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.
Showing posts with label service course. Show all posts
Showing posts with label service course. Show all posts
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
Service Courses at the Center of the Universe
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.
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.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
How TC fails Pragmatism
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?
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?
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