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PNWCA Conference Write-Up

On April 16, I had the opportunity to attend the Pacific Northwest Writing Centers Association Conference as part of the delegation from Evergreen. I thought I’d post my notes and thoughts here, though they probably won’t mean much to very many people.

Getting There: The conference was at the University of Washington – Bothell campus, which put me about 20 minutes from home and in an area that I’m quite familiar with. The trip up was uneventful, though we left at 6:30 in the morning and ended up hydroplaning half the way there due to heavy rains.

Keynote: After the Center, Then What? Writing Centers and the New Work Order
The keynote speaker for the conference was Nancy Grimm from Michigan Technological University. In it, she discussed how writing centers prepare peer tutors for their future placement in the workforce, and talked a lot about how the modern workspace mirrors the work done in writing centers nationwide. She discussed the old order versus the new order, in reference to two different approaches to management and the distribution of knowledge. The old order was when knowledge was centered amongst a particular group of people high up in the management hierarchy. The new order, on the other hand, is modern times, when knowledge has been distributed amongst employees, and when the addition or loss of an employee can drastically affect the knowledge base that a company has. Writing centers help tutors develop the capacity for ethical thinking, as well as developing an awareness surrounding their relationships to other people. She also discusses how writing center allows the development of knowledge management skills crucial within the new order, which involves literacy and the language used within writing center work: accessing information and crossing boundaries, for instance. She closed by giving a list of five things that any writing center director should do in order to maximize ethical thinking in the workplace:

  1. Review mission statements to see if they reflect the impact that the Center has campus-wide.
  2. Reconsider what makes a good writing tutor within a global context; promote diversity in staff.
  3. Reconsider how we think about tutor training; training is not the same as education.
  4. Consider the promotion of literacy for the new work order; how will newcomers to the center improve the quality of work at the Center?
  5. How does the Center engage with being at the center or at the margins of the educational process?

None of these five points are exact quotes, but what I understood them to be. This was an excellent start for the conference, as it injected everyone with a lot of energy.

Concurrent Session A: The Ripple Effect
The first session I attended was a facilitated discussion about how to create a welcoming atmosphere for writing centers that allows both the tutor and the client to be comfortable in that environment. This was quite an interesting discussion, as I got to listen to a range of different ways that writing centers have created a welcoming environment for extremely diverse populations. There were five discussion questions, which we skipped between as appropriate. Below are my notes on each question:

  1. How can a writing center create a welcoming environment?

    • Get to know students, build relationships
    • Create a personal evaluation form that allows students to track progress
    • Remember the name of the student and state it
    • Advertise/get the word out/class visits
    • Bring classes to the writing center/sample roleplay
    • Treat everyone as a newcomer (including new tutors)
    • Create a "home" for tutors/social activities
    • Open house for all
  2. How can we create a welcoming environment for international students?

    • Have a diverse staff
    • Tutors of same ethnicity as int’l student to help explain
    • Conversation pal program (Highline Community College)
    • Teach skills needed to succeed in American writing
    • Dialog – exploration of ideas
  3. What are some positive consequences of creating a welcoming environment for consultees, consultants, and the college as a whole?

    • Teachers promote the center
    • Ripple effect – word gets around
    • Elimination of ethnic divisions
  4. What are some negative consequences of creating a welcoming environment for consultees, consultants, and the college as a whole?

    • Americanized writing (non-judgmental)
    • Noise
    • Lack of confidentiality
    • Interrogated feeling

Some of this was stuff I hadn’t considered, though the majority of the attendees seemed to work in centers with a much higher percentage of international students attending than Evergreen’s.

Concurrent Session B: Crossing the Line
This was essentially an ethics workshop. It presented a series of exercises used by Highline Community College to discuss and break down barriers around the ethical considerations of being a tutor. This is something that was extremely interesting to watch, since everyone had four choices after watching a short skit demonstrating a particular ethical dilemma:

  • I would/should do that
  • I would/should never do that
  • I might do that but…
  • I don’t know what I would/should do

The range of responses when asked why people picked their positions was very enlightening to me, and I’ve begun to notice when I do some of the things discussed in this workshop. For me personally, this was very interesting, and I may end up taking it to Evergreen’s Center Director and pitching it for inclusion in one of the staff retreats.

Concurrent Session C: Communicating with Faculty: Exploring Conference Summaries
This was a presentation on research done at Seattle University surrounding the use of conference summaries in tutoring. Essentially, the Writing Center there decided that they wanted to be able to provide some sort of feedback to faculty regarding a student’s progress in a session. A form would be completed at the end of each session and, if the student consented, that form would then be sent to the faculty for whichever class that student came in for. Some interesting results here, namely that most people declined to have that information sent to faculty and that it added a considerable burden on tutors to complete and maintain the paperwork after each session. Evergreen does something like this in response forms, but they’re used for internal tutor evaluations only. After the presentation of the research, we had a short discussion session to clarify any questions we had about the research and to give suggestions on how to improve the system.

This gave me a few ideas, on the off chance that Evergreen’s Writing Center decides to do any revamping of their attendance system in the near future.

Concurrent Session D: Conflict and Compromise: The Question of Required Tutoring
This was a presentation by Evergreen’s own Bo Kinney on whether or not centers should require students to attend sessions. This isn’t one that I can easily summarize, as I don’t have any real notes for it, but suffice it to say that it added a few interesting elements to our own internal debate surrounding required tutoring.

After all the sessions, we had a post-Conference wrap-up, which allowed various groups to give their impression of the day. I found the whole thing to be very educational, though I didn’t take the opportunity to network at all, which I kind of regret — that would have been a very useful endeavor. From my understanding, though, other members of Evergreen’s delegation networked quite well, so we’ll see how those connections add in to our work as a Writing Center.

Resolving Problems With dag yum Repository

I recently had some problems with checksum mismatches for the dag yum repository. The specific error was as follows:


http://apt.sw.be/fedora/3/en/i386/dag/repodata/primary.xml.gz: [Errno -1] Metadata file does not match checksum
Trying other mirror.
Error: failure: repodata/primary.xml.gz from dag: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.

Below is the series of commands I used to resolve the problem, as root:


cd /var/cache/yum/dag
yum clean all
wget --cache=off http://apt.sw.be/fedora/3/en/i386/dag/repodata/filelists.xml.gz
wget --cache=off http://apt.sw.be/fedora/3/en/i386/dag/repodata/primary.xml.gz
wget --cache=off http://apt.sw.be/fedora/3/en/i386/dag/repodata/repomd.xml

Trent from the FreshRPMs general discussion list suggested the wget command sequence, and I refined his steps a bit to eliminate the hassle of having to move files around. It works just fine now, and I’ll use this solution anytime there’s a checksum problem with that repository.

Going to Be a Prius In The Family

My mom has her name in for a package 4 or 5 2005 Toyota Prius, with salsa red, driftwood, or seaside pearl as color options. Driftwood seems to be preferred.

If I were choosing driftwood, Amanda would surely joke (once again) about driving a car the same color as my pants.

I picked up an interesting tidbit while inquiring into Toyota of Olympia’s waitlist times — only 5 percent of the total Prius builds are actually package 5. Package 4 is far more popular. This is interesting, and definitely sways my package choice towards package 4, should I ever be in the market for a 2005 Toyota Prius (or later year, of course).

Gmail as Primary E-Mail

I’ve decided to forward all my e-mail to my personal Gmail account on a trial basis. So far, this seems to be drastically reducing the amount of spam I have to stare at via my mail client. The drawback is, I still have to log in to Gmail to filter that spam to make sure it’s being caught correctly, and there still are some false positives (and some missed spam messages).

But that’s why my original filter system of rejecting anyone not in my address book on Thunderbird is still in place.

It seems to be working alright so far, though — thank goodness for Google’s ever-expanding storage. If you don’t believe me, look at the Gmail welcome page. That’s an up-to-the-second tally of disk space available to users. Ph33r.

Summer Job Progress (sort of)

I’ve applied to the State of Washington as an Information Technology Technician 1. I got a test score of 70, which puts me literally on the lowest end of the job scaling — the minimum score to be considered is 70. We’ll see whether that actually turns out to provide me with a job or not.

I may end up working for the Writing Center over the summer, but obviously that was sufficiently unclear that I decided to file an application with the State. I might also apply at the Best Buy down the street to be a computer technician, though I’m undecided on that.

We’ll see what happens.

Port Townsend Excursion

Amanda and I are headed up to Port Townsend on Friday, April 29th to visit a friend of ours and see a play. Apparently, Enterprise Rent-A-Car allows people under 25 to rent for a $30 fee. This, of course, makes the trip marginally more expensive than it otherwise would be, but it works out well, since we don’t typically have a car.

It’ll be a semi-long drive, but we should make it up with no problems.

Summer Quarter 2005

I’m kind of thinking about possibly taking some Summer courses at Evergreen again this year, though I’m leery of being able to do so and hold down a full-time job. Currently under consideration:

Obviously, most of these are writing courses. The grammar course looks cool, but it also runs during the evenings, which might make it an interesting course to take transporation-wise. It’s only for one session, though — not even the whole quarter. The first session runs from June 20 – July 24, the second session from July 25 to August 27.