Generating New Theory for Online Writing Instruction (OWI)
Whiteboard Tutorial Without Chat
Note: This tutorial movie re-loops automatically, so that you can view it as often as you’d like.
Tutorial Two presents an example of a synchronous tutorial that has been conducted entirely on a whiteboard, which has real-time text and graphical capabilities. Participants see everything as it is typed. The whiteboard features visual tools such as highlighting, lines, arrows, circles, squares, and mathematical symbols, as well as ways to vary the effects such as colors and size. In this example, the black font represents the tutor's talk and the magenta represents the student's talk. The tutor has used the graphics tools, to demonstrate particular grammatical principles or to highlight information to remember.
Often, students do not feel initially comfortable using the visual tools although they tend to use them more during repeat visits and additional tutorials. In this platform, students have the opportunity to practice whiteboard skills prior to a tutorial. Given that many students may not take advantage of such opportunities, teacher/tutors may have to do some quick individual instruction in order to facilitate a successful interaction. Those who are shy or uncomfortable with electronic environments either may become more comfortable or may choose f2f writing instruction.
This tutorial, which occurred in the SMARTHINKING OWL Grammar Center, is focused on a very specific question about how to address a sentence-level problem—that of "run-on" sentences. The tutor's purposes were to address the student's question by (1) reviewing the student's own sentence, (2) providing some rules and model sentences that the student could use during the tutorial and review later, (3) encouraging the student to correct his own problem sentence, and (4) providing further guidance as necessary. In this tutorial, the tutor talked a lot more than the student, presumably because he was outlining some pertinent rules to guide the lesson; however, the tutorial required student participation to be interactive.
Theoretically, this synchronous grammar tutorial is difficult to peg. Dialogue, of course, is necessary for any chat tutorial to work; in this case, the dialogue is more of a question-and-response format, similar to lecture, than an extended discussion. There are, however, elements of personalization, praise, and individualization based on the student's own problem sentence, that makes this tutorial more a blend of dialogue and lecture. The tutor makes a decision that may be theoretically based in Expressivism. Other than circling Jay's choice of a semi-colon in his final version of the sentence, Kurt does not "write on" the student's text. As there is no single proven way to conduct OWI intertextually, the teacher/tutor’s decision is open to question, critique, and analysis.
One goal of this whiteboard tutorial is to provide an archival study tool for the student. Since he participated in identifying and resolving the questions (which is one that may reoccur for him as a patterned sentence error), the archived board should have more meaning for him upon later review.
Implications for Future Research
Given the previous analysis of this tutorial interaction, the following are some questions that practice-based research could explore within this context.