Seeing the One-to-One Writing Conference Through Owl Eyes: Reimagining the Voice of Tutor

The one-to-one, face-to-face writing conference has long been hailed a godsend for struggling writers. The traditional IRL ("in real life") tutorial takes many shapes: (professor and student in office, tutor and student in library, tutor and student in writing center, etc.). When this writing conference moves into the MOO (Multi-User Domain, Object-Oriented), how does the environment affect student-tutor interaction? More specifically, what sorts of adjustments from the "normal" writing conference must be made in order for an effective conversation to occur in the synchronous OWL? This project brings the one-to-one writing tutorial to distance learning students at Old Dominion University through LinguaMOO. Students in a 300-level Introduction to Rhetoric course participate in writing conferences for various assignments. The conferences with these students (fifteen total) are logged and subsequently archived for review. In studying the transcripts, several conventions of the traditional writing conference appear out of place within the context of a synchronous online tutorial. This project seeks to describe the online synchronous writing conference with respect to traditional writing center theory through the analysis and coding of a series of the conference transcripts.