What I really like about Coogan is that he takes the time to lay out and explore what he thinks the "electronic writing center" could and should be. His outline gives a concrete image of what he wants to see happen. Whether or not it is plausible can be debated, but I liked seeing his vision for the future so clearly laid out.
This is also what bothers me about the piece ultimately. He is not ultimately advocating his EWC be created in a certain place or time. He is merely drawing a nice picture. Yes, he explore what happened when he tutored electronically, but he never implemented any of the things he suggests as being vital to the EWC he imagines. He could have piloted the database at his own institution with published writing to see how it could have worked. He could be proposing how to implement such a center at a particular type of university, but he doesn't. Coogan paints the picture then leaves it for someone else to work out the logistics.
Is this a common convention of "idealized" writing centers? Am I asking too much of this work?
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I agree, Emily, and wonder how we hire and train tutors to work in the theoretical framework that not only values student agency and the writing process, but helps students negotiate "the great divide" between themselves and faculty, and push back against a monolithic university system that assumes writing skills are transportable. Is the latter even a consideration for tutors or more appropriate for the WC directors in the academy? Who leads that charge in reality?
At times I wondered what he was really promoting. It seems that he talks about online writing tutoring using email but then jumps to providing a way for student writing to matter, a library like online database for student writing so students can dialogically converse with each other via writing to increase their writing choices.
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