Keywords
synchronous, video chat, Skype, Google Docs, rhetorical canon of delivery, performance, program description, graduate students, accessibility, low-bridge technology, student revision, pedagogy
First Paragraph
As recent articles in Writing Lab Newsletter and elsewhere demonstrate, the writing center community has shown great interest in exploring the question of how to best use technology as a way to deliver tutorials to distance learners or expand the writing center’s hours of operation. For example, in a 2010 “Geek in the Center” column in WLN, Jackie Grutsch McKinney provides a chart to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of many online conferencing options, including Adobe Connect, Elluminate Live, Skype, and Google Docs (13). In what follows, I briefly situate this conversation about distance tutoring within the rhetorical canon of delivery. Then, I describe my own experiences tutoring in a graduate writing center (GWC) at Penn State University as a way to add experiential examples to Grutsch McKinney’s discussion of Skype and Google Documents (Google Docs). While graduate students’ circumstances represent a greater need for distance consulting than is perhaps experienced by undergraduates, the techniques we developed and the lessons we learned are not particular to graduate writers. I hope this discussion shows what is possible with experimentation and provides a possible theoretical framework, through my discussion of delivery, for evaluating those experiments. Ultimately, using my experiences with Skype and Google Docs as a model, I argue that by focusing on how choices about delivering tutorials coincide with the values of a center, writing centers can critically assess the strengths and weaknesses of approaches to distance tutoring.
Citation Information
Type of Publication: Newsletter Article
Author: Sarah Summers
Year of Publication: 2013
Title: “Delivering Distance Consultations with Skype and Google Docs”
Newsletter: Writing Lab Newsletter, Volume 37, Issue 7-8
Page Range: 10-13