ABSTRACT
Among the many concerns confronted by designers and administrators of OWLs, one issue is critically important: the need to provide a virtual space in which learning dialectics can be enacted with both social and epistemological richness. The interpersonal and ideological exchanges of face-to-face tutorials are rich with opportunities for writing and rewriting new truths, but those processes, social in structure and expression, can represent a daunting object of translation for creators of OWL spaces. Even if we reject, as perhaps we should, the pessimism of Postman (1992) about the role of computers in opening a posttextual episteme and the sinister associations Birkerts (1994) would have us make with the cathode glow of workstation monitors, we can’t help but be cautious. What will learning dialectics look like when our OWLs are fully feathered and ready for flight? Will we have created a portal through which our best proximal pedagogies can be exported into the cybersphere? Will we have created something different, but equally rich, a new environment that facilitates student writers’ epistemological processes? Will our worst fears have come to fruition-a glitzy, expensive virtual space that makes cyber-anxious administrators coo with pride, another overhyped hypertext? This chapter is, at its heart, the story of the asking of these questions during the creation of WSU’s second-generation OWL, the story of the dialogic spaces that opened up as we proceeded, and the story of the dialogic spaces that continue to emerge as our OWL begins taking its tentative first flights.
