Connection Failed

I had to laugh this morning as I tried to respond to several of my tutors'-in-training blogs, and each time I would hit "post comment," my laptop would tell me: Connection Failed. My comments were lost, and after a few such occurrences, I gave up and stopped trying to comment. (Sorry, tutors!)

The irony, of course, is that my tutors-in-training this past week read about and then practiced online tutoring. Our readings concerned the "Anxieties of Distance" (Carlson and Apperson-Williams) and the unique challenges of "Responding Online" (Rafoth). In my tutors' blogs, I see a range of positions toward online tutoring, from C.'s wholehearted support of the online tutorial to Z.'s adamant denial that online tutoring can be as valuable as the face-to-face tutorial.

My own position falls somewhere in the middle. The greatest danger of online tutoring, of course, is that the connection will faill - not just in the sense that the technology goes wonky on us (although this does happen, I'm sure) but in the sense that we, as tutors, will fail to connect with our clients.

The writing center tutorial is all about connections, I would argue; the interpersonal relationship between tutor and client facilitates the verbal give-and-take that makes the writing center tutorial so valuable. If that connection fails in the online environment, especially in asynchronous tutorials like the "email tutorial" (which is all our writing center currently offers), what is the effect on the client?

I know some writing center directors see the online tutorial as a means of inviting clients into the face-to-face tutorial. The logic, simply, is that if the client has a good online experience, s/he will be less intimidated about coming to the face-to-face center. I'm sure this is true to some extent, that some clients choose online tutoring for its convenience ("You mean I can just email my paper to a tutor instead of spending 30 minutes in the writing center? Sweet!") or because it means they don't have to "face" their writing problems ("You mean I don't have to admit to another human being, face to face, that my writing sucks? Sweet!"). But in our technology-saturated world, I think many clients choose online tutoring because they have seen first-hand that excellent collaborations can take place online.

That is, many of our clients are fully immersed in online worlds like Second Life or MMORPGs like Halo; some of them no doubt blog or follow blogs; most of them probably use social networking sites like Facebook not just to keep up with old friends but to make new ones; a few of them may even contribute actively to messageboards on fansites or activist organizations, or possibly even compose and/or read fanfiction, a highly collaborative online activity, as I know from personal experience. Such techno-savvy clients come to the online tutorial with an expectation for how productive the online collaboration can be. But that doesn't mean that they are prepared to "connect" with a writing tutor.

How do we, as tutors, captialize on the willingness of our online clients to move the tutorial into a new, virtual realm, while also realizing that their online experiences may not have prepared them for the online tutorial anymore than being a student in a writing class has prepared them for the face-to-face tutorial? How do we ensure that the client-to-tutor connection that makes a good tutorial in any environment doesn't fail online?

I don't have an answer to this question. I think online tutoring is an area ripe for research; certainly The Writing Lab Newsletter devotes more and more of its pages to the online writing center these days, and we need even more formal research (my tutors rightly pointed out how dated the articles we read for class were - and I shudder at how quickly 1998 has become dated!).

In the meantime, my advice to my tutors-in-training would be to avoid the extremes of "technological determinism" - it will be a good tutorial because it is on the computer, as if the technology itself makes for a successful encounter - or "technophobia" - the online tutorial is always already inferior to the face-to-face tutorial because it takes place through technology. We need to recognize the online writing center as a REAL space; we need to take it seriously as writing center professionals, whether we are tutors and directors, by training our tutors to use the space effectively and by researching the problems and the potential of online tutorials.

Of course, the connection sometimes fails in face-to-face tutorials, too. But when it fails online, does it fail for the same reasons? And what can we do to make sure the connection does not fail in the online environment? These are the questions I leave my tutors-in-training with this week. I look forward to hearing (and reading) their ideas.