f2f

The excerpt on page 487 about the student and tutor in an asynchronous conversation about a paper when they were only a room apart – one in the tutoring lab and one in an adjacent writing lab – reveals much about what the student thought was valuable: fixing parts of the paper s/he thought needed fixing instead of also conversing about audience and development. The student failed to realize the importance of those 2 aspects in writing a good paper. It also reminded me of Nelson’s policy to let the student decide what to work on in a piece of writing. Here the student knew what s/he wanted to work on but didn’t see the relevance of the peripheral learning that would have occurred in the f2f conversation with the tutor.