New Vistas for Student Writing Consultations: Tutoring with Desktop Interactive Video

While not yet a commonplace, it is no longer unusual for Writing Programs and Writing Centers to use synchronous conversation for student conferences. There are, however, new technologies emerging which will open even more vistas for student writing consultations. We are already seeing more and more programs use some kind of interactive video (usually compressed) for teaching. Digital lines and more and more bandwidth will make desktop conferencing feasible.

I propose to discuss the next step beyond synchronous text-based conferencing. Having run synchronous text-based tutoring sessions over the Internet for several years, I am presently experimenting with video-conferencing. Ultimately, I intend to wed the two technologies--to have one window of synchronous video and one window of synchronous text on the desktop. I intend to show a video tape of a tutoring session and then discuss how what we've learned from both text-based and preliminary video conferencing can tell us about more advanced desktop systems which will allow for the use of both technologies.

Presenter: Barry Maid

Category: Classroom practice

Target Audience: Not Applicable

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