Revised Environment/Information/Ecology section

Well, here's a new version using Jeremiah's draft as a frame. I'm also sending it out in a Word document since it is a bit lengthy.

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"Environment": A Core Concept for a Core Course

The present iteration of WRT 235 hinges on students' and teachers' explicit consideration of "writing environment" as a concept. In the context of the opportunities the course makes available for learning functional literacies, students and teachers conceptualize writing environments spatially and materially—in terms of how actual writers can effectively work with (and through) literacy technologies. In the context of more specifically critical literacy learning, students and teachers consider the social and technical limits of literacy technologies, thinking through writing environments as "built" (i.e., as information architectures) and as "found" (as information ecologies). Finally, as an overture toward the rhetorical focus of the major, students and teachers combine these conceptualizations in thinking about writing environments as environments for social action. Whereas in a previous iteration of the course, students and teachers focused on writing environments as productive of (written) identities, the contemporary course highlights both what "writing environments" may be and why writers might want to engage with them.


Why envinroment?

We rely on the use of environment as not just another information metaphor but as more representative of the information contexts within which our students compose. The common metaphors for understanding and envisioning information systems are architecture and ecology. While these metaphors influence our use of environment, we see environment as more reflective of the networked situations of our digital writing/writers. As the WIDE Research Center Collective notes in their argument “Why Teach Digital Writing?” the networked computer created a “changed writing environment.” This environmental approach allows for the continued dispersement of writing in both small and large applications, creating a plastic metaphor for the writing we encourage in our writing and rhetoric major. As outlined in the “CCCC position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments,” composing digitally refers to a variety of literacies, applications, genres, classrooms, and technologies. This variety requires a more networked metaphor, such as environment. In what follows, we highlight the key aspects of information environment in contrast with the more frequently used concepts of architecture and ecology.

Describing composing in an environmental framework, appeared in the mid to late 1980s as the possibilities of composing with personal computers spread. In particular, John B. Smith and Marcy Lansman, in “A Cognivitive Basis for a Computer Writing Environment,” connect the “revolution” in computers to the new “writing environment” possible for writers. However, these conceptions of writing environments focused on their role in producing “effective writing” (Glynn, Oaks, Mattocks, and Britton 1). And examples of early computer writing environments were “commercially successful word-processing programs” (Glynn, Oaks, Mattocks, and Britton 1). Our understanding of writing environments evolved with the rise in the networked computer. In fact, it has become commonplace to reference digital environments, which, we assume, encompasses a networked computer with a variety of composing software. For example, the field’s current understanding of “computer writing environments” has achieved its most public usage in Michigan State University’s Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center. In their “Why Teach Digital Writing, the WIDE Research Center Collective points to a “changed writing environment—that is, to writing produced on the computer and distributed via the Internet and World Wide Web” (WIDE Collective).

While we owe a debt to WIDE’s use of environment, we see it as more than a descriptive concept for the digital writing of today’s students. We see environment as a pedagogical concept that can offer our students a rhetorical framework for encountering composing situations in our classrooms and without. While the networked nature of digital writing is important, the concept of an environment must encompass the variety of composing situations that our students find themselves in. Technology foregrounds the materiality of literacy, according to Christina Haas, and environment, in our use, and with our students, highlights the materiality of a composing situation—networked or not. As Christine Borgman notes in From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure, “People [Writers] select and implement technologies that are available and that suit their practices and goals” (3). Our understanding of environment echoes Jon Udell’s depiction in “The New Freshman Comp”: “A social application [such as wikis/Wikipedia] works within an environment that it simultaneously helps to create. If you understand that environment, the application makes sense. Otherwise it can seem weird and pointless.” Writers and applications work together to create and sustain environments, as those same writers work through or within environments. As Johnson-Eilola and Selber write, “Technologies are no longer tools to users; they are environments, spaces, worlds, and conversations” (emphasis added x).

Recent work on the infrastructure of digital writing adds an institutional and material aspect to environment that we appreciate. Specifically addressing the production of new-media compositions, Devoss, Cushman, and Grabill target the “institutional infrastructures and cultural contexts necessary to support teaching students to compose with new media” (16). A “productive and activist understanding of infrastructure,” they contend, is necessary for writing programs “to come to terms with how to understand and teach new-media composing” (22). Our use of environment illustrates that an awareness of infrastructure is necessary in all composing situations, not only new-media composing. Students respond to communicative problems that are not necessarily new-media problems—but they are problems with material and infrastructural problems and constraints. Perhaps our implementation of environment echoes Mary Hocks’ depiction in her approach to visual rhetoric: “Critiquing and producing writing in digital environments actually offers a welcome return to rhetorical principles and an important new pedagogy of design” (632). While an understanding of infrastructure—and the materiality of all composing—is key, that understanding must be pedagogically feasible for teachers and students in our program. Borgman’s use of infrastructure describes it as outside of a composer in which, we interact with different infrastructures but are not a part of them: “a global information infrastructure is a means for access to information” (30). Environment lends us a flexible framework for talking about composing from the composer’s perspective.

Beyond having a strong infrastructural component, our understanding of environment reflects an attempt to reconcile our teaching situation, program, and students with the concepts of information architecture and information ecology.

As outlined by Richard Wurman, information architecture, engages in the “building of information structures that allow others to understand” (17). Of late, information architecture has blossomed in the networked possibilities of the World Wide Web (Rosenfeld and Morville; Lipson and Day; Morrogh).
Some in the field of technical communication have pushed for information architecture as a useful and productive area of study and example for the education of technical communicators. Michael Salvo, in particular, pushes for the inclusion of information architecture in our technical communication pedagogy. In his “Rhetorical Action in Professional Space: Information Architecture as Critical Practice,” Salvo convincingly describes information architecture as a “user-centered art of rhetorical design” (41). Rather than merely describing situations, information architecture, according to Salvo, allows for and illustrates the potential for action on the part of technical communicators in the designing of information objects. In other words, it is a “critical rhetorical strategy for intervention” that “ensures opportunities for agents to participate in long-term design and planning” (Rhetorical 54). In an effort to jettison the overused concept of community, Nicole Brown, in “The Regionalization of Cyberspace: Making Visible the Spatial Discourse of Community Online,” points to information architecture as a strategy for “defining” and “constructing” “informational paths,” as well as “conceptualizing online learning spaces and the writing and reading that occurs in these contexts.”

While I am convinced by both Salvo and Brown of the possibilities for information architecture, especially by Salvo’s claims for its importance in technical communication pedagogy, the concept holds less promise for our purposes in designing and implementing a writing and rhetoric major—and for creating a productive approach to our students’ composing situations. With its history in architecture and online information, information architecture might be too technical or professional for our programmatic and pedagogic needs. Information architecture revolves around a (professional) concern for users interacting with/in online contexts that does not capture the online and offline networked environment within which our writing and rhetoric major operates.

Seemingly more closely aligned with an environmental approach, information ecology represents an oppositional metaphor, in many cases, to information architecture. Even within Salvo’s illustration of the possibilities information architecture offers technical communication, he introduces information ecology in order to distinguish the two metaphors (Teaching). Gaining one of its first treatments by Marilyn Cooper in her 1986 article, “The Ecology of Writing,” ecology provided an alternative to the solitary author of cognitive models of writing. Ecological systems, according to Cooper, are “inherently dynamic,” and reflect the fact that “all the characteristics of any individual writer or piece of writing both determine and are determined by the characteristics of all the other writers and writings in the system” (368). Focused on the act of writing, Cooper described a model of writers mediating information systems as they compose.

Although Cooper was not looking at information technology in particular in her conceptions of an ecological approach to writing, she was providing an alternative to the cognitive model of writing. Similarly, Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O’Day, in their book Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart, rely on information ecologies as a metaphor for our interaction with and understanding of information technology. They define an information ecology as “a system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment” (49). Rather than focusing on technology, information ecologies highlight human interaction with technologies. The authors push for people to “get involved in the evolution of their information ecologies—jump into the primordial soup, stir it around, and make as many waves as possible” (58).

In the field of technical communication, the ecology metaphor has been employed in the study of workplaces, especially the proliferation and evolution of genres within workplaces. In particular, Clay Spinuzzi has developed the analytical framework of genre ecologies as means for investigating compound mediation in workplaces through a “community-centered interpretive view” (Compound). Through his investigation (tracing) of genres in organizations, he shows how genres mediate the interactions between humans and technology (Tracing). In other words, genre ecologies are the “dynamic and unpredictable clusters of communication artifacts and activities” mediating humans’ interactions with complex technologies (Spinuzzi and Zachary 170-1). Echoing Wurman’s vision of information architecture, Spinuzzi and Zachary see genre ecologies as a means for analyzing and aiding the (over)flow of information.

In this sense, we agree with Salvo and his criticism that an information ecology approach is too descriptive, limiting the involvement of users in the design of artifacts and systems. For our purposes, many information ecology approaches take an overly technology-centric focus. Even in the genre ecologies metaphor, technology, or genre, is given too much agency. We want to focus on writing and the writing done in local environments. Ecology works for describing a scene and examining how technology functions in that ecology but, at least in the work of Nardi and O’Day, the concept relies on its biological roots. Just as humans and nature share an ecology, humans and technology share information ecologies. While Spinuzzi bypasses this biological approach, he relies on genres as the mediating artifact for examining an open/ecological system. As writers enter different environments they have different technologies, needs, goals, audiences, etc. Environments are more transferable than ecologies while at the same time giving agency back to the writer, without reasserting a cognitive approach. Essentially, we want our students to analyze and produce in a variety of environments that result from a communicative problem.

Relying on Johndan Johnson-Eilola, we see environments as more similar to his depiction of the datacloud. Writers inhabit information environments and rely on information as a resource. Johnson-Eilola labels our work with information in these environments as “rearranging, filtering, breaking down, and combining” (4). These activities are required as users reconstruct technologies within specific contexts. In essence, users are designers/writers in environments. In his depiction of information environments, Earl Morrogh separates the users from the designers, or information architects; he then defines information environments as “physical and/or computer-mediated information space within which context is defined by real and conceptual structures” (109). While we agree with Johnson-Eilola that the “moment of use” is crucial to the “specific nature of uses,” we see that moment of use and reconstruction due to the numerous forces in that moment as culminating in an environment. Therefore, unlike in Morrogh’s use of environment, writers are the users and designers of an environment. As writers work within an environment, the “separation between online and IRL is tenuous” resulting in a “spilling over” of relationships, communication, documents, and identities. Environment more closely encapsulates this inhabitation of information represented by the datacloud.

But, we are interested in environment, ultimately, as a teaching concept. It must be a concept that is descriptive and productive for students both in and outside of the classroom. Echoing Hocks, environment must be a transferable and flexible “pedagogy of design.” While it is introduced in WRT 235: Writing in Electronic Environments, the concept must resonate with WRT 201: Writing Argumentative and Persuasive Texts, as well as upper division and capstone courses such as WRT 495: Capstone in Electronic Portfolios. Leaving the confines of Writing in Electronic Environments should not parralellel a departure from the environment concept.