Nick Carbone writes:I think it will depend upon a few things.
One, of course, is the technology. A MOO tutorial, with a room description and other amenities like notes and friendly bots and slide shows offers a different consulting environment than a chatroom where only discussion goes on. Those are two realtime examples and they differ dramatically from f2f realtime. One simple example: you send a message to a writer and then wait for him or her to respond. Things move slower than talking f2f and depending upon each person's familiarity with the interface, degrees of confusion caused by technology on top of all the usual miscommunications possible when words are exchanged come into play.
As a technology, taking papers by email and reading them in ascii, and responding in email in ascii limits how comments can be written--the space they will go into. A progam like TTU's where the student paper appears in one frame and tutor's comments in another, where the comments are separate from the text but next to it as opposed to responding in email (as in this message) where comments are interspersed, changes how one responds. It also changes how the writer will read and perceive the response. TTU's online writing center format for paper feedback is a good example of technology evolving to improve the quality of the feedback experience, from content to presentation to preservation of the writer's "author"ity.
Technology will continue to evolve. It will be possible, for example, to have high bandwidth access to allow for video conferencing. Video feeding (since iMac's new home movies ads) will become default on PCs as they follow (again) Mac's marketing lead. Those little screen top video cameras will become more common as well as the Internet/WWW (iwww) continues its inexorable march into the center of popular culture. So over time, maybe in as few as five years, iwww-based video conferencing will help change how things progress.
A second issue, however, is in the way those technologies are used. Whispers in email can be found between the lines. That is, reading writing that's written in first draft form, as most tutor comments are, as most email and chat and moo messages are, requires reading with a better ear. We have to listen more carefully to the words, and we have to tread more carefully before we make conclusions about what we are hearing. A lot of what I do in training now is to isolate tutor comments and to ask the staff to describe their tone. How does this person sound? It's important, for example, for tutors to begin each response with some kind of intro and some explanation of what kind of response they are giving:
My name is Nick, and I've read your description of the paper. It sounds like you're concerned, when you say "how my argument goes," about how well your argument might be using the excerpts that you chose from the book (because earlier you said you were happy with the passages you chose). I haven't looked at your piece yet, but based on what you're saying, I'm guessing that a some level you might be concerned about how well you use those quotes and how well they support your thesis. When I read, I'll set off my comments by **double asterisks like this**. I'll read twice. The first time through I'll make comments on any questions I have about your argument and the points you're making. The second time through I'll see if my guess is right, and will look at one or two examples of how your evidence works with your argument. Let me know if this helps or if you have follow up questions.Maybe another way of saying all this is that you have to communicate the whispers you want to be heard and also indicate what whispers you are hearing. In the above example, I laid out the hunch I had based on what I'd read, and explained how I was proceeding because of that. In that respect, consulting online is to consulting face to face as mental telepathy is speaking in all those science fiction movies. In the movies,
telepathic aliens always wonder at the inefficiency and lack of immediacy of human speech, but humans do just fine by speaking. They've learned how to use it fully. So too with consulting online, some things are different, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but there are ways to compensate. The experiences won't be identical, nor should they be, but they can in many cases be comparable.