In Richmond’s Eng. 383 course that trains our Writing Consultants, I used to run across Michael Pemberton’s “Planning for Hypertexts in the Writing Center . . . Or Not,” warning about technology in our practices:
Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves whether it is really the writing center’s responsibility to be all things to all people. There will always be more to learn. There will always be new groups making demands on our time and our resources in ways we haven’t yet planned for. (306)
My short answer for new media writing is “we had best be this one new thing to as many people as possible, or some other organization will do it for us and perhaps put us out of business.”
As this community of Writing Center professionals grows online, taking its place alongside WCenter , WLN, and other treasured print and digital resources, I want to stake a strong claim as to why I disagree, in a civil but nearly absolute manner, with Pemberton’s claim.
My response is one most applicable to those starting Writing Centers in places that have never had them or even a tradition of what we Yanks call “peer tutoring.” The ethos accrued in helping writers with new-media projects could be immense. Such clout will help to protect centers and their staff from what I’m seeing here in the States, an ever-more predatory environment as campus services compete for budgets in a time of austerity.
What Has Changed Since 2003
Pemberton’s article does not appear in the current edition of The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors, and that may be a mistake. Though the nature of the digital landscape has changed greatly since the piece first appeared in 2003, and what was then called “hypertext” has morphed, some of the author’s concerns remain valid.
Our Center took a version of Pemberton’s first stratagem to “treat hypertexts like any other texts.” As time as gone on, I’m convinced more than ever that if we do not adapt our practices to writing with and as new media, other units on our campuses will, and Writing Centers will lose their institutional ethos, if not existence.
We began the shift to tutoring new-media projects by making them ourselves, then using them to strengthen the center’s online presence.
As I began this post, in the office next to me one of my Consultants with a flair for HTML coding was doing some hand-turned code for our latest handbook for Writing in the Disciplines. That handbook, even compared to my academic publications, is the accomplishment that has made me proudest in my 21 years of service to Richmond and its writers. Faculty have taken to contributing eagerly; they may not want to code, but they want to share expertise and use the finished project in their courses.
As much as I respect my co-workers in Information Services and our other campus centers that provide peer tutoring, these offices do not have the pedagogical background to make such a site about writing. We do. Luckily, our colleagues also lack the inclination, as they have enough to do! That may differ on other campuses, especially when new offices begin to compete for aspects of student academic support.
If other campus services that might build such a site plan to do so here, staking a claim to this part of the Internet, will find my surveyors’ flags already planted. Since Pemberton’s article first appeared, the Internet “went mainstream” for teaching and learning on campus. Locally, we have faculty asking students to do digital stories, video-enhanced analytical writing, and more. Such projects are increasingly creeping into the Humanities disciplines as well.
We’d be foolish to ignore the sea change and stick to the 20th century artifact of stapled and printed papers for training. They still form the bulk of our work, but for how long will that continue?
While there is much room for collaboration with others on campus, I’d claim that writing centers should at least shape, if not own, writing on campuses. Someone will do this work. It should be us.
How Tutor Training Changed
I do not teach HMTL code or Photoshop techniques in class. Instead, we spend more time considering the rhetorical differences of print and new media work, the power of still and moving images, the use of good documentary techniques (bear with the film maker for the first 13 seconds!), and concept of linking as a new form of punctuation (Johnson).
Students tend to produce rough drafts of the new-media materials such as our handbook, using the powerful, but easily mastered, wiki tools at Google Sites. Later I take these drafts to the next level of consistency and completion, employing a few Consultants who complete advanced training with me.
Faculty have begun to note and praise the work, and that helps us maintain our reputation for pedagogical innovation. Those trying such projects locally must consider a few aspects of planning, such as the scope of one’s audience, IP rights, and the practicalities of recruiting and paying a few new-media assistants who can bring one’s Web presence up to current standards while making it readily available on the sorts of hardware one finds in labs and, most assuredly, in students’ palms.
In particular, I hope that other writing centers will adopt our practice of publishing open-access content, outside the gated communities of course-management systems and under the provisions of Creative-Commons licensing.
Then we should share widely, publicize locally, and stake our claims to the next generation of writers and the sorts of work they produce.
Works Cited
Johnson S. Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and
Communicate. Basic Books, New York, 1997.
Pemberton, M. “Planning for Hypertexts in the Writing Center . . . or Not.” The St. Marin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. 3rd Ed. Eds. Christina Murphy & Steve Sherwood. New York: Bedford St. Martins, 2008: 294-308
jessid, you sure can be proud of that handbook! It is a great resource, offering a wealth of ideas for people with all kinds of disciplinary background. Thanks for sharing this.
I absolutely agree with you when you call the failure to acknowledge the importance of digital text production “foolish”. Most students I get to see in my seminars and conferences do not produce their texts with pen and paper anymore. Not long ago, one of my groups agreed that digital writing allows writers to keep up with the speed of their thoughts during writing, whereas analog writing slows writers down and makes writing more painful and tough. Some stated that it is only in digital writing environments that they get to understand Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow”. However, while more and more students express positive attitudes towards writing in digital environments, most of my colleagues remain skeptical and even averse.
I am involved in teacher training and get to see many pre-service teachers who sooner or later will be expected to be able to procure writing competence. Sometimes I am quite appalled by the negligence their training pays to digital literacies. I often wonder: what do these students learn in the writing center that a) prepares them for their job and b) helps them prepare the children they will work with for the literacy challenges ahead?
I think, other than in Pemberton’s article, the important questions for writing centers do not revolve around web design, how to build webpages and such. I believe writing centers should concern themselves with writing; alhough they don’t have to jump on every bandwagon, they have to change when writing changes. And it has – and still is.
Adjusting one of Pemberton’s questions, I wonder: how should writing centers prepare to accommodate digital literacies? A first sound step in this endeavor, I guess, would be to set a good example for how these literacies can be harnessed in personal learning environments, for how ‘knowledge workers’ can make use of the heuristic potential of (digital) writing.
The “seductions of technology”, as Pemberton puts it, do not necessarily have to lead to a ‘dilusion’ of writing centers’ “core values”; they can be reframed as incentives for autonomous learning.
Luckily, Pemberton’s article ends on a much more positive note than I expected: personal apprehensions should not interfere with our “efforts to learn and wor with the new rethorical forms that technology brings about”. I subscribe to that. Back in 2003 the buzzword was “hypertext”, maybe today it should be “digital scholarship”, “connectivism” or simply “web 2.0”. On the way from collective intelligence to collaborative intelligence ( http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2006/04/power_law_of_pa.html) , there is a wealth of opportunities for writing centers to contribute the expertise that sets them apart from other units and still be true to their basic beliefs.