aware of the availability of instant communication and the professional and personal dangers inherent in such a medium. They expand their research possibilities and are given the opportunity to explore how they might use the Internet in their future employment. Students also learn other, not so obvious, communication strategies. They learn to write more quickly, to express themselves more clearly and concisely.
Narrative skill is also enhanced. Anyone who spends time at a MUD finds themselves not only listening to a conversation, but within an unfolding story; by joining in, they become part of the story themselves. As Eric Crump remarks, "if we look at all of literature, including scholarly publication, as being one long, vast, intricate and diverse conversation, then the discussion on-line can be seen as part of the same discourse. The conversation is [simply] migrating to a new media."
For those students who also learn programming skill--how to build additional spaces to the MOO--their critical analysis skills improve. Students learn more about cause and effect and apply it to a textual environment--something that might not have ever have occurred to many of them, especially those who are not fluent in the areas of reading and writing. And because an environment is created for them on-line, they can see the connection between a narrative description and how they envision the world around them.
We also expected drawbacks. Communicating so swiftly, as anyone who has used e-mail knows, creates a hotbed of typographical errors, not to mention poor phrasing, grammar, punctuation, and a tendency to say too quickly what it might have been wiser to give further thought. Additionally, some students are just not ready for Cyberspace, either because they lack keyboard experience, have never used a computer, or are tentative or frightened by the whole idea.
While working on this project we also discovered that a very different type of relationship is formed between colleagues than what we might have formed had we been down the hall from each other. Lack of body language and eye contact meant that we weren't always clear in our meanings to each other and often had to clarify our positions. When it came time to announce our project to our respective administrations, we realized that we had developed some trust between us, but that it wasn't as fully realized as it might have been had we actually known one another in person, and we certainly didn't transfer the trust to others who became involved at our respective schools. We also had to deal with differing levels of technical expertise at our schools and unforeseen Internet difficulties such as lag or inability to connect. We learned to have a backup ready.
 


 
 
 
 

Preplanning
 

We began by talking, but it wasn't long before we started teaching ourselves how to add our own spaces to MediaMOO. When we decided to begin building writing centers, we became more serious in this endeavor and started to avail ourselves of the tutorials and on-line assistance MediaMOO offered. Almost every day one of us would meet someone new, and we began to learn exponentially. We branched out to other MOOs, availed ourselves of their services, and then regrouped at MediaMoo to share what we learned.
Once the project was a definite go, Barry wrote a proposal for the National Peer Tutoring Conference to be held in Birmingham this fall. The paper was written in Microsoft Word. Barry then pasted it from Word directly into MediaMoo where Jennifer read and edited it. We worked, in short, just as if we were in the same room together at the same time.
            We realized early on that both sets of students would need very clear instructions and that we wanted the pilot project to be closely supervised so that we could receive useful and in-depth input from our students. We therefore limited the project to one introductory literature class and one graduate class.
Jennifer then wrote detailed instructions for using both e-mail and MUDs. The instructions cover the step-by-step procedures of logging on as well as how to talk, emote, whisper, and page. Additionally, she wrote consultation guidelines for Barry's graduate students telling them about RSCC and what her expectations were as an instructor. She wrote an evaluation form, a syllabus statement, a net etiquette guide and, to help others create such projects, a textual blueprint of our final writing center design with building hints. Together with a full description of the project and the NPTC proposal, Jennifer then put all of this information on the Roane State gopher so that anyone with Internet access can obtain it by typing gopher rscc.cc.tn.us.
Again, all of the brainstorming, writing, and editing occurred on-line and through e-mail correspondence before it was actually placed on the gopher. In short, we did what we expected our students to do.
Concurrently, we began to build the writing centers themselves. There are several MOOs that accept students and are considered academic environments rather than recreational or professional ones. And these locales differ more than a casual observer might think. While some MOOs attempt to make the student feel at home by offering a traditional environment complete with the long corridors and grassy knolls of a college campus, others choose a combination of maps and narrative and are more creative--allowing the students to keep one foot in the traditional environment while probing anything that their imaginations can take in.
Since we see Cyberspace as a place where students can escape the traditional classroom and find new ways of learning, we chose to build our centers at locales that were not laden with building codes and rules and that allowed flexibility and freedom. We sought balance.
As a matter of fact, we started out with only one rule that all readers of WLN should be familiar with: any writing center we built had to be located near a body of water. One pleasant outcome of building in Cyberspace is that the builder/programmer has unlimited resources, complete autonomy, and almost full control of the setting, within the guidelines of the MOO. One of our Centers is actually constructed on an island in the middle of a river. Located at CollegeTownMOO in Storm Lake, Iowa, students log on, take the Underground Walkway to Prospero's Isle and step onto a woody island that is meant to be a retreat for writers. The island offers trails, a swimming hole, cabins, and a graystone building which houses the writing center.
Inside, the Center has an idea board for writing terms and help, a robot lab assistant that works cheerfully for 24 hours a day and can answer simple questions, and even an M&M dispenser. A hot-air balloon on the deck is geared toward curing writer's block. It can transport students to other areas of the MOO where they can disembark and poke around
We built a similar space on DaedalusMOO, where one of the chief attractions for our students is the ability to log in and create a temporary 28-day character on the spot. This allows students to use their own names or nicknames instead of referring to each other as guests.
There are five main rooms where students can hold private writing consultations, in addition to the deck area, which overlooks the water. The two conference rooms, one formal and one informal, are named after our schools. The outdoor areas may also be used for consultations or group meetings. When students are in one room, they cannot hear students in another room. Students can converse with one person, join a group, page each other from different places at the MOO, or even whisper to each other.

The Students

Jennifer's community college students are enrolled in a Composition II course. Their primary focus is writing about literature. None of them had any Cyberspace experience before the project started and at least five of them had no computer experience at all.
Barry's students are graduate students enrolled in a course called "Working with Writers." Originally designed as a teacher training course, Barry reconceived it to have students understand issues that concern all people who work with writers, not only in the classroom but in the workplace as well. The students who comprise these first Cybertutors are a diverse group. A few had experience using e-mail, but none had experienced synchronous communication on the Internet. Some had worked in writing centers either as undergraduates or as graduate assistants. Others had years of experience as classroom teachers.

The First Consultations

Our own experience in Cyberspace has taught us that there may always be unexpected problems with the technology. Yet despite technological snafus, we were sure things would work relatively smoothly. The plan was for the composition students to e-mail drafts of their essays to a special e-mail account. Once Barry received the essays, he would forward them to the Cybertutors' individual accounts. They could then read the essays and send them back to the writers. Thinking that quick responses were important, Barry told his students that they would be expected to return the essays to RSCC within 24 hours.
Jennifer's students started mailing their essays around noon on Tuesday, September 20. Barry's students hung around the UALR writing center all afternoon. Through MOO conversations and phone calls, Barry knew the essays had been mailed; however, nothing showed up in the account. After arriving home, he again checked the account. Still no mail from Roane State. He checked again later, and then the mail started arriving. Unfortunately, the Internet connection had been down for several hours.
All of Jennifer's students were to have listed three possible MOO consultation times. Barry was then to assign the RSCC papers to UALR Cybertutors based on their being able to meet the conference times suggested by her students. He managed to get all the essays forwarded to his students by 9:00 p.m. CDT. A few of Barry's students managed to read the essays that evening. They had either stayed on campus late after an evening class and used one of the campus computer labs or managed to access their mail from home via modem. But most of Barry's students did not check their mail until some time Wednesday. Then they assumed they had 24 hours from the time they first received the essay, not from the time it had been sent. In fact, some of them first received the essay almost 24 hours after it was initially sent.
After having clearly gone over the instructions with his students and handing them the procedures in writing, Barry was fairly confident that his graduate students would be able to follow through. The first response, by Cybertutor Joel English, had both of us smiling. Joel had not only followed instructions to the letter, his comments about the paper were most insightful. We started to feel that things were under control. Then amid the first flush of success, we began to see problems. First of all, we discovered that Jennifer's students were waiting for the responses beyond the 24-hour limit. Then the RSCC students started getting e-mail from Cybertutors which were only confirmations of MOO consultations instead of being full comments about the papers. Then some comments started coming through that were woefully inadequate. And some comments, because of incorrect use of the communication software's margins, were unintelligible. Barry started to do some checking with his students, but his first task was to find them.
Time became a major issue. Jennifer's students needed responses because their lives would take them off-campus where they would not have access to their e-mail accounts. Barry did manage to track his Cybertutors down and discovered part of what was going on. While some of them were oblivious to the problem with the timing, others had taken it upon themselves to e-mail the RSCC students to confirm a MOO consultation and let them know they would be sending comments later. That explained some of the deviations from our original procedures. However, some of Barry's students simply did not follow instructions.
Nonetheless, the project continued, and we prepared for the first on-line conference, which occurred on Thursday, between Joel English, at UALR, and Danielle Johnson, at RSCC. The two of them seemed to adapt very nicely to the MOO environment. They had such a good time that they decided to meet for further work on the paper the next day. Interestingly enough, Joel and Danielle would meet a total of six times for almost six hours on this first round of conferencing.
As the conferences continued, we had a few more high points as well as some more problems, but the majority were ironed out and the second round of conferencing went far more smoothly.
 


 
 
 
 

The Results
 

Despite some initial problems, the student evaluations from the first round of conferences were overwhelmingly enthusiastic. The students were more motivated and had fun. We often overheard laughter from our offices. Additionally, Jennifer's sense is that she saw significantly more interest in revision on the part of her students. She is convinced that the greater revision helped the quality of her students' work. As might be expected, the revised papers were better than the initial drafts, but what we did not expect is that the actual physical process of using Cyberspace seemed to emphasize the student's conception of writing as a process.
The real questions we were looking at concerned the technology. Does it work? Is there a payoff? What kinds of problems would we see arise when our students joined us in Cyberspace? We're beginning to have answers. Yes, it works. Yes, we think there is a payoff. As for the problems, we now think we have a much clearer idea of student issues in Cyberspace.

Student Issues

Different people respond and adapt to Cyberspace in different ways. It is a new environment for almost everyone. We had been regularly participating in synchronous conversations in Cyberspace for almost nine months. For all our students it was a new experience. Barry managed to introduce his students to MOOs all at once. By reserving a university computer lab, he was able to get everyone on a MOO and observe and lead them through their first Cyberspace experience. He was also able to get a fairly good sense of which of his students were adapting most quickly to the new virtual environment.
Jennifer, on the other hand, was at that time working on only two computers, a problem that has since been rectified in her Center, largely due to the success of this project and new labs being installed elsewhere on campus. It is much easier to teach students how to MOO when they can talk to each other online, but even if they cannot, the work can be accomplished through one-on-one attention.
A handful of Barry's students took to Cyberspace like they were born to be virtual. However, some continue to be uncomfortable in virtual environments. The level of comfort, perhaps even more than the level of technical expertise, seems to be of primary importance in the virtual tutorial experience. We were able to tell by reviewing the logs of the conferences that those conferences that seemed to be most successful were the ones where the tutor took the lead in making the RSCC student comfortable.
In many respects this is no different than what we see happen every day in real life writing centers. As students walk into a writing center the first time, they are often nervous, hesitant, and don't know what to expect. It's crucial that real life writing center staff do their best to make the new students feel at ease. As a result, writing center tutors are trained to make new students feel at ease. The best real-life tutors are the ones who ease into their conferences after making the student feel comfortable.
Aware of this, we both counseled the graduate students to take the lead at providing a comfortable feeling, and we pointed out to them that the programmed virtual objects located in the Cyberspace writing centers are themselves designed to make people feel at ease. Some of the students created this comfort in a variety of inventive ways. One provided virtual fried chicken. Another made good use of the coffee pot on Daedalus MOO. Still another was so good at just putting the student at ease that it seemed as though both soon become unaware that they were working in Cyberspace and not sitting and talking across a table in a real-life writing center.
Unfortunately, some of the Cybertutors quickly volunteered their own discomfort and lack of experience in Cyberspace. While they probably did so in order to engender a feeling of empathy with the RSCC student, the result was just the opposite. Graduate students who admitted to feeling uncomfortable in Cyberspace seemed to spawn the same feelings in the students they were working with--not a good way to start a conference. Indeed, those conferences where the tutor admitted to not being knowledgeable did not appear to be productive.
Yet another necessity at making the students comfortable were the real-life writing center tutors at RSCC. These undergraduate tutors sat beside the RSCC student until they had logged in and learned how to talk and emote. They then quietly drifted away, although they stayed within earshot in case they were needed.
One of the most interesting observations about the first round of conferences was the way time became a factor. Perhaps we should have been more conscious of it. We have, after all, spent countless hours in Cyberspace ourselves. Most conferences, even the ones that didn't go as well as planned, lasted at least one hour. However, the students who had good conferences didn't seem satisfied with just a one-hour session. We later discovered that several of the pairs had made their own arrangements to meet for a second or third conference, or, as in Joel and Danielle's case, a sixth. The fact that freshman composition students at a community college showed enough interest that they were willing to spend extra time conferencing about their papers is a compelling indication that Cyberspace tutoring is a viable option to understaffed writing centers that have an Internet connection.

The Future

Several conclusions become clear now that we have actually had students tutor on-line. The first is that all the basic guidelines for peer tutoring experiences hold, and, perhaps, may even be more important in Cyberspace.
No matter who they are, Cybertutors need to be supervised. Barry's tutors came to the project with a wide range of experiences. We found that with one notable exception, the tutors with writing center experience seemed to work better.
As in a real-life writing center, it is also helpful to have the instructor's assignment available, and even better if their expectations are noted. Instructors should also be flexible about due dates.
Since the technology is new to most people, we need to make sure students are comfortable with it. We discovered that whenever there was a problem, it seemed easy to blame it on the technology. As a result, the technology was often used as an excuse by some of the Cybertutors who gave less than adequate responses to the student work. In fact, our observation is that the technology works best when used by people who are comfortable in their task in a real-life setting.

Coda

While building and operating writing centers in Cyberspace was natural for us, we don't expect virtual writing centers to replace the tried-and-true, old-fashioned kind. However, we do expect that as more writing center staff introduce students to Cyberspace, more students will have the opportunity to receive writing consultations and sound writing center theory and practice will become even more important.
 

Works Cited

Crump, Eric. Rhetnet Mission Statement. 1994.
 
Fanderclai, Tari. On-line Lecture. Netoric's Tuesday Cafe Discussion. MediaMOO. 21 June 1994.
 

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