Bits, Bytes, and Baker’s Dozens: A Virtual Tour of OWL Space
©2000 by Josephine A. Koster
May not be reproduced without the express written consent of the author. [1]

"They say the owl was a baker’s daughter."— Hamlet. iv. 5.

In November 1993 I had the misfortune to discover that horses had a transporter button and could instantly teleport their atoms to another location, leaving their hapless riders behind in a crumpled heap on the ground. Having shattered my right arm into seven pieces, severed a tendon, and destroyed most of the nerves that controlled my finger movement while making this discovery, I was forced to endure a long and boring period of physical therapy to regain the use of my hand. At that time, while I owned a computer, I used it mostly as a glorified typewriter. I had e-mail, but used it very infrequently. My physical therapist, knowing how frustrated I was with the slow and painful progress I was making, suggested that I buy a trackball for my computer and go online as part of my rehabilitation. Thus began my career as a web surfer, and the first of my virtual tours began.

In 1993, of course, the World Wide Web was in its early childhood. Most information available to an electronic surfer was available either on gophers, with their endless lists of submenus, or as ftp transfer files. Today’s powerful search engines were regarded, still, as the stuff of science fiction; while early tools like Magellan existed, there were few good ways to find information on the Web and it was even harder to track it down. Many universities and public institutions had internal servers, but finding and gaining access to them was extremely difficult. Those of you who didn’t spend much time doing electronic research in these years probably can’t or won’t imagine the changes we have seen in cyberspace in less than a decade, from restricted, menu-driven access with largely incompatible formats to today’s fluid, compatible, easily searchable hypertext domains.

Today, halfway through the last year of the second millennium (or halfway through the first year of the third millennium), I can go to the powerful search engine AltaVista (www.altavista.com) , type in the search string "online writing lab" and receive the response "6,519 pages found." Or I can go to a metasearch engine like allthesites.com, type in the same command, and receive the response "Your search for online writing lab returned 6041 documents in 0.0923 seconds." While neither of these are perfect search methods–they don’t, for instance, rule out duplicate pages, multiple pages from the same OWL, or pointers going to the same page–they clearly demonstrate the proliferation of writing centers in cyberspace, and with it the demand for centers that lack web presence to consider creating an online site.

I’ve been watching the growth of OWLs for nearly a decade now, first as a Center tutor and Director and more recently as the tour guide on the Virtual Tour of Writing Centers (http://faculty.winthrop.edu/kosterj/tour.htm). While OWLs have multiplied over the last few years (Bruce Pegg currently lists around 300 of them on the iwca web page(http://iwca.syr.edu), they seem to have settled into three categories of sites. There are basic information OWLS, which advertise the physical center and may also present a repertoire of its resources (such as retrievable handouts); interactive OWLs that permit asynchronous tutoring; and what I’ve begun to call ‘live OWLs," which offer synchronous tutoring, real-time interaction for writers (often in MOO or MUD environments), or other electronic simulations of the face-to-face physical writing center experiences. In constructing a written version of my virtual tour for this guide, I’ve tried to pick out a baker’s dozen representative sites that offer information architecture and features that new OWL constructors might want to emulate and that OWL researchers might want to study. In compiling this group of sites, I’ve focused particularly on information architecture–that is, not only the physical design and ease of use of the site, but the way(s) in which the site is designed to make it easy for a Center to launch, maintain, and update. Moreover, I’ve tested these sites in several browsers so that I could see how they would look to users on various computing platforms. And I’ve given them the real acid test–asking some of my undergraduate students to review the sites and tell me how easily they could find information on them. What’s resulted is a collection of sites that, in my opinion, are well worth the study.

This is a personal, eclectic list, not an official "Best of the Web" collection, and other scholars, would, of course, nominate different favorites. But these, it seems to me, show the range of possibilities currently offered in OWL space and give indicators of future developments in the field, both helpful features for institutions considering the construction of their own cybersites. Some OWLs, of course, offer services that fall into all three categories; in the essay that follows, I’ve placed those OWLs into the category in which they are most outstanding.

Every writing center–from those at the smallest private schools to the largest public institutions–needs to let users know where to find it, how to reach its tutors, and what services it offers. By far the largest number of OWL sites on the Internet are chiefly concerned with this expository function. Their designs can vary from the most basic text blocks (location, hours, phone numbers) to sophisticated maps of information management that allow users to access most of the Center’s services through hyperspace. The sites singled out below, then, should be considered as model cases for presenting information to an institution’s specific users and as examples of effective information architecture that other Centers might emulate.

The Caldwell Online Writing Center at the McCallie School, Chattanooga, TN (http://blue.mccallie.org/wrt_ctr/)

It doesn’t take a large university to mount an effective basic OWL site. The website hosted by the Caldwell Writing Center at the McCallie School provides an excellent example of an easily-navigable information site. The simple layout is browser-friendly; text-based links allow the user to move quickly from the main page to a student page, a faculty page, or a parents’ page. The main screen provides the Center’s mission statement, information about its staff, and links to other McCallie School pages, though it doesn’t currently offer the Center’s hours of operation. In addition, it provides quick links to frequently-requested information, such as an MLA Works Cited page, the school’s Grammar Hotline, and various writing projects and courses at the school. Any Center that wishes to mount a basic page for user information that requires little maintenance or technical upkeep could use this site as a starting place.

The Writing Center at the University of Richmond (http://www.richmond.edu/~writing)

Another intelligently-designed site, the University of Richmond’s online writing page is noteworthy for how much support it provides not only for its clients but for tutors and teachers as well. One of its features, The Writer’s Web designed by Richmond faculty and students, offers advice by the stage of the writing process, which is accessed through an attractive graphical user interface (GUI) with easily-navigated links forward and backward between screens. Faculty can find, in a number of formats, Center referral forms, help for discussing writing in their classrooms, information on scanning information onto the web, and links to the Epiphany Project for using writing and technology in the classroom. And tutors can find not only the report forms for summarizing sessions (password protected), but the Writing Fellows’ Handbook, resources for their training, and a wonderful interactive presentation on "Training for Tough Tutorials." The experience of Joe Essid, the Center Director, with integrating technology and pedagogy shows clearly in this website, with its wide variety of crosslinks and formats that enable users with different computing set-ups to access its resources, and offers an excellent model to any institution wanting to make writing resources available to everyone on campus.

The Writing Center at George Mason University (http://writingcenter.gmu.edu)

The George Mason OWL has recently undergone a complete redesign to improve its usability, and the careful planning put into the new organization of the site clearly shows. From the easily-readable Verdana typeface to the informative labels that flash when the cursor touches a link, everything about this site is designed to encourage easy navigation. My current students, in fact, think this is one of the "coolest" OWLs they’ve seen.

This OWL is closely linked with George Mason’s Writing Across the Curriculum program, and has multiple crosslinks for both students and faculty to enable them to best use its features. The new "highlights" page not only tells writers what features are available but celebrates the success of its tutors–subtly highlighting the professionalism and expertise clients can expect to find from peer tutors at GMU. Information sites are divided into online style guides, online grammar guides, and online handouts, each with a clear explanation of what the category provides. The site also promises that online writing and ESL workshops and online ESL expertise will be provided for students of English as a second language beginning in Fall 2000, marking a further expansion of the Center’s services. As an example of an informative site that is closely linked with other university programs and services, this is a terrific model.

Meramec Writing Center at St. Louis Community College (http://www.stlccc.cc.mo.us/mc/support/cwc/fpages/index.html )

Of all the OWL sites I know, the Meramec Writing Center at St. Louis Community College has the most innovative user interface and has earned the rare accolade of "It rocks!" from my students. A cartoon map of the Center as an electronic village is the first page a client encounters; the site tells users, "Each of the buildings on the Village Map acts as a "button" to select an option. Simply click on the building icon or its environs, and shazzam!, there you'll be." Clients can click on the Visitor Center for startup information; the Faculty House for instructor information (with its Faculty Lounge and Michael Jackson apparently staffing the desk); Write Hall for grammar help, assignment sheets or sample essays (accessed by clicking on a picture of a file cabinet); and Scotty’s Sidewalk Café, where writers can post their own work and read that of others. The Post Office lets writers send e-mail to the Writing Center, subscribe to a weekly writing tip, or click on a mailbox to learn something about a writer whose name begins with the letter on the mailbox, while Lewis at the Links Arena helps writers find off-campus help. Designed for the video generation, the St. Louis Community College site is innovative, entertaining, and visually appealing. Institutions creating their own sites should give careful consideration to whether such a graphically-oriented site would be right for their clients.

Englishworks at Gallaudet University (http://depts.gallaudet.edu/Englishworks/

An excellent example of an informative OWL that has been especially tailored to the needs of its clients is Gallaudet University’s Englishworks. This online reading and writing center features an extensive section of handouts for writing across the disciplines, literature, ESL, reading, and grammar, including a series of reading exercises based on the biographies of famous deaf Americans. Neither hearing-impaired users nor anyone else who accesses it will have trouble navigating the site; this is an extensive and well-organized collection of materials to support the Center’s tutorial missions for a specialty population.

California State University, Northridge (http://www.csun.edu/~hflrc006/ep2xe.html)

California State University at Northridge has been changing its online writing center presence, including a pilot test of a writing chat room and e-mail tutoring. Now one of the CSUN Center’s most noteworthy informational features is aimed at the large population of non-native speakers of English both on campus and in the community. CSUN’s Online Reference Desk features an extensive page titled "Self-Instructional English Language Practice," which features resources these ESL communicators need. Users can find dictionaries, collections of idioms, online chat rooms where they can improve their English, and even links to tutoring programs provided in the community. The page also features links to online quizzes for ESL communicators to test their progress in learning English. The links are explained in clear and simple language so that language-challenged users will be able to navigate them easily. As a site designed to meet the information needs of a specialized group of users, it’s hard to beat this one.

Interactive OWLs allow visitors the chance to share information asynchronously with the staff of the writing center that runs the OWL. Their services run the range from providing handouts and answering frequently asked questions to accepting papers for tutoring asynchronously.

The Online Writing Lab at Purdue (http://owl.english.purdue.edu)

The oldest, the most commonly cited, probably the busiest, and in many ways the most comprehensive of interactive OWLs is the Purdue Online Writing Lab, which most people credit with originating the acronym OWL. Launched in 1993 as a way to provide information to clients who couldn’t schedule face-to-face appointments at the overcrowded physical Writing Center, Purdue’s recently-redesigned online presence is constantly growing. To date it offers not only asynchronous essay tutoring but over 130 handouts on writing subjects, ESL materials, resources for teachers, and a host of other links for teachers and writers. Muriel Harris, the director of the Purdue Writing Center, recently said, "It’s baffling how important this resource has become....We needed something to serve our students, but now we help businessmen around the world who have questions about English as a second language, teachers in rural communities who use our handouts because they don’t have books, and other universities that are establishing their own OWLs." [2] Any institution thinking about establishing an OWL would do well to read Purdue’s "Online Tutoring Discussion" (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owls/tutoring/tutoring.html), which provides an even-handed and thorough discussion of the conceptual issues involved in e-mail tutoring. More to the point, any institution thinking about establishing an OWL ought to look at the "Statistics" section, which confirms that the Purdue OWL receives an average of 25,000 hits a day. It takes a big server–and a well-trained, dedicated staff–to make such a commitment to providing writing assistance on a global level.

The Online Writery at the University of Missouri (http://www.missouri.edu/~writery)

Missouri’s Online Writery conducts what it calls "cybertutorials," asynchronous reviews of writing, and is notable for the information it elicits from the writers submitting work. A very detailed web-based drop box form asks the writer to describe in detail the writing assignment, its requirements, the writer’s rhetorical approach, and what the writer perceives to be the draft’s strengths and weaknesses at the point of submission. Institutions looking to construct their own OWLs will find this an excellent model to use in eliciting enough information from an online client to provide effective feedback on the draft. The Writery also hosts The Writery Café, "an open discussion list where informal, open-ended conversation is welcome about anything concerning writing, writers, life, those sorts of things." The Café is a subscription-based listserv used by a variety of clients who just want to share a sense of writing community; it is one of the more appealing and low-maintenance features of the Writery that other sites may wish to imitate.

The Writing Center at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb)

Chapel Hill’s OWL is an excellent model of a well-designed, easily navigable asynchronous site. Its attractive interface is clean and simple, with a noticeable "new features" box to attract repeat visitors. Guests can easily log in and visit the asynchronous e-tutoring site, although they must register in order to receive a response from a tutor. This courtesy is particularly welcome for the unsure or nervous writer, who wants to see what will happen to her paper before risking an actual submission. The UNC Center also provides handouts in categories that include "Writing the Paper," "Writing for Specific Fields," and "Grammar and Mechanics, along with a number of user services such as a calendar for the semester that students can use to plan assignments and appointments. Besides e-tutoring, the Center supports on-campus writing groups and classroom instruction, and staff a Grammar Hotline for the truly desperate. Institutions planning their own OWLS can learn a great deal about simple, clean, user-friendly design and navigation from this site.

The Writing Center at The University of Wisconsin–Madison (http://www.wisc.edu/writing)

Like Purdue’s OWL, the Wisconsin-Madison OWL is frequently visited by writers seeking advice on specific topics, and is noteworthy for its well-organized "Writer’s Handbook", which helps users find advice on specific writing topics from punctuation and grammar to writing a graduate school admissions essay. It is a frame-based site, which may challenge some Internet browsers, but there are multiple links in the main frames to allow users to find their way to the information they need, and the procedures and expectations for submitting a paper by e-mail are clearly explained. The site also provides easy access to registration for the nearly 40 non-credit face-to-face writing short courses the Center offers each semester. Because the information architecture of the site has been so carefully thought out, it’s easy to see how the site can be expanded without major overhaul; glancing at the "date last updated" on many pages shows that this design is indeed easy to maintain and expand. Centers that expect to grow but not to have a lot of technical support in maintaining their web presence have much to learn from the design of this site.

Slowly we are seeing the development of OWLs that allow writers to interact with other writers and with tutors in real time, eliminating the time-lag for responses and simulating in many ways the interactions of a face-to-face tutoring situation. The most commonly-used technical set-ups for such services are offered through combinations of web boards, MOOs, and chat rooms. But such OWLs require a considerable commitment of staff, resources, and time; any institution considering implementing such a service should consult with institutions who have experience in this area (such as those listed below) in order to understand the ramifications of such an undertaking.

The Online Writing Lab at Washington State University (http://owl.wsu.edu)

Washington State’s OWL is not truly an synchronous OWL, but is close to it; writers post a draft to a web board and receive a variety of responses, both from OWL tutors and from other writers. Looking at the logs of postings, it seems as if the responses follow very quickly upon the postings, creating a near-synchronous exchange. Users are required to register; this process allows the OWL to notify the writer when someone responds to the writing he or she posts, and the writer can also indicate whether only OWL staff or any user can respond to the piece of writing. The interface is cartoon-heavy (the owl in the trenchcoat and sunglasses is perhaps a bit over the top) but the instructions are clear, user-friendly, and written in a voice that should encourage even the most reluctant submitter. A particularly attractive feature of this OWL is that its features are made available as freeware (http://owl.wsu.edu/authors.asp#freeware ); Washington State’s willingness not only to share its expertise but to help other institutions implement it (for a "modest stipend" and expenses) is an example of writing center generosity at its best.

The Writing Center at Salt Lake Community College (http://www.slcc.edu/wc/)

This site demonstrates that institutions of any size can provide effective synchronous tutoring if the resources are available. Salt Lake Community College’s OWL offers a variety of services, including a web cam showing the waiting area and web-board writing interaction like Washington State’s, but one of its most outstanding features is its moo-based Virtual Writing Center. This real-time communications environment gives writers a synchronous forum to discuss issues in writing, composition, rhetoric, and related pedagogy. Tutors are available at specified hours, usually during the work day and early evening; the MOO instructions tell clients "You will know when you have connected because the computer will describe an open plaza to you. Please remember that it is essential to read everything that appears on your screen when you are in the VWC. Writing advisors are in the advising lounge. You get to this lounge by typing in ADVISING....Try RING BELL to get someone's attention. If no one responds in a few minutes, it is more than likely that they are busy in real life and cannot respond."

Obviously, using such an interface requires some familiarity with MOO/MUD skills; while many of today’s undergraduates have such experience, other users may find that posting a paper in MOO space and then discussing it takes considerable getting used to. Institutions designing such an interface, moreover, will need to consider the needs and habits of their clients. Many clients, especially those who are employed, work on their papers in the evenings and on weekends rather than during the workday. Finding time to discuss a paper in a MOO may be difficult for such clients; schedulers may wish to consider whether more night-time and weekend hours are feasible and/or appropriate. SLCCC’s clear rationale and instructions provide excellent templates for institutions wishing to implement MOO-based synchronous tutoring.

Colorado State University (http://writing.colostate.edu)

The Writers’ Center at Colorado State University has a Virtual Writer’s Lounge, a MOO space where, as the web page notes, writers can "talk about writing they are writing or are planning to write, and that talk is in writing and with another writer." Like the Salt Lake Community College MOO, this chat room seems to feature lively exchanges about parts of pieces of writing; furthermore, it simplifies both scheduling matters and the question of posting a draft by encouraging writers to use the asynchronous interface with its well thought-out heuristics (http://writing.colostate.edu/sndpaper/paper3.htm) to share their writing with tutors and to schedule appointments to meet in the lounge with a tutor to discuss the work virtually. Again, users are required to have a certain amount of sophistication about how to use a chat room, but Colorado State’s interface provides a great deal of support and instruction to simplify its use; for instance, it provides instructions for both Windows and Mac users. Institutions seeking to emulate this site would be well advised to create similar materials suited to their own users’ needs.

Each year as I update the Virtual Tour, I am amazed at how much our degree of sophistication and hence our expectations as consumers of information in cyberspace has increased in less than a decade. Now we are less likely to regard an OWL as a luxury or an online filing cabinet and more as an intelligent and usable partner in delivering the best possible assistance to writers. This select tour of OWL sites can only hint at the rich variety of material that many Centers have already posted in cyberspace, and I certainly mean no disrespect or disparagement of any site I didn’t mention in this essay. As I stated at the outset, my focus here has been on OWLs that researchers can learn from and that new OWL creators can emulate. Where these baker’s dozen sites lead, other sites will surely follow and even surge ahead as we continue to try meet the challenge of providing tutoring support in an electronic environment. Our goal now must be to match the sophistication and needs of our users as we design, update, and maintain OWLs in the twenty-first century.

NOTES

^[1] My thanks to all the visitors to the Virtual Tour of Writing Centers for their comments and suggestions, and especially to James Inman, Cliff Gardner, Tracy Hudson, and Eric Buswell for comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

^[2] “Reading, Writing, and a World Learning English on the Web.” Advertisement, Gateway Technology Forum. The Chronicle of Higher Education (14 July 2000): A38.