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After reviewing the pages, the manager contacted the Director of
Freshman English, who is my direct supervisor, to tell him that the
pages were unacceptable. She did not agree to the method I had
assigned for writers' questions to be posted to the OWL. I assumed
the OWL would have its own e-mail account; other OWL universities
recommend setting up OWLs in this manner, so that all of the
cybertutors could easily access an OWL-specific account. There are
other communicating options, such as newsgroups and MOOs, but I
thought that I would just go with the experienced suggestion. I
couldn't argue that I would have many cybertutors logging into an OWL e-mail
account at that time to the manager,
since only one Writing Lab Instructor was interested in using work hours to
tutor online, but I was and am anticipating
that the OWL e-mail account would eventually be accessed by many cybertutors.
However, the request for an OWL e-mail
account was denied. The Academic Computing Manager said that it is university
policy that for security reasons people must be assigned to
e-mail accounts. An OWL could not have an account because there would not be
anyone person responsible for it; therefore, people could change the password or,
worse, send unacceptable, anonymous e-mail messages from a university account. I can't imagine any Writing Lab Instructors doing this; nevertheless, it is university
policy to anticipate such actions.
So, I agreed to a type of discussion-list program that sends the student's OWL
questions to everyone on a list (the cybertutor,
the Director of Freshman English, and me), one of us responds to the questions,
and the answers are sent to the inquiring student
and the three list subscribers. This procedure works all right; however, it is
a little tricky keeping track of who answered which questions,
and the questions fill up space on the list members' personal accounts. The
Director of Freshman English had to participate on the discussion list so
that he could monitor the OWL's business; however, now that we have a somewhat
active OWL, he has become frustrated with the questions
and answers that keep posting in his personal account and has asked if he could
be taken off the list. Although we have
only had approximately fifteen OWL questions, as an inactive cybertutor, he is
voicing his disinterest in monitoring
us. Nevertheless, it is university policy that we have this supervision.