theoria--praxis--poeisis

Chapter Three draft, notes

2011-01-25T11:28:00.000-08:00

Chapter Three

“But I do not believe that such comprehensive methods are always the best. Methods that collect and analyze data on a need-to-know basis, such as experiments or even surveys, also can be of great value. A quest for comprehensiveness reflects an expectation that each study should stand alone, an expectation that in itself emphasizes the uniqueness of each site and each occasion for research. If we have only one chance to study a phenomenon, then collecting all possible information about it when we can makes sense. But why assume we only have one chance?
(Charney, 2001, p. 410)

Outline –
1. Research into technical communication practices is difficult for a number of reasons, including the rather pedestrian but nonetheless tricky problem of carrying out an organized, thoughtful study. However, as discussed in Chapter Two, technical communication is a field which bridges the humanities and the sciences as well as academics and workplace practice. In Chapter Two I offered a description of the split between the literary humanities (the colleagues with whom we often share departmental affiliation) and the sciences (the colleagues with whom we often work in teaching students and presenting technical data to the public). In this chapter, I discuss the methodological problems which spring from this ideological split.
2. In seeking to further the bridging nature of technical communication, both as a practice and an area of research, many of us pursue the scientific question of what can be known; however, the utilitarian nature of the service course means that immediately practicable knowledge takes precedence over knowledge for its own sake. Thus, for the TC service course, the most pressing methodological question is what must be known?
The question of what must be known breaks down into recognizable forms rather than abstractions. For constructing a research method beneficial to a TC service course, the very least of what should be investigated includes the most common workplace genres and the most common rhetorical situations in which those genres are enacted. Genres and the circumstances under which they are enacted serve as rules to a sport, the basic organizing concepts behind the plays of the game.

3. What are the research debates in TC?
a. academy versus industry
b. academy
i. calls for partnership
1.
ii. against the industry
1. miller
a. “This discourse is infected by the assumptions that what is common practice is useful and what is useful is good. That good that is sought is the good of an existing industry or profession, with existing structures and functions. For the most part, these are tied to private interests, and to the extent that educational programs are based on existing nonacademic practices, they perpetuate and strengthen those private interests—they do indeed make their faculties and their students ‘more responsive tools’” (1989, p. 21).
b.
2. Bushnell
a. “It is tempting to act as the bridge from industry, to bring its practices to our students so that they may successfully ‘return’ with those skills after they graduate. But this impulse ignores what our mission as college and university teachers should be: to prepare our students to be critical thinkers, and to see that communication (because of the nature of language itself) is a complex human enterprise that goes far beyond describing or informing” (Bushnell, 1999, p. 177).
b.
3. Blyler
a. "In doing so, critical researchers wish to 'situate and analyze' their own research practices 'within larger structures of power and privilege,' asking 'whose interests are being served by our research efforts?'" (Blyler, 1998)(p. 40).
b. Blyler's (1998)call for a blending of the researcher/participant relationship is complicated by her praise of feminist research wherein "the participants, rather than the researcher, identify the issues to be addressed" (p. 41). If that's the case, then research participants within industry, with industry-minded goals, may well direct research which is indeed explanatory and descriptive--just the things against which Blyler argues.
iii. against science, empiricism
1. blyler
2. herndl
3.
to be included:
(Blakeslee, 2009)

4. Methodology –
5. What is there, and can we measure it?
a. Law
b. William James?
c. Creswell
6. If we can measure it, how can we measure it?
a. Creswell
b. Macnealy
Methods: ethnography, which is one of the “comprehensive” methods alluded to by Charney, can record behavior within a cultural group (such as with Winsor’s study). Culture, however, is unlikely to be replicated within the service course classroom, and therefore the behaviors prescribed/circumscribed by that culture, cannot be replicated in a useful fashion.
Disciplinary Identity
Aggregable research adds to our sense of disciplinary identity by way of charting history in terms of practice.

What you aim for is consensus, but you have to be happy with reasonable assurance. Happy with what you can know.

Work with what you can get, not with what you’d like to have. Because academics want to know the truth, but in the TC service course we’re more concerned with practice rather than enduring truth, or rather, we’re more concerned with the truth about contemporary writing practice.
More concerned with actionable knowledge rather than universal truth.

The goal of technical communication is actionable knowledge rather than universal truth, so the research methods should reflect that goal. Knowledge that you can use to improve the human condition.

The existential despair felt by scientists and literary humanists is treated differently by each: scientists work to improve the human condition despite the existential realization of the aloneness of existence, and part of the way they do this is through collaboration—teamwork.

Surveying Instructors and Engineers

My procedure consists of two simple surveys, one delivered to instructors of TC service courses and the other delivered to civil engineers. The instructor survey has 12 questions. Five of those questions are multiple-choice, 1 is true/false, 3 are open-ended, and 3 offer multiple choices as well as an open-ended response option. None of the questions ask for the instructor to draw a conclusion or make an inference. Of the purely open-ended questions, one asks for the participant to provide a definition of “revision,” one asks for a description of student group-writing activity in the classroom, and one asks the participant to describe the advantages of group revision versus writing and revising as an individual.

However, there are problems inherent in surveys. For one thing, surveys assume content knowledge on the part of the participant. Since many instructors of TC service courses might not have TC training, education, or experience, their knowledge of technical communication may be limited. However, the survey is directed to people already teaching a TC service course and asks only about their experience and opinions as an instructor, so their knowledge of TC as a discipline or professional practice is not a limiting factor. Indeed, the purpose of the survey is to discover what, if any, group writing occurs in those classes; thus, the instructors may be the best source of such information.

Instructors are often unreliable sources of information about their own classes or teaching. A classroom instructor may have false impressions of student activity for a variety of reasons. An instructor may have too many students to observe at once, or may only be able to glean surface-level details concerning classroom activity. An instructor may also be mistaken about how well or how diligently students are working. Group activity is also often frowned upon in classrooms, since academic achievement is routinely tied to individual performance; thus, an instructor may have a negative outlook on any group activity in the classroom. Surveys are also problematic in that they ask respondents to report based on memory, and respondents may remember incorrectly or through the lens of their own prejudices/assumptions about what their students have done.

I have chosen surveys because they seem to be the best method for data collection for my study. In discovering what sort of group revision activities happen in a classroom, interviews would work equally well for gathering useful data; however, in order for my study to be useful it needs to encompass a number of schools and participants. Interviews would be unwieldy and time-consuming, and might not gather information any more useful than from a survey. For the purposes of my study, problems associated with participant knowledge and memory would be just as problematic for interviews as with surveys.

There are no publicly-available records for determining classroom activity in a TC service course. While there are syllabi and course descriptions, these are only loose descriptors and do not offer several key pieces of information vital to this study. For instance, while a syllabus might indicate how many written assignments are required that same syllabus might not include information on group revision activities because those activities might not result in a grade. In fairness, many institutions of higher learning are now putting more information into syllabi in an effort at communicating what takes place in classrooms. Future studies might include a comparison of how syllabi have changed over time to reflect public interest in higher education. For now, however, a survey is a better method of gathering information about classroom activity.

My study is also an attempt to gather a broad swath of information so as to provide some insight into how TC service courses are taught nationwide. Interviews on such a scale are not manageable at this time, and for broad-based data surveys work just as well.

Part of the purpose of this study is to offer a method by which TC service courses can be regularly updated. Service courses are, by nature, not well funded, and as I’ve mentioned before they are often taught (and administered by) non-tenure track instructors who may not have extensive training or interest in research. A survey which can be regularly administered with beneficial results is a cheap, quick way to gather usable data on activities in the classroom and how they relate to workplace writing.

Surveys are not interactive, meaning that while the researcher may be gathering data, he or she is not actively conversing with the participants. Thus, an opportunity to build useful relationships may be missed. It seems clear, however, that many service courses are isolated from their primary stakeholders: future employers. Instituting a regular survey of local businesses and employers may be the first step in establishing a dialogue. Simply sending out a survey indicates an interest in serving the community, whether on or off campus.

My sample:

For my instructor survey, I am recruiting instructors of TC service courses at colleges and universities which have both a graduate degree in TC and an accredited college of engineering. I chose this population because it is likely to represent the “best” in what is offered in TC service courses because the instructors at such institutions are more likely to have some training and background in TC, they may have increased access to resources for professional development, and they are more likely to have an ongoing relationship with the engineering faculty and engineering professionals. Those conditions are in stark contrast to other schools which do not have any TC degree, much less a graduate program, and which do not have an engineering program.

Because I work in a civil engineering department and have ready access to civil engineers, both academic and non-academic, I have elected to survey civil engineers. Civil engineers also offer the opportunity to study professionals who have a broad range of writing experience because civil engineers regularly communicate with a wide audience, such as clients in government, the military, city councils and private citizens with various educational and business backgrounds. In contrast, aerospace engineers (for example) often communicate only with a small audience, such as other aerospace engineers and government employees. Thus, civil engineers are in need of writing abilities that address the needs of a diverse audience.

For my survey of engineers, I have chosen to survey engineers contacted by the Advisory Council of the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M, where I work. The Advisory Council is made up of engineers who, according to the department’s bylaws, “provide advice, support and counsel to the Department Head with the express purpose of helping to maintain the highest level of academic excellence reflecting the profession of Civil Engineering. They are all degreed, licensed engineers and they also represent a wide range of engineering activities, from City Manager, City Engineer, military engineer, and consulting engineer. The advisory council also represents a range of technical expertise, from water resources management, construction, structural, coastal and ocean, pavement, transportation, and other areas. In short, this group is made up of successful engineers who offer a variety of experience. They will be asked to distribute the survey to the engineers who work for them as well as other civil engineers.
Texas A&M does not have a technical communication degree program or graduate study in TC, so I will not be distributing surveys to instructors at A&M.

Validity

Validity, as defined by MacNealy, is “the degree to which a specific procedure actually measures what it is intended to measure.” The research question for this dissertation is “How can we continually mine workplaces for usable information on their writing practices so that those practices can be performed in the classroom?” To answer MacNealy’s challenge, my study must produce results which (a) accurately reflect workplace writing, and (b) can be used in a TC service course to improve instruction. Therefore, the survey results must be evaluated in such a way that some standard of “usable information” is met.

In order to reach a standard by my results may be evaluated, some of the survey questions are intended to determine what, if any, differences exist between how service course instructors and professional engineers perceive group writing. How important is group revision? What are the benefits of writing and revising in a group as opposed to performing those same activities as an individual? Answers from both instructors and engineers will provide some idea as to how these two groups value group revision, thus establishing a baseline by which service courses can be judged in terms of “keeping up” with business.

The surveys also ask which writing technologies are used to enact group revision. The aim of such questions is multifarious: technologies are the tools with which we work, and if service courses in TC are supposed to prepare students for writing in the workplace, then our classes should contain at least some of the technologies used to produce workplace writing. But finding out what writing technologies are used in the workplace goes beyond “skill building,” and reflects a concern articulated by Selber that we should “concern ourselves with such changes and encouraged computer literacies in our classrooms that consider the rhetorical, social, and political implications of computer-mediated communication and work” (Selber, 1994, p. 366). If, for instance, we find that workplace writing increasingly makes use of the “cloud” for not only storage and transmission, but for creation, revision, and analysis, then what are we to make of that increasing reliance upon corporate entities which now encourage us to move beyond stand-alone devices and rely instead on an increasingly public set of technologies and activities? To address that question we first need to know what kinds of writing technologies are used in the workplace for specific activities, such as group revision.

Threats to Validity

Threats to validity are described by MacNealy as “issues affecting the determination of causal relationships.” None of the questions in my surveys ask participants to address causes or causal relationships. Each question deals only with gathering information related to the activity of group revision, either in the classroom or in the workplace. However, in fairness my research question implies the causality in any explanation which addresses it. In asking “How can we continually mine workplaces for usable information on their writing practices so that those practices can be performed in the classroom,” I am suggesting that there is an answer to that question, and that that answer will exist in at least two parts: one, a suggestion as to how the challenge can be met, and two, a reason why that process meets the challenge. The process of determining why a process can address a question necessitates causal reasoning. MORE HERE.

Blakeslee, A. M. (2009). The Technical Communication Research Landscape. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 23(2), 129-173.
Blyler, N. (1998). Taking a political turn: The critical perspective and research in professional communication. Technical Communication Quarterly, 7(1), 33.
Bushnell, J. (1999). A Contrary View of the Technical Writing Classroom: Notes Toward Future Discussion. Technical Communication Quarterly, 8(2).
Charney, D. (2001). Guest Editor's Introduction: Prospects for Research in Technical and Scientific Communication--Part 2. Journal of Business & Technical Communication, 15(4), 409.
Miller, C. R. (1989). What's Practical about Technical Writing? In B. E. Fearing, and Sparrow, W. Keats (Ed.), Technical Writing: Theory and Practice. New York: Modern Language Association.
Selber, S. A. (1994). Beyond skill building: Challenges facing technical communication teachers in the computer age. Technical Communication Quarterly, 3(4), 365.

Chapter Two: Initial Outline and Rough Draft

2010-06-25T14:28:00.000-07:00

Chapter Two
Contents
Chapter Two 1
General education 2
Required Writing Classes and a Common Body of Knowledge 2
Desired Skills for Technical Communicators 3
Service courses 5
TC service courses 7
Differences between Academic and Non-Academic Writing 9
How do these differences relate to this study? 9
Revision 10
TC instruction 12
Relationship of TC instruction to non-academic work 12
Textbooks 12
For TCers 12
For Non-TCers 12
Contingent faculty? 12
Engineers 12
Engineering communication 12
TC working with engineering 12
Academic 12
Practitioner 12
Research methods 12
Methodology 12
TC research methods relevant to this study 12
Importance of speed, broad approach 12

General education
Required Writing Classes and a Common Body of Knowledge
The belief in a common body of knowledge needed for effective writing is evident in the history of Harvard’s composition program in the 1870s (Brereton, 1995). Faced with growing evidence of poor writing skills, Harvard began requiring coursework in writing along with entrance exams designed to test a student’s writing skills (Brereton, 1995). Harvard’s program required students to write essays on texts from the Western canon, such as works by Shakespeare and Milton (Brereton, 1995). The belief was that by linking the practice of writing to commonly-accepted masterpieces of fiction, student writing would improve. Exposure to the data, the applied body of knowledge, of those famous authors would naturally cultivate good writing.

Harvard’s program did not spring forth in isolation: they were facing a very real influx of students who were not writing the way the Harvard faculty expected. Even earlier, during the 1840s, the less standardized English of the American West led to increased emphasis on grammatical correctness (Connors, 1985). In fact, during that time correcting other peoples’ grammar became a common pedagogical strategy designed to improve written communication (Connors, 1985). The idea that critiquing grammatical constructions was a valid method of improving one’s own writing is based upon the very real fact that grammar, any grammar, is a set of guidelines created by a community of use: languages and their grammars are socially-constructed systems, the application of experience and data familiar to a specific populace. Without standards of syntax, grammar, and usage, communication is difficult at best. However, what those standards are, or should be, is the subject of often strident debate, evidence of which can be seen in Texas’ recent adoption of a new recommended reading list for public K-12 writing instruction (Heinauer, 2008). And writing instruction is an ongoing struggle due to the problems inherent in identifying the qualities of good writing and how those qualities may be taught.

In 1944, in response to the coming flood of World War Two veterans entering college, the American Council on Education issued a report describing general education at the college level to be “those phases of nonspecialized and nonvocational education that should be the common possession, the common denominator, so to speak, of educated persons as individuals and as citizens in a free society” (Bigelow, 1947). The list included items such as “emotional and social adjustment,” “family and marital adjustment,” “natural phenomena,” literature, music, “thinking about the meaning and value of life.” The second objective requires a student “[t]o communicate through his own language in writing and speaking at the level of expression adequate to the needs of educated people” (Bigelow, 1947, p. 258). The committee went on to recommend courses which could be adopted to help meet these objectives. While the committee did see communication as valuable enough to include in its own right, the overall tenor of the report suggests that knowledge. . .

Like the Harvard faculty a century earlier, the American Council on Education believed that exposure to fine, artistic writing would naturally improve students’ writing; however, neither the American Council on Education nor Harvard

Go bigger with this section: post-WWII education, GI Bill, technical and scientific advancement, Vannevar Bush, and all. . .that. . .jazz.

General education, at least from the standpoint of the 1840s through post-World War II America, was an act of conserving the knowledge and value of prior generations in order to ensure the continuation of life as we had come to know it. Regardless of whether educators felt, or continue to feel, that education is the attempt to broaden minds and free the nascent intellect, public education is in fact the attempt to preserve and protect existing knowledge and values. Arguments over reading lists (such as that mentioned above) and science curricula demonstrate that the battle over what is known and what is new continues to cause problems for teachers.

But the argument that there is a standard body of knowledge, a bucket of facts that every college-educated person needs to know, is compelling and not to be taken lightly. Because educators are tasked with passing along knowledge and skills which have proved fruitful in the past, we are tempted to reduce the experience of education to a demonstration of philosophical realism: The reality of the external world is codified and described by the teacher. The students, who exist in the same knowable world of phenomena, can learn about these phenomena through the teacher’s efforts because the phenomena exist independently of people. In other words, the world exists prior to us knowing about the world. In the classroom, realism pedagogy enjoins the teacher to speak about the knowledge and demonstrate the skills. The students learn by being in the right place at the right time and by paying attention. For classes in which a lot of information needs to be learned in order to master the ideas at the root of the subject, a realism-based approach is not necessarily a bad idea. The quantity of data required to understand such a subject requires that some method of mass-distribution be used, whether on site, online, or some hybrid combination of the two.

Many general education classes are based upon these assumptions, including courses in chemistry, calculus, literature, and political science, all of which rest on the bedrock faith that the “out-thereness” of the world (Law, 2003) is knowable, that it is possible for people to share this knowledge, and that the information about the world around us exists independently of our own existence.

The realist pedagogical approach is evident in the tangled history of TC service courses. Connors (1982) tells us that the beginnings of the technical writing service course are rooted in the engineering schools that grew out of the Morrill Act, and that by the end of the nineteenth century those engineering schools were graduating “competent engineers who were near-illiterates” (p. 331). The purpose of requiring TC instruction to engineering students was to convey the knowledge and skills (again, Law’s “out-thereness”) to the students who needed them. One problem with a realist approach to writing instruction is that the students in those classes already knew how to write; that is, they were already literate. They were also (presumably) already oriented to the physical sciences. Because the students already knew the facts they needed, a pedagogy based on realism would not fit their needs. In other words, if simply knowing enough information were the sole requirement to be a skilled writer, then all well-read individuals would be good writers.

Desired Skills for Technical Communicators
This is a proposal for the study of the differences between group revision in TC service courses and the group revision that takes place in engineering firms. In this section, I present some of the highlights of both recent and canonical literature on the subject of TC and TC education in order to then compare these ideals with service courses for undergraduates.

Researchers such as Johnson-Eilola, Whiteside, Hayhoe, Harner and Rich, and Rainey, Turner, and Dayton describe TC education with broad terms such as collaboration, context, emancipation, and technological change. According to Johnson-Eilola (1996), TC workers “rely on skills in abstraction, experimentation, collaboration, and system thinking to work with information across a variety of disciplines and markets” and that “symbolic-analytic work mediates between the functional necessities of usability and efficiency while not losing sight of the larger rhetorical and social contexts in which users work and live” (p. 245-6). While focused on professional technical communicators, Johnson-Eilola’s claim is true for almost any profession in which data is interpreted for multiple audiences; thus, his remarks are pertinent for any student in a service course.

With specific regard to TC curricula, Hayhoe (2005) wrote,
Academics need to work with our practitioner colleagues to identify in detail the body of knowledge and skills that technical communicators need to be competitive and effective on the job. We must then revise our curricula to focus on that knowledge and those skills to prepare future students. And we must work through our professional organizations with those in industry to ensure that our alumni and those without formal training in the field can learn what they need to know” (266).

In line with Hayhoe’s argument, the 2008 International Professional Communication Conference in Montreal featured a discussion entitled “Developing a Body of Knowledge for the Technical Communication Profession,” chaired by Hillary Hart. I mention this conference because its attendees are both academic and non-academic TC professionals, thus serving as evidence that a partnership between academics and practitioners is not an effort solely on behalf of the academics. Hart then went on to chair the STC’s Body of Knowledge project, still ongoing, which is an attempt at broadly defining areas of knowledge for technical communicators in a public, online venue. Taken together, Hart and Hayhoe indicate a growing desire to formalize what TC workers and researchers have been doing for almost a century.

Whiteside (2003), wrote that “[t]he global nature of today’s business economy spreads to additional challenges for technical communicators . . . including grant writing, usability, educational technology, user interface design, multimedia design, and knowledge management” (304). Whiteside’s statement holds true for those practicing TC as a profession or those who produce technical documents as part of another profession, such as medicine or engineering. Speaking more broadly, Rainey, Turner, and Dayton (2005), published a study which listed the following “most important competencies for technical communicators”:
• Skills in collaborating with both subject-matter experts and coworkers
• Ability to write clearly for specific audiences directed by clearly defined purposes
• Ability to assess and to learn to use technologies
• Ability to take the initiative (be a self-starter) and to evaluate one’s own work and the work of others (323).

While Rainey, Turner, and Dayton’s study is concerned primarily with professional technical communicators, their list of competencies can also be applied to students taking TC service courses. For instance, undergraduate engineering majors will someday routinely “collabora[te] with both subject-matter experts and coworkers” as well as “write clearly for specific audiences direct by clearly defined purposes.” TC researchers, for our part, must remember that some of the research intended to help our own colleagues can be applied to students enrolled in service courses.

David and Kienzler (1999) suggest that the “broad context” found when students “find clients for their work” may be a bridge between classroom and non-academic work. David and Kienzler also state that “students [in undergraduate service courses] are asked to find real-world problems to solve, and the work is frequently done collaboratively.” They go on to suggest that teachers of TC adopt an “emancipatory” pedagogy which will help “meet the call from industry.” By “emancipatory,” David and Kienzler mean an approach to teaching which encourages students to solve classroom problems (assignments) for the sake of solving “public” problems. They make note of “messy problems involving complicated relationships among multiple variables” and “action through knowledge translated across disciplines” for students in service courses. Those variables include ones found during research, but could also include the variables of people working collaboratively, rapid changes in writing technologies, and the relationship between service courses, “user departments,” and professional practice.

Harner and Rich (2005) claim that the changing nature of the TC profession is matched by the changing nature of academic program design, and that “it would be helpful to examine the state of many scientific and technical communication programs across the nation” so as to get an idea of what a common TC curriculum looks like as well as pedagogical strategies for meeting curricular goals. Like Hayhoe, Whiteside (2003) also called for professional and curricular standards for TC instruction, and both also indicate the need for increased communication from industry to help guide that standardization.

In sum, then, these sources demonstrate that TC is, or can be, a field of great depth and breadth. However, there is little evidence in the literature that provides insight into TC regarding how it’s taught to non-TC majors. There is also the further question of what should be taught, and whether there is a method for discovering the writing skills and knowledge in the workplace and getting it into the service course classroom in usable form.

Service courses
A service course is a course offered by one department to non-majors from other departments. For the purposes of this proposal, which suggests that TC service courses are an important site of research into group revision practices, understanding the difference between service courses and courses for majors within a discipline is important. For instance, the required course in Texas history that all students enrolled in Texas public colleges and university must take is offered by history departments as a service course. The word “service” indicates that the department is serving the campus at large by providing instruction in a specialized topic for those who are not necessarily majors in that department. Service courses are rooted in the notion of a “general education” curriculum which ensures that all students are exposed to the same pieces of knowledge.

In 1946, the American Council on Education issued a report describing general education at the college level to be “those phases of nonspecialized and nonvocational education that should be the common possession, the common denominator, so to speak, of educated persons as individuals and as citizens in a free society” (Bigelow, 1947). In their list of ten objectives, which included items such as “emotional and social adjustment,” “family and marital adjustment,” “natural phenomena,” literature, music, “thinking about the meaning and value of life,” the second objective states, “To communicate through his own language in writing and speaking at the level of expression adequate to the needs of educated people” (Bigelow, 1947, p. 258).

Connors (1982) outlines the history of just such a course in technical writing: classes offered through English departments for the benefit of engineering students. But while we have this history, we also have articles that comment upon service courses without defining them. For instance, a number of articles discuss various aspects of service courses, such as choosing a textbook for teaching intercultural communication (Barker & Matveeva, 2006), changes in pedagogy (David & Kienzler, 1999), measuring transfer of rhetorical skills into other classes (Ford, 2004), and positioning required communication courses as writing-in-the disciplines courses (Russell, 2007). Despite the lack of definition, Barker and Matveeva go so far as to make broad claims, such as “we all know that a certain amount of skill instruction occurs in the course” (198). Yet at least one study indicates that a great many service courses are taught in the United States each year (Reave, 2004). Surely, it is time to get a handle on things.

Dobrin, trying to impart a feel for the trials of the technical writing teacher, laments that “[i]ndeed, technical writing is probably taught in more different ways—inside more different departments—than any other ostensibly humanistic course” (1982). Even at individual institutions, it is sometimes the case that “no systematic evaluation has been conducted on the effects of the current technical communication service courses” (Scott & Plumb, 1999).

But it is inaccurate to say that there are no sources of information concerning service courses. Course descriptions, for one, can provide claims of course content and purpose. For instance, out of course descriptions for 70 higher education institutions, TC service course descriptions claim to offer students practice in “basic genres and topics” (University of Alabama), “patterns of writing” (TTU), oral presentations (15 different institutions), and an avalanche of reports, proposals, and letters. While these course descriptions are obviously generic, often for the sake of allowing instructors some freedom to develop class-specific assignments and readings, they do point to coherence of purpose. Simultaneously, that coherence is disrupted by long-standing debate within the field of TC concerning the very definition of TC itself (Allen, 2004; Dobrin, 1985; Miller, 1979) or the nature of TC research (Blyler, 1995; Charney, 1996).

Research into what is taught in service courses is difficult in part because there are so many service courses offered. According to the Texas Common Course Numbering System, in Texas alone there are 66 colleges and universities offering a TC service course and each school, department, and individual instructor doubtless has differing interpretations of the terms mentioned in the course descriptions above. Another reason for difficulty in researching TC service courses is that while academic and non-academic publishing venues exist in abundance, there are few large repositories of information about service courses. Reasons may include a lack of emphasis on service courses with regard to tenure and promotion for professors, lack of trained instructors (and therefore lack of sustained research because these same instructors might be untrained in TC, or may be encouraged to carry out research judged more appropriate for future tenure-track positions), and the already-mentioned generic nature of course descriptions. As mentioned earlier, Barker and Matveeva claim that many TC service course instructors are likely working with “set syllabuses that do not allow much flexibility” (192). As cited earlier, Dobrin’s view is contrary to Barker and Matveeva’s, since he claims that “technical writing is probably taught in more different ways—inside more different departments—than any other ostensibly humanistic course” (1982). Despite the chronological gap between these two sources (2006 and 1982, respectively), they serve as a reminder that there may yet be a lack of consensus about what is taught, and even by whom, in TC service courses.

If our service courses are to fulfill their stated functions, then we must be more diligent in performing practical research that allows for some confidence that we are teaching writing which is similar to actual workplace writing. Furthermore, we must be willing to make this information widely available so that other researchers can continue to build upon what is already known.

TC service courses
Knievel (2007) suggests that “the service course is a particularly rich site of contention, promise, and crisis—a bellwether of the field” (1), and I would further argue that service courses are a logical place to study whether academic instruction is keeping up with workplace practice. While much research is devoted to studying students who will become professional technical communicators both inside and outside of academia (Harner & Rich, 2005; Hart-Davidson, 2001; Johnson-Eilola & Selber, 2001; Rainey, Turner, & Dayton, 2005), studying the instruction we provide those students (such as engineers) who will not be employed directly in our field is also critical. Studying service courses for engineering students who will not be professional technical communicators is important because that body of students is headed into a market which requires detailed, technical knowledge, and which also requires regular communication with multiple audiences, including fellow engineers, engineers in other fields, supervisors, employees, and potential clients. Engineering students come to the service course because they need training in genres, audience analysis, and the rhetorical and technological tools needed for getting information from those who know it to those who need to know it. Thus, it is our obligation to inform our service courses with workplace practice.

Faculty who teach TC service courses are almost overwhelmingly contingent (84%), non-tenure track faculty (Meloncon & England, forthcoming). Faced with heavy teaching loads and perhaps teaching TC for the first time (or without training, or both), those contingent faculty members might not have a wide range of contacts outside academics. While engineering departments across the nation maintain non-academic contacts through professional licensure of faculty, advisory councils, and ABET-mandated quality improvement initiatives, liberal arts programs often have little contact with the non-academic workplace. Even TC programs, which we might assume to have close ties with practice, often face cultural barriers that work against collaboration with their non-academic colleagues (Dicks, 2002). Thus, liberal arts faculty members might have few resources for developing and implementing new content for a TC service course.

With such a large contingent labor force, we can guess that many service course instructors simply are not versed in TC or TC research methods, and may not be able to carry out research designed to answer the question of what to teach in the service course. Contingent faculty are also among the most poorly funded in terms of professional development and research, and so even if they are able they may not have the money or facilities in order to conduct research. Lastly, it’s important to mention that many faculty members simply do not have the breadth of contact with the professional world necessary to find out what writing skills and practices are needed outside of classroom walls.

Technical communication (TC) is taught to a large number of undergraduates as part of a required service course for non-majors. A rough estimate based on Reave (2004)places the nationwide number of undergraduate students in TC service courses at around 700,000 in the academic year 2007. Thus, TC service courses affect a large number of future professionals, both in terms of those students’ future practice as well as how they perceive TC as a discipline. As those students move into the professional realm where TC is part of their everyday work, they will inevitably encounter situations for which their service courses should have provided some level of preparation. Ten years have passed, however, since service courses appear to have occupied the interest of TC researchers by way of a special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly. None of the articles in that issue addressed service course content nor a method for keeping those same courses updated. In the meantime, the ethnographic approach seems to have maintained its popularity with writing researchers.

Part of the disjuncture between writing for the humanities (and thus the approach that humanities-based textbooks take) and writing in the scientific and engineering fields has to do with the mission of technical communication itself: clarity reigns supreme. Over and over, engineers are rightly taught that clarity is the goal of good writing (Boyd & Hassett, 2000; Lengsfeld, Edelstein, Black, Hightower, & et al., 2004; Leydens & Schneider, 2009). Indeed, ABET criterion 3(g) states that "Engineering programs must demonstrate that their students attain. . .an ability to communicate effectively” (ABET, 2007). The humanities, though, often approach writing as an art in itself, and that the act of writing (rather than its product) is worth studying. And as with the engineers who argue the opposite, the humanities scholars are indeed correct. These two approaches are both utterly logical, and yet incompatible.

Joanna Wolfe (2009) points out that textbooks for introductory TC service courses actually fail to serve a huge chunk of their clientele: engineering and science students whose rhetorical and epistemological approach do not mesh with those of the humanities scholars who produce the textbooks. To be fair, there are textbooks written by engineers or by humanities scholars who work closely for engineers. Hillary Hart’s Engineering Communication is such a book, created by a humanities scholar whose position and experience aligns her with an engineering college. But those books are few and far between, and their level of adoption does not even begin to approach those of the humanities-driven textbooks. As Wolfe bluntly puts it, “the most popular technical communication textbooks on the market focus on rhetorical situations that are far more likely to be encountered by someone with a job title of technical writer rather than one of engineer” (353, emphasis in original).

The contrast between what engineers and employers seem to want can be seen in Blyler’s argument in favor of a pedagogy of social action, urging teachers and students to take a rhetorical approach to the construction of power in both textual and graphical narratives (Blyler, 1995). In an earlier article, Blyler takes a humanities-based stance when arguing against a “formulaic” view of genre and purpose for business communication courses (Blyler, 1993). But formulaic is exactly what many engineers would like, and is often exactly the approach needed for effective engineering communication. In the humanities, we argue that texts are social artifacts constructed to meet the needs and expectations of (frequently) tightly-knit groups with a level of discourse contingent upon their workplace activities and needs. But Blyer’s argument suggests that teaching should take the opposite approach, and that we should not train students to write genres within such a specific context. Taking a broad approach to audience analysis and textual production would help student writers think more globally about writing and perhaps more critically about the purposes of genre. But to teach that broader view of rhetoric means we’re not responding to the stated needs of our client departments and are in fact working more pragmatically according to our own Jamesian “cash value.”

Bushnell argues that preparing students simply for their future jobs based on expectations provided solely by employers undermines the role of the university in producing writers who “shape knowledge” and who acknowledge bias rather than avoid it (Bushnell, 1999). However, for students in technical majors who take the service course as part of a communication requirement, the expectation to “shape knowledge” may be too great a leap: engineering students, for example, are taught to create knowledge (design structures, conduct tests) and then to report it. To introduce the idea of shaping knowledge in the form of a one-semester course, or to encourage students to take a rhetorically-bound epistemological stance, may be asking too much. Bushnell’s take on university education is also a bit dated: we no longer (always) aim to broaden minds and further intellectual horizons. Instead, it seems the more common goal is to train students for specific professions, which more and more commonly require even further specialization after college.

Academics and practitioners in TC have an ongoing conversation about how we can increase the perceived value of our profession (Hughes, 2002; Johnson-Eilola, 1996; Redish, 2003). Much of that discussion has to do with conversations about licensure, re-positioning TC in accordance with added value, defining TCers as knowledge workers, and the like. One practical place to start increasing the value we add, and are perceived as adding, is to offer higher-quality courses to non-majors. Our course descriptions say the TC service course is intended to give students practice writing for "business” and “industry,” for their “future careers in writing and business,” “writing for [the] professions,” and writing in a “business environment.” If that’s the case, then the service course is a logical place to begin introducing students to the value that good writing can add to the workplace.

Unfortunately, a faculty member wishing to update the content of service course has few resources other than his or her ability to gather new information. The TC literature barely discusses service courses, and there is little information on what content should be included. Popular textbooks, such as Johnson-Sheehan’s Technical Communication in the 21st Century and Markel’s Technical Communication do a good job of discussing genres and writing practices; however, an introductory text of any sort will necessarily have large gaps and will not address the specific writing needs of students from various majors.

Differences between Academic and Non-Academic Writing
How do these differences relate to this study?

Bosley contends that documents types represent a connection between academic and workplace writing, listing “proposals, grants, reports, procedures, white papers, user manuals, tutorials, online material, memoranda, meeting minutes, letters, promotional and public relations material” (Table 2.1, 29) as document types used by both (Bosley, 2002). For academics, however, most of these document types represent administrative work taken on by tenured and tenure-track faculty. Contingent faculty rarely have need to write public relations material, proposals or meeting minutes because their jobs are largely relegated to teaching. Bosley’s argument therefore applies only to a minority of TC faculty teaching the service course, since the majority of service courses are taught by contingent faculty.
Bosley indicates that academics and practitioners alike write and work collaboratively on committees and teams. However, Dicks indicates that this is in fact a difference due to the difference with which individual initiative is treated by both academics (publication and tenure) and practitioners (teamwork, collaboration and increased corporate value) (Dicks, 2002).

But perhaps one of the most important distinctions between workplace writing and college writing is the end, or goal, of the document. In school, everything a student does is for his or her direct benefit. Students work as individuals and are graded as individuals. Even in group work, students receive individual grades, and savvy instructors have policies in place for the student who does not contribute as much as is expected. Upon graduation, students receive a personalized diploma recognizing their efforts. Students own their writing, and thus their grades.

Dicks’ claim is that the differences between academic and workplace writers move beyond the generic and into the realm of cultural divides. Dicks enumerates five cultural differences which contribute to the disconnection between academics and practitioners, including “perception of information,” “language and discourse styles,” “views of collaboration versus individual effort,” assumptions about employment,” and “reward structures” (Dicks, 2002). In workplace writing, documents frequently do not list an author but instead bear the name of the company or institution for which the employee works. The end of the workplace document is to increase the value of the organization, not the individual. Individual benefits such as paychecks, raises, and promotions come only as the result of work which increases the value of the company.

Writing in the classroom means the student owns the document and has produced all of the work within it. When a student cites information, it is for the purpose of acknowledging outside help, such as quoting a source of information. But in the workplace, documents are frequently used and re-used, and even kept as templates for later work. A single paragraph may contain the words of five or six employees, but those words are not attributed individually; instead, the document is taken to be literally the work of the corporate body. Ownership of that text goes to the organization, and plagiarism takes a backseat to corporate identity and profit. Our service courses, however, likely do not (and perhaps cannot) reflect the for-profit approach to group writing. If they cannot mimic those goals, then we can at least investigate and acknowledge those differences in meaningful ways.

The lack of recognition of the difference between classroom writing and workplace writing is largely transparent, and often detrimental, to the service courses designed upon the assumption that classroom writing and business writing are the same thing. In the next section, I discuss the academic definitions and perceptions of revision in order to provide some context for why group revision is an important aspect of this study.

Revision
Within academic culture, attempts to define revision offer microcosms of insight into researchers’ attempts to define an activity which resists definition. Ethnographic methods often get at the social (Katz), rhetorical (Winsor) or physical (Jones) aspects of revision; however, it’s clear that like almost any other writing activity revision takes place within specific (mixed) contexts. Haar (2006) provides examples of “deliberately wrought” (11) descriptions of revision offered by revision scholars, ranging from metaphorical (“internal” and “external,” “up” and “down,” revising “out” and “in”), cognitive (“a turn, a change of direction or attention, a step, a transformation from a writer-centered to a reader-centered mode of writing,” according to Flower), duration (“quick” and “thorough,” according to Elbow), and a literal definition by Fitzgerald that says “revision means making any changes at any point in the writing process.”

Revision involves as much technological expertise as any other variety of the writing process. Yet there is much less scholarship dealing with the technological aspects of revision than with writing (either writing in general or the writing of a first draft). Artemeva, Logie, and St-Martin (1999) use an interface between students posing assignments and revising, encouraging written interaction between students, and developing a community within the course itself. Even in 1999, such newsgroups were not new technology, and now ten years later they are one of the more antiquated online technologies.

Within non-academic, workplace culture revision takes on a different dynamic than in the classroom because writing often serves different social purposes. For example, workplace writers often do not get credit for their individual efforts; rather, the company gains value and recognition. In the workplace, writers often work together with little regard for plagiarism since the company, or the group itself, is considered the author. Since revision takes place in response to an audience, I argue that revision is when the work of the individual becomes the work of the group, and that work always takes place with the use of some tool, whether analog or digital. Uncovering that process and how the group works with technology to attain the group’s goals is a worthwhile goal for anyone trying to improve TC service courses.

Katz’ study, which places revision as an activity between co-workers (“writing review”), explicates the socialization of employees into the rhetorical commonplaces and practices of the workplace. Employees frequently get their writing reviewed, voluntarily or not, by a supervisor who has some power over the employee. For Katz, the interactions between employee and supervisor are just as important as changes made to the document: employees are working to improve the image of the company rather than writing for individual achievement like students in a classroom environment (39). This change, from writing as an individual to working with others to achieve a common goal, and which necessitates a cognitive shift on the part of the writer, needs demystification for both service course instructors as well as students.

Winsor claims that this shift in cognition occurs within an “environment [that] includes a complex of readers, purposes those readers have, history they share, expectations under which they operate, and a host of other factors that are relevant for rhetoric” (8). Unlike a classroom, a work environment de-emphasizes the needs and goals of the individual and emphasizes those of the group. How, then, can a service course instructor know the conditions and interactions that take place when writing as a team rather than a person, particularly when the students in the service course will primarily not be students of English, rhetoric, or technical communication (other than in the broadest sense)? Winsor’s answer is that it cannot happen until the individual is aware of the culture of that profession (9). Thus, if students are to learn effective revision practices for their desired profession, at least part of that profession’s culture must exist within the classroom experience and that part of that replication of culture must include the technologies with which revision are performed.

TC instruction
Relationship of TC instruction to non-academic work
Technical communication theorists struggle, and sometimes fight, to find a place to “fit” technical communication curricula. Carolyn Miller’s “What’s Practical about Technical Writing” addresses this problem head-on. She writes, “In its eagerness to be useful—to students and their future employers—technical writing has sought a basis in practice, a basis that is problematic. I do not mean to suggest that academics should keep themselves ignorant of nonacademic practices [. . .] But technical writing teachers and curriculum planners should take seriously the problem of how to think about practice. The problem leads one to the complex relation between description and prescription” (Miller, 1989). The relation(ship) she describes is whether the classroom or the cubicle should lead, whether academics are in the business of “vocational preparation” or “cultural awareness” (18). As she and others acknowledge, the question is part of a larger debate in American colleges and universities, and one which is “infected by the assumptions that what is common practice is useful and what is useful is good (21), clearly putting herself at odds with the Jamesian pragmatism which argues not only that “what is useful is good,” but that what is useful is true. While arguing for both academics and non-academics having a role in curricular development, Miller eventually stands firmly on the side of academics having the ultimate responsibility: “If technical writing is the rhetoric of ‘the world of work,’ it is the rhetoric of contemporary praxis. In teaching such rhetoric, then, we acquire a measure of responsibility for political and economic conduct” (24).

Dicks
Blakeslee
Dobrin

Dobrin writes, “The teacher of technical writing is teaching the student to perform for his or her peer in a particular technical community, a community of which the teacher is not himself a member. It is as if he were teaching Balinese dancing in Bali” (137).

Dobrin’s mistakes here are manifold: the students will, quite often, not be “performing” for their community at all, and instead will be “performing” for clients, co-workers, and supervisors who are not technical professionals, or at least not professionals within the same field. Next, Dobrin assumes that technical writing instructors do not belong to the same community to which the student belongs; however, the instructor should at least be able to recognize that the act of writing itself is of course a communal act and that therefore teacher and student do have a connection. Lastly, Dobrin’s immediate retreat to the world of the humanities by making a reference to culturally-based dances shows that, at least in this article, he is out of his realm. He should have included a reference to a technical field, such as “teaching a chemical engineer how to use a gas chromatograph,” particularly since the major example used in his essay is from a student majoring in chemical engineering. Granted, Dobrin’s text is quite outdated and TC has changed a great deal since then in terms of academic recognition. On the other hand, Dobrin’s text is still included in TC anthologies.

Textbooks
For TCers
For Non-TCers
Contingent faculty?
Engineers
Engineering communication
TC working with engineering
Academic
Practitioner

ABET. (2007). Criteria for accrediting engineering programs: effective for evaluations during the 2008-2009 accreditation cycle. Baltimore, MD.
Allen, J. (2004). The case against defining technical writing. In J. M. Dubinsky (Ed.), Teaching Technical Communication: Critical Issues for the Classroom (pp. 67-76). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.
Barker, T., & Matveeva, N. (2006). Teaching Intercultural Communication in a Technical Writing Service Course: Real Instructors' Practices and Suggestions for Textbook Selection. Technical Communication Quarterly, 15(2), 191.
Bigelow, K. W. (1947). General Education. Review of Educational Research, 17(4), 258-265.
Blyler, N. R. (1993). Teaching Purpose in a Business Communication Course. Bulletin of the Association for Business Communication, 56(3), 15-20.
Blyler, N. R. (1995). Research as Ideology in Professional Communication. Technical Communication Quarterly, 4(3), 285.
Bosley, D. S. (2002). Jumping Off the Ivory Tower: Changing the Academic Perspective. In B. Mirel, Spilka, Rachel (Ed.), Reshaping Technical Communication: New Directions and Challenges for the 21st Century (pp. 27-39). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Boyd, G., & Hassett, M. F. (2000). Developing critical writing skills in engineering and technology students. Journal of Engineering Education, 89(4), 409.
Brereton, J. C. e. (1995). The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875-1925. Pittsburgh and London: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Bushnell, J. (1999). A Contrary View of the Technical Writing Classroom: Notes Toward Future Discussion. Technical Communication Quarterly, 8(2).
Charney, D. (1996). Empiricism Is Not a Four-Letter Word. College Composition and Communication, 47(4), 567-593.
Connors, R. J. (1985). Mechanical Correctness as a Focus in Composition Instruction. College Composition and Communication, 36(1), 61-72.
David, C., & Kienzler, D. (1999). Towards an emancipatory pedagogy in service courses and user departments. Technical Communication Quarterly, 8(3).
Dicks, R. S. (2002). Cultural Impediments to Understanding: Are They Surmountable? In B. Mirel, Spilka, Rachel (Ed.), Reshaping Technical Communication: New Directions and Challenges for the 21st Century. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Dobrin, D. N. (1985). What's The Purpose of Technical Communication. Technical Writing Teacher, 12(2), 146-160.
Ford, J. D. (2004). Knowledge transfer across disciplines: tracking rhetorical strategies from a technical communication classroom to an engineering classroom. Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on, 47(4), 301-315.
Harner, S., & Rich, A. (2005). Trends in Undergraduate Curriculum in Scientific and Technical Communication Programs. Technical Communication, 52(2), 209-220.
Hart-Davidson, W. (2001). On Writing, Technical Communication, and Information Technology: The Core Competencies of Technical Communication. Technical Communication, 48(2), 145.
Heinauer, L. (2008, March 26, 2008). State board of education struggling to decide how best to teach reading and writing. Austin American-Statements. Retrieved from http://www.statesman.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/03/26/0326sboe.html
Hughes, M. (2002). Moving from Information Transfer to Knowledge Creation: A New Value Proposition for Technical Communications. Technical Communication, 49(3), 275.
Johnson-Eilola, J. (1996). Relocating the value of work: Technical communication in a Post-Industrial Age. Technical Communication Quarterly, 5(3), 245.
Johnson-Eilola, J., & Selber, S. A. (2001). Sketching a Framework for Graduate Education in Technical Communication. Technical Communication Quarterly, 10(4), 403-437.
Law, J. (2003). Making a Mess with Method. Retrieved from http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/law-making-a-mess-with-method.pdf
Lengsfeld, C. S., Edelstein, G., Black, J., Hightower, N., & et al. (2004). Engineering Concepts and Communication: A Two-Quarter Course Sequence. Journal of Engineering Education, 93(1), 79.
Leydens, J., & Schneider, J. (2009). Innovations in Composition Programs that Educate Engineers: Drivers, Opportunities, and Challenges. Journal of Engineering Education, 98(3), 255.
Miller, C. R. (1979). A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing. College English.
Miller, C. R. (1989). What's Practical about Technical Writing? In B. E. Fearing, and Sparrow, W. Keats (Ed.), Technical Writing: Theory and Practice. New York: Modern Language Association.
Rainey, K. T., Turner, R. K., & Dayton, D. (2005). Do Curricula Correspond to Managerial Expectations? Core Competencies for Technical Communicators. Technical Communication, 52(3), 323-352.
Reave, L. (2004). Technical Communication Instruction in Engineering Schools A Survey of Top-Ranked U.S. and Canadian Programs. Journal of Business & Technical Communication, 18(4), 452-490.
Redish, J. (2003). Adding Value as a Professional Technical Communicator. Technical Communication, 50(4), 505-518.
Russell, D. R. (2007). Rethinking the Articulation Between Business and Technical Communication and Writing in the Disciplines: Useful Avenues for Teaching and Research. Journal of Business & Technical Communication, 21(3), 248-277.
Scott, C., & Plumb, C. (1999). Using portfolios to evaluate service courses as part of an engineering writing program. Technical Communication Quarterly, 8(3), 337.

KM and the group revision assignment - Alavi's two points

2010-04-01T13:16:00.001-07:00

Knowledge management
Alavi, Maryam, and Leidner, Dorothy E. “Knowledge Management Systems: Issues, Challenges, and Benefits.” Communications of the Association for Information Systems. Vol 1, article 7. February 1999.

From page 6:
Two major points emerge from this [definition of knowledge]:

1. Because knowledge is personalized, in order for one person’s knowledge to be useful to another individual, it must be communicated in such a manner as to be interpretable and accessible to the other individual.

2. Hoards of information are of little value: only that information which is actively processed in the mind of an individual through a process of reflection, enlightenment, and learning can be useful. Knowledge management, then, refers to a systemic and organizationally specified process for acquiring, organizing and communicating both tacit and explicit knowledge of employees so that other employees may make use of it to be more effective and productive in their work.

Questions to address:
Point 1:
Does this mean that group revision in a classroom isn’t likely to involve the conveyance of knowledge?
Undergrads reviewing each other’s work might not be looking at information which has been “communicated in such a manner as to be interpretable and accessible to the other individual.” I think we can logically posit more than one reason for this assertion:
- The classroom writing assignment, whatever it is, likely has a college instructor as the stated audience. If that’s the case, then the readers are not the intended audience: they lack the education and the experience.
- My own experience with such assignments indicates that they are frequently directed toward someone other than the instructor (a local business owner, a professor within another discipline, or a fictional supervisor or future employer). Again, whether real or imagined, the intended audience is someone other than the student readers; thus, the group work might not qualify as knowledge work if they are incapable of interpreting, or providing their own intellectual framework, for the information presented by the author.
- The student author might not have sufficient experience within the discipline in order to understand the information presented within the paper as “knowledge.”

These claims are dependent upon a number of assumptions which I’ll try to lay out. For one, they assume that students are still novices concerning their chosen field. While likely to be true, it’s only fair to point out that some non-traditional students include those who have experience in their field and who are returning in order to obtain a diploma or certification. A second assumption is that there is no other communication taking place: that, in fact, the information (non-contextualized data, thus, not knowledge) contained within the writing assignment in question is the only information or data being exchanged. However, anyone who has taught such a class knows that this cannot be the case. Any group of students will naturally share knowledge simply in exchanging papers: a look, a comment, question, or statement undoubtedly means that there is transfer of knowledge. In short, the writing assignments and their subject matter are not the only possible conveyances of knowledge.

A third assumption, and this one is pretty serious with regard to TC service courses, is that groups of students within a single class are likely to be made up of different majors. A TC service course of 20 students is likely to have at least 10 or a dozen majors represented by those students, meaning that a group of two or more students will mostly likely represent more than a single field of study. Furthermore, I have course descriptions from 82 different schools offering TC service courses. Of those course descriptions, 23% contain the word “field” or “discipline” used to indicate that more than one major is serviced by this course, and that the work within the course may well be (some state it outright) tailored to each student’s field of study. Thus, we have added support for the claim that students in separate majors participating in group revision may not be engaging in the sharing of knowledge due to disparate levels of experience within those separate fields.

Point 2 –

Alavi’s second description does seem to indicate that knowledge management takes place within the context of classrooms, however stridently I may seem to object above in the specific case of group revision projects. Classrooms, and in particular writing classrooms, are indeed set up to enable “systemic and organizationally specified process[es] for acquiring, organizing, and communicating both tacit and explicit knowledge of employees so that other employees may make use of it to be more effective and productive in their work.”

The point of group revision exercises, and I’ll know more about what others think once I get my IRB paperwork finished, seems to be to expose writers to the feedback of others, and to expose readers to the approach used by other writers. The process of feedback, regardless of what form it takes, certainly seems to be both “systemic” and “organizationally specified” (particularly if the instructor has gone to the trouble of using assignment descriptions, prompts, peer review prompts and instructions, and assigned peer reviewers tasks to complete during the peer review process. Thus, the system of knowledge management is at least IN PLACE in the TC service course classroom, whether it’s in use or not or whether knowledge is exchanged.

So, given Alavi’s two points and given my own critique, I might wind up arguing that the system necessary to support knowledge management exists in the TC service course; however, the participants might not be capable of carrying it out. Regardless, I think knowledge management is turning out to be a convenient way of categorizing and comparing group revision in the workplace and group revision in the classroom.

Knowledge Management as Codification Tool?

2010-03-30T14:06:00.000-07:00

The data gathered for my dissertation will, eventually, have to be codified (organized in a meaningful way). Rich Rice suggested I use communications theory as a way of understanding what I find, whereas Fred Kemp (my dissertation chair) suggested systems theory. I’ve only looked preliminarily into those, but so far there’s nothing that suggests to me I could use them productively; however, there is one thing I’d like to comment upon.

Most theories I’ve encountered seem to try to account for static and dynamic, sameness and change, in some way. The communications theory I’ve read so far (and that’s not much) offers various metaphors for understanding communications between and among organizations: circle, star, etc., each figure accounting for power relationships and the supposed flow of information within that network. But there’s also an attempt to account for a change in state—what happens when the information is received, or how we can determine whether that information has been received and that therefore some sort of communication has taken place—that leads to speculation on the difference between organizations and individuals who stay the same and those that change, and what forms that change takes.

Systems theory (wherein I’ve read a bit more) is often an extended discourse on little but change itself: how the parts shape the whole, or the actions of the whole, or how understanding a system can change the system itself. . .on and on about static and dynamic systems. So, at the very least we can speculate that sameness and change are important to theorists in more than one area.

I’ve just read over Andrew P. McAfee’s “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” (http://bit.ly/ddzslZ) in which he defines Enterprise 2.0 along with six characteristics he’s identified as belonging to any technology that works as Enterprise 2.0. So, to begin, Enterprise 2.0 is "those platforms that companies can buy or build in order to make visible the practices and outputs of their knowledge workers" (McAfee 23). Earlier in the piece, he defines “platform” as a source of information in which “content is generated, or at least approved, by a small group, but then is widely visible” (22). So, to combine these two ideas, we might conclude that an Enterprise 2.0 platform is a method of communicating whereby a smaller group of people could distribute information to a larger group in such a way that the knowledge workers involved—whether the distributers or recipients—could see what others were doing and how they were doing it.

Into the mix goes McAfee’s SLATES acronym, which stands for the six components of such a system:

Search – “page layouts and navigation aids can help, but users are increasingly bypassing these in favor of keyword searches”

Links – “works best when there’s a dense link structure that changes over time and reflects the opinions of many people”

Authoring – “most people have something to contribute, whether it’s knowledge, insight, experience, a comment, a fact, an edit, a link, and so on. . .”

Tags – “don’t try to impose an up-categorization scheme; they instead let one emerge over time as a result of users’ actions.”

Extensions – computers using algorithms to suggest other content based on user behaviors. “Amazon’s recommendations were an early example of the use of extensions on the Web.”

Signals – pushed content

Each of these six components is based upon the idea of change: “bypassing,” “changes over time,” “something to contribute,” “emerge,” and then my own words “suggest” and “push.”

So, as a baseline, we can confidently claim that Enterprise 2.0 technologies are those which enable workers to (a) create, and (b) make visible not only what they’ve created but how they created it.

This model can be seen in how engineers communicate in the workplace: design reports, in particular, or even construction bids and statements of qualifications, almost never get their beginnings as a blank document. Engineers are always building (figuratively as well as literally) upon past documents and knowledge that others have created. Even beyond the rather simplistic view that engineering is based upon well-known characteristics of physics and chemistry, we can point to more subtle building blocks such as design projects done in the past which are similar to the one currently in the development stage. Building standards, such as LEED certification, ADA compliance, and EPA compliance exist prior to the design project, and thus the project itself is only part knowledge creation: it is in even larger part an effort at knowledge sharing and knowledge application.

In the technical writing class we use to prepare engineers for their future as knowledge workers who need to communicate with others, however, the knowledge is largely created (a) for that class as assigned by the instructor, and (b) by individual students. Thus, the knowledge management paradigm we see in writing in the workplace does not exist, or does not exist to the same extent, in the classroom.

Humanities Instructors and Technical Students

2010-03-02T06:44:00.000-08:00

The last couple of weeks have served to emphasize more subtly the differences between an object-oriented approach in a field like engineering and the people-oriented approach in a field like English studies. I saw “more subtly” because so many of those differences have been hammered home in the past, but my recent experience has been far more subtle.

I’ve been working with some ocean engineering students who are writing a methods section for a technical report. One of the lessons we’ve had to discuss has to do with passive voice. They’ve been told, over and over, never to write in the passive voice. They avoid it pretty consistently. They’ve also been told that a methods section is like a set of instructions for someone who wants to duplicate your work. Both pieces of advice are, in this case, incorrect and can serve to illustrate some of the challenges involved with teaching technical communication.

Writing instructors frequently tell their students to avoid the passive voice and use the active voice. There’s more focus on the doer of the action, and less focus on the objects of that person’s actions (which is presumably “better” because people are more important than objects). But engineering, and many of the sciences, in fact, are focused on things rather than people. Keeping in mind that the audience for a technical report is technical by default, writing with an object-oriented approach is the logical choice. Audience awareness is in fact a humanities-based approach, and if we humanities folks are going to work honestly alongside more technical disciplines, then we need to keep their audience firmly in mind.

Next, the purpose of a methods section is not so that the first person who reads your document can rush into the lab and duplicate the process. Instead, the purpose of a methods section is to create community (this is a hard one for the technical folks to swallow, but it’s true). Science is, methodologically speaking, a community project. Science assumes that there is a world external to each of us, that that world is shared in common by everyone, and that measuring that world can teach us something valuable. All of these assumptions mean that a good methods section should tell a precise story: what was done in the lab, how it was done, why it was done, and whether there were any variances in standard procedure (the word “standard” itself implies community knowledge creation). The methods section is a way for the engineer or scientist to become transparent to the larger community of technical activities, thus playing an important role in the ongoing conversation of scientific discovery. Without that methods section, the report separates itself from the transparency that makes science possible.

In explaining the purpose of a methods section, both technical and humanities personnel have a tendency to underestimate its role, and simply describe it as a set of instructions; thus, students often written in the present tense, as though they are telling someone what to do. This is, of course, a failure, since the point of the methods section is to build the author’s ethos and establish connections to the community, and that therefore the methods section should be past tense: the story of what was done in the lab.

Reading through an engineering writing assignment described in some FIE conference proceedings, I was able to clearly see the humanities influence in the design of the assignment itself. That humanities influence is often powerful and works well in an engineering communication course: there’s no reason to cut out audience analysis, rhetorical training, document design, and the like. However, the goal is to help technical professionals become better technical professionals. For the assignment description I read, the genre was listed as “research paper,” which from the start grounds the entire endeavor in the humanities. Much of the assignment, however, seemed like a good idea (again—using the humanities to teach engineering communication isn’t necessarily a bad idea): groups used individual critical analyses of sources to determine which topic would be their focus; groups used affinity diagrams to narrow their focus; groups were composed of both students and faculty; individuals were assigned tasks by the group; groups merged and revised documents together.

But the whole assignment is flawed from the beginning. The authors indicate that the engineers need training working in groups because as professional engineers they will be required to work in groups. But what the authors fail to do then is to find out what kinds of things engineers do in groups. For instance, when writing, engineers rarely start with a blank page or are allowed to decide upon a topic (or project) all on their own. Instead, engineers almost always have projects handed to them, and their writing almost always starts with boilerplate material based on building codes, specifications and standards, and written materials from past projects; thus, the brainstorming and individual research that went into this research paper does not, in fact, mirror the professional engineering writing experience.

I am not (yet) advocating engineering communication classes wherein students actually work with boilerplate material provided by previous classes (though that does sound intriguing) or that the above assignment is entirely wrong-headed. Rather, I’m proposing that humanities instructors who teach future technical professionals be aware of the differences in working environments and in disciplinary conventions that make technical professionals—often, though not always—so very different from the humanities.

Problems with TC service courses at research universities, pt 1

2010-02-25T08:11:00.000-08:00

At most universities, and certainly at most research-intensive doctoral institutions, service courses are not taught by tenure-line faculty. These lower-level courses are often seen as not offering the opportunity for research and publication that upper-level or graduate courses would, and thus there is little incentive in the form of pay raises, tenure, or promotion, for teaching such courses. At four-year baccalaureate institutions, this practice isn’t so prevailing, but is nonetheless common. Thus it is that an overwhelming percentage, some 84%, are taught by contingent faculty (“contingent” meaning faculty who will not gain tenure and who are employed on a yearly, often part-time, basis).

The majority of technical writing service courses are offered by English Departments, and for a more thorough explanation of how this came about you should read Robert Connors’ “The Rise of Technical Writing Instruction in America” (Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 12(4), 1982). The main plot points of this sad tale have to do with an increasing number of technical colleges producing an increasing number of graduates who were perceived as lacking in writing ability. The seemingly-logical solution was to ask the local English faculty to “fix” the problem. Thus it is that in departments whose primary tenure and promotion focus was literature and cultural studies we nonetheless see the rise of lecturers hired to teach technical writing. Some colleges recognized that technical communication was a fertile field of study, sometimes lucrative, too, and developed their own successful TC programs. We see evidence of such success at RPI, Texas Tech, and Michigan State.

Commonly, though, literature departments simply continued on in the money- and time-saving practice of hiring adjunct lecturers to teach technical writing, thus playing a starring role in some of the most common problems in technical writing service courses today.

Problem: Contingent Faculty are not Paid Well, Supported Well, or Treated Well

The going yearly salary rate for full-time contingent writing faculty in the state of Texas is half of what the tenure-line faculty make. This is true for colleges with or without strong TC programs. Thus, the people teaching the classes which (a) are in highest demand and (b) are the classes the tenured faculty do not wish to teach, are the people paid the least.

Vacation and Sick Leave

In Texas, it’s not unusual for contingent faculty to not accrue any vacation leave. For instance, at Texas A&M I taught in the English Department year-round. I taught fall, spring, and summer, teaching a total of 12 sections per academic year. I accrued sick leave on a monthly basis. As a long-time state employee, I should have also accrued vacation pay at the rate of 10 hours per month. However, the English Department does not consider adjunct faculty to be full-time, and thus they do not accrue vacation pay. This situation is, to my knowledge, fairly common across the state. I do not know if it is common in other states.

Contingent faculty layoffs

When tough economic times hit, it is common practice to lay off the contingent faculty first. For instance, the Bryan/College Station Eagle ran a story on February 18, 2010, entitled “A&M English lecturers advised to start job hunts.” The story states that around 30 lecturers (one-third of the department’s total faculty) were advised to start looking for jobs. Quite frankly, the English Department should be applauded for letting the lecturers know this early in the semester. It’s not unheard of for departments to wait until the end of the semester to make such announcements. Regardless, the classes taught by those lecturers are clearly the ones in highest demand at A&M; nonetheless, they’re the ones whose instructors are first to be laid off.

Attitude of Tenure-line Faculty Towards TC Instructors and TC

A tenured administrator once told me I’d be able to still work on my dissertation while teaching four classes because they were technical writing, which can be taught “with the brain turned off.” Within the comments appended to the BCS Eagle story above, one commenter (identified as “englphdmom”) wrote

“The much-touted technical writing . . .is about nothing more than rhetorical evaluation of audience, formulaic templates, and communication of ideas in grammatically correct, straightforward language. Any English major will be able to apply these concepts in teaching technical writing.”

Any practitioner or researcher in the field of TC will of course see the problems with that statement. In fact, it’s ironic that englphdmom indicates that all writing—including, presumably, poetry, novels and other forms of fiction—is merely the end result of audience analysis and grammatical construction. But of course this attitude towards TC is also not uncommon; however, it’s important to note that I have only run into it within English departments whose primary focus was literature. It’s also important to note that if effective communication were only the sum of what the commenter listed above, then effective communication would still be quite difficult.

Taken together, the problems listed above make the expectation of quality technical writing instruction at a research university almost laughable. And at many schools, laughable is certainly what we get.

So what’s the solution? Many research intensive universities are already forming TC departments, sometimes within the existing English department and sometimes not. For instance, some TC programs are called “engineering communication” and are housed within a college of engineering. At others, the TC program exists as its own department, fighting for classroom space and money just like all the others. I’m not sure what my own inclination is. For one thing, colleges of engineering tend to be quite sympathetic to the need for quality writing instruction, and thus they often make for a good home for TC. But its nature, though, TC is encompasses more subject matter than simply communicating about engineering, and thus constraining a TC program to engineering doesn’t make much sense. What about schools of business and law, or medical schools, or all the technical communication that happens within the social sciences or humanities? Given that TC is seen as a service—and in many ways, it is—that exists to help other disciplines, it seems likely that TC may never settle into its own department. But that subjugation of the word “service”—implying that one who serves another is less than the one served—is logically flawed. A parent who serves a child is nonetheless the parent, and doctors serve patients all the time.

Is Revision Separate from Writing?

2010-02-18T11:22:00.000-08:00

Revision as Writing

In thinking and writing about groups working on revising a document, I’ve become increasingly convinced that “revision” may be an artificial separation. There is a substantial, though not insurmountable, body of research that indicates revision is indeed something different than writing, or that revision is at least something which it is possible to distinguish from writing even if it is not separable from writing.

Haar (2006) claims that revision “doesn’t have a well-developed history of theorizing and study” (3). I might suggest that revision doesn’t have a body of study or academic theoretical framework because it’s so very difficult to separate revision from simply writing. I cannot imagine any circumstance under which I would write without some modification of the text—spelling, organization, word choice, rhetorical strategy—before the text hits the screen. My son, all of 8 years old, is at the beginning stages of writing. He prints letters, frequently not distinguishing between lower- and upper-case into words, and makes sentences of those words. But he’s already revising in his head before he begins printing. He speaks softly, mouthing the words to himself, making corrections and emendations, before beginning to write. And as he writes, he makes little corrections (rounding out a “c,” perhaps, or getting the downward stroke on the correct side of a “d”). Those physical corrections, of course, are simply the end result of the revision process already in place in his head. His writing, in fact, is indistinguishable from his revision. They are coterminous, sharing the leading edge of his thought plane.

But as important as writing is, it seems foolish for me to simply dismiss revision as the focus of serious study. For one thing, writing, and any aspect of writing we care to identify, is simply too important to ignore. That argument has been made too many times by too many people for me to go into it here. Suffice to say that writing’s important; therefore, research into revision must also be important. Haar indeed states that that “revision touches every part of the writing process” (7), and then goes into various academic definitions of revision, some focusing on the time scale during which revision happens, others identifying the mechanical aspects of revision (proofreading as opposed to organization, for instance). Haar provides us with examples of “deliberately wrought” (11) descriptions of revision offered by revision scholars, ranging from metaphorical (“internal” and “external,” “up” and “down,” revising “out” and “in”), cognitive (“a turn, a change of direction or attention, a step, a transformation from a writer-centered to a reader-centered mode of writing,” according to Flower), duration (“quick” and “thorough,” according to Elbow), and a literal definition by Fitzgerald that says “revision means making any changes at any point in the writing process.” Fitzgerald’s distinction seems to me to be the least helpful. Writing itself is, for me at least, an act of change, the most insignificant portion of which takes place on the screen and the most profound of which takes place within myself or my readers. In other words, I’m not sure but what revision is so closely related to writing that distinguishing between the two is simply an academic exercise.

Fortunately, I’m in the business of academic exercises.

And separating revision from writing does indeed allow for some advantages: for one thing, the perception that revision is different than producing, say, a rough draft, is helpful in locating a particular event or process to investigate. Another advantage to separating revision from writing is that revision is almost always in response to your audience, whether you are serving as your own audience (and editor) or whether you are revision in response to someone else’s input, revision is a response to the reader. For my purposes, the group action—two or more people changing a workplace document—is important in that group revision and peer review have become more important to composition theory in the last ten years as we see the de-emphasis on the individual as author and the emergence of recognition that writing is the result of living and working with others—friction, if you will, which is both positive and negative. There never was an author who wrote out of a vacuum, creating something from nothing (no matter how long it’s taking that idea to die, it was never true). But the teaching of revision in TC service courses (and I think we could expand this to freshman comp, too, as well as others) is still often a limited-interaction exercise.

I’ve received some very good, thoughtful responses from posting the following query to the ATTW-L:

I'm interested in knowing how group revision activities (two or more writers working on the same document) are conducted in your department's TC service courses. What sorts of genres, activities, and technologies are included when teaching/allowing students to revise a document in groups? How is authorship represented in the final document, and what roles do the students play when revising in groups?

The reason I ask is that my dissertation deals with service courses, and my preliminary research indicates that group revision may look and be conducted much differently in the workplace (specifically, engineering firms) than in the classroom. I am looking for more evidence of the classroom experience of document revision.

Any information or thoughts you have will be greatly appreciated, on- or off-list! Of course, I'll be happy to share my findings.

The responses I’ve received so far indicate that much of the peer review that takes place in TC service courses can be described as “asynchronous” (groups actually working as individuals and supplying critiques to other individuals) and somewhat mono-technological (MS Word shows up quite a bit; email somewhat less; Drupal only once, and no other technologies listed).

But the preliminary information I’ve received from civil engineers answering basically the same questions is that group revision is frequently an activity wherein the group offers feedback as a group: in other words, everyone talks about what needs to happen as a group rather than as individuals working silently. Furthermore, there’s a wide range of technologies that gets used for this revision process: Google Docs, Google Sketchup, paper, Words, and PDF docs.

So, as Rich Rice pointed out the other night, the real value of my dissertation will be to figure out how service courses get their information about group revision, and to then suggest a process by which service courses could get more accurate and timely information about workplace writing (in other words, try to offer some solution).

Service Courses at the Center of the Universe

2010-02-12T06:54:00.000-08:00

Service courses exist at the center of the academic universe, pulled by the event horizons of a dozen different institutional singularities without ever fully succumbing to the influence of one or the other. Their orbits are unstable, and yet for decades they have managed to balance on the pin head of academic gravitas.

Service courses exist because legislatures tell public institutions they have to have them; they exist because academic institutions feel that students need to “just know” some things; they exist because legions of students have taken them in past generations, thus making them a tradition; and, they exist because they are part of an honest effort at helping students become citizens.

Many academics take “service course” to mean any of the lower-level courses that all students at public colleges are required to take; thus, introductory classes in history, political science, and freshman composition are all service courses. However, service courses are actually any courses offered by one department to the students of other departments (non majors). Thus, there are far more service courses than one might think. Service courses that fall under this definition could be as varied as renaissance and reformation history, medieval philosophy, web design, or technical editing.

But whatever its most far-flung incarnations may be, for technical communication researchers the “service course” is most commonly the class taught to students from across the university who need initiation and practice in the workaday documents they will be required to produce upon graduating and securing a job. This course, designated ENGL 2311 by the Texas Common Course Numbering System (TCCNS), has a variety of definitions across the nation, but most fall pretty comfortably into the following description:

“Principles, techniques, and skills needed for college level scientific, technical, or business
writing.”

Texas A&M University refines that to the following:

"Processes of developing field-specific technical information related to the major, including researching, drafting, editing, revising, and designing technical reports, proposals, manuals, resumes and professional correspondence for specific audiences. Special topics, computer and distance sections available. Prerequisites: ENGL 104; junior classification."

A careful reader will note that while above I defined the goal of the service course as preparing students for workplace writing, the first definition—from the Texas Common Course Numbering System—mentions only “college level. . .writing” and that A&M refers to writing “related to the major.” The question that arises naturally from this juxtaposition is whether “college” writing is the same as “workplace” writing. My experience talking to people in business, politics (including members of the Texas State Board of Education), and education (elementary, secondary, and post-secondary) indicates that at least for many people, college writing is in fact the same as workplace writing. In other words, many college graduates who have gone on to shape our families, communities, businesses, and schools think that the way we write in the classroom is the same way we write in the office. Therefore, there is no dissonance caused by the above contrast in definitions.

Researchers conversant with college writing and business writing will, or should, note that there are in fact pretty significant differences between college and business writing. For instance, there is a distinct difference in genre. College writing is often in the form of essays, but essays practically don’t exist at all in business. Furthermore, a good college-level producer of essays will write using terms and citation styles that often don’t apply to business. MLA citation style, by way of example, is practically unheard of off campus, and essays frequently deal with students’ personal opinions on politics, literature, and history, which, though important, do not often come up in workplace writing.

There is, of course, a significant amount of college writing which is not in essay form. Students routinely produce proposals, lab reports, and technical reports. They also make posters, slides, and handouts for technical presentations, and some students produce educational materials as well as websites and business plans and case studies. These document do in fact share a great deal in common with workplace writing: they are modeled on actual workplace documents (such as business plans) and are required so that students gain experience in generating these documents, becoming more comfortable with the genre and purpose of such texts. So far, so good.

But perhaps one of the most important distinctions between workplace writing and college writing is the end, or goal, of the document. In school, everything a student does is (or is supposed to be) for the direct benefit of the student. Students work as individuals and are graded as individuals. Even in group work, students receive individual grades, and savvy instructors have policies in place for the student who does not contribute as much as is expected. Upon graduation, students receive a personalized diploma recognizing their efforts. Students own their writing, and thus their grades.

In workplace writing, documents frequently do not list an author but instead bear the name of the company or institution for which the student (now graduated) works. The end of the workplace document is to increase the value of the organization, not the individual, though individual benefits of course come through in the form of paychecks, raises, and promotions. But the primary purpose of that document is to increase the value of the organization: paychecks are a secondary benefit, a consequence, of the increase in organizational value.

Writing in the classroom means the student owns the document and produced all of the work within it. When a student cites information, it is for the purpose of acknowledging outside help, such as quoting a source of information. But in the workplace, documents are frequently used and re-used, and even kept as templates for later work. A single paragraph page may contain the words of five or six employees, but those words are not attributed directly to those authors; instead, the document is taken to be literally the work of the group. Ownership of that text goes to the organization, and plagiarism takes on an entirely different shape and meaning. Stealing words and ideas from other companies is bad; re-using text produced from a worker who may no longer work there is completely reasonable, even without attribution.

The lack of recognition of the difference between classroom writing and workplace writing is largely transparent, and often detrimental, to the service courses designed upon the assumption that classroom writing and business writing are the same thing.

Focusing the Question

2010-02-11T06:29:00.001-08:00

How do we, then, 1) measure and 2) bridge the inevitable gap between employer expectations and the knowledge, skills and dispositions taught in TC service courses such that schools can better keep up with changing needs and emerging trends in industry?

This question is the one that’s occupied me for the last couple of years. It’s a noble quest, to be sure, trying to keep a practical, service-oriented course on track with employers’ expectations. It’s the basic requirement of an education: teach me to do something, or to think something, that will better me (or, in this case, make me more employable). But over time, the base question (“How do we. . .?”) has become more rhetorical than anything else. How, in fact, do we keep classes current with industry, assuming that we should do so in the first place?

And is it possible to keep a course which serves an entire undergraduate university population, composed of 90-some-odd majors, relevant to the writing practices of each student’s intended career path such that those students will come out of the course actually writing and understanding the documents of a particular profession better and more effectively than when they went into the course? No, probably not. But it’s worth looking into.

William James might argue that the “cash value” of the larger question, the “How do we” question, is to serve as a touchstone or a frame, but not the actual endeavor itself. Rather, it lays philosophical ground for me in that it keeps the focus on the practicality of the TC service course.

So back to the question, I’ve been refining it in my head for some time now. If the question lends itself to broadness, to lack of specific focus such that it really does become more rhetorical than an actual request for information, then I can at least refine my approach to the question. The question of “How do we. . .” then becomes a guiding philosophy rather than something I have to answer directly. I’ve considered questions like:

1. If more authentic writing situations make for more effective learning, then how can a technographic study help capture workplace writing practices for inclusion into the classroom?

In order to answer this question, I’d need to make clear the value and validity of a technographic study (which, in all fairness, I’d need to do in any study that uses the word “technographic”).

The study design would have to take into account other study designs and their findings in order to make that final comparison, the “how can a” part of the question, make sense. And that’s a sticking point, seems to me, since another ethnographic study (not technographic in nature) would of course have examined different things in the first place; thus, comparing results wouldn’t work too well without some serious rhetorical gymnastics.

2. How can ethnographic observation methods, traditionally used in writing studies to record information on the production of texts as well as the interactions of writers, be shifted in order to take into account the participation of technological artifacts in the writing process?

I like this question a bit more than the first because it allows for a simple critique of past studies and an opportunity to justify a different approach (the technographic lens, if you will). That’s a valuable piece of real estate, but I think it would work better as an article rather than as a full-length dissertation project. Must make a note.

3. If, as a number of researchers assert, technology “participates” with us in the creation of both artifacts and activities, how can we measure the extent and influence of that participation?

This question works well, too, and in fact may be the winner of this group. First, I’d need to line up some theorists and researchers who assert that technology participates alongside us (Johnson-Eilola and Kien I already have, but I’m wondering if there aren’t some other techno-heavy hitters like Marcuse and Ellul who could be worked in?). So, assuming I’d gotten the theoretical basis squared away, next would come the study. And the study itself would be the primary benefit to this question over the previous: the previous question could be answered entirely using deductive reasoning, or at least an answer could be roughed out of the raw material. But with this third question, I’m allowing for the inclusion of a decent empirical study. My diss chair will argue that it’s going to be difficult to quantify the word “participation” empirically, but I’m not sure that’s the hard part. I think a good study design would adapt ethnographic methods such as direct observation and interviews, with focus groups where we focused on the technology itself and got the group to provide some feedback, some sense of how they fit the technology into their daily work.

But there’s a host of what I’ll call on-the-ground problems with that one, starting with who I’d be using as participants and why, and how to get them to talk about technology without leading them (technology is notoriously transparent—just think about the last time you really thought about how helpful shoes are) into saying what I think. So that’s just two good problems to deal with. I’m sure there are more.

But one of the more serious, I think, problems is that I might just uncover disciplinary differences in the group inclusion of technology that point to the dissolution of TC service courses, and I’m not sure that’s a good idea.

Let me back up: let’s say I use two participant pools, one from a human resources firm and one from a civil engineering firm. What if I find that the use of language, the production of written artifacts, and the inclusion (and subsequent participation) of technology into both spoken and written communication is so very specific to each firm (and really, to each field) that, in fact, there’s no way to include both approaches in a single class? Would that point to an overall condemnation of the idea that we can train future professionals to produce technical documents in a single, one-size-fits-all course?

Honestly, though, that potential conclusion doesn’t worry me. It’s getting there—the problems on the ground, as it were—that are the real obstacles. If those can be addressed such that a replicable, empirical study can be carried out and the results recorded in a usable fashion, then the results may fall where they may. I imagine chapter five will be full of all kinds of speculations about application anyhow.

Techne and Teaching TC

2010-02-03T08:43:00.000-08:00

I’ve just this morning re-read Moeller and McAllister’s (2002) “Playing with Techne,” which offers a strong contrast to much of my reading, writing, and thinking over the past couple of years. In a nutshell, Moeller and McAllister argue against the current mindset that professional, as opposed to academic, documents and setting are the preferred method of teaching technical communication. As a caveat, I think it’s important to note that Moeller and McAllister seem to be talking about TC classes offered to TC majors, rather than the far more common service courses offered to non-TC majors (to the tune of some 800,000 students per year, in fact). So that distinction may be responsible for much of my reaction to their argument. And it’s only fair to point out that the essence of their discussion—that encouraging students to “play” with newly-acquired tools and knowledge is one of the best ways of getting them to develop skills and learn associated conventions—is an excellent point, though I’d point out that encouraging folks to play with anything is a good start to learning.

Moeller and McAllister (2002) argue against “textbooks that push technical communication students prematurely into workplace scenarios” and claim that textbooks of technical communication “position the student as an employee who is stuck awkwardly between a boss who wants a project done inexpensively but well and a customer who wants a project done well but inexpensively” (185-6). Moeller and McAllister miss, however, one of the primary exigencies of teaching technical communication: the overwhelming majority of our students are not going into TC as a profession, and they do indeed enter the classroom looking to learn a few things that will immediately help them in a workplace situation. Engineering students, in particular, tend to graduate and begin working immediately in positions that place them between a mid-level boss and a customer in precisely the scenario described above.

Moeller and McAllister also argue against the data-driven assertions of other TC researchers that novice writers often only begin to value rhetoric after being exposed to the professional discourse and environment. Instead, they criticize TC for having “warmly embraced an emphasis on ‘efficient writing’ simultaneously taught and practiced in a recontextualized classroom that tries to mirror difficult workplace realities” (187).

A great deal of their argument reinforces the classroom versus the “real world” duality that makes for so much trouble in both academic and non-academic surroundings. The purpose of universities has always been to produce and spread knowledge. This mission, which is tempting to describe a two-pronged but is really indicative of the symbiotic relationship between research and education, is and has been commonly found in the Far East, Middle East, Near East, and Western schools for centuries. And while the modern American university now leans more towards being a trade and professional than a liberal arts institution, our job is still to produce knowledge and spread it around in anticipation of someone doing something with that knowledge. Whether they’re hunting for furs or designing solar-powered sewage treatment plants, our students have got to be ready to do something with what we teach them, and that means the classroom is part and parcel of the “real world.” To pretend that school isn’t the “real world” is simply to miss the point of school.

Moeller and McAllister go on (unwisely, in my opinion) to suggest that students don’t have much experience being students, even though they show up to college having already experienced as many as 13 years (sometimes more) of formal instruction (188). In fact, our students show up often knowing little other than how to be students, and how to fit within the construct of the classroom environment. What we need to break free from, then, is the idea that the writing assignments of the TC classroom will be similar to the essays and personal narratives they’ve written so far. Thus, approaching the TC classroom with an air of workplace sensibility seems to be a good start particularly if we’re going to pay attention to the research results from Katz, Winsor, and others.

The crux of their argument, which despite my criticisms is an interesting and valuable point, is that students in TC courses should be encouraged to be shapers of knowledge, the artisans to whom the word techne makes reference (though actually the ancient Greek for “artisan” is, in Roman letters, tekton). But it seems they’re working from first principles rather than hard data, and I think they’ve missed the target in terms of accurately identifying the first principle. For instance, and as I stated earlier, they identify students as not knowing much about being students. That’s a missed opportunity for enlightenment. I’d argue (again) that college students know, in fact, very little except for how to be students. And, as I also pointed out above, they’re simply missing out on a great deal of valid data gathered by painstaking ethnographic methods, and while I’m currently engaged in a critique of those same studies, I’m by no means under the impression that the results of those studies are invalid or should simply be ignored. Far from it! My own critique is based on the idea that there’s some missing element to the methodology behind many of the ethnographic writing studies we’ve done in the past. But the results of those studies, such as they are, sure seem pretty solid and are at least worthy of comment in Moeller’s and McAllister’s article.

Artemeva, Logie, and St-Martin (1999), in an article that represents the dialogic opposite of Moeller and McAllister’s argument, describe a course in which lower-level engineering students are exposed to “typified writing practices in situated contexts of the engineering disciplines, interactions with existing texts, and interactions with relatively experienced writers (engineering students from upper years, teaching assistants, and instructors)” (302). Artemeva, et al, admit that “[r]ather than viewing their course work as dummy runs or simulations, students need to perceive what they are doing as being real and having consequences” (303), but this admission is in frank response to the necessity of TC coursework matching TC professional practice rather than resisting it.

In line with Winsor’s findings, Artemeva, et al, state that students “usually bring with them a resistance to the notion of engineering as a profession that requires literacy” (303). If Artemeva, et al, are right, and my experience indicates they are, then Moeller and McAllister’s humanities-based approach will simply not appeal to the engineering students in their classes, and might even alienate them entirely.

How TC fails Pragmatism

2010-01-30T07:30:00.000-08:00

My master’s thesis deals with pragmatism as it appears in a series of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels. I argued, pretty successfully, that Jamesian pragmatism was already a feature of American novels before James himself became famous for endorsing pragmatism as a life philosophy. Since then, I’ve been affected by James’ writings in my teaching and my research, always believing that I was engaged in a very pragmatic practice: teaching others to improve their writing so that they could move on in their classroom and work-related careers. But a conversation with my dissertation chair, Fred Kemp, has made me question that assumption of pragmatism. Pragmatism is an approach to valuing a theory or situation so as to find whether it benefits the individual. A pragmatic approach to education would involve a student choosing a major and then taking classes that fit his or her interpretation of that major’s value to the individual. A history major might focus in on nineteenth century America and classes that would aid in teaching that history to high school students.

But Fred pointed out that TC service courses are a response, not a homegrown initiative. Those classes are a response to a need identified by others, and our response is to create and offer a class based on those needs. It’s a backwards sort of pragmatism, one that responds to someone else’s pragmatic desires. A department which offered such courses could do so in a pragmatic matter, being sure to make money and intercampus social capital, provide teachers with an outlet for their well-honed pedagogical skills, and creating a curriculum that meets the needs of the department while also serving the students and client departments. But that’s almost never what happens. In fact, I’d argue that it never happens except there may be some golden campus where service courses benefit everyone. In practice, those classes tend to make servants of the undertrained instructors who are paid blue collar wages for university-level teaching, and the students are frequently not served by those courses due to the courses’ generality and lack of theoretical and practical rigor.

So in practice, TC service courses are the opposite of pragmatic. They’re some sort of perverse altruism where the best of intentions help few, if any, attain their goals.

Joanna Wolfe (2009) points out that textbooks for introductory TC service courses actually fail to serve a huge chunk of their clientele: engineering and science students whose rhetorical and epistemological approach do not mesh with those of the humanities scholars who produce the textbooks. To be fair, there are textbooks written by engineers or by humanities scholars who work closely for engineers. Hillary Hart’s Engineering Communication is such a book, created by a humanities scholar whose position and experience aligns her with an engineering college. But those books are few and far between, and their level of adoption does not even begin to approach those of the humanities-driven textbooks.

Part of the disjuncture between writing for the humanities (and thus the approach that humanities-based textbooks take) and writing in the scientific and engineering fields has to do with the mission of technical communication itself: clarity reigns supreme. Over and over, engineers are taught (rightly so) that clarity is the goal of all good writing. The humanities, though, often approach writing as an art in itself, and that freewriting and rough drafting and the very act of writing is worth taking noting. And as with the engineers who argue the opposite, the humanities scholars are indeed correct. Two approaches, both utterly logical, and both somewhat incompatible in teaching and in practice.

The contrast between what engineers and employers seem to want can be seen in Blyler’s (1995) article in which she argues for a pedagogy of social action, urging teachers and students to take a rhetorical approach to the construction of power in both textual and graphical narratives. Blyler (1993) takes a humanities-based stance when arguing against a “formulaic” view of genre and purpose for business communication courses. But formulaic is exactly what the engineers would like, and is often exactly the approach needed for effective engineering communication. In the humanities, we argue that texts are social artifacts constructed to meet the needs and expectations of (frequently) tightly-knit groups with a level of discourse contingent upon their workplace activities and needs. But Blyer’s argument suggests otherwise. We should not train students to write genres within such a specific space and place. No doubt helping students recognize their rhetorical circumstances, taking a broad approach to audience analysis and textual production, would help them think more globally about writing and perhaps more critically about the purposes of genre. But that means we’re not responding to the needs, the stated needs, of our client departments and are in fact working more pragmatically according to our own “cash value” when it comes to our service courses.

Perhaps pragmatism has failed me at last, in that a pragmatic view of the TC service course will result in classes that do not address the specific needs of the intended audience. Furthermore, if we deliberately create courses that do not address those specific needs, we may be failing to follow our own stated goals for effective technical communication. If the class fails, perhaps the class author is the one to blame.

Bushnell (1999) argues that preparing students simply for their future jobs, based on expectations provided solely by employers, undermines the role of the university in producing writers who “shape knowledge” and acknowledge bias rather than avoid it. However, for students in technical majors who take the service course as part of a communication requirement, the expectation to “shape knowledge” may be too great a leap: engineering students, for example, are taught to create knowledge (conduct tests) and then to report it. To introduce the idea of shaping knowledge in the form of a one-semester course, or to encourage students to take a rhetorically-bound epistemological stance, may be asking too much. It’s also important to note that Bushnell’s take on university education is dated: we no longer (always) aim to broaden minds and further intellectual horizons. Instead, the more common goal is to train students for specific professions, which more and more commonly require even further specialization after college. What careers exist for which (a) a university degree is required, and (b) require no further specialization or continuing education?

I'm Back in the Datacloud Again, and It's Fixin' to Rain

2010-01-29T07:11:00.000-08:00

TC luminaries like George Hayhoe sometimes espouse an industry focus which emphasizes the value created outside the classroom by TC professionals and subject-matter experts. Hayhoe writes, “Academics need to work with our practitioner colleagues to identify in detail the body of knowledge and skills that technical communicators need to be competitive and effective on the job. We must then revise our curricula to focus on that knowledge and those skills to prepare future students” (266).

However, if our mission is to teach rather than train, as Johnson-Eilola puts it (and Stanley Fish, too, in a recent column entitled “The Last Professor”), then we cannot allow ourselves to simply follow industry, meeting only current expectations rather than exploring new ideas and creating knowledge within the classroom. Hayhoe also notes that “discipline-standard processes and criteria for evaluating work products are other hallmarks of a profession” (p. 266). Standardization, if indeed desirable, would come most effectively after a sturdy partnership exists between industry and academia. That partnership, though, comes at the cost of re-evaluating our research methods not merely in terms of how to gather data, but also as a way of creating communities of knowledge. Research, knowledge, practice, and education cannot exist as separate cultures if TC is to grow into a mature discipline. In my writings and readings this week on technography, I think I’m beginning to identify a useful construct, or theoretical stance, in keeping us in touch with our research agenda while keeping us grounded in the workaday experience of using tools to create and collaborate.

Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s Datacloud discusses technical communication in terms of “remixing”: just as a dj remixes music, symbolic-analytical workers (Robert Reich’s terms, borrowed for the book and for this discussion) re-mix information for different audiences, taking complex, sometimes very technical data and turning it into a prospectus for investors, marketing materials for potential customers, an operations manual, and a series of graphics for an online advertising campaign. We’re like conductors assembling the evening’s program from our repertoire of rarefied musicology. In the end, the audience should be satisfied that we’ve presented them with a meaningful experience, even if some of them only listened to the timpanist.

Johnson-Eilola’s version of a datacloud is one in which huge chunks of data are presented and re-presented by trained professionals interacting with their audience, their tools, and their colleagues. Kien’s view of a technography, as I wrote yesterday, seems more interested in the experience of the individual within the group (no matter his example of a group modifying a document—his vignettes from personal life focus almost exclusively on his own subjective experience awash in connectivity). For my money, the current rein-holder of technography should focus in on the group experiences of technology in which the tool itself plays a pivotal role. As a technical communicator, I’m currently most interested in document production, and the process of revision is my (again, current) area of interest. But I think Johndan’s version of the datacloud provides a wealth of opportunity for researchers interested in performing a technography.

For instance, in “Relocating the Value of Work,” Johnson-Eilola mentions the potential power of networked technologies. One use of networked technologies is, of course, distance education. But another, more activity-oriented implementation of networked technologies might include reaching outside the classroom and into the workplace, reducing the isolation of students and mentors (an isolation which Johnson-Eilola argues against) and increasing contact with the workplace. A network as an “environment for learning,” as he puts it, can be implemented by combining human networks such as classrooms and teachers, along with mentors and peers outside the classroom, and then adding computer networks to gather and reflect upon knowledge gained from the interaction of the human networks.

Here’s how he says it:
“Perhaps more importantly, we must move beyond the idea that the network is a medium for transmitting knowledge. A more radical notion is that the network is also an environment for learning, working, and living. Put in a different way, we need to think about new formations for knowledge that rely on network organization, metaknowledge and metawork that act at a level above current knowledge structures. This is another way of saying we need to redefine technical communication in broader terms than functional skills: we should be teaching rather than training” (p. 264-5, emphasis in original).

Bringing the discussion back to technography, I re-read a passage in Johnson-Eilola’s Datacloud this morning in which he not only echoes, but I would say presages Kien’s remarks on technography:

“In analyzing these continued processes of articulation and rearticulation, we begin to see a recursive development in which the computer absorbs social actions, fragments and flattens them, only to have those actions and spaces reabsorbed into culture in various ways. However, I want to avoid the idea that the computer interface somehow autonomously causes broad social changes. Instead I want to suggest that the computer participates in broad social changes. In a recursive and contingent process (or set of processes), particular forms of interface tend to influence how people work” (34, emphasis in original).

Clearly, this is a good sign for me and my current fascination with all things technographic. Here’s a well-known TC researcher indicating that yes, the technology we use participates alongside us in social change. Again, as with Kien, I’m a little uncomfortable assigning any hint of volition on the part of a tool or any sort; however, it’s worth noting that tools and techniques are little is not the reflection of desires on our part. The desire to work and produce drives our desire to tools that aid in that work, and thus our tools are manifestations of our desires. In that sense, we could certainly argue that our desires participate, as parts of us, alongside us and within us, and the tools we use are physical symbols of that participation. So perhaps I’ve quieted my own doubts concerning Kien’s anthropomorphism (animism is what it reads like) by bringing my own thoughts about technology out of the theoretical, abstract realm and back into the day-to-day experience of working with tools.

Robert Johnson vs. Kien's Technography

2010-01-28T08:08:00.000-08:00

Robert Johnson’s User-Centered Technology is a favorite work among technical communicators. In it, Johnson proposes “that the end of technology be refigured as in the user: those humans (virtually all of us) who interact with various technologies (large corporate and governmental systems or small, stand-alone devices; simple hand tools or complex electronic networks; discursively created or materially constructed artifacts) on a daily basis in our public and personal lives” (21). Johnson contrasts his view with how he perceives other theories of technology, those that largely subordinate the user of the technology to the tool, or system, which the user is using.

In contrast, Kien’s Global Technography seems to argue more in favor of viewing humans and technology as an interconnected system, claiming that “ubiquitous mediation is the norm” (14) and that “the props, backdrops, and containers of our interactions practice everyday life right along with us” (16). While this statement certainly teases my imagination, and makes for interesting research ideas, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with Kien’s casual anthropomorphizing of technology. In short, I’m not sure that tools “practice” anything, much less “life.” That the presence of the tool, or system, affects my performance of everyday life is not in question. What is at the heart of my discomfort is whether one can assign agency to technology.

In response, we might point to Johnson’s argument that “the system-centered view holds that the technology, the humans, and the context within which they reside are perceived as constituting one system that operates in a rational manner toward the achievement of predetermined goals” (25). But here we can see that Kien moves away from Johnson’s condemnation of “predetermined goals” by side-stepping the issue of determinism altogether and getting into the messiness, the unpredictability, of everyday life. Kien’s “global,” as it were, argument is that because our human interactions are constantly mediated via technological interface, we need to create a methodological affordance, a stance, which accounts for our interactions with technology (as those interactions pass through that technology on their way to the intended human audience). Kien argues that this “ever-changing vicinity of the device itself thus becomes the defining parameter of the field of study” (16). Kien seems to be talking mostly about communications technology, and his book is full of anecdotes describing the changes in behavior and interpersonal relations that occur due to our modern existence being almost entirely circumscribed by technological connectivity. And not just any technologies, but wireless communications technologies: devices specifically made to allow for interactions between people, thus also made specifically to mediate the interface that exists between two people. That interface is at once made possible, as well as changed by, the phone (for example).

Where Kien and Johnson seem to agree is on the user’s technological awareness. Johnson argues that “users know about technology and the experiences they have with it are always located in a certain time and place that changes from minute to minute, day to day, era to era” (9). Kien keeps talking about “eruptions” of change and an ongoing “epiphany” of insight into how communications technology affects our performance of culture, life, and learning. For me, an eruption or an epiphany carries connotations or either the unpredictable natural world (erupting around us) or divine interference (epiphany); either way, the user experiences life by way of accident, or lack of control, and is not aware of his or her performative relationship to technology. I don’t think this is an accurate characterization for all users, at the very least because I feel there are a great many users out there who are thinking actively about their relationships and performances with regard to technology. By way of example, I point to all the poignant criticism of Apple’s just-announced iPad. Many of my friends on Twitter and Facebook, along with professional reviewers at Wired and CNN, are pointing out shortcomings of the device, and actively critiquing whether this new device, neither laptop nor phone, can (or should) be fit into our lives. I think these reactions to a device not yet publicly released contradict Kien’s descriptions, his sort of non-teleological lens through which our interactions with technology change and reproduce unpredictably.

Back to my own study, wherein workplace writing review is examined in terms of how technology changes that process, I think a researcher would deliberately look for work groups who actively consider their technological aids to document production. If not, if the participants are of the sort hinted at by Kien, who simply react to technology rather than think and plan and theorize it, then their descriptions of how technology changes their revision process will be worthless, and ultimately, impossible to reproduce in the classroom.

But I think my own criticism of Kien’s theories is really only in how he writes about them, treats them, and not with the base idea: an ethnography, which measures and describes human activity within a particular cultural and spatial context, can be channeled into a technography, a description of human activity with a particular cultural and technological context (I’m tempted to write “virtual spatial context,” but the term “virtual” to describe electronic interactions is annoying to me). Kien indicates that our interactions with communications—and it’s only fair to note that he’s talking about global connectivity--technology seem to throw traditional narrative and theories of knowledge out the window, but I don’t see that at all. Instead, I see technography as a way of performing a particular kind of ethnography (even though an anthropologist might not see it as ethnography at all). So I’ll be more specific: a technography, for me, is any study that focuses on how technology alters a human activity, and which tries to account for that change by way of gathering data from the people who use (a) while they’re using it, and (b) in the contexts in which they use it. Thus, disruptive though technology may be, and disruptive to our data-gathering methods, no doubt, methodologically speaking a technography is simply a more narrowly focused application of ethnographic methods.

Not sure I’m comfortable with that, but it’s time to start working what I’ve written into a usable format.

Technography as Methodology

2010-01-27T06:53:00.000-08:00

Thinking still about technography and its possibilities for research methodology as well as methods. I find that I can pretty easily come up with an application and call it “technography”; however, I find that I can also come up with ideas for new animals and call all of them “horses. It’s the methodology, the justification, that I’m finding problematic. Kien refers repeatedly to the “role that technology” plays, and that in order to conduct a technography the researcher would need to observe technology as though it were a human participant. I’m not sure I can pull that off, but I do feel he’s on to something. What I’m going to write about today deals more with eking out a space in which technography might exist, and then seeing if I can fit some scenarios into it.

As opposed to an ethnography, which functions within a physical space, a technography uses technology as part of its spatial constraint. If a group of people all sitting around a monitor and working on the same document is a technography, then we’d need to identify that monitor as part of our technographic space. The OED gives us “technography: the description of the arts, forming the preliminary stage of technology.” Certainly, it would be easy enough to describe a technology, but I suspect that without at least a partial delving into technique that that description would be weak. A diagram of parts, no more. So identifying the monitor in our example as part of the technographic space only gives us, again, part of that space. The other space would need to be identified as well: what software is used? Are there multiple physical points of input (is each person using a keyboard) and allowances for simultaneous input (are all those keyboards inputting at the same time)? How was that software chosen—by group consensus or individual recommendation? Or simply to keep up with the Joneses?

Technography also deals, at least in part, with the role that a tool plays as a member of a working group. In technical communication terms, that role might be filled or demarcated by the affordances of the technology itself: a wiki allows for rapid page creation but no spell checking, and Word allows for rapid spell checking but difficulty in rendering HTML. The constraints, then, of the tool mark off the physical space of the technography: whereas ethnography is often limited to physical spaces (an urban elementary school, or a medieval monastery), a technography is limited by the interactions facilitated and disallowed by the tool in question.

For a study on workplace revision, a technography might take into account the following things:

• The number of users who could interact with the document simultaneously
• The ways in which users interact with each other while interacting with the document (do they talk, communicate via text, or is the document itself the interface of their communications?)
• How accessible the document is (are permissions required, or can anyone on the network modify it, or can anyone in the world modify it?)
• The location of the file (on a proprietary server, a third-party provider, a single user’s desktop, a portable device)
• The ways in which interaction and revision are presented within the software. Are revisions always in red, or do they appear in little balloons, or is there some way in which revisions can be hidden from all but the person who wrote them?
• The ways in which users characterize their interactions with the document (not sure what I mean here, but I feel somehow that asking the users how they feel about working together on a single document is important). This might lead to being able to categorize users as deterministic, user-centered, or some other sort of technological school of thought.

That last point is giving me some mental reservations. It seems obvious that in order for a technography to be a legitimate methodology then we’d need to include some description of how the participants view the tools they’re using for the prescribed task. For the purposes of collection, this could be done via an interview. But what purpose those descriptions would fulfill is elusive to me. Collecting the thoughts of people who use technology to accomplish a task is nothing new. I suspect that Roman officers along Hadrian’s wall occasionally asked the enlisted men how they felt about how the wall was working. But for a technography, could we argue that that description is a logical step in trying to account for how the tool is used to accomplish a goal? The interview need not focus upon romantic or far-flung thoughts: instead, the interview could simply contain commentary by the user on whether the tool in question worked well for the task at hand.

But I imagine that, if a necessary part of the definition of a technography is that it has group interaction at its core, then interviewing the group as a group would be far more fruitful. It might be easier to “get a sense of the room,” as it were, if asking the group about their interactions with the monitor (to refer back to the earlier example) were substituted for interviews of individuals.

If my target group is engineers, as it will be, then interactions with technology may be something they’re more than happy to describe, engineers being the technological folks they are. The question remains, though, whether technography can be validated as a methodological approach rather than simply an interesting catchword.

Last shot for today: if a methodology is an explanation of why a method is useful, or necessary, and if methodology has to do with attitudes towards the making of knowledge, then technography could be defined as group interactions through a technological interface. In my own specialized case, the group interaction would be workplace writing review and the interface would be whatever technology the group uses in order to accomplish the goal of review. The assumption that that technology is as important as the task—that the choice of technology teaches us as much about the activity as the rhetorical content of the document—is a technographic mindset.

Regardless of the particular workings of a technography, the point (as I see it) is to perform a study in which human activity is measured along with how that activity is shaped by the tools used by the participants. If interactions between participants can be measured, then surely how the participants use the technology in question can also be measured. I suspect it can be done empirically; I doubt whether that data is quantifiable.

How would a Technography Work?

2010-01-26T07:00:00.001-08:00

Many, though by no means all, of the major workplace writing studies in the past twenty years or so have relied on ethnographic research methods, and in my opinion we’ve learned a great deal. For instance, individual authorship is much different in the classroom than in the office space, and writing review is often an act of socialization rather than simply correcting and improving a text. My gut feeling, though, is that the tools with which writing review is conducted have changed to the point wherein we need to start thinking of technography rather than ethnography. A technography is an ethnography wherein the human activity in question is observed and recorded via technology. That single definition isn’t a stretch from a more traditional ethnography: certainly, an ethnographer takes notes and transcribes them using technology, and can observe in person how people use technologies to carry out their daily activities.

But, having read through a couple of Kien’s works, I’m beginning to revise that definition to something more like: a technography is a study in which technology is regarded as an active participant among a pool of other participants. According to Kien, “industry uses the word technography to define real-time, multiuser document production. In this scenario, many users network and interface with the technology directly to produce a common text, much like having a group of individuals each equipped with chalk and eraser gathered at a blackboard to produce a text” (Qualitative Inquiry, 14:7: 1102). This particular example is so much in line with how I suspect workplace writing review takes place that I think it’s worth beginning to think of technography as a useful way of theorizing that activity. Within individual engineers in particular, the drive to write is usually missing entirely, and because the engineering profession requires substantial amounts of writing they normally only write in teams. From an ethnographic research perspective, the individual fades into the background as the rhetoric of engineering takes over via many hands and keyboards.

A true technographic study would look at the performative aspects of both the participants and the technologies in question. But if I’m looking at workplace writing revision, how is it technographic? How would I describe the role the technologies play in aiding the revision? The first step is to discover what kinds of tools engineers use for workplace revision, and that can be done pretty quickly. Regardless of the particular tool in question, a technographic approach allows for analysis of how that tool is used—and uses—the writers. For instance, MS Word will make spelling and grammatical suggestions, and my experience with students engineers suggests that those suggestions are almost always followed. Thus, MS Word makes suggestions during the revision process, and those suggestions are followed. An ethnography would make note of the humans’ response to the software while potentially overlooking the software’s role. This seems to be technography’s value, not that an ethnographer would ignore technology—there is too much evidence that that is simply not the case—but that we need a theory to account for the technological actor.

A technographic outlook also allows us to insert the workplace into the classroom via the dynamic nature of digital workspaces. In other words, since work isn’t necessarily performed in the cubicle anymore, those digital workspaces can be accessed from the classroom, thus allowing students and instructors (and researchers) a peek inside while treating the black box that makes it all possible as an active participant.

I’ve searched the EBSCO Communication and Mass Media Complete database for references to “technography,” but found only two sources, both by Kien. My guess is that while actor-network theory, which seems to serve as a foundation for how technography is theorized in communications studies, is well known amongst TC researchers, technography is not.

My concern, and it’s minor, is that “technography” is simply another way of saying something else, which of course is built upon something else, and which all comes back to something (ever) else. But such is the nature of all theories, that they are based upon the metaphors and analogies of others, and that while the current theories of a generation work well, they will inevitably be supplanted by others. But my sense is that the value, to me, to TC, of technography is that it allows for a greater latitude in interpreting the writing actions of groups within a technological framework that accounts for that framework as an actor. I’ll have to do additional reading to find out how technography, stated as such or not, is represented within the literature.
For now I think the next step is to determine which revision tools engineers typically use for writing/reviewing in teams. Team working (I’m deliberately avoiding the overused “teamwork”) is a key component of technography, and engineers from students and recent graduated to older, more experienced PEs work in teams almost constantly. So the team aspect of this particular technography, dealing as it does with writing review, might need to begin with a couple of pilot studies (really just informal asking around). The first should be something like:

“When you review written documents in teams, what kinds of technology do you use?”

The next would need to begin focusing in on a particular action, or rhetorical situation, in which the engineers work in teams in order to revise a document. My question at that point is whether an ethnographic approach (direct observation) might work better than simply seeing a record of the revision process (the “before” document, an “in-process” snapshot,” and then the “final,” marked-up document)? I think both, just to be safe.

Another possibility might be to install screencasting software to capture the revision as it happens within the team and then simply review the recording and make a transcript. Of course, that might be dependent upon whether I could reassure my participants that I wouldn’t show their work to anyone else. Engineers rely upon their ideas and designs for income, and it wouldn’t be fair to share that work.

OK, next step: identify what kinds of workplace revision take place at engineering firms.

Technography as Method

2010-01-25T07:31:00.000-08:00

Is it possible to use digital methods to replicate the results of ethnographic studies on workplace writing review?

The reason this question is important is because there is loads—and I mean loads—of evidence that novice writers only become advanced writers when they begin to associate themselves with the discourse, and thus the communities formed by that discourse, used by their chosen discipline. Thus, a newly-graduated engineer will start to incorporate characteristics of the professional discourse he or she sees and experiences in the engineering workplace. Technical communication and composition researchers assure me this is true. It’s a fact proven by empirical research. I’ve read that research, and it sure seems solid.

But it begs a couple of questions:
1. Why bother with writing courses in colleges if we’re not able to reproduce the circumstances of a professional writing environment (whether that’s for the law, accounting, marketing, engineering, etc.)?
2. If we can replicate those circumstances, and thus begin graduating students who are already professional writers in terms of their chosen field, how can we keep those circumstances both (a) updated, and (b) specific enough to help each student?
3. Surveys of employers consistently indicate that communication skills are at the top, or near the top, of the list of things those employers look for in a new employee. But if those communication skills are only learned once the novice communicator (writer) begins working within the professional workplace, how can our students hope to get jobs since, as students, they will always be novice writers?

I think working on #2 is our best hope, and, like Princess Leia recording the secret message in R2D2’s innards, we can only beseech the Obi-Kenobi’s of the professional world to help us out. So how do we go about replicating the circumstances of a professional writing environment? As always, that’s my central question.

Working with my genius wife, I’ve sketched out what I think is a preliminary plan for testing whether workplace revision processes, what Katz called “writing review,” can be duplicated within the classroom so long as we have some online contact with professionals. As I’ve lamented before, the way this has been researched in the past is to use a sort of pseudo-ethnography: the researcher gets permission to follow people around and watch what they do. But that’s time consuming. The researcher needs special training, the researcher has to follow folks around for long enough to get a good idea of what they’re doing, and then the researcher winds up with reams of field data that has to somehow be coded.
There has got to be a way around that. I don’t know if it’s intellectual curiosity or an intense case of laziness, but I feel as though we have enough digital tools laying around such that we can learn what we need without leaving the office. But what I need to know first is whether folks in the workplace are using digital tools for writing review, like Word’s track changes and commenting features, or Google Docs or even wikis. If they are, then we’ve got a start, because those are tools we can use for classroom assignments, and they are also the petard through which can hang ethnography.

Here’s the study, based on the premise that I can find three or four engineering firms that use Word’s track changes/commenting feature in their writing review process.

Two groups of students write a document of a professional genre, such as a Statement of Qualifications (SOQ).

That document is reviewed by two groups of professional engineers using MS Word’s track changes/commenting feature. One group of students knows that the reviewers are professional engineers; the other group of students does not.

The students see the reviewed document and are allowed to incorporate or not incorporate the suggested revisions. In interviews, the students asked to justify why and how they used the suggested revisions.

After the students make use (or don’t) of the revisions, the first draft, suggested revisions, and final draft is then reviewed by another group of professional engineers as well as by a group of writing instructors. The two groups (engineers and writing instructors) are asked to evaluate whether the students made effective choices when including or not including the professional feedback.

If the findings are positive: in other words, if the final evaluators indicate that yes, the students did make good use of the professional feedback, then we can argue that gathering feedback in this way, rather than ethnography, is a viable method of beginning the professional rhetorical assimilation of the students. We can also begin to encourage instructors to begin incorporating this method of feedback into their classes. Many professional schools, such as engineering and law, have close ties to the professional community; thus, finding participants to provide occasional feedback shouldn’t be impossible. We could also theorize that digital research methods are a possible alternative to direct data collection via ethnography, thus opening the door to more effective writing instruction within professional disciplines.

If the findings are negative, in other words, if the final evaluators indicate that no, the students not make good use of the professional feedback, then we can argue that perhaps ethnographic data collection is still the way to go when researching workplace writing review practices for inclusion in the classroom. We can also argue that writing revision is more than the written form of feedback: that there is socialization that takes place (as I believe Katz and others have argued) that cannot be recorded in the written word. We could also argue that, contrary to widespread belief, the “digital generation” is still pretty heavily reliant on face-to-face communication, or at least communication that’s not written.

One of the reasons, perhaps THE reason, this method holds so much fascination for me (other than the rampant laziness cited above) is because digital tools offer so many possibilities for recording human activity, and therefore also shaping human activity. It’s clear that we’ve changed some of our habits and work styles because of the Internet, and I think that it’s possible to begin re-shaping how we go about doing writing research, too. While loads of us certainly have done plenty of digital writing research, a great deal of that (think Kairos) deals with exploratory pedagogies and rather academic discussions of new media. I’m more interested in how folks use digital tools to get writing done in the cubicle, not in the classroom.

My wife proposed the word “technography” to mean a technological replacement for ethnography. I’ve just found a book in the A&M library that suggests the same, so that may be my hook: technography rather than ethnography. For me, technography suggests a digital observer rather than an in-person observer, and since so much of our work is digital, testing technography as a way of gathering data on workplace writing review seems like an obvious choice.

Ramblings on Study Methods

2010-01-24T07:33:00.000-08:00

So I’m trying to get together a study to study workplace revision practices, and I’m having some problems. My real goal is to study the research methods used to examine workplace revision practices: I’ve read a number of very well-done ethnographic studies, but I keep thinking there must be a faster, cheaper way to do workplace studies than ethnography. I also think there must be a research method that requires less training than ethnography.

But revision itself is a bugbear. Reading through the scholarly attempts (look at Haar, chapter 2 of Horning’s collection, to get an idea) at defining revision is like learning a whole new field. Loads of stuff. But what I noticed in particular, and this is significant, is that these definitions don’t seem to really contradict each other. Unlike other sets of scholarly definitions—like those for technology, or rhetoric—the definitions for revision don’t seem to really be at odds. Well, there’s some disagreement, like whether revision is simply writing or a separate process. But overall, it’s simply a struggle to find meaning: should we talk about revision in terms of the physical process (essentially proofreading) or revision as it falls on the schedule of things to do (it comes after a rough draft but before the final draft)? So really there’s less confusion in learning about revision than in studying other humanities-related subjects.

But to get back to research methods, I’ve been thinking that social media (think Facebook and Twitter) should offer some way of contacting the workplace and gathering data about the revision process within engineering firms (I work with engineers, so contacting engineering firms is the path of least resistance). But I think that Facebook and Twitter offer ways around some of the traditional problems associated with distributing a research instrument, such as a survey: social media allow for few barriers when it comes to distribution, and many connections to boot. For instance, if I want to survey Texas politicians about legal matters related to property ownership, the first few folks I contact may not know anything about it. But they’ll know someone—some real estate-lawyer-turned-politician—who can really comment on the matter. And she’ll, by nature of her job, know someone else, and social media allows for quick distribution: person A knows person B is an expert, and passes the survey along, and person B knows person C, and so on. And there are a number of engineering groups on Facebook, so that would work as a distribution method. I don’t have to spend time tracking down contact info for all those folks; instead, I can simply join a single Facebook group and initiate contact.

But that really only speaks to the distribution side of research, the access to a pool of participants. While that’s certainly interesting, and likely to be a timesaver, it doesn’t have to do with the other side of the study. If research is hunting and gathering, then Facebook and Twitter only help with the hunting. There’s no gathering.

But an article I read the other day—Jones?—pointed out that some folks think applications like Google Docs constitute social networking, or at least social media. And that’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be interesting to set up a number of experiments using Google Docs?

For instance here’s one:
Two groups of five students post their rough drafts to Google Docs. Each group has two professional engineers assigned to it, but one group knows it and the other doesn’t. So Group A knows they’ll be getting some feedback from a professional engineer and Group B only knows they’ll be getting feedback from unidentified parties, other students for all they know.

If everything I read about the valuation of rhetoric as a part of becoming a member of a discourse community proves true, then both groups should pretty quickly identify the professional feedback regardless of whether they know for sure the other participants are professional engineers. Something about the way the pros offer their feedback should let the students know, clue them in, that they’re professionals.

Another experiment would be to simply watch, and record somehow, the revision process of two groups of professional engineers working on technical reports and using Google Docs (or something comparable onsite, such as a local wiki). Simultaneous group also using Google Docs (or some other software) but with students as participants. Then compare the results. Of course, I’d have to be looking for a construct of interest, some textual feature, such that if it appears within one group and not the other I’d have something to compare.

So what would that rhetorical feature be? It’s tempting to say that what’ll happen is that the novice writers—the students—would begin almost immediately to recognize the professional, more experienced discourse of the professional engineers due to word choice or some other feature. How they recognize that professional discourse isn’t the point here. What they do in reaction to it is, at least this time through. So my guess is that the sign they recognize the professional discourse will involve mimicking the style of the discourse, which means in order to judge whether the novice writers have recognized and begun to use a new style I’ll need to have some raters. Having raters opens a whole new can of worms, but it can be done. Perhaps in virtual teams.

Another option would be to interview the students after the exercise and see how they characterize what happened, and whether they recognize the shift in their own style. That shouldn’t be too hard. Make sure the questions are along the lines of “Do you think your writing improved?” or even simply “Do you think it changed?” or “How would you characterize the person providing feedback, and what was your reaction to that feedback?” I think any of those questions would work fairly well, particularly the last one. In fact, they might be delivered via survey.
So that last study would test a number of things, wouldn’t it? In short, they’d be:

Do novice writers recognize the discourse of their chosen profession simply by seeing it?

Do novice writers react differently to the professional engineers’ writing without knowing it’s a professional engineer supplying it?
Is collaborative writing technology a tool by which these changes can be recorded and observed? If so, can we get enough observational data to justify replacing an ethnography with observation of collaborative writing technology?

"But words are words," right?

2009-11-23T07:20:00.000-08:00

Dennis Baron’s “Web of Language” (http://illinois.edu/db/view/25), which should be on every rhetorician’s reading list, has this post (http://illinois.edu/db/view/25/17285?count=1&ACTION=DIALOG) in which he mentions that “wingnuts” like Michelle Malkin “make their living by redefining reality.” Dennis, as he always does, made me realize that I’ve been guilty of ignoring the power of words.
Though I cut my rhetorical teeth on Reagan’s “Star Wars” plan and matured in my practice in the age of spin doctors, I think I’ve nonetheless taken the approach of Shakespeare’s Brabantio, who says

"But words are words; I never yet did hear
That the bruis'd heart was piercèd through the ear."

As a teacher and writer, I’ve gone about admonishing others to pay attention to their words, drawing attention to the power of all sorts of discourse; however, I find that I still approach the really crazy talk of editorial newscasters as just that: crazy talk. Can’t harm me. Words are just words.

But the dualism here—that I would note and praise the power of discourse that underscores my own beliefs and aims while downplaying the effect of that which runs contrary—certainly isn’t logical. Or maybe that’s the point: words (and all symbols) only have power in so far as we give them that power. So while I can be moved by one argument, the opposing positions fall into the category of “sound and fury,” ultimately “signifying nothing.”

In the public sphere, however, that can’t be the approach of choice. For example, traffic lights are powerful symbols because we give them power: communal authority undergirds the traffic light’s role in our lives. As an individual, I may gleefully ignore the meaning and power of the traffic light. However, my choice in not giving meaning to the traffic light will result in my being at the mercy of those who do, and I may wind up taking a life (or having my own life taken) because others choose to believe and act upon a symbol, thus giving it power.

Similarly, it seems I cannot ignore the silliness of wingnut commentators who carelessly use their words (and they know it, too, as anyone paying attention to rhetoric in the post-Clinton, post-9/11 era knows it) to, quite deliberately, redefine reality. The rhetoric is cheap and simple: Demosthenes, cheap lawyer that he was, would be appalled at the gravitas with which political fun is had at the expense of economic and global necessity.

And so America has town hall meetings which are the very picture of incivility because some of the attendants came to learn, while others came to shout proudly the new reality they’ve been sold. We’ve done it to ourselves, I suppose, telling folks for so many years that “actions speak louder than words,” and that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” such that when the Information Age hit us the first ones to realize that words are more than words were the ones who most quickly reached for the digital megaphones.

There's little that does more to emphasize the power of rhetoric than the wingnuts who have realized that their words really do redefine reality for millions of Americans every day. Of course, their immature insouciance is what moves their words from mere discourse to public danger.

I'm not sure what role professional researchers in rhetoric and technical communication should play in this ongoing game, or whether we'll quickly have our reality redefined into nothingness: so many of us are ivory tower elites, after all, with our heads stuck in the clouds.

Writing about TC is often not TC

2009-09-22T09:52:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking about this oddity this week while creating help materials for engineering students. I realized that my “instructions” about writing a memo weren’t technical communication, or were at least different enough to not appear to be TC. My instructions took on the form of an essay, though I did use headings, sub-headings, a bulleted list or two, and zero references to William F. Buckley. In fact, I noticed when I read through Tom Johson’s recent post “How to Get a Job in Technical Writing — A 7-Step Guide for Students.” His post wasn’t really TC, either; again, more like an essay.

Why is that? Why should a communication-based field use a non-native genre when describing itself? Is TC naturally descriptive while the essay’s explicative style lends itself to explanations? I don’t think so. Good TC documents, like a spec sheet, can contain quite a bit of explicative material such as reasons why a particular product must be used rather than another, similar product.

Or am I wrong? Is it that TCers simply use a style similar to essays when explaining what TC is, but that that similarity is only passing? I bring up these questions because essays are, in a way, antithetical to the kinds of writing TC professionals are routinely hired to write. While an essay may be used to persuade, inform, or entertain, a TC document always needs to do something, and if the writing is also pretty then that’s fine, too. It’s purpose, too: TC documents are usually not intended to do anything but help someone with a problem (or prevent a problem from occurring), whereas an essay isn’t a necessary thing; rather, essays are often artistic and pleasurable. Like the difference between a statue and a column: they may both be made of marble, but one’s needed for support and the other is just. . .well, pretty. But describe the use and purpose behind columns in structural engineering and you may wind up writing an essay. Odd.

TC and Epistemology

2009-09-17T12:53:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine posted the following to an email list about a year ago. What follows it is a revised version of my original response.

“I believe that by attempting to clarify or define our epistemology we could make strides towards a more satisfactory and possibly more universally acceptable definition of our field. For that to happen, all students and teachers of TC need to concern themselves deeply with how knowledge in our field is created and also with the ever evolving/changing epistemic processes that underlie knowledge accumulation/gathering/owning.”

Agreed. As a tangential commentary to your statement, I might point out that most of the intro-level tech writing books I’ve seen define TC (often calling it tech writing, as I’ve done here) as getting usable information from one source to another such that the audience can make a decision or perform an action. This definition limits us to the communication of information rather than combining it with “the processes we use to gather/create/own knowledge,” as you’ve so aptly pointed out.

Furthermore, those same texts never take the time to define the word “technical,” which is certainly fraught with difficulty (particularly for an intro text). But the attempt is necessary. As another friend of mine might point out, oversimplifying our field for intro service courses has the indirect result that professionals entering the market retain the illusion that technical writing is a largely pedestrian skill rather than a broad, rich field; thus, our service courses continue to undermine our own efforts at establishing recognized value for TC. In simple terms, we’re teaching our students that TC is memos, reports, and email. End of story.

I’m differentiating between data transmission and data collection because one has to do with serving other professionals and the other as to do with knowledge creation, ideally for the benefit of anyone and everyone. The transmission aspect is something we’ve been doing for quite some time. We analyze genres, rhetorics, and really dig into usability testing in order to get those ideas to users. What we haven’t, perhaps, focused on so much is that we’re collecting and validating that data in the first place, and part of our epistemology (unlike other fields) is that while we do engage in creating knowledge (again, like other fields) we also (and this is critical) keep a lookout for how the audience receives and validates the data we’re going to communicate. That community aspect, what Robert Johnson might lump into his “user-centered design” paradigm, and what I’ve called the “non-system system,” differs significantly from fields similar to ours, such as sociology and psychology: we gather/create data, we find ways to assemble it, AND we work in conjunction with our audiences in making that data work while also teaching them about the structures (and yes, epistemology) underlying that collection and transmission. And maybe that’s our “hook,” so to speak. If more traditional social scientists can help explain how individuals and groups behave, then maybe we’re the ones who explain how received knowledge is communicated and validated from one group to another. That seems like a powerful incentive to encourage a serious revision of how TC is approached in both academics and business. Otherwise, we’re just teaching folks how to write memos.

Aristotle Schmaristotle

2009-04-14T17:29:00.001-07:00

I say that technical communication belies Aristotle's theoria/praxis/poeisis triumvirate by combining theory and praxis: in modern TC, there is no differentiation.

That's what I says.