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New Dimensions in Computers and Composition Studies

Image of Electronic Writing Centers: Computing the Field of Composition book cover Image of Electronic Writing Centers: Computing the Field of Composition

David Coogan

Against the idea of the writing center as a fix-it shop and the computers as a teaching machine, Coogan theorizes the electronic writing center as a dialogic space where students and tutors learn to value those off-stage voices and contradictory impulses that inform their writing. By connecting e-mail tutoring with similar practices in the classroom, Coogan challenges us not only to imagine new roles for computers in the writing center but to implement a new practice of dialogic literacy in the discipline of Composition.

"Coogan presents a meticulously researched and highly readable account of how communication technology is not simply refinishing the surface of what we do as teachers but affecting the deep structure of the way people actually learn."

Fred Kemp
Texas Tech University

"This is not just a book for those who work in writing centers or with computers and writing. This provocative and theoretically grounded study situates the debates about electronic tutoring within the larger debates about the nature and purpose of writing instruction generally."

Alice Gillam
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

"Dave Coogan's work is important not just because he was one of the first (or maybe "the" first) to seriously engage in online tutoring, but because he is able to place the practice within a sophisticated theoretical context without losing touch with the firm soil of practical experience. His exploration of online tutoring is grounded in long experience, delivered in a clear, strong voice, and informed by a sense of history and possibility."

Eric Crump
National Council of Teachers of English

David Coogan is an assistant professor of English in the Department of Humanities at the Illinois Institute of Technology.