Clint Gardner

Over on the listserv WCENTER a few weeks ago there was a discussion of iPads and their uses in writing centers.  I brazenly stated that I was going to keep a list of apps that people mentioned, so here goes: From Neal Lerner of Northeastern University: GoodReader : Used for reading and annotating files. Ultimately, we hope to have writing conferences in which writing consultant and student are reviewing the student's paper on GoodReader, jointly annotating, and saving the file for the student writer to use when revising.   Box.net : Used for transferring and having access to files. Dropbox : Also used for transferring and having access to files. iThoughtsHD : A mind-mapping tool, useful for idea generation and breaking through those writing blocks. iBrainstorm : Another tool for generating ideas and then organizing those ideas in ways that nicely lead to a written form. PlainText : A text editor, useful for taking notes during a consulting session, which

Dawn Mendoza reads her poem "Round."

Paula Michniewicz offers up William Wordsworth's "Daffodils" to the Mobile Poetry Collective :

A new Undersea World  feature for you just in time for National Poetry Month: Mobile Poetry Revolutionary Collective! Join the revolution and call in the poem of your choice to 801-930-0674. It can be your own work or a favorite of yours. Be sure to state your name, identify the author (even if it is your own) and the title. I reserve the draconian right to exclude any submission I see fit. The submissions will be featured here on The Undersea World . Here are some prototype samples from various folks: Carrie de Azevedo-Poulsen gives us "Thanks" by W.S. Merwin Cordelia Willgren offers up Naomi Shihab Nye's "At the Seven Mile Ranch, Comstock, Texas" Ethan Millard give us Jaberwocky by Lewis Carroll The Death of See by William Carlos Williams

Last week, I was talking with colleagues about a future super-secret project (stay tuned) and we got to wondering how many two-year college writing center folks were on WCENTER. WCENTER is the preeminent listserv for writing center folks. I've been a member since 1992, but I don't recall anyone trying to figure out who (demographically) was on the list. Rather than burdening list members with a huge demographic survey, however, I just decided to stick with the original question: what types of institutions are WCENTER users coming from. I only left it up for a few days, so I'm not saying that this survey has captured all potential WCENTER readers/respondents, by the way. My Survey Monkey professional account was expiring, however, and I wanted to download the data. (so much for self-funded research, eh?) In any case, here we go: I did suspect that four year plus universities and colleges would dominate the users of WCENTER, given the list's history and the de

A few weeks ago, I queried both the WCENTER and WPA email lists to get their response to a rather unscientific study on tutoring and new media in writing centers.  These are the charted-up results.   I hope to provide some commentary on them at some point when the (new)Jazz are not playing. UPDATE: comments ahoy! The number of respondents is 118 (n=118). The questions that allowed multiple answers are represented as area graphs to give a better sense of the overall spread of the response. Most of the respondents were from higher education. This is no doubt due to posting the survey on WCENTER and WPA-L. I am uncertain of the demographics of either of those lists, but I have a well-informed hunch that not many non-higher education folks participate in them. The purpose of my research is, ultimately, to write an article about tutoring in new media (for wont of a better term) at open access institutions. I was somewhat surprised by the nearly 20% of respondents who don&#

One of the "Upcoming topics" on the sidebar reads "How to beg-off writing/creating an article/web-thing even though you should be writing it really, but you are gasping for air."  I fear I must announce, however, that I've been an utter failure in being able to beg-off anything and have been persuaded to write such an article for an upcoming issue Computers & Writing edited by Shelley Rodrigo and Matthew Kim.  The overall subject matter for this issue is rhetorical media and open access institutions.  In their call for papers, Rodrigo and Kim define rhetorical media as an almalgam of all sorts of new media --including web texts, audio, video, and other web 2.0 stuff.  Here's my grandiose (and accepted!) proposal: “New Media and the Twenty First Century Open Access Writing Tutor:  How Writing Center Work Will Never be the Same Again” The days where students came to writing centers with “papers” to be talked/worked over are pretty much gone, particula