betajames

Collaborative learning can be efficient in providing first-year students with a real immediate audience for their work; it can also generate new ideas and can translate productively into outside world experiences.

Collaboration can be either hierarchical or egalitarian depending on group dynamics (i.e., whether or not some members have more control than other members of the group or if members have equal say).

The strengths and weaknesses of collaboration reside in the strengths and weaknesses of the collaborators.

Collaborative learning is a process although sometimes disjointed in which as Bruffee says the blind can sometimes end up leading the blind.

We are spokes in a wheel.

Due to a somewhat abrupt change, there wasn't as much blogging this week. Instead, students emailed me early self/course evaluations, offering their perspectives on their performance at my request. Though there were some expressions of uncertainty, I think a majority of those who emailed me understand quite well their position in #345tw. That's not to write that there aren't some persistent concerns. I want to find the time to address them in full next week. Given the group facilitation planned for next Tuesday, I doubt 15 minutes will be enough. With that in mind, I want to suggest now the possibility of a face-to-face meeting next Thursday. The focus of this additional meeting will be course requirements beyond the use of Twitter, including deadlines for blogging and other assignments. So, #345tw students, could we meet twice next week? 

Evaluating Twitter won't be the only topic on the table, but as some students have already posted their evaluations, I want to take a moment and look ahead to the possibility of doing away with Twitter. If M1 and/or M2 decide against keeping and using Twitter for the rest of the semester, something needs to replace it. Something needs to replace it because, along with Posterous, Twitter was part of the alternative to using Blackboard and/or having ENG 345 as a more traditional course. Something needs to replace Twitter if only because of sheer volume. Please forgive the elementary math used below to illustrate tweet volume:

5 tweets per week x 140 characters = 700 characters per week

700 characters over the next 10 weeks = 7000 characters

On an average of 5 characters per word: 7000 / 5 = 1400 words.

So, if students continued to use Twitter for the next 10 weeks, they'd each produce around 1400 words. This is equivalent to a solid short essay, but I'm not about to suggest an additional major writing assignment as a replacement. Instead, here are some possibilities:

1. An additional blog post and/or comments per week
2. Face-to-face meetings once a week
3. Revise existing requirements
4. A new social media tool

From my perspective, only two of the above options are viable. Additional blogging in the form of one more required post per week and/or more comments may be the most sensible. Students are already comfortable with blogging and managing Posterous. Given students' growing confidence, perhaps there's more yet we can do with Posterous alone. I also think meeting face-to-face once a week for the rest of the semester could prove beneficial. If nothing else, requiring such meetings would provide a set time for groups to see each other and discuss facilitation and project work. 

Based on the early evaluations of Twitter, I'm less inclined to think students will be open to revising requirements for use. I'm even more disinclined to think a majority of students will be open to learning a new social media tool at this point in the semester. It may be better to just settle in and work with what's been working so far.

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Most of the group projects posted this week appear solid and I look forward to seeing how each group brings their project to fruition. I do have one concern, though, which I posted on Twitter yesterday: "#345tw clarification: Content curation in the form of links to YouTube or other sites does not count toward 'appropriate media equivalent.'" The point behind this clarification concerns the focus of the group project itself: original content creation. Each group needs to create its own content, take its own photos and post them to Flickr, shoot its own videos and upload them to Vimeo or YouTube, type up its own texts and post them to a wiki, etc. Simply posting or linking to content posted by others outside the group/class, whether audio content, photo content, video content, or some other kind of content, won't count toward the 2400-word requirement or the appropriate media equivalent. I encourage each group to research and reference outside sources, but we can't get away with posting a cluster of YouTube videos about [insert topic here] to Tumblr and call it good.

Odd how 2 snow days impact even a course that's predominantly online. Confusion, miscommunication, and misunderstanding abounded this week and I'm a little unsure as to why. Perhaps I need to email more friendly reminders...

pecha-kucha (Japanese for "chatter"), applies a simple set of rules to presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. That's it. Say what you need to say in six minutes and 40 seconds of exquisitely matched words and images and then sit the hell down. The result, in the hands of masters of the form, combines business meeting and poetry slam to transform corporate cliché into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art.

If nothing else, I think Pecha Kucha is good training and good practice. Everyone should try Pecha Kucha; it's a good exercise for getting your story down even if you do not use the method exactly for your live talk in your work. It does not matter whether or not you can implement the Pecha Kucha "20x20 6:40" method exactly in your own company or school, but the spirit behind it and the concept of "restrictions as liberators" can be applied to most any presentation situation.

The method makes going deep difficult. But if there is a good discussion after a Pecha Kucha type of presentation then it may work well even inside an organization. I can imagine having college students give this kind of presentation about their research followed by deeper questioning and probing by the instructor and class. Which would be more difficult for a student and a better indication of their knowledge: a 45 minute recycled and typical PowerPoint presentation, or a tight 6:40 presentation followed by 30 minutes of probing questions and discussion?

PechaKucha Night was devised in Tokyo in February 2003 as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public.
It has turned into a massive celebration, with events happening in hundreds of cities around the world, inspiring creatives worldwide. Drawing its name from the Japanese term for the sound of "chit chat", it rests on a presentation format that is based on a simple idea: 20 images x 20 seconds. It's a format that makes presentations concise, and keeps things moving at a rapid pace.

"I'm gonna express so hard." - John M.

Expressivism may be a better base for other kinds of writing, a way in that enables writing students to develop an emotional commitment to the act and performance. However, for as freeing as expressivism might be for some, given its perceived lack of arbitrary rules, it may be just as important to develop standards without being prescriptive. 

I'm reminded of guiding ENG 112 last semester. For the first major, traditional writing assignment, I asked each student to put together a pecha kucha presentation. Despite the 20/20 constraints and the minimalism of presenting in this way, I stressed to students the freedom they had, offering personal narrative as one of many options. I attempted explaining to them that the PK could serve any number of ends for them, from how and why to what and where. In other words, I framed the PK as an expressive opportunity, but one that was part of the overall process of the larger, traditional writing assignment.

Given this frame, I shouldn't have been too surprised that some students simply turned in the script for their PK as the first draft of what was supposed to be a research essay. Either I didn't draw enough separation between the PK and the research essay as independent, but connected acts of writing or students just neglected to acknowledge it. Perhaps there was some confusion between ethos and persona, much like the kind Roger Cherry describes.

It's unfortunate that class this past week didn't get into much of that discussion, but I understand why. I wanted to make sure we gave enough time to the discussion of expressivism, even with a student-led facilitation about it. There were almost too many worthwhile comments made about expressivism, so I want to point to students' blogs as they contain similar thoughts (both in the original posts and in the subsequent comments, too).

the personal voice of a writer doesn't need to be labeled as romantic, just personal and I don't think that it discourages or excludes academic discourse. On Twitter, I asked why not both? Can we not have both personal voice as well as academic discourse in a paper?

The class being the official judge of the writing. Students are students for a reason. They are there to learn. I do not nessicarily agree with this.

I give you my best ink splattered pages and what do you give me in return? You give me a voice—a voice in my head that answers, that talks back but also one that questions.

Writing is a combination of a few different techniques and variables, much like completing a puzzle. What a teacher/professor needs to do is to find what the benefits and limitations of each theory of writing. The teacher should also know what genres of writing will benefit the most from the different theories and practices.

If we can find a way to weave the student’s own expressive thoughts in conjunction with his or her peers I think this can lead to “mastering new dialects…not abandoning the old, because our native tongue is always the means for understanding new ones

Consider the appeal of blogs, letters, journals/diaries and speeches. Such things are written from a personal point of view, usually in order to gain support for some cause or to deposit frustations or explain hopes and dreams. A little voice goes a long way, because in being comfortable with what one is writing, one may be able to construct a better argument.

After we've gotten the students to understand that their experience is helpful in writing, at some point if they're not strong in it already, we do have to get them ready to deal with specific audiences they might be writing to, and to be sure they're writing is technically correct as well. 

Before we can address the writing process with students, I think we need to re-educate them on how to approach school. Because I think the writing process, as many have stated on their blogs, is something we sort discover on our own.

By helping students understand themselves they can exist in a community with more knowledge and in turn professors also learn a new perspective they may have never once been introduced to in the past.

As writing teachers, we need to be careful if/when asking for experiences that students haven't had, that expressivism can (should?) be a potential layer over process and/or chosen when deemed necessary. Prewriting's perhaps the most obvious point of inclusion for expressivism, but the week's readings also reveal some promise for the purposes of revision.

Still, I'm curious if our thoughtful reactions to expressivist notions will occur in relation to rhetoricla, feminist, and other theories we've yet to read about and discuss. Is each theory of teaching writing simply layered on process? Or is posing such a question, in which these theories are "just layers," unfair?

Also, is Sean Connery an expressivist? Evidence: 

The first set of student-led group facilitations this week were effective and set something of a standard by which I think all future facilitations will be judged. The clear delineation of responsibility led to most group members appearing comfortable and confident with their assigned roles. Practical activities and discussions occurred in both face-to-face sessions; real-world examples of technical communication as well as reading summaries kept sessions from being too nebulous. 

Neither had much of a clear conclusion; each dissolved into more general discussion about the class, which was fine. That written, I have an expectation that future facilitations will have a cleaner, clearer closing section. Still, I want to offer my public thanks to those students who were brave enough souls to facilitate first.

There was also a noticeable shift in the blogs toward more practical, technical concerns this week. The level of comfort and confidence with Posterous and/or Twitter is sufficient now that many are able to get into the nuts-n-bolts of technical writing. Perhaps some are just seeing greater worth in the online textbook by McMurrey. It may also involve the shift in focus to the group project and the proposal in particular, which is due about 36 hours from now. 

The "Zero Gravity Toilet" (ZGT) assignment was due this week, too. Below are some personal favorites that I think captured the spirit of the assignment and showcased a strong, burgeoning understanding of technical communication.

M1:

The Cornballer from Arrested Development 

The "kill kit" from Dexter 

The Neuralizer from Men In Black 

The gun bra from Austin Powers 

M2:

The PKD blaster from Blade Runner 

The arc reactor from Iron Man 

King Triton's trident from The Little Mermaid 

The matter teleportation device from Star Trek 

In some ways, I think the facilitation was more helpful than the later discussion. While structured as a mock first-year composition class session, we were all in on the simulation. It was a meta-classroom situation. This allowed for some interesting meta-commentary moments, including the quick realization of the puzzle exercise as emblematic of process theory. Unlike first-year writing students, we were quite aware of how and why Michelle E. structured her facilitation. This awareness and experience also provided a different foundation for additional thoughts on the assigned readings. Some students pulled more from the facilitation than from prior classroom experience; this kind of immediacy made for a more fruitful discussion. 

Still, a couple students might have been a little too quick to write off (ha ha) the idea of discussing audience with students. Talking about audience with those who haven't the best awareness of it can be difficult, but that can't/shouldn't mean we avoid it altogether. For as offensive or problematic David Foster Wallace's SWE/SBE speech might be, don't we have a responsibility to help students foster that awareness? And if not a direct conversation, can we devise activities/exercises (if not full assignments) that address?

Related to these questions, though, are others, including that of just what first-year writing students can handle (as well as how much). Which tools are now in/essential to teaching first-year composition? How much direction is to be provided? What does it mean to afford students the opportunity to be creative, particularly with those students who resist? What do we force on students vs. simply ask of them?

Perhaps we should put a disclaimer somewhere on our future syllabi: "your audience may vary."

In a number of Posterous entries and Twitter updates this week, I noticed a certain amount of "settling in," evidence of students getting comfortable and confident with the communicative technologies required for this course. It appears that what I hoped for last week is indeed happening. That is, as students figure out the idiosyncrasies and intricacies of Posterous and Twitter*, the less they focus on them. We're getting more into the discussion of what technical writing is, what it does, how it works, etc.

However, this shift in discussion and focus presents a new problem: likening technical writing to other forms of writing that we're more familiar with. This can be problematic because such comparisons limit our perspective of what technical writing is, what it does, how it works, etc. It may be natural for us to make such comparisons when learning new things, but this constrains our ability to understand. 

The kind of writing we do can be connected to almost any other kind of writing. It's all argument, it's all communication, it's all information. But the intent, the presentation, the topic, all these things are different and dependent on the kind of writing we do. Elements of journalism or poetry are similar to (or can influence) technical writing and the inverse is also arguable. However, technical writing is its own form of communication, replete with just as many idiosyncrasies and intricacies. 

So, rather than drawing comparisons between technical writing and journalism or poetry or writing about videogames, I'm hopeful that we'll move more toward analysis of technical writing itself. The ZGT assignment due next week should provide a greater indication of this analysis.

*Twitter remains an interesting course experiment, but there have been a couple complaints about how some students are using the service. Some are tweeting ad infinitum about other courses, how bored they are at work, their relationship status. For some students, this is TMI. However, each student's Twitter account/profile is theirs; I can't lay claim to it or dictate too much of the content. So long as students post 5 course-related tweets every week, making sure to include the course hashtag, #345tw, I have to be okay with students using Twitter for other purposes. I just want those students to know that their classmates might not be okay with those other purposes.

M1:

Blogs should have a meaning behind them, whether it is to relay new information or to start a conversation, blogs need to be thought out.

I didn't realize that the more you have conversations with people about the product at hand, or directions, or documentation, or whatever level you are trying to operate on, that you learn more and more of the issues at hand by teaching it. I understand that the more you teach something, the better you are at explaining it, but I can really see it now when I look back on issues revolving around things such as customer service.

my challenge to the group is for us to add more color with links, attachments, formatting, and subheadings. Some of us are, but the more the better.

A technical writer must prepare and reflect on his or her priorities and goals before embarking upon introducing some new medium of joining conversation. Anne Gentle encourages personal reflection before immediately trying a new way of becoming accessible to the community.  The technical writer must be wary of the amount of time they spend on a newly discovered social media site, as it's efficacy may be dismissed because of time one may spend on it during the workday

Right now in class with all the blogs and twitters we are doing, we are documenting and helping other people to document what they think is important.  When we go through and read other blogs it helps to organize our own ideas. 

M2:

Knowing why someone is reluctant to use social media could potentially make the difference in convincing them

It would not be worth anyone's time if an instruction manual was written and aimed towards someone with previous knowledge of the product but that was not the actual audience. If the audience does not understand the material, the writing piece seems pointless and did not accomplish its purpose.

I feel like I'm contradicting everything Gentle is writing about the relationship between technical writers and social networking, but customer service must be approached much differently than writing a document, and should probably be done by tech support, right? 

social networking is a huge way to get out your product, name, intentions, etc and a great way to build clientele.  The more they can read/write/connect with and about your company the more it will grow.

[page numbers indicate reading from edited collections rather than original journal article]

Ede and Lunsford characterize “audience addressed” as the assumptions that writers must know—or learn about—the attitudes, beliefs and expectations of their readers.  “Audience invoked,” on the other hand, is a theory based on the idea that the writer invokes an audience by providing cues that tell the reader what role the writer wants the reader to play.  Ede and Lunsford do not identify so much with either side as argue that writers need to have skills to both invoke readers and to anticipate and address readers, depending on the rhetorical situation. Ede and Lunsford expand further: “Those who envision audience as addressed emphasize the concrete reality of the writer’s audience; they also share the assumption that knowledge of this audience’s attitudes, beliefs, and expectations is not only possible (via observation and analysis) but essential” (180). Such individuals encourage “real-world” writing, influenced as they are by audience analysis in speech communication and cognitive psychology research on the composing process. Ede and Lunsford also expand further on the second role of audience: “Those who envision audience as invoked stress that the audience of a written discourse is a construction of the writer…The central task of the writer, then, is not to analyze an audience and adapt discourse to meet its needs.  Rather, the writer uses the semantic and syntactic resources of language to provide cues for the reader—cues which help to define the role or roles the writer wishes the reader to adopt in responding to the text” (184). Ede and Lunsford then address what writing asks of writers, including discursive adaptations to meet the needs and expectations of an addressed audience or responses to the intervention of others (189).  Ultimately, though, the authors state that “the most complete understanding of audience thus involves a synthesis of the perspectives…termed audience addressed, with its focus on the reader, and audience invoked, with its focus on the writer” (191). Because of the complex reality to which the term audience refers and because of its fluid, shifting role in the composing process, any discussion of audience which isolates it from the rest of the rhetorical situation or which radically overemphasizes or underemphasizes its function in relation to other rhetorical constraints is likely to oversimplify. (192)

The first face-to-face meeting in a mixed-mode course is almost always uneventful. In my experience, much time's taken up in the form of a Q&A in which the instructor and students figure out together the course parameters, what's (mis)understood about them, and respond accordingly. Despite the clarifications provided in both M1 and M2, I think we're still in the middle of a rocky start.

In particular, I'm concerned about some students' early overemphasis on technology over technical communication. I am to blame for at least part of this, given the technology autobiography assignment and perhaps the focus of Gentle's Conversation and Community. But this is not a course on how to use Twitter. Using technology is part of the course, yes, but these uses are in the service of something else, i.e., technical communication. Blogging and tweeting are required parts of this course because they can help facilitate discussion and further our understanding of technical communication. Posterous and Twitter are not ends, but means. Technologies like these are tools; technical communication is often about those tools. 

Of course, this perceived overemphasis could be an overreaction. I asked a lot of students these first two weeks and they had to manage much of it on their own. With almost all Posterous and Twitter accounts up and running, we should soon move beyond limited discussions of technology and get more into the particulars of technical communication.

We won't be writing papers; we will be producing documents. We may not be making arguments, but we will be relaying information. 

I don't want to conclude with any kind of negativity, though. I also don't want to close with the last word. There are a number of students who are not in possession of this overemphasis on technology and I want to highlight them here.

From M1:

Now I think about goals of technology and how I want myself represented or anything that I am involved in on the web. There is great planning of the overall design to attract visitors to the site. It enables people to get their voice out there as well as any information that would be vital for an audience.

The idea of content that is more valuable because of its usefulness is liberating and exciting. I do believe information should be researched and have credibility, but the idea of users contributing so equally is new and innovative to me. It’s a sort of real-time dialogue, even if it’s actually asynchronous, because it’s still so fresh compared to feedback and response time in the past.

This is the new expectation: that real conversation can be initiated so that the producer may anticipate questions and provide quick and accurate answers. It now makes sense to me why blogging and joining twitter should be required in this course. Nowadays, making connections and receiving constant updates on information or stories is important.

Understanding users’ needs and desires is a must in order to be a successful writer of documentation.

In terms of user-friendly content provided on such platforms, be it a blog or otherwise, the content provider must keep the user’s needs first and foremost in mind and, armed with such an understanding can deliver content successfully. These ideas have caused me to reconsider simple features of my Posterous blog such as the theme, ease of use, number of words used, etc.  I should think more deeply about my blog as a personal contribution to our course’s online community and keep this community in mind when creating posts, tags, and adding any outside content.

While user interface is now focused upon in modern technical writing, a gap still exists in communicating information about portions of the device with which users don't typically interface (i.e., all the stuff inside) from the developers to the people who need more information than the typical user about those parts of the device (such as someone who is trying to fix it when it is broken).

According to McMurrey, technical writing is usually written about a well known topic, such as a major. When using technical writing it is important to make sure you know who the audience is. In other words, it is very important that the way your writing is worded is easy for the audience to understand.

Basically, I found that she was giving technical names to processes and tools that I use daily—I have watched hours of theatre makeup tutorials on You Tube, uploaded countless pictures to Flickr, learned how to set up a Linksys router via a blog, subscribed to the TED.com RSS feed, etc. I do not know where I learned to do such things—it was certainly not in the classroom or a textbook.

I realize how important it is to the world of science, technology, business, and the field and career I want to go into.  No matter what line of work I go into I’m sure it is going to require a lot of writing and most of it will be technical.  This class will be useful for my future in helping to build a clientele and in establishing a name for myself to show people that I care about what it is that I am doing.

I always thought of technical writers as being those people who write instruction manuals for complicated technology that no one understands.  I now know that even doctors are considered technical writers.