In this blog carnival, we, writing center personnel, center on how emerging digital technologies have been impacting the writing center world. Therefore, we invited reflections from writing center tutors and administrators across geographical, linguistic, and cultural contexts to explore how they think and imagine the connections between digital literacy, multimodal composition, and writing centers (see the full CFP here.). What resulted is seven unique yet interconnected blog posts that serve as starting points for current and prospective writing center professionals and literacy advocates to collectively think about ways the interrelatedness of digital literacies and writing center studies could evolve the…
Author: Bri Lafond
Saurabh Anand, Sarah Fischer
Dr. Bri Lafond (she/her) is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Millikin University and Virtual Events Chair of the Online Writing Centers Association. She researches content creators’ multimedia composing practices as well as how various technologies impact writing center tutoring, training, and governance.
Before accepting my role as Assistant Director of the California State University, Channel Islands Writing & Multiliteracy Center (WMC), I understood asynchronous tutoring as additional support for students to utilize when the incentive to attend a synchronous session was unavailable (either because of their schedules or other personal reasons). Writing centers in the past have offered asynchronous feedback through email exchanges and text-based comments left on student papers (Denton, 2017; Bell, 2011), yet what distinguished them from the synchronous sessions also provided was the inability for students to converse with tutors in a live setting. This was my understanding of…
We were ahead of the curve. In the summer of 2022, four months before ChatGPT burst onto the scene, we sent out our usual July message to tutors at UConn’s Writing Center, reminding them about August orientation dates and that everyone would need to bring a draft essay based on a pair of readings. Here’s part of that message: Read the two articles linked below, both about writing and artificial intelligence, then ask, How should writing centers anticipate and respond to the AI futures discussed in these articles? You can take any number of different angles—practical, philosophical, ethical, cultural, educational,…
During my formal education as an English and Portuguese language and literature undergraduate major in Brazil, I learned English through traditional methods like timed exams, grammar drills, and textbooks, and was mostly discouraged from using technology. This approach left me feeling inadequate, and I soon internalized that “writing in English was not for me.” Despite teaching English to Brazilians, I never felt confident in my written pieces in English. Everything changed when I started volunteering at CAPA, the Academic Publishing Advisory Center— a writing center in southern Brazil where I acted as a translator and tutor, translating faculty and graduate…