More Methodology Problems

John Law –

“My first point is quite simple. It is, as I hope I have implied, that there no single answer, no single grand narrative. For the world is, the worlds we live in are, messier than that. There are many possible narratives. This means that any way of imagining technologies is partial, not simply in a technical sense, (though it is certainly, and also, a technical point) but also politically: we have what Donna Haraway describes as the privilege of partial perspective (9). This, then, is one of my themes, a leitmotif. That there is no single answer. But that, instead, there are partial answers. Partial possibilities.”

From "Networks, Relations, Cyborgs: on the Social Study of Technology"

Rich Rice suggested that the real value of my dissertation won’t be in identifying what the differences are between TC service courses and the ways people write in non-academic settings (civil engineering firms, for my purposes). Instead, the real value will lie in determining how TC service courses got to be different in the first place. What happens in the service course classroom—what happens in the committee meetings, the syllabus writing, the program reviews (assuming the average academic program review even takes service courses into account)—such that there would be any difference at all between what happens in the classroom and what happens the boardroom, cubicle, corner office, or workstation?

More formally, I might identify that difference by way of finding out how service course instructors perceive the writing tasks of workplace writers. Simple as that. How do the people who teach service courses think writing happens in the workplace? From there, make a recommendation.

But I foresee some difficulties. For instance, let’s assume that the data all points to roughly the same answer. Of a survey pool of (let’s say) 50 service course instructors, 70-some-odd percent say they perceive writing to be a more individualized activity (not in a classroom, no group work, no chatting before and after class) with more cutting-edge technology (iPhones instead of three-year-old PCs). Fair enough. What action, thought process, or methodology can be recommended which will get faculty more in tune with what happens off campus?

The barriers in place to service course improvement have little to do with ignorance, I think, but more to do with institutionalized barriers difficult for faculty to mitigate. For one thing, these service courses are by nature very generalized in their scope. If all students at a single university are required to take a particular course, then that course cannot be narrow in scope. At Texas A&M, not all students are required to take technical writing. But there are more than enough such that those service courses fill up months before the new semester begins. If there were enough instructors, then there would still be a problem meeting the need due to a shortage of classrooms. In short, while not all 48,000 students at Texas A&M are required to take a TC service course, there are still too many to serve.

Part of the problem is that while TC service courses aren’t required, they are strongly encouraged. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board requires all public university students to take 6 credit hours of “communication” courses. At A&M, there are 9 classes which meet that requirement. For practical purposes, however, most departments require that their students take technical writing, particularly if that student is in a technical or science major (like civil engineering or chemistry). If only the students from the colleges of science and engineering take technical writing, that nonetheless means the classes would have to either be quite generic or try to cater to a number of different writing needs.

Service course instructors are also overwhelmingly adjunct and underpaid. Thus, any attempt at changing service course curriculum should be done in such as way as to place as little burden on adjuncts as possible. Additionally, it’s not unusual for adjunct TC instructors to not have much training in TC; thus, any imperative to change should not be expected to come from inside the classrooms themselves. Therefore, the burden for change would come from above (or outside). But Huot (2002) indicates that change initiatives (in this specific case he’s talking about assessment and assessment tools) should come from faculty rather than administration due to a increased sense of buy-in on the part of the faculty as well as the idea that faculty will have a better sense of what to ask and how to ask it in their own courses. Fair enough.

But if TC instructors are largely unpaid and untrained adjuncts, and if top-down change initiatives aren’t as effective as those that are homegrown, how can TC service courses be changed?

For my own purposes, perhaps it will be enough to simply suggest a possible methodology for change. My dissertation, after all, doesn’t have to solve the world’s problems (as Fred’s pointed out a number of times). And I could potentially suggest a methodology cobbled together out of current theories (the quote above from John Law sounds like a good start) which deal with the nature of research itself. Embracing Law’s statement above, for instance, means I could easily argue that no real answer will ever really present itself, and that since service courses deal with ongoing changes in human behavior then perhaps the only definitive answer is that there’s no definitive answer. Changes in practice make for changes in research methods necessary to examine and describe those changed practices. Fair enough.
Kind of Ouroborous in nature, but fair enough.

But regardless of how much I differentiate personally between methodologies and methods, it’s only fair to point out that methodologies mean little without implementation. After all, we have explanations for why we do things (methodologies) because we do things. Without that thing, that action, that method, there’s little reason to have a philosophy undergirding it.

Technography as Methodology

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.