Clint Gardner

I neglected to link in a post to my article " Rhetorical Media and the Twenty First Century Open-Access Writing Center: Predictions, Predilections, and Realities ."  The issue of Computers and Writing Online that it is featured in didn't stay up very long either.  Ah well.  Here is an excerpt from the conclusion to further tempt you to read the whole thing:  Are we at open-access institutions, quite literally, disabling our students by not providing them with adequate response to non-traditional types of texts?  Millward (2008) states, “Two-year colleges, whose mission is to serve as a gateway for nontraditional students, must not allow themselves to become, by default, the new gatekeepers for the [under-served]” or, what Cynthia Selfe (1999) bluntly calls a new illiterate class (423).  As individual writing center professionals at open-access institutions, we have to decide if it is worth while to keep our writing centers relevant to this change, or whe...

On November 3, 2012, I was honored to receive the 2012 Ron Maxwell Award for Distinguished Leadership in Promoting the Collaborative Learning Practices of Peer Tutors in Writing.  Here is the acceptance speech I delivered: I want to thank the selection committee and especially my good friend Jon Olson as well as the Maxwell family for continuing Ron’s legacy.  I also offer my humble thanks to Harvey Kail who nominated me for the award.  It is truly an honor to be listed among those who have contributed such excellent work to the field of peer tutoring in writing.  When Jon first notified me of the award, I was taken aback.  It was something I never expected, but am truly honored to receive. I also wish to thank and offer my appreciation of the peer writing advisors at Salt Lake Community College for helping me to learn about peer tutoring and fostering learning.  When I think of my work, I think of the peer writing advisors and their origins and t...

My summer project of revising the SLCC Student Writing Center online reporting system is coming along exceedingly well. Aside from some fancy graphs to get a better sense of the feedback we are giving to writers, the system also allows folks to put in their work schedules and automatically populates our live online tutoring schedule system. Users can also more easily read the shared reports from other writing advisors, and access the course website and assignment database we've been developing. One cool feature is a word cloud that takes the 50 most-used words out of the user's (or writer's) session reflections. There are more changes, but I've forgotten them. A big move in August will be to revamp the dated interface to something more 2010s than 20-naughts. Tutorial Session Report system

So far I've been blazing through my summer projects that I thought would take much more time.  These projects mainly focus around our home-brewed tutorial session report system.  Basically, I am working to make it more integrated into our current online tutoring system, as well as to work it into a proposed technological innovation that will make it far easier for our Writing Advisors to create reports about and reflect on the sessions they conduct. I was a bit hesitant to post my proposal anywhere, since I was worried about jinxing it by making it public too fast, but what the heck.  Here is the proposal.  Feedback is always welcome.

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, w...

Dawn Mendoza reads her poem "Round."