Eric Miraglia & Joel Norris. "Cyberspace and Sofas: Dialogic Spaces and the Making of an Online Writing Lab.”
Miraglia and Norris discuss the process they went through in planning and inaugurating a new OWL, emphasizing the role of dialog with and between interested parties, including administrators, students, and tutors, throughout the process. Their OWL was planned through a dialogic process to be a dialogic space. Their OWL offers both asynchronous and synchronous opportunities for students to get feedback to their writing. They felt it was important to enable synchronous response because synchronous interactions are more likely to be one-to-many or many-to-many, whereas asynchronous response, such as email, is more likely to be one-to-one. They also implemented a policy of having all OWL tutor responses co-authored by at least two tutors, resulting in each response being the product of dialogic processes itself and reflecting multiple voices. Because students can respond to other students in the OWL, “tutors who respond online are responsible not only for providing thoughtful and constructive feedback, but also for encouraging safe and generative spaces for students’ personal reflections to take on social expression” (99).
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