WRT 235 Article

The third view

2009-05-08T10:27:00.000-07:00

First, I want to shout that I like the article as it is! Mumble Grumble. @#$%^&*

Okay now that is off my chest. Here are my thoughts about cuts. I reread the article twice, noting likely slash sites. I found that most of my sites were the same as J's, except that I agree with Mike that a big chunk of the history section should come right out. Details:

1. I agree with all of the cuts regarding bios and citations. It the history section is shortened, a chunk of those citations go, too.

2. Start with the second paragraph (or maybe with "Writing today means writing digitally . . ." and go to "Even so, . . . ")

3. Cut the quote from Starr, the WRT 106 description, and the first paragraph of the Teaching section.

4. We could cut the diagram, although this will entail rewriting, since a discussion of the diapgram is so embedded in the text. I vote that we wait on this cut until the others are completed; maybe it will not be necessary.

5. Cut the Yancey section. The flow is fine without it.

6. Cut the history section as Mike indicated. Keep the first two sections, then go to the fourth iteration paragraph. Savings = more than 2 pages. The text adjustment can be minimal between paragraph #2 and #6. Something like: "The development and application of the writing environment concept-metaphor came somewhat naturally out of the several iterations of the course. WRT 235 was originally designed and adopted by our program in 1991 as an analog to business writing, as that seemed to be both the environment and the rationale for a course in writing with computers. Within two years, the course's purposes, goals, design and assignments changed, and then changed again, and again, until by 2005 it had gone through four iterations, each time designed with more critical analyses about computer mediated discourse, with more rhetorical demands for writers writing in that an electronic environment, while the where of such writing became both more omnipresent and metaphorical. The fourth iteration of the course included an explicitly rhertorical dimensiton . . . ." continue with paragraph #6 of the history section. (If you do not like this bridge, feel free to edit it, please.)

7. Michael suggests shortening the collaboration stations section. I disagree. The assignment is a wonderful realizatoin of the environment metaphor, and the more we help readers see its full potential the better.

8. Michael suggests shortening the conclusion, and this is a possibilitity if the previous cuts do not add up to 9 pages. It could be two paragrpahs, perhaps beginning with "We look forward to a time when we . . . " Then skip the next paragrpah, and finish with the current last paragraph. I would rather cut this section than the diagram section.

L.

MP's possible cuts

2009-05-04T09:07:00.000-07:00

After looking over the 39 pages of the manuscript, I've got some ideas for cuts. Hopefully, many of these overlap with Jeremiah's and we'll find 9 pages shortly.

1. Redundant bios at beginning and end of manuscript; I vote we delete the bios on p. 39 as this gains us a page.

2. For me, some deleting and tightening can occur in the metaphors section. In particular, I think the information architecture section could be one paragraph (p. 6). We can cut the paragraph quoting Nicole Brown and combine the others. The ecology section could be two paragraphs (down from 4).

3. The where section, in which we outline infrastructure, can be trimmed. I nominate the paragraph beginning with Borgmann and including the long quote from Starr (pp.10-11). Also, on p.11, the paragraph beginning "We believe..." can be cut except for the first line, which can maybe be placed in next paragraph. This gets us more quickly to how what we are doing is different/new.

4. To my mind, p. 13, which focuses largely on how this focus impacts our majors, can be significantly cut. This is frustrating as I think the reviewers asked us to add some of this in.

5. I find it hard to say this next potential cut, since the practitioners' history has always been an important element to me. However, what if we revised the history section so that it opened with the most recent iteration of the course. We could then include a few sentences looking back at previous approaches.

6. The section on collaboration stations can be shortened--especially towards the end. This would allow us to delete Figure 1 (the course handout, p.23). I don't have specific paragraphs to delete but I'm wondering how we can get to the reason for including collab station section sooner. Then by deleting the figure, we can also delete references to using the handout in class.

7. Our concluding section could be two paragraphs. Jeremiah just told me he thinks the Yancey can be cut (or that's what I heard!). At the least, it could be shortened considerably and briefly noted in opening of para. 3 in that section. The last paragraph could be cut or, actually, maybe the final two paragraphs could be cut.

I don't know how many pages those cuts get us, and some of that will depend on the domino effect caused by the deletion of sources and footnotes (JD mentioned footnote 11 as a possible cut and I agree). After looking over the draft, however, I'm much less worried about how the loss of 9 pages will hurt the article. It will still make its point.

mp

JD's ideas for cuts

2009-05-02T07:43:00.000-07:00

Hi guys--

Lydia and Chloe are out at a birthday for a few hours, so I thought I'd take a whack at identifying some possible cuts. We have to get rid of 9 pages!

In my notes here, I am referencing the draft I forwarded from Danielle Aquiline yesterday ("DyehouseEtAl.Dec07. . . ").

p1: fix Shamoon bio formatting--it looks like it isn't adjusted to the current margins. Savings: 1 line

pp1-2: cut the first paragraph of our article, which merely repeats our abstract. I suppose that we would have to cut the first heading, too. Savings: .5 page

p10: cut the big block quote from Starr. This would mean revising the second half of this paragraph to eliminate its reliance on that quote. Savings: .5 page

pp12-13: cut the paragraph describing WRT 106 and community service writing. (I know: we added this for the reviewers. But as I read the ms., I am not seeing how this particular paragraph adds anything.) Savings: .5 page

p14: "Last semester"--ha ha! No real savings here, but we do have to change it.

pp16-17: cut the paragraph detailing the "roles and identities" focus of the course's 3rd iteration. I like this paragraph, but I think we can do without it. Savings: .5 page.

pp19-20: cut the first paragraph of the "Teaching Writing Environments" section. Savings: .5 page

pp22-24: cut figure 1 and the paragraph that explains it. If we do this, we'll have to quickly summarize the ideas that students are working with in the paragraph beginning "In class, the discussion begins with the emphases diagram. . . " Or perhaps we'll have to rework this whole little section. Still, it may be worth it. . . Savings: 1.5 pages.

p26: cut the Yancey invocation paragraph. Savings: .25 page

p29: rewrite our acknowledgments as a first endnote. Savings: .75 page

pp31-32: cut endnotes 9, 10, and 11 (on existing collaboration stations, on figure 1's "risks," and on the B.A.'s required courses). Savings: .75 page

pp33-38: cut citations no longer needed and "archival" citations of course documents (plus updating our MLA citation style to eliminate URLs) Savings: .5 page

p39: cut redundant biography paragraphs (in Danielle's ms., they appear on the manuscript's first page) Savings: 1 page

If I've estimated the savings correctly, these cuts would rid us of 7.25 pages. What do you think?

Thanks for considering--

J

Danielle's message (from Deborah Holdstein)

2009-04-27T10:49:00.000-07:00

Dear Professor Dyehouse:

I write regarding your accepted _CCC_ manuscript. As you most likely know, my term as editor ends in December, 2009, and I am trying to publish all accepted manuscripts in one of my remaining issues. While Danielle Aquiline (my editorial assistant) and I first indicated to you that we would be passing along your manuscript to the incoming editor, we have other, very exciting news to report, and we ask that you read this memorandum with care.

Recently, a decision has been made to publish all of these manuscripts in two blockbuster issues: September, 2009 and December, 2009. These issues will each feature a good number of articles published in what we’ve called “hybrid” fashion—that is, having print and online components, as I have explained in several “From the Editor” essays.

As you may know, anything published in print or hybrid form in _CCC_ has undergone the same, full level of review as every other article we publish, and, of course, it has been accepted for publication. In this hybrid format, two pages of your article will appear in the print journal—and the title of your manuscript is listed in the full Table of Contents in the print journal—with clear direction to view the entire piece online in “The Extended CCC,” which replicates the print journal on screen with consecutive pagination.

Owing to budgetary constraints that make online publishing only slightly less costly than print, the majority of the articles will be featured in this hybrid/online “Extended _CCC_” (on the very permanent NCTE website).

We hope you understand that for your manuscript to appear in an upcoming 2009 issue of _CCC_, it is necessary for us to publish it in this part print-fully online form. Articles appearing in this manner are eligible for the Braddock Award and are searchable for scholarly work. As you may have seen, again, “The Extended _CCC_” appears on the secure and carefully monitored NCTE website. I have scheduled your article to appear in the December, 2009 issue.

Further, as we may have already indicated to you regarding your particular manuscript, we must ask that you cut your manuscript to a maximum of 30 pages. (If your manuscript is currently thirty double-spaced pages or fewer, then you can disregard this warning.) This, too, is to keep within our allotted costs. These pages must include your bibliography, brief bio, and abstract. So that we can meet our deadline and have the issues in production according to NCTE’s schedule, you must make these cuts and return your manuscript to us by Thursday, May 14. (And in doing so, please re-title the electronic file with your name, partial title of the ms, and the date of the current revision.) Keep in mind that after we receive and review your final version, it will have to be fact-checked and go through several layers of copyediting; there also needs to be time to respond to queries from one of the copyeditors. Then, you will see page proofs, and we will need a quick response at that time, as well.

As always, Danielle and I will be happy to assist you in any way possible as you do this important work.

We are very pleased to be able to publish all the manuscripts accepted during this editorship; we acknowledge that “hybrid” publication (part in print, all online) might not be what you had anticipated. If you do not wish for your work to be published in this way or if you are unable to make the required cuts, you may be released from your consent to publish so that you can submit your manuscript elsewhere. Of course, we hope you will choose to publish with us in the flagship journal in rhetoric and composition. Should you have a chair, tenure or promotion committee, or other contact person or evaluation committee that will want further affirmation of the review process and the reasons for these forms of publication, I am happy to write such letters, and I have already agreed to do so for several authors.

Please feel free to look at a recent issue—December, 2008 or February, 2009—and check online for “The Extended _CCC_” (www.ncte.org/cccc/ccc) to see more specifically the way your article will appear.

We greatly appreciate your willingness to work with me and with Danielle during this exciting and transitional time. Please let us know immediately (writing to me and copying Danielle) that you have received this e-mail and intend to send us a revised manuscript if yours currently exceeds thirty pages. And if you need Danielle to send to you the most recent version in our files to expedite your work and to make sure we’re operating from the same version, she will be glad to do so.

Please let either of us know if you have any questions or concerns.

Best,
Deborah Holdstein

Revised Environment/Information/Ecology section

2007-02-02T09:30:00.000-08:00

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.

mp
_________

"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.

new 1st para. draft

2007-01-26T08:08:00.000-08:00

For many of us, Kathleen Blake Yancey captured an opportunity—what she called a "moment"—for composition as a field in her 2004 CCCC Chair's Address, "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key" (297). In that address, Yancey describes a "tectonic change" under way in the ongoing development of literacy practices linked to the digital computer, a change that reorganizes literacy both in and out of schools (298). "We have a moment," Yancey argued, and it calls for the accommodation of schooling to our students. Our students, like others in the newly developed "writing publics" that Yancey evokes, do not seem to require our aid or certification: in their technologically-constituted literacy activities, they "think together . . . organize . . . and act within [digital and online] forums" (301). Teaching these students, Yancey suggests, means paying attention to Cynthia Selfe's "technology-literacy link," accommodating our teachings to what we discover in that connection. Measuring our concerns against our optimism, teaching these students means engaging them in the ongoing development of their literacy practices and "literate lives" (Selfe and Hawisher)—meeting, them, that is, in the development of their written and writing selves and in the places or environments in which they write.

conversation with a student

2006-12-22T06:53:00.000-08:00

Just finished the following conversation with Barry, a former student in my WRT 235 class.

J: Barry, you took a course with me entitled "Writing in Electronic Environments." How would you define an electronic environment for writing?

B: Ah--uuh--hmm. How about anytime you're using a computer to write?

J: OK, but how would you define it? In terms of space? The spaces where you work? In terms of technologies? The technologies that you use? Socially? In terms of social context?

B: All of those?

J: OK. Hmm.

B: Well, it sort of depends on what you mean by writing, doesn't it? . . .

J: Wow! Great answer! Great question! Thanks, Barry! [Walks away, mumbling: "It depends on what you mean by writing. . ."]

B: Do I get an "A" for that?

---

Great stuff, and a great question from Barry. I think it may be that we ought to focus on the connection Barry offered: how we conceptualize "electronic environments for writing" depends centrally on how we conceptualize writing--and vice versa. So: discussion of "environments" offers a kind of alternate approach to talking about definitions of writing. . .

Other Versions of 235

2006-11-09T08:56:00.000-08:00

I'm using this post to collect some versions of our 235 at other schools.

Jan Fernheimer's Writing to the World Wide Web:http://www.rpi.edu/~fernhj/WWWWf06/

Alex Reid's New Media: http://web.cortland.edu/reida/cyberspace/

Patricia Freitag Ericsson's Multimedia Authoring: http://www.wsu.edu/~ericsson/355_syllab_F06.html

Michael Day's Writing for Electronic Media: http://www.engl.niu.edu/mday/532/syll.html

Karl Stolley's Multimedia Writing: http://419.multimediawriting.com/

Moran's Access chapter

2006-10-25T09:00:00.000-07:00

Jeremiah mentioned Charles Moran's chapter "Access: The A Word in Technology Studies" (found in, who else, Hawisher and Selfe's _Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies_) the other day. I just looked at it and it does aid our local take on environment. He situates his discussion of access within UMass's status as a northeastern land grant school. Perhaps environment gets at issues of access untouched by architecture or ecology.

mp

A way to start?

2006-10-24T06:38:00.000-07:00

The draft intro below begins a bit abruptly, so I've been thinking over ways to ease into it a little. Mike, you mentioned that the Houghton Mifflin editor was impressed that 235 was so old--that it had been on the books for so long. That's exactly the kind of pregnant fact that can draw readers in and simultaneously authorize our historical/reflective inquiry.

Why don't we start with a little chronology of the course, bringing it up to the "present," in which we're revising it for the major. Example first line: "In 19XX, the University of Rhode Island's Faculty Senate approved a course designated WRT 235, ". . .," as an English department offering for URI's undergraduate students." I mean, that's just a stab at it, but still. . .

Consider this argument?

2006-10-17T12:12:00.000-07:00

My purpose here is to [use] concepts from postmodern geography to explore how spaces and places are socially produced through discourse and how these constructed spaces can then deny their connections to material reality or mask material conditions. Cultural geography invites us to question the relationships between material conditions and imagined territories, a relationship I identify here as the politics of space, and asks us to attend to the negotiations of power that take place across and within a number of spaces: regional or topographical, domestic or institutional, architectural or electronic, real or imagined. Making a geographic turn enables me to examine the politics of space in composition with three general aims: (1) to interpret some of composition's most enduring spatial metaphors as "imagined geographies" responsible, in part, for composition's disciplinary development and identity; (2) to illustrate the effects of time-space compression on composition's workers; (3) and to argue for a spatial politics of writing instruction that denies transparent space and encourages the study of neglected places where writers work. . . . After demonstrating the endurance of one of composition's most important imagined geographies, the frontier, and the emergence of two more, the city and cyberspace, I argue that these imaginary places for writing and writing instruction have been rendered benign, or anesthetized by the influence of transparent space; that we have neglected the relationship between material spaces and actual practices; and that we need to attend to the effects of time-space compression on composition's workers. (Reynolds 13-14).

intro from 10/2 drafting session

2006-10-03T13:31:00.000-07:00

Developing a new major in Writing and Rhetoric has required the development of new courses and the reappraisal of existing ones. “Writing in Electronic Environments” is one of the courses we are reappraising for our new major. Initially included as a core course to introduce majors to composing electronic portfolios, Writing in Electronic Environments is, for some of us, taking on new significance as we go forward with the development of an actual curriculum. Our multimedia writing course is proving to be a cerntal site for our work in thinking through the major.

For many of us, Kathleen Blake Yancey’s 2004 CCCC Chair’s address captured the moment in which our field must develop a new curriculum and a new major for composition. Yancey’s vision of that present draws together the field’s understanding of emerging mulitimedia literacies with recent research on how writings’ variable distribution and circulation—not just its production—occasions our new pedagogical endeavor. Even acknowledging our sympathies with Yancey’s argument, we were surprised at how much of the major curriculum seemed condensed in Writing in Electronic Environments, a lower-level offering.

Certainly, Writing in Electronic Environments includes work with multimedia composing and many occasions for observing how writing circulates in Internetworked forums. Yet it’s neither the technology nor the chance to teach the circulation of writing that encapsulates the Writing & Rhetoric major: it’s the key term from the title, “environment.” For us, this concept condenses a sense of the complex sites in which writing is produced, circulated, and consumed. . . .

Working through our reappraisal of Writing in Electronic Environments, we discovered that the history of the course parallels the history of our field’s approaches to writing, technology, and rhetoric. First a skills course, then a process course, Writing in Electronic Environments later became a course articulated around the social perils and possibilities of writing with technology. Now, as we bring together our conceptual insights with our understanding of this course and its history, we draw upon our own past approaches to layer together past concerns with a new attention to rhetoric. Like Stuart Selber’s approach in Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, we address “skills,” “process,” and “social” concerns simultaneously.

Lankshear and Knobel, New Literacies

2006-09-20T08:47:00.000-07:00

I came across a couple of lines in this book, New Literacies: Changing Knowledge and Classroom Learning, that might help us describe environments and our curricular and pedagogical approaches.

• “The second point about the environments of the information technology revolution is that they tend toward endless proliferation of information…Amid the exponential growth, far beyond saturation, of publicly avalialble information, it is important that we be able to develop means and strategies for handling it in workable and effective ways” (59).
• “The challenge is how to live in physical space and, to an increasing extent, in cyberspace and the datasphere. A sound education will cater to both, and will do so in informed and principled ways” (66).

mp

course history - two paragraph version (with intro.)

2006-08-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

Here is a 2 paragraph version of the course history segment, prefaced by a one paragraph intro. I would be glad to revise any of this if the theme, tone, examples, etc. are wrong.

Of course, after mucking around in the history of the class for several days, I find the 2 paragraph version completely inadequate! So, below the 2 paragraph version I have pasted a 5 paragraph version, just in case you want to see a few other ideas available to us by reviewing the history theme.

LS

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Today for those of us in composition studies, a course on writing with computers does not seem like an anomaly, especially if it is one writing course amongst many in a writing curriculum that stretches well beyond first year composition. After all we have --- years of disciplinary research in computers and composition, and we have specializations in this writing with computers at the Ph.D. level. Yet, few of us would anticipate that such a course would be placed at the heart of a writing major that is driven by attention to composing processes, critical theory and rhetorical traditions. Somewhat to our surprise, that is exactly where our version of such a course is now situated: as one of the first required courses students will take as they pursue our new degree program in writing and rhetoric. Situating the course in this way indicates that it has moved from the margins to the very center of the curriculum, a move that prompts us teachers of the course to interrogate it all over again, reconsidering its design and its raison d’etre, particularly in order to understand what are this course’s inherent central principles that stretch all the way through a writing major?

One place to start answering that question is to consider the history of this course as it has unfolded in our program. That history puts us on the trail to an answer, even if it does not fully resolve the question of "inherent cetnral principles." In a very early iteration of the course, which we refer to as WRT 235, we focused on the practical/utilitarian needs prompted by a new writing technology and on how "to use the computer to add depth to each step of the writing process: inventing, drafting and revising.“ Nine years later we totally revised the course, calling it “Writing in Electronic Environments,” and signaling a radical departure from the practical writing assignments and expressivist-process pedagogy of the earlier iteration. Now, we focused on the social and cultural elements that seem to drive the way writers interact with this particlar writing technology for the purposes of self-expression, self-representation, harvesting of information and communicating. The syllabus was organized around themes (for example “The Internet as a Technology for Representations of Oneself,” or "The Internet as a Technology of Electronic Democracy") that invited critical thinking about the ways the technology instantiates writers into surprising roles and identities, and how these are linked to writing behaviors, habits and demands that are purely digital in origin and execution (such as web pages, list serves, blogs, face pages, chat rooms, etc.). With this iteraion, the couse seems both more substantive and thoroughly digital.

This “mini” history seems to imply that by its later iteration, the course had found its inherently appropriate content, centered on its own processes and genres of writing, and is appropriately situated squarely in the center of our writing program’s curricular concerns--composing processes, critical theory and rhetorical traditions. For us instructors of the course, however, when we design the syllabus and assignments by using analytical methods derived from either critical theory or composing theory, we are still using central principles derived from non-electronic writing environments to drive an electronic writing course. Surely, if the course is worth being at the center of the writing major, things should be the other way around: At least some of the theory and analysis shaping the course should derive from principles inherent to the nature of writing in an electronic environment. We are, therefore, pondering, yet again, a new iteration of the class, one that really tangles with what we mean by writing in an electronic environment. In essence, what do we mean by “environment”? Are the concepts entailed in “writing environment” robust enough to form a central principal for the course, and can it redound through the writing major, generally?

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5 paragraph version.

One place to start answering that question is by considering the history of this course as it has unfolded in our program. This course, which we refer to as WRT 235 and which has had three different official iterations in our university’s catalog, keeps evolving. Each iteration was initially prompted by practical-utilitarian concerns and rationalizations, but the day-by-day teaching of the course and our observations of students’ writing with computers gradually, inevitably refocuses the course around critical and theoretical concerns of composing and communicating with, through and within advanced writing technologies. For example, the first iteration of this course in 1991 was based on the rationalization that:

Students entering a variety of fields (business, journalism, engineering, resource management, education and public relations) may be expected to write and produce a variety of texts with the computer. In addition, they maybe responsible for supervising, coordinating or leading others who are using the computer to write or publish documents.

Because of this rationalization, a major assignment for the class asked each student in the class to visit a work site in order to study how computers used for writing in that setting.

This practical/utilitarian orientation stayed in place until next iteration of the course, which occurred within two years. This iteration, called “Writing with Computers,” focused on the ways in which composition research alerted us to “how the computer changes the writing process, how it transforms [a writer’s] view of text from static and linear to fluid and hierarchical, how graphics may enhance text or be irrelevant, and how [it facilitates writing] as part of a team.” Clearly, the practical/utilitarian aspects of the course, while still present, were becoming secondary or, more accurately, were becoming a means to thinking about the nature of texts and about composing practices, including, according to a standard syllabus, “helping you [the student] to use the computer to add depth to each step of the writing process: inventing, drafting and revising [ . . . ] seeing text as fluid, an opportunity for play and open ended exploration . . . “ With this language, the course was clearly more theorized and driven by the insights and pedagogical savvy gained from forty years of writing-as-a process research and practice. These changes, however, did not make the inherent principles of writing with computers a driver of the course. Indeed, the opposite was still true: writing process research and theory, including expressivism, was driving the course.

By 2000, however, the title of the course became, “Writing in Electronic Environments,” signaling a radical departure from the nine-year history of a course anchored in practical writing assignments and expressivist-process pedagogy. This next iteration was prompted, in part, by our day by day, week by week, observations of our WRT 235 students’ writing on list serves and e-mail, in their rudimentary web sites, in their appropriation of others’ texts when researching, and their desktop publications. These artifacts offered evidence that much more was changing than the writing process. Slowly but surely, the course became more and more focused on the social and cultural elements that seem to drive the way students interacted with this technology for self-expression, self-representation, harvesting of information and for communication. In this third iteration, the course was driven by themes that invite critical thinking about the way the technology instantiates writers into surprising roles and identities, and the way these are linked to writing behaviors, habits and demands that are purely digital in origin and execution. For example, when students’ study of the theme “Technologies of Writing and their Effects on Writers and Writing,” the assignment is the writing of an essay in Two Technologies, One digital, one non-digital; when they study “The Internet as a Technology for Representations of Oneself,” the assignment calls for setting up and keeping of a web log (blog). Furthermore, whatever themes are selected by the instructor, conscious attention is given to critical analysis of the popular, social hopes and promises of that use of the technology, as these were challenged by the students’ actual experiences as writers.

With these themes and concerns, the course in its third iteration moved more firmly to the center of our writing program’s curricular concerns: composing processes, critical theory and rhetorical traditions. Indeed, naming the course as a required as part of the major in Writing and Rhetoric seems to confirm its central place. But, once again, there is pressure for the course to revert its earliest conception, a course anchored in practical demands This course is central to a writing major because, said our colleagues, it is students’ first exposure to those writing tasks that we expect our graduates to be able to do: to develop an electronic portfolio of digital documents that presents their best work from their courses and through which they represent themselves as skilled rhetoricians, writers, editors, and text designers. In other words, the course is central to the major because it serves students’ practical needs in their career setting!

For us instructors of the course, however, the “how-to” of electronic writing is no longer a substantive focus or rationale. In addition, we realize that even though the course has evolved to include attention to composing processes, critical theory and rhetorical traditions, we recognize that the analytical methods derived from critical theory and rhetorical traditions currently push the course through its readings and assignments, similar to the course in its second iteration, when it was driven by process theory. But surely, if the course is at the center of the writing major, things should be the other way around: the inherent nature of writing in an electronic environment should drive the course. We are, therefore, pondering a fourth iteration of the class, one that really tangles with what we mean by writing in an electronic environment. What do we mean by “environment”? Are the concepts entailed in “writing environment” robust enough to form a central principal for the course, and can it redound through the writing major, generally?

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the history segment (long version)

2006-08-11T10:11:00.000-07:00

Here is a draft of the history segment. It is too long. I am wrestling with it to shorten it. I would appreciate advice in the meantime.
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What are this course’s central principles that we believe stretch all the way through a writing major?

One place to start answering that question is by considering the history of this course as it has unfolded in our program. This course, which we refer to as WRT 235 and which has had three different official iterations in our university's catalog, keeps evolving in two ways. Each iteration is initially prompted by practical-utilitarian concerns and rationalizations, but the day-by-day teaching of the course and our observations of students’ writing with computers gradually, inevitably refocuses the course around critical and theoretical concerns of composing and communicating with, through and within advanced writing technologies. For example, the first iteration of this course in 1991 began with a working title of “Writing with Computers in Career Settings,” reflecting a sense that using computers for writing was a workplace phenomenon and that such a course would be “needed” by only a segment of students, those in business and professional tracks. We argued for the course by stating:

"Students entering a variety of fields (business, journalism, engineering, resource management, education and public relations) may be expected to write and produce a variety of texts with the computer. In addition, they maybe responsible for supervising, coordinating or leading others who are using the computer to write or publish documents."

By the time this course actually moved through the university’s approval process, the title was shortened to “Writing with Computers” and the rationale for the course included a discussion of the ways the writing process is enhanced, modified and sometimes, perhaps, impeded by composing with computers. Nevertheless, the course and the writing assignments remained the same—practical/utilitarian—and we promised to offer one section a year, taught by a non-tenured faculty member late in the day. A course on the margins, to be sure, and not one overly concerned with principles that stretched through the rest of the writing curriuclum.

The next iteration of the course, which occurred within two years, retained the same title, but the rationale for the new design focused on the ways in which composition research alerted us to “how the computer changes the writing process, how it transforms [a writer’s] view of text from static and linear to fluid and hierarchical, how graphics may enhance text or be irrelevant, and how [it facilitates writing] as part of a team.” Clearly, the practical/utilitarian aspects of the course, while still present, were becoming secondary or, more accurately, were becoming a means to thinking about the nature of texts and about composing practices. Consider these first three goals statements for the course.

"Goals
1. This course aims to change the way you write on computer, helping you to use the computer to add depth to each step of the writing process: inventing, drafting and revising.

2. The course aims to change your critical stance towards text, from seeing text as static and permanent to seeing text as fluid, an opportunity for play and open ended.

3. The course aims to have you see texts as hierarchies, especially to have you transform texts into hierarchies with the aid of outliners, hypercard and other analytical text tools."

With this language, the course is clearly more theorized and more in keeping with writing process research and theory. In this iteration the course itself become more driven by the insights and pedagogical savvy gained from forty years of writing-as-a process research and practice. Redesigning the course in this way made it more central to the program and more embraced by the faculty but these changes did not make the inherent principles of writing with computers a driver of the writing curriculum, as a whole.

By 2000, however, the title of the course became, “Writing in Electronic Environments,” signaling a radical departure from the nine-year history of a course anchored in practical writing assignments and expressive-process pedagogy. This next iteration of the course was prompted by two very important tends. First, access to and uses of computer technology became more personal and affordable, and in a university environment, more insistent. Second, the ways to use the technology became easier and more complicated at the same time. Word processing, formatting text and integrating graphics became routine, for example, while the native forms of electronic writing (such as list serves, web sites) developed so rapidly as to constantly challenge what we thought we knew about writing with computers .

These trends and activities had several effects on the course. First, since the course promised to focus on the use of computers for writing, it attracted more students who wanted to learn more about the practical things of writing (such as, more about word processing, graphics in texts, doing e-mail, web sites etc.). At the very same time, we eliminated the most practical, “how-to” elements of the class. We did this partly because these were available to students through other venues, and partly because day by day, week by week, our WRT 235 students’ writing on list serves and e-mail, in their rudimentary web sites, in their appropriation of others’ texts when researching, and their desktop publications were evidence that much more was changing than the writing process. Slowly but surely, the course became more and more focused on the social and cultural elements that seem to drive the way they interacted with this technology for self-expression, self-representation, information and communication, the way individuals users (and organizational users) were writing, responding to, seeking out, sharing and representing themselves through this technology. Not surprisingly, these were the very issues that became more central concern to emerging specialists in writing with computers and to the discipline, generally (references needed).

Now the course is driven by themes that invite critical thinking about the way the technology was instantiating writers into roles and identities that had associated writing behaviors, habits and demands. The course deliberately takes up these themes and each theme is associated a writing project that was purely digital in origin and execution. For example:

"Theme: Technologies of Writing and their Effects on Writers and Writing
Assignment: Essay in Two Technologies, One digital, one non-digital

Theme: The Internet as a Technology of Democracy
Assignment: Participation in The Intercollegiate Electronic Democracy Project’s Issues-based List Serves

Theme: The Internet as a Technology for Representations of Oneself
Assignment: Setting up and keeping a web log (blog)

Theme: The Internet as a Technology for the Dissemination of Information (includes Visual Rhetoric)
Assignment: Activist "Website" of 3 - 4 Linked Pages"

Furthermore, whatever themes were selected by the instructor, there was conscious attention given to critical analysis of the popular, social hopes and promises of that use of the technology, as these were challenged by the students’ actual experiences as writers. For example, for the project on the Internet and democracy, students reflected on such issues as:

"*You now have participated in an extensive email discussion (asynchronous) list? Briefly describe its purpose and qualities. What was the style of writing? What writing and communications “demands” did that environment make on participants?

*Think for a few minutes beyond your personal uses of the computer for interpersonal communication. What might be the larger social, community, or political advantages of the wide-spread availability of chat rooms, email discussion lists, interactive blog sites, and other forms of synchronous and asynchronous communications? What might be the disadvantages or problems?

"According to some political theorists, democracy thrives when and if ordinary citizens are guaranteed freedom of expression and they engage in rational public deliberation about issues of social or political concern. Based on our electronic writing experiences this semester what are your hopes for “keypad democracy”?"

Clearly, a major goal of the course in its third iteration is the development of a critical habit of mind with respect to the writing (and the writer) that occurs in electronic environments. At the same time, this critical perspective included attention to those conventions, features and communicative appeals of digital genres which best assure clear, honest, ethical, and thoughtful communication between writers and their audiences. In other words, the course also included attention to rhetorics and genres of writing in electronic environments.

It would seem that with these themes and concerns, the course in its third iteration moved more firmly to the center of the writing program’s curricular concerns: composing processes, critical theory and rhetorical traditions. Indeed, naming the course as a required as part of the major in Writing and Rhetoric confirms its central place. But, once again, there is pressure for the course to revert its earliest conception, a course anchored in practical demands This course is central to a writing major because, said our colleagues, it is students’ first exposure to those writing tasks that we expect our graduates to be able to do: to develop an electronic portfolio of digital documents that presents their best work from their courses and through which they represent themselves as skilled rhetoricians, writers, editors, and text designers. In other words, the course is central to the major because it serves students’ practical needs in their career setting!

For the instructors of the course, however, the “how-to” of electronic writing is never a substantive focus. New generations of software make the how-to of electronic writing ever easier, while rendering the composing processes and rhetorical options and opportunities more invisible. For the instructors of the course, the urgent question is “What are this course’s central principles that stretch all the way through the curriculum?” As we ponder this we realize that even though the course has evolved to include attention to composing processes, critical theory and rhetorical traditions—all of which link to central principles that stretch all the way through the curriculum--it does so with respect to electronic genres of web pages, blogs, list serves, etc., and these concerns are course specific rather than redounding to the writing major as a whole. To be general we have to take it one step further – to really tangle with what we mean by writing in an electronic environment. What do we mean by making “environment” a principle for writing, generally?
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Wikitravel example

2006-08-03T06:10:00.000-07:00

Here's a draft of the Wikitravel project description for the article.

mp
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The implementation of a project involving Wikitravel in recent Writing in Electronic Environments courses has proven productive in teaching of the course and with students’ engagement in public and collaborative writing. In addition, more than updating electronically traditional goals of writing pedagogy, the project also illustrates the revolutionary role of the networked computer in digital writing (Porter 2002). This project asks students to participate and create in a writing environment that parallels many other environments these “digital natives” (Prensky 2001) engage in regularly, from MySpace or Facebook to blogs to IM and video games. The following brief description outlines this digital writing project and the ways in which it follows Melinda Turnley’s (2005: 132) call for students to “intervene productively in relationships among technology, texts, and people.”

Wikis represent a set of webpages with an open-editing system; in other words, anyone can add to, delete, or change a wiki, making them highly collaborative. No knowledge of HTML is required, only a networked computer with a web browser. While classroom-based wikis present tremendous opportunities for collaborative writing, we aimed for a more public wiki, one which pushed students into the networked environment within which wikis flourish. In other words, we didn’t want the network to be our class.

The Wikitravel site started in June 2003 and represents a free, open, world-wide travel guide created and maintained by “Wikitravellers from around the globe.” With only 8,000 articles, Wikitravel presented a more manageable and productive entry into wikis for my students than the more popular Wikipedia. In addition, the New England area, especially Rhode Island, entries were particularly thin, holding no more than templates. After introducing wikis and Wikipedia, we asked students to explore Wikitravel, honing in on local New England articles. What became apparent was the empty and, at times, inaccurate information for the state of Rhode Island. Their goal was to begin building the Rhode Island aspect of Wikitravel.

The classes divided into groups based on local areas of interest, such as Block Island, Providence, or South County. While all aspects of Rhode Island required content, each group explored the existing or non-existing templates for their region, making decisions as to how and what they would contribute. As the groups quickly noticed, Wikitravel manages contributions by relying on standard templates, including categories for history, travel to and from, eating, and sleeping. Essentially, students were forced to make the choice between breadth and depth, depending on their approach. In other words, they could attempt to add content throughout the template or they could hone in on one or two areas and add substantial content to, for example, the dining section of Providence.

Additionally, Wikitravel has a thorough Manual of Style which outlines in detail the preferred form for entries, including the listing of phone numbers, hours of operation, and URLs. So, students were not only researching Wikitravel and its format, but they were also researching their regions. This research required a merging of first-hand experience with published reviews, articles, or information. Especially in the state of Rhode Island, local knowledge is valued over, and many times conflicts with, official knowledge or information. For example, South County is not an official county. It represents an imaginative geographic area in the southern portion of the state, including the official Washington County. But it also represents a rural and less-populated region complete with beaches, roadside garden stands, and an independent attitude. Students struggled with how to represent their regions accurately to potential travelers within a standard template--how do you make South County fit into Wikitravel’s model?

Unlike web pages, which are published and then frequently or occasionally updated by a webmaster, wikis are always in a state of flux, always being re-published. Students struggled with the collaborative and combative approach to writing Wikitravel required. As they researched, they published and they revised. Group members constantly mediated additions and revisions with fellow group members and the public at large. Ownership of writing was in flux as writers pushed towards a “final” developed node. Minor and major changes from classmates and anonymous Wikitravellers kept the audience and public nature of their writing at the fore as they pushed for a useful travel guide. With a goal of multiple outlet formats, Wikitravel requests that contributors avoid HTML. Instead, contributors are asked to rely on Wiki markup when editing a page. A straightforward table walks Wikitravellers through the process, illustrating “To get this output…use this markup” instructions. Granted, students only learn minimal HTML with this project. However, this contextualized writing for the web provides students with a situation in which they must adopt to their purpose to a prescribed and preferred format—a useful skill in any writing environment. Further, especially in the context of other projects throughout the semester that include web authoring software and Blogger markup language, the Wikitravel project exposes students to the code and structure underlying all writing on the Web. This process complicates what writing in electronic environments consists of and how writers mediate their purposes with preferences and technology.

As a public, technologically-mediated environment, Wikitravel asks students to consider the creation of knowledge in their digital-native culture that values and supports peer-to-peer, distributed networks. In terms of Wikitravel, editors and users must maintain the global picture while they work at the micro-level. Students, many of whom still operate under a Britannica-like knowledge structure, balk initially at the idea of others revising or editing their sentences or words. However, at the macro-scale, students see vast improvements and additions that are ultimately useful and robust. Sure, the Block Island node might have some grammar issues or even an inaccurate phone number for a hotel, but the overall node in the context of the Rhode Island site is a helpful, locally-created travel guide.

Yancey's 2004 keynote

2006-08-01T14:06:00.000-07:00

As we think about target composition journals and themes rather than tech journals, I keep thinking about Yancey's 2004 CCCC keynote speech. It was electrifying and really important for the field. I want to suggest that we might refer to some of her themes, either in our opening or closing (or both) as a way to resonate with the composition audience. I think I will give relevant excerpts from Palmquist's summary, and if you think it is worth pursuing, I will dig out the CCC version and work it into the draft.

Yancey’s relevant keynote address themes:

Theme #1: Yancey identified three areas where change should occur: the development of a new composition curriculum, the assessment and revision of our writing-across-the-curriculum efforts, and the creation of a major in composition and rhetoric.

Theme #2: Yancey’s discussion of the development of a major addressed the importance of considering information technologies as sites of production and distribution of writing. She also addressed the implications of the process movement in composition studies and the challenges posed by post-process theorists to that movement.

Theme #3: Yancey suggested that we pursue a new model of teaching writing that pays attention to issues that are not addressed by the current model, including:

* Intertextual circulation – or, more concretely, how the writing that our students do relates to writing in the world
* The media through which texts might be delivered
* The remediation of texts across delivery media and the implications of remediation for “what moves forward, what gets left out, what gets added—and what they have learned about composing in this transfer process”
* Preparation to become members of the writing public

Yancey’s discussion of the model focused on three key areas: the circulation of composition, the canons of rhetoric, and the deicity of technology.

Linda

proposal for a revised outline

2006-07-24T07:12:00.000-07:00

In looking back at our outline (and thinking over our last thread), I'm wondering if some planning revisions might help along our collaborative writing process. So: here's my draft of a new plan of work (focusing mostly on a first or introductory section). Please tell me what you think!

Rev'd WRT 235 article outline (in sections):

1. Introduction. Orient our article in terms of our development of the major and the redevelopment of the course. Introduce our article's attempt to contribute to the theorization of the major. Discuss our goals for this piece: thinking through the major in terms of what we're hoping to accomplish in WRT 235 and with the "environment" focus. Scale back or eliminate discussion of "symbolic analysis" work.

[1a. Begin by discussing the major historically: as proposed, approved, and being implemented. Highlight what kind of curricular thinking/theorizing this major makes possible. Compare/contrast this theorizing with what Linda and Bob did in their book. Emphasize the necessity for communication among CWP faculty members, the development of a common vision of a course, and the extension of that common vision to larger discussions about a collective vision for the major among CWPers (and among members of the field more generally?). ]

[1b. Next, discuss WRT 235 historically: its inception, its early constraints, its role as core course in our major (for multimedia writing instruction, for introduction of the portfolio), and in its role as a course undergoing redevelopment. Justify our article as a sort of writeup of the collegial work we've been doing: CWP meetings about the major, LJM meetings about WRT 235, the LJM reading group meetings, etc. ]

[1c. Discuss in detail what it means to theorize the major through this particular course and its concepts. Here's where we preview the upshot of the article. To my mind, our attempts to theorize the major through WRT 235 shouldn't merely highlight the role of technology in all writing--as a reader, that's what I'd expect from an article like ours, and I think it's a conclusion that's too easy. No: we should push ourselves to think about how the environment concept reflects our view of what it is that we're teaching our WRT 235 students and our majors more generally.]

[My view of the upshot: On one hand, we want to emphasize the teaching of rhetoric (conceived pretty traditionally) as rhetors' skillful negotiation between communicative purpose and argumentative means. On the other hand, though, we are pushing very hard on the meaning of "means,"and, hopefully, giving our students an expanded view of what is possible in electronic writing environments--environments that can seem, especially to developing writers, like fixed and immutable channels. In our major, as in WRT 235, we are teaching writers that the forums in which written communication takes place can and do change, that effecting such changes is actually at the heart of the writing/rhetoric as an art, and that writers who seek to accomplish their purpose for writing had better conceive of themselves as not only message-emitters but also as designers of the communicative environments in which their messages become legible. WRT 235 can give writers a fast introduction to such principles insofar as it is committed to electronic environments, where such changes are common and (usually relatively) easily effected. The major, on the other hand, is faced with teaching this principle (mostly) in the slow-moving and highly conservative world of print--a much tougher task. Again: my 2 cents--we can negotiate over this.]

2. A redeveloped concept for a redeveloped course: "environment." Present our sense of the concept. Distinguish it from other, similar concepts (architecture). Elaborate its meaning in terms of scholarly accounts (JJE's datacloud) and in terms of WRT 235 (how we understand ourselves teaching writing in electronic environments). Explain two WRT 235 course assignments (single topic IEDP-style discussions, Rhode Island travel wiki entries) by way of providing readers with examples of the concept in application.

3. Thinking environmentally about the major. Draw out the general teaching philosophy for rhetorical education that has developed in section 2. (Perhaps this is the moment to narrate our meeting, in which Linda helped me to see the importance of teaching something like best practice strategies for writing in electronic environments?) Discuss this philosophy in terms of the other core courses: 201, etc. Discuss this philosophy in terms of primarily electronic/online versus primarily print/document-centered courses. Summarize and conclude.

Architecture versus Ecology

2006-06-15T08:01:00.000-07:00

I'm pasting in some writing I've done on the architecture/ecology section. It needs work which may be easier when some of the other sections develop. The trick is showing environment as a necessary and different metaphor.

______________________________________________________________________________

why environment?

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 architecture and ecology in order to differentiate and illustrate information environment.

• not [information] architecture

Coined by Richard Saul Wurman, information architecture represented initially an attempt to expand the field of architecture into information spaces. Through architecture, Wurman offered a defense against, or a “guide for,” information overload described in his book Information Anxiety. As Wurman writes in Information Architects, “I don’t mean a bricks and mortar architect…I mean architect as in the creating of systemic, structural, and orderly principles to make something work—the thoughtful making of either artifact, or idea, or policy that informs because it is clear” (16). In particular, an information architect 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). As a modern taxonomy and strategy for handling the vast information of this “information age”, information architecture represents both a field or professional activity (one can be an information architect) and a metaphor (Morrogh). The Information Architecture Institute reflects these dual understandings of IA in its definition:
• The structural design of shared information environments.
• The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability.
• An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

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.” Salvo, in his “Teaching Information Architecture: Technical Communication in a Postmodern Context,” illustrates these educational opportunities as he describes the possibilities information architecture holds for educating technical communicators.

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. The technical communication bridge described by Salvo does not necessarily translate to a more programmatic approach, especially the focus on web-based communication. 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 major operates.

* not [information] ecology

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.

• [information] environment

Salvo criticizes an information ecology approach as 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.

Our understanding of environment echoes Jon Udell’s depiction in “The New Freshamn 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). Through rhetorically-based education we can prepare writing and rhetoric majors to engage with and build these environments in a more informed and productive manner that does not hinge on making them symbolic-analytic workers solely.

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.

JBTC article

2006-06-06T08:08:00.000-07:00

Wilson, G. (2001). Technical Communication and Late Capitalism: Considering a Postmodern Technical Communication Pedagogy. JBTC, 16, 3-32.

Jon Udell's "The New Freshman Comp"

2006-04-25T06:04:00.000-07:00

Although it is a year old, I just came back to this short article from O'Reilly Network by Jon Udell. This quote connects to our use of environment, I think: "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."

Spinuzzi

2006-04-12T06:55:00.000-07:00

I should remember this book but in case I blank, this is a reminder. He probably gives useful citations on ecology.

Clay Spinnuzi. Tracing Genres Through Organizations. MIT, 2003.

More ecology and architecture

2006-04-12T06:44:00.000-07:00

These mightbe useful in the article. I'm starting to think about the info architecture versus info ecology aspect.

Nardi and O'Day. Information Ecologies. MIT, 1999

Michael Salvo. "Rhetorical Action in Professional Space: Information Architecture as Critical Practice." JBTC, 2004.

Some ecology/architecture cites

2006-04-10T10:34:00.000-07:00

In Nicole Brown's "The Regionalization of Cyberspace: Making Visible the Spatial Discourse of Community Online," she cites some folks on ecology (Cooper, Nardi and O'Day) and architecture (Wurman) as she considers community. Ultimately, she pushes for information architecture as her preferred phrase.

Ecology mention/article

2006-04-03T13:24:00.000-07:00

In a recent TCQ, Killingsworth cites Cooper's 1986 "An ecology of writing," published in College English.

"Composition specialists beginning with Mariln Cooper's influential College English essay of 1986, 'An Ecology of Writing,' have explored the idea that all writing connects to an environment in ways that are little understood and require further study" (364).

For what they're worth--

Cooper, Marilyn. "An Ecology of Writing." College English 48 (1086): 364-375.

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. "From Environmental Rhetoric to Ecocomposition and Ecopoetics: Finding a Place for Professional Communication." Technical Communication Quarterly 14.4 (2005): 359-373.

TCQ articles

2006-04-03T07:02:00.000-07:00

This article looks like a part of Johndan's Datacloud:

"Relocating the Value of Work: Technical Communication in a Post-Industrial Age" TCQ 5.3 (1996): 245-70.

Here's one from Selber:

Selber, Stuart A. "Beyond Skill Building: Challenges Facing Technical Communication Teachers in the Computer Age." Technical Communication Quarterly 3.4 (1994): 365-390.

(mostly) literal transcription of our outline

2006-03-31T09:38:00.000-08:00

occupational intro.
* symbolic analytic
* our approach
* [map]

-----

why environment?
* not [information] architecture
* not [information] ecology
* [information] environment

information environment (Datacloud)
* "smear" (symbolic multiplicity)
* unsmearing: symbolic/material; psychological/existential; social [perspectives on the information environment]
* ratios [among the perspectives: architecture = s/m + p/e; ecology = s/m + s; environment = s/m + p/e + s]

How we see this taking shape on the ground
Pedagogical, programmatic
Major
[The major's] environmenal thread: 235, 360, 495
[The major's] rhetorical thread: 201, 490

-----

Rhetorically trained information writer
Is it TC lite?

Denied

2006-03-01T07:18:00.000-08:00

Thank you for submitting a proposal to the special issue of Composition Studies focusing on the writing major. We received an avalanche of excellent proposals. Unfortunately, your proposal was not among the very few we were able to select for development into a fuller article. We wish you good luck with the project and hope to read more about it in another venue.

Best,
Linda Adler-Kassner and Heidi Estrem for the Composition Studies Special Issue Collective

Proposal sent

2006-02-01T08:05:00.000-08:00

The proposal has been sent.

Here is the revised version.

mp

Writing in Electronic Environments: An Old Course for a New Major

Reflecting the digital turn in composition studies, multimedia writing courses have become commonplace in many writing programs. Yet these technology-rich courses take on new significance when located within a writing major, especially as a required course. This article explores the development of a writing major through the lens of a required writing course titled “Writing in Electronic Environments.” Specifically, we examine the course as an opportunity to make its practices and core concepts more central to the rhetorical approach of the major, and writing program, as a whole.

A core course, “WRT 235 Writing in Electronic Environments” explores a series of electronic environments for writing: print, message, research/information, and web. By focusing on “environments,” we open up traditional ways of considering multimedia writing, encouraging students to participate in what Johnson-Eilola calls the “datacloud.” Dataclouds—symbolic multiplicities—foreground the complex movements of writers’ work with information in electronic environments. Thinking through our Writing and Rhetoric major, we use the concept of environment to complicate genre-based and traditional approaches to composing.

Drawing out the theoretical implications of the course we’ve designed, this article considers how the focus on environment in WRT 235 illuminates other core courses in our major, particularly “WRT 360 Composing Processes and Canons of Rhetoric” and “WRT 495 Capstone in Electronic Portfolios.” Among many other questions, we ask how majors can think about writing environments in the history of rhetoric? How can majors foreground their engagement with the datacloud in a portfolio?

The proposal

2006-01-30T17:34:00.000-08:00

Writing in Electronic Environments: An Old Course for a New Major

Reflecting the digital turn in composition studies, Multimedia Writing courses have become commonplace in many writing programs. Yet these technology-rich courses take on new significance when located within a writing major, especially as a required course. This article explores the development of a writing major through the lens of a required writing course titled “Writing in Electronic Environments.” Specifically, we see the course as an opportunity to make its practices & core concept more central to the rhetorical approach of the major, and writing program, as a whole.

A core course, WRT 235 explores a series of electronic environments for writing: print, message, research/information, and web. By focusing on “environments,” we open up traditional ways of considering multimedia writing, encouraging students to participate in what Johnson-Eilola calls the “datacloud.” Dataclouds, symbolic multiplicities, foreground the complex movements of writers’ work with information in electronic environments. Within our Writing and Rhetoric major, we use environment to complicate genre-based and traditional approaches to composing.

Drawing out the theoretical implications of the course we’ve designed, this article considers how the focus on environment in WRT 235 illuminates other core courses in our major, particularly “WRT 360 Composing Processes and Canons of Rhetoric” and “WRT 495 Capstone in Electronic Portfolios.” Among many other questions, we ask how majors can think about writing environments in the history of rhetoric? How can majors foreground their engagement with the datacloud in a portfolio?

a little history

2006-01-27T20:10:00.000-08:00

I gather you are looking to me to provide some history re: wrt235. Here are some thoughts and you can tell me if this is what you had in mind.

An early iteration of this course was WRT 235 Writing with Computers and it developed because we understood that something different in the composing process was in hand when using computers to write. When you look at the 1993 course description (pasted below) you will see that we made the case for this course with a focus on the writing process, arguing that writing with computers enhances the writing process, and you will see that the selected genres for writing are business & professional genres--established, sedimented genres which would be facilitated by writing with computers.

By 2000 we had put in place WRT 235 Writing in Electronic Environments. Unfortunately, I do not seem to have the course rationale in my computer archives. I will search my paper files at school. I do remember that in approx. 1999 the English Dept. went through curricular changes and some of our courses went along in that process—WRT235 being one of them. Schwegler led the charge on this, so I shall also try to prompt his memory, too. The “new” WRT235 involved a change of wording in the title and description as a representation of the big shift in our understanding of computers in composition. By then several things were clear, at least to me. First, the changes summoned by the technology were more dramatic than merely “enhancing” the writing process. Second, the ‘things’ being written were not merely more finished versions of existing kinds of writing; they were fundamentally different – email, chat, usenet, web pages, yes, powerpoint. Third, the critical thinking (as well as technical abilities) summoned by the technologies and their uses (&/or written & visual ‘products’) would have to be different. We knew that the “Writing with Computers” label simply did not represent all that was/is at stake in that area. Add to this Schwegler’s commitment to social and critical theory as well as to a rather deterministic world view, and you have the birth of “environment” as the frame for the course.

LS

******************************************
1993 version:
Wrt 235: Writing With Computers

Description: The study of writing as modified by writing with computer. Practice in a variety of professional papers, graphic enhancement of text, and desktop publishing.

Rationale: During the past 18 years there has been a growing body of knowledge about the ways in which writing with the computer modifies and enhances the writing process. Presently there is no course at URI that teaches writing with the computer . Such a course would have students write extensively for a variety of professional situations, and they would also study how the computer changes the writing process, how it transforms their view of text from static and linear to fluid and hierarchical, how graphics may enhance text or be irrelevant, and how to write as part of a team.

Research indicates that students do not see writing with the computer as an opportunity to move through the writing process more completely and successfully. Patricia Harris, a writing researcher, found that students tend to use the computer as an advanced typewriter, merely entering sentences and checking for correctness, whereas they could use it to:
1. explore topics and expand content;
2. to play with text in order to discover meaning;
3. to revise extensively, especially with the aid of readability scales in order to increase their sense of audience.
If students have the opportunity to study and practice writing as it is enhanced by the computer, they would learn to see the words, sentences and paragraphs on the screen as fluid or changeable, enabling them to play with their text until their drafts more perfectly match their observations, analyses and insights. In other words, in such a course, students would learn to write differently than they do with a typewriter, and they would see texts from an entirely new, more creative fluid perspective.

In addition, our experience with Wrt 335x ( the experimental version of this course) proved to us that students are ready to work on their writing when they see themselves writing a variety of professional papers that are appropriate for a variety of real world situations and career settings. The kinds of writing included in the course are memoranda, letters, instructions, reports of various lengths and kinds with graphic enhancement, case studies, team reports and desktop publications of various kinds. By the end of the course, students are aware that effective writing of these kinds of texts is shaped by the rhetorical elements of context, audience, structure, content and language. This critical approach to text production combined with special features of text production on computer (such as graphic enhancement and text analyses) enable students to explore and to critique a wide variety of presentational formats.

We also had to respond to specific concerns about the course. Here are two such Q & A’s. We see in the last two answers to #1 the beginnings of taken-for-granted elements in what we are now calling the electronic writing environment.

Questions & Answers about Wrt 235

1. How is this different from any other writing course?

This course design proceeds from ideas generated by research about composing with a computer.
--First idea: students see the computer as an advanced typewriter and do not use the extensive 'invention,' 'drafting,' and 'revision' opportunities available. The course will work to change the way students write on computer , helping them to use the computer to add depth to each step of their writing process.

--Second idea: students do not see text as "fluid," as do those professionals who write with computers. The course aims to change students' critical stance towards text from static and permanent to fluid, playful and open ended.

--Third idea: writing with a computer transforms text from a linear product to a hierarchical product . One of the major differences between novice writers and professional writers is that professionals see texts as hierarchies, a vision which reinforces critical reading and organized thinking. The course aims to have students transform text into hierarchies, especially with the aid of outliners, hypercard and other analytical text tools.

--Fourth idea: writing with a computer offers the opportunity for a common professional experience: networked writing. Most students see writing as a solitary activity, but many professional environments require writing in groups, especially writing via computer networks. This class aims to make this experience integral to the course and aims to have students understand how to make group writing and group participation a successful experience for all students.

5. It sounds as if this course is trying to do a little bit of everything; what's the focus?

The focus of this course is writing--especially the special opportunities, the improved writing process and improved mastery possible when writing with the computer, and it explores the important link between various kinds of professional writing and the computer.

Handling the lit.

2006-01-23T09:21:00.000-08:00

Here's one way to handle the literature:

Scholarship on teaching Internet genres, to the degree that it agrees with us, merely confirms the ideas we gain by reflecting on our pedagogical practice.

That is, "No theory for our pedagogy, thanks--we'll do better by following what our actual classroom experiences suggest to us."

JD

Follow-up on Tufte

2006-01-19T10:59:00.000-08:00

In his The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2003), E. Tufte argues that PowerPoint software "actively facilitates the making of lightweight presentations" (26). His arguments on this point are pretty well known, I think: PowerPoint encourages the "foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narrative and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous decoration and Phluff, a preoccupation with format not content, and attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch" (p. 4).

What can Tufte's complaints tell us about writing in electronic environments? First, his focus on PowerPoint as a common tool for producing a particular kind of (multimodal) communication suggests that one of the electronic genres we ought to be thinking about is "overhead presentation."

Second, Tufte's actual complaints suggest that there are better and worse ways to develop this genre. Linda made this point in general in our meeting last semester, I believe: "best practices" exist!

A question we may want to consider is whether it's possible to separate the genre from the tool--to separate overhead presentations from PowerPoint, Keynote, Fireworks, or whatever. In principle, of course, the answer is yes. But, pedagogically, practically, is this the right way to go? (I expect that Linda answers in the affirmative.)

The bigger question, for me, is even more practical. Where do we go to find accountings of rhetorical "best practices" in e- or multimodal genres? I guess we have Tufte's work for presentations, Williams & Tollett (or others) for web design, and Linda's IEDP conventions for asynchronous chat. Who teaches e-mail in terms of conventions? Desktop publishing? Wikis? Blogs? Do we face a problem in emerging (or fast-changing) e-genres? Do situational inflections of particular technologies render talk of conventions too monolithic at the "environmental" level? Is this too much a skill-oriented approach in any event?

That's all for now--more later on symbolic/analytic--

J

Reference

Tufte, E. (2003). The cognitive style of powerpoint. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

Datacloud

2006-01-18T08:17:00.000-08:00

Here are some quotes from Johndan Johnson-Eilola's Datacloud that might guide us. In the first quote, his pointing out the tenuous relationship between online and IRL seems to parallel the paper and internet genre relationship; and why I like the use of environment.

- "Workers in such corporations, like the students in my classes, rely heavily on their abilities to communicate rapidly and in multiple media, to organize and circulate information, and to attack problems in creative, nontraditional ways. Increasingly, users in such spaces--both microcontexts and macrocontexts--work and learn within visually and structurally dense, often frankly and intentionally chaotic spaces. They multitask, they surf, they filter and rearrange, and they push and pull data streams. The often-held separation between online and IRL ("IN Real Life") is fairly tenuous, with relationships developed online spilling over into the real world; information at the surface or at depth in the computer moves back and forth to PDA, web-enabled phone, video monitor, stereo, and more" (32).
- "Unfortunately, current approaches to computers in education tend to prioritize more traditional types of work: writing essays and reports in word processors, analyzing profit and loss flows in spreadsheets, and calculating forces in numerical analysis programs. These are all useful skills, but they are the legacy of an earlier form of work; one that is being replaced by more complex forms. Because we have failed to understand the characteristics of symbolic-analytic work, we have yet to do an effective job of helping people learn to become symbolic-analytic workers" (72).

mp

genre teaching

2006-01-17T08:02:00.000-08:00

We'll have to do a bit of work to reconstruct how URI's CWP got into "genre" as a teaching approach. From what I have learned from Nedra, I think that Trimbur's textbook had something to do with it. Cultural studies perhaps even more.

Mike, as you've said, Linda's title for WRT 235 suggests a focus on expanded notion of electronic genres in terms of "writing environments." Yet, as you point out in your reference to Bauman (1999), many workers in our field have chosen to "see print forms as the default" in their exploration of electronic genres.

Pedagogically, too, this tendency seems to hold. In her report on teaching a "multimodal genre," C. Tardy (2005), for instance, deliberately minimizes the likely "environmental" impacts of PowerPoint software on the student writing processes she describes, choosing instead to emphasize the influence of rhetorical conventions associated with (print) science articles.

Nothing is necessarily wrong with her emphasis, of course. Even as she approaches the concept of multimodality, however, she describes the causes of writers' choices primarily with reference to a print genre and its contextual dynamics. Here, the choice of which cases are studied (Tardy: graduate and professional writers) certainly mitigates against any finding of "environmental" factors as the causes for writers' choices.

This is just one example, though. Are there any scholarly studies of teaching electronic genres in terms of "environment"? Any theory to help us make the link?

In her discussion of PP, Tardy cites E. Tufte, one of my favorites. He'll be useful, I imagine.

Reference:

Tardy, C. M. (2005). Expressions of disciplinarity and individuality in a multimodal genre. Computers and Composition, 22, 319-336.

Another article

2006-01-17T07:51:00.000-08:00

Another article that might prove useful is Kathleen Blake Yancey's "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key." It connects new majors with technology.

The title above links to it.

2006-01-16T08:37:00.000-08:00

WRT 235 Article

Looks good. I'll check out the Bazerman.

There is an article that might be useful as a reference but not much more; I've pasted the abstract below. Although only written in 1999, it's funny how we've moved beyond this idea of internet genres in many ways. This view sees print forms as default.

The Evolution of Internet Genres (Oct. 1999, Computers and Composition)

MARCY BAUMAN

ABSTRACT New Internet writing environments differ significantly from print forms. They allow texts to evolve-to change their purpose and audience over time. They allow for new forms of collaboration-texts organize themselves without an omniscient editor shaping them. As a profession, we need to understand and experiment with these forms.

mp

2006-01-16T07:40:00.000-08:00

So, here's our new blog. Let's use it to compose our Composition Forum abstract and article.

Now--on genre--here's a link I'd like to share:

Bazerman's Book Chapters

Lots of Bazerman's stuff is on offer on this site, but I point your attention specifcially to "The Case for Writing Studies as a Major Discipline" (under "Book Chapters 2005-2000"). If we get around to working with activity theorists' research on the relationships between genre and writing in electronic environments, we might want to use this piece as a way to get into that subject.

Mike, I believe you once suggested this article to me?

Giesler, C., et al. (2001). IText: Future directions for research on the relationship between information technology and writing. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 15, 269-308.

It's precisely the kind of thing I mean.

Just a few things to get us started thinking about the big picture--

More concentrated stuff to follow, I promise--abstract before article--

J