Your Desktop or Mine: Extending the Reach of Writing Instruction

Student-teacher conferencing is an integral component of university-level writing instruction and a crucial element in the development of a student writer. The individualized conferencing session not only supplements traditional classroom activities but is the principal mode of mentoring and learning once a class has ended. While the in-person format is the most familiar practice for the writing conference, options for effective remote conferencing between a student and a writing instructor have not been explored. In this paper, we describe how desktop sharing provides a flexible medium for remote, collaborative text editing, and how it preserves the most important characteristics of an in-person conference. Computer Science PhD students who used desktop sharing with their writing instructor over a period of two years found remote editing useful and convenient as long as voice communication was intelligible and stable. We discuss the differences between remote and face-toface conferencing, and highlight the instructor’s challenges when using a remote editing approach for the mentoring of student writers, especially if student and instructor have no previous shared editing experiences.