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.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Quodlibet
I’ve always been interested in what we teach and why. My father, an attorney, was always happy to explain the uses of reading Greco-Roman philosophy and political thought. He was never too proud to explain the uses of historical study or of reading the more prominent works of the Western canon. My mother, a public school teacher who specialized in elementary grade music, never hesitated to point out the importance of studying music, including in her explanation the development of rhythm, fine motor skills, and listening. My mother, in her turn, grew up listening to her parents talk about education. Her mother was a 40-year veteran of Texas public schools, spending the majority of her years teaching seventh grade English. Her father taught physical education and coached basketball for at least as many years, and even in his later years would lead the exercises for all of his undergraduate classes, doing the jumping jacks and push-ups along with the students for every section of every class. For my grandparents, talking about education around the dinner table was literally both the bread and the butter of their lives.
My own investigation into the why’s and wherefore’s of education started with writing instruments. I became engaged in the history of the pencil and its adoption, and exclusion, from writing instruction in classroom environments. Interested as I am in older writing technologies, I nonetheless used them as a way into a discussion of digital writing technologies, the pencils of today. I wanted to know what a student was thinking when choosing a particular writing tool, be it hardware or software. But as with Demosthenes, so with today: more often than not, we use what is available to us whether through social pressure, market forces, or some indeterminate personal choice, I found I could not climb into another’s thoughts and distinguish between personal motives and external exigencies. Parchment or papyrus, pencil or PC, those are things we cannot yet know.
So my inquiry changed, both broadening and narrowing at the same time. I became intrigued with the service course, that bugbear of the academic curriculum characterized by academic departments which offer to teach a course in their subject area to students not majoring in that area. History, math, writing, the sciences: most academic departments offer a version of the service course due to a number of reasons. We offer the service course because other students need to know the basics of our profession; we offer the service course as a favor to other departments, and they offer us similar favors in return; we offer the service course because most public universities are required by law to offer students a broad education, and thus our governments have a say in what gets taught and to whom.
Service courses in subjects such as chemistry, history, and literature attempt to offer students outside those fields a glimpse into the practice and base knowledge necessary to understand them. For those subjects, we might well assume that the periodic table, the Battle of Hastings, and Beowulf will be with us for many more years. For history and literature in particular, the classroom experience is the definitive experience: those fields are not practiced widely outside the classroom. For service courses in math, we can safely assume that the principles underlying calculus and probability calculations will not change, nor will the methods for executing those principles.
For technical communication, our service courses represent a particularly difficult position. Technical communication, like engineering and marketing, exists outside the classroom in thriving variety. Our tools, including hardware and software as well as the genres of documents we use, change in both predictable and sporadic fashion. Looking back, we could have predicted that the advent of personal computing would have a democratic effect on who produces business documents (clerical workers not trained in technical communication or document suddenly found themselves with the tools necessary to perform those tasks), or that an Internet connection would provide new ways of sending and receiving documents. Not all changes are predictable, though, and in the early days of the Internet I suspect that no one saw Twitter coming, nor Facebook, and YouTube would have been a pipe dream even for the most forward-thinking digital advocates. And so our service courses in technical communication are in a bind, trying to keep up with changes we can see and those we cannot.
In technical communication service courses, we are further bound by the lack of trained instructors. The history of technical communication instruction, bound so tightly to university needs and the literary expectations of a traditional English program, add up to an undertrained, underfunded, and often uninterested workforce of lecturers and adjuncts who teach technical writing service courses in order to make ends meet while finishing their degrees in literature and cultural studies. Add to this the above difficulties in keeping current in technical communication practices, and what we have is a recipe for mediocrity: students trained to mechanically fill out genre-specific documents based solely on textbook and institutional memory. For technical communication service courses, memory is not enough.
For the service course in technical communication, there is at least one more significant binding factor: historically, professional technical communicators and technical communication academics do not communicate well with each other. Speaking generally, and only generally, professionals in technical communication think of academics as monks in their towers, separated from the lively practice by culture, time, and distance. Academics in technical communication are, in this view, full of lofty ideas and scholarly ideals that rarely find purchase in the world outside the ivory tower. Professionals, views by the academics, do not heed the valuable studies and hard-won data of our continued investigations into more effective forms of communication. The two branches of this divided family speak only rarely, and with some unease.
However, the creation of usable knowledge is at the heart of both professional technical communication practice and the academic study and teaching of technical communication. As academics, we study document design and rhetoric specifically to help an audience perform an action or make a decision. With untrained instructors, that goal cannot be met. With underfunded programs, that goal cannot be met. Without a stable dialog between practitioners both inside and outside the academy, that goal cannot be met.
My own investigation into the why’s and wherefore’s of education started with writing instruments. I became engaged in the history of the pencil and its adoption, and exclusion, from writing instruction in classroom environments. Interested as I am in older writing technologies, I nonetheless used them as a way into a discussion of digital writing technologies, the pencils of today. I wanted to know what a student was thinking when choosing a particular writing tool, be it hardware or software. But as with Demosthenes, so with today: more often than not, we use what is available to us whether through social pressure, market forces, or some indeterminate personal choice, I found I could not climb into another’s thoughts and distinguish between personal motives and external exigencies. Parchment or papyrus, pencil or PC, those are things we cannot yet know.
So my inquiry changed, both broadening and narrowing at the same time. I became intrigued with the service course, that bugbear of the academic curriculum characterized by academic departments which offer to teach a course in their subject area to students not majoring in that area. History, math, writing, the sciences: most academic departments offer a version of the service course due to a number of reasons. We offer the service course because other students need to know the basics of our profession; we offer the service course as a favor to other departments, and they offer us similar favors in return; we offer the service course because most public universities are required by law to offer students a broad education, and thus our governments have a say in what gets taught and to whom.
Service courses in subjects such as chemistry, history, and literature attempt to offer students outside those fields a glimpse into the practice and base knowledge necessary to understand them. For those subjects, we might well assume that the periodic table, the Battle of Hastings, and Beowulf will be with us for many more years. For history and literature in particular, the classroom experience is the definitive experience: those fields are not practiced widely outside the classroom. For service courses in math, we can safely assume that the principles underlying calculus and probability calculations will not change, nor will the methods for executing those principles.
For technical communication, our service courses represent a particularly difficult position. Technical communication, like engineering and marketing, exists outside the classroom in thriving variety. Our tools, including hardware and software as well as the genres of documents we use, change in both predictable and sporadic fashion. Looking back, we could have predicted that the advent of personal computing would have a democratic effect on who produces business documents (clerical workers not trained in technical communication or document suddenly found themselves with the tools necessary to perform those tasks), or that an Internet connection would provide new ways of sending and receiving documents. Not all changes are predictable, though, and in the early days of the Internet I suspect that no one saw Twitter coming, nor Facebook, and YouTube would have been a pipe dream even for the most forward-thinking digital advocates. And so our service courses in technical communication are in a bind, trying to keep up with changes we can see and those we cannot.
In technical communication service courses, we are further bound by the lack of trained instructors. The history of technical communication instruction, bound so tightly to university needs and the literary expectations of a traditional English program, add up to an undertrained, underfunded, and often uninterested workforce of lecturers and adjuncts who teach technical writing service courses in order to make ends meet while finishing their degrees in literature and cultural studies. Add to this the above difficulties in keeping current in technical communication practices, and what we have is a recipe for mediocrity: students trained to mechanically fill out genre-specific documents based solely on textbook and institutional memory. For technical communication service courses, memory is not enough.
For the service course in technical communication, there is at least one more significant binding factor: historically, professional technical communicators and technical communication academics do not communicate well with each other. Speaking generally, and only generally, professionals in technical communication think of academics as monks in their towers, separated from the lively practice by culture, time, and distance. Academics in technical communication are, in this view, full of lofty ideas and scholarly ideals that rarely find purchase in the world outside the ivory tower. Professionals, views by the academics, do not heed the valuable studies and hard-won data of our continued investigations into more effective forms of communication. The two branches of this divided family speak only rarely, and with some unease.
However, the creation of usable knowledge is at the heart of both professional technical communication practice and the academic study and teaching of technical communication. As academics, we study document design and rhetoric specifically to help an audience perform an action or make a decision. With untrained instructors, that goal cannot be met. With underfunded programs, that goal cannot be met. Without a stable dialog between practitioners both inside and outside the academy, that goal cannot be met.
Friday, January 09, 2009
Program Review and User-Centered Service Courses: What Needs to Change
Service courses represent our largest academic client base, but one of our least-represented areas of research. During this talk, I will discuss why current program review methods fail to account for rapid changes in writing genres and technologies as well as why we should be concerned.
Continuing a conversation begun by the November 2007 issue of Technical Communication, this paper seeks to identify a gap in current practice of program review in TC. Our profession, practiced in the classroom and the cubicle, serves students and employers in diverse disciplines by way of the service course. Service courses make up the majority of credit hours generated by TC instructors; however, our program review models do not take these diverse populations into account. The CPTSC (and WPA) models for program review call for periodic external review with an eye toward improving our courses, faculty research, and institutional goals. An unfortunate oversight is not including professionals who convey technical information but who are not, by title or training, technical communicators. My own classes for the last twelve months are made up of junior and senior undergraduates, none of whom are (currently) headed for jobs in our discipline, but who are required to take the service course in TC due to the everyday demands of their future jobs. What is missing is input from the employers of service course students, the non-academics who nonetheless convey technical information on a daily basis. Without their input, our service courses will not do what we say they do, i.e., train professionals in various disciplines to write in the workplace, and may not even keep pace with changing writing genres and writing technologies. By educating students in irrelevant and out-moded genres and technologies, we are further encouraging the perception that writing classes are not worthwhile to students outside the writing majors, and, incidentally, furthering the argument for excluding technical communicators in academics and the workplace.
I intend to provide a brief overview of program review as it is often applied to technical communication programs, and compare those methods to editorials and other texts (such as Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s Datacloud) proposing ideas for the future of technical communication; texts which often indicate a need for increased involvement from non-academic stakeholders. I will also present the current state of my own research into technical communication program review, which includes data gathered from engineering programs at my institution (Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas) as well as business and education colleges, as well as ideas for future improvements in program review.
Continuing a conversation begun by the November 2007 issue of Technical Communication, this paper seeks to identify a gap in current practice of program review in TC. Our profession, practiced in the classroom and the cubicle, serves students and employers in diverse disciplines by way of the service course. Service courses make up the majority of credit hours generated by TC instructors; however, our program review models do not take these diverse populations into account. The CPTSC (and WPA) models for program review call for periodic external review with an eye toward improving our courses, faculty research, and institutional goals. An unfortunate oversight is not including professionals who convey technical information but who are not, by title or training, technical communicators. My own classes for the last twelve months are made up of junior and senior undergraduates, none of whom are (currently) headed for jobs in our discipline, but who are required to take the service course in TC due to the everyday demands of their future jobs. What is missing is input from the employers of service course students, the non-academics who nonetheless convey technical information on a daily basis. Without their input, our service courses will not do what we say they do, i.e., train professionals in various disciplines to write in the workplace, and may not even keep pace with changing writing genres and writing technologies. By educating students in irrelevant and out-moded genres and technologies, we are further encouraging the perception that writing classes are not worthwhile to students outside the writing majors, and, incidentally, furthering the argument for excluding technical communicators in academics and the workplace.
I intend to provide a brief overview of program review as it is often applied to technical communication programs, and compare those methods to editorials and other texts (such as Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s Datacloud) proposing ideas for the future of technical communication; texts which often indicate a need for increased involvement from non-academic stakeholders. I will also present the current state of my own research into technical communication program review, which includes data gathered from engineering programs at my institution (Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas) as well as business and education colleges, as well as ideas for future improvements in program review.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Get a Q, Man: Finding a Research Question
I’m not new to writing, and I’m certainly not new to hating it. I learned from an early age to hate assignments that required me to put pencil to paper, though in retrospect I realize that I loved using pencils and paper: what I hated was the stupid “copy this down” assignments that qualified as learning in my elementary school. I hated the focus on handwriting, and I hated the way that teachers made a difficult and cantankerous language seem like something we should all already know. In later years, I hated the way that grammar instruction was used as a bludgeon for reminding students of what they didn’t know, as a way to say “I’m in the aristocracy because I can correctly identify parts of speech.” When I learned to type in the seventh grade (manual typewriters, desks in a row, copying out inane texts) I found that writing could be fun because typing was a challenge. I never had good handwriting, but I learned to type quickly and realized that typing was not about cramped hands and boredom and instead focused on quickly getting words onto the page. I loved typing.
But I still didn’t enjoy writing until we began writing essays about books in high school. My English teacher for both my freshman and junior years was a wonderful woman who supplemented her terrible teaching salary by writing trashy romance novels. She could write, and write to a deadline, and that gave her a lot of mental freedom to not worry about silly things like grammar instruction and note cards, and instead focus on writing. I remember writing an essay about Stoker’s Dracula that was particularly fun. I was surprised to find that I actually enjoyed it. What I realize now is that I enjoyed writing for a purpose, and discussing the role of technology in an industrial age, as Stoker saw it, in fighting a spiritual being was about as practical as I would be for a number of years. But I could see how words fit into ideas, and how ideas fit into a tool, a very special tool called an argument, and an argument could—I could see this already in high school—change people. Is there a greater magic?
In college, I had difficult writing what I thought were really good research papers. Something that involved my own opinion was easy enough—just sit down, hammer down a few lines and you’re done. But coming up with something to look into, to research, to learn about and then formulate an opinion was as hard as hard gets. I’m interested in everything! How am I supposed to pick and choose when medieval heraldry, Greek columns (and the associated philosophies of beauty and ratios), and Wittgenstein all scream for my attention? Like Rands in Repose, I cherish the “content firehose,” the constant input of all kinds of data, scooping up bits of information like gold and devouring it like manna from heaven. And so I realize now that my problem with writing isn’t motivational, isn’t technological (putting pen or whatever to paper, or banging away on the keyboard), isn’t philosophical; instead, my problems with writing have to do with focus. I ain’t got focus. Everything is interesting to me in some way, and I have trouble hanging on to a writing project for longer than it takes to make a pithy observation. I click madly through Wikipedia like the Internet is about to die and I’ll be the one required to know who the Red Baron’s little brother was (Lothar) and that the Duesenberg brothers went on to put their automotive design features into cars for Auburn, or that General Electric makes some of the most terrifying guns in existence (electrically-powered Gatling guns used to destroy infantry machinery and personnel).
Now that I’m working on a dissertation, this otherwise innocuous problem (who can be faulted for curiosity? other than cats, that is) is the insurmountable peak, the immovable object, the moving target that is myself, my problem, and my dissertation. It is destructive to everything valuable in a dissertation, a scholarly study intended to launch a scholarly career of focused, disciplined inquiry. I’ve always known that discipline is one of my gifts. I’ve spent my adult life forging ahead when others quit, regulating food and drink, quitting smoking (I’m great at that one: I’ve done it dozens of times), getting papers graded and back on time, biking and walking rather than driving, reading and studying rather than watching television. But any of those things can be done by marshalling my body, and I find that there are times when I cannot marshal my mind.
The research question: was there ever a taller, more forbidding Everest? Is there a Tenzing to my Hillary, or am I not Hillary at all, but instead some weekend climber who believes that weekly, daily, hourly hard work can be forsaken for the purchased privilege of being carried to the top, snapping a quick pic on the cell phone and jetting back home to yodel about my accomplishments on Flickr and a commercial blog?
How does one get to the Research Question? I’m willing to bet that there are loads of heuristics, rubrics, and Venn diagrams from self-help academic guidebooks written by successful scholars who know, just KNOW, that their method will work for anyone. Like weight-loss and exercise machine infomercials, if I just had the faith in their product that they do then I’d shuffle off this mortal dissertation with aplomb and—most tempting of all—speed. Because speed is what I want now, a done dissertation and a good job lined up for the fall, the time when all us good academics spawn our way to new institutions and the “baths of all the western stars.”
I don’t think someone else’s method would work for me in finding a research question any more than someone else’s exercise routine would satisfy me. There might be the initial interest, the initial exercise that is different and somehow appealing, but in the end I’d go back to making my own routine, based on my own eccentricities, my own exercise goals, and my own resources. My own approach, in other words, has always been my favorite.
Sometimes, when the moon is just right, I tell my students that writing is like sculpting with clay: you pile enough material together, take some out, shape it around, and eventually you build up enough good material in the right proportions in order to have something that works, something recognizable to someone else as pretty, or useful, or valuable. Then I turn things around and say that writing is also like sculpting with marble. You begin with a huge glob of immutable stone, something heavy and hard to work with, and you make small cuts, chips really, and keep taking away and taking away until you’ve gotten the thing you wanted, the shape of your ideas. It’s this contradictory metaphor, of adding and subtracting, that daunts me in the search for my research question. I can add easily—that’s my talent, in fact, finding things that someone else didn’t know were there and adding them to the pile, seeing relationships between the stone monolith in front of you and the chips on the floor, some from other’s work, that still bear a resemblance to the mother stone which birthed them. But taking away? That’s hard. I’m a terrible pretender, and I cannot pretend that all the chips on the floor, and all the sculptures in the garden, aren’t all of a piece, the same piece, the same pursuit that drew us all to the quarry.
So now I’m looking at 20 some-odd pages of pre-proposal, though it’s really just a preamble, and I see things about service courses, textbooks, the value of technical communication, stakeholders, research methods, program review, timelines, and (of course) technology, and I don’t see the dots. I can’t see the dots. They’re there, apparently others can see them, but I can’t find them consistently, and if I can’t find them how am I supposed to connect those dots? For me, each dot is a galaxy, a waiting storehouse of content and intrigue, and the lines between them are just the most obvious state highways going from one place to another—there’s one right there, it’s out in the open and it’s not interesting, but what I really need is some altitude, some distance, so that I can see the outlines and say, “Ahhhhh, this is a picture of. . .” Something. Some arrangement of pixels that means something, that can be expressed in a sentence, but not just any sentence, a particular rhetorical construction that begs the existence of another rhetorical construction—a question. I’m good at the “quest,” part—I can look and learn and look and learn, but it’s the formulation of what I’m looking for that has me in a bind, so tightly wound up that I cannot see the ropes, only know that they’re preventing me seeing what’s really there, where the knot is, where the skein is tied, or even to recognize the skein at all. The yarn of my studies is too far into my skin; I can’t see it for the pain.
But there’s a way to do it, I just know there is and if I keep looking, scanning, browsing, I’ll find it. But the scanning and browsing has to be within me, not without; essential rather than accidental. What am I looking for, and how do I compile what I already know into that question?
Can program review research methods be modified to inform TC service courses fast enough to keep up with changes in workplace writing?
I don’t know. It sounds wrong, feels wrong, in my head when I read it. There’s not enough there, not enough material, stone, chips, and there’s also too much there, too many nouns, and too many loose ends (what does “fast enough” mean?).
How about –
Can a program review method be developed that accounts for the potential for rapid change in workplace writing, and can that method be applied to TC service courses?
For my money, that’s two questions, not one, but they are closely related and maybe that counts for something. More stone, less chips, though, so that’s good. But, as Fred Kemp has pointed out, I should avoid a yes/no question.
My most current version of this question is below:
What is the most effective research method for practical, responsive curricular change within TC service courses in order to keep pace with changing workplace writing genres and writing tools?
But I still didn’t enjoy writing until we began writing essays about books in high school. My English teacher for both my freshman and junior years was a wonderful woman who supplemented her terrible teaching salary by writing trashy romance novels. She could write, and write to a deadline, and that gave her a lot of mental freedom to not worry about silly things like grammar instruction and note cards, and instead focus on writing. I remember writing an essay about Stoker’s Dracula that was particularly fun. I was surprised to find that I actually enjoyed it. What I realize now is that I enjoyed writing for a purpose, and discussing the role of technology in an industrial age, as Stoker saw it, in fighting a spiritual being was about as practical as I would be for a number of years. But I could see how words fit into ideas, and how ideas fit into a tool, a very special tool called an argument, and an argument could—I could see this already in high school—change people. Is there a greater magic?
In college, I had difficult writing what I thought were really good research papers. Something that involved my own opinion was easy enough—just sit down, hammer down a few lines and you’re done. But coming up with something to look into, to research, to learn about and then formulate an opinion was as hard as hard gets. I’m interested in everything! How am I supposed to pick and choose when medieval heraldry, Greek columns (and the associated philosophies of beauty and ratios), and Wittgenstein all scream for my attention? Like Rands in Repose, I cherish the “content firehose,” the constant input of all kinds of data, scooping up bits of information like gold and devouring it like manna from heaven. And so I realize now that my problem with writing isn’t motivational, isn’t technological (putting pen or whatever to paper, or banging away on the keyboard), isn’t philosophical; instead, my problems with writing have to do with focus. I ain’t got focus. Everything is interesting to me in some way, and I have trouble hanging on to a writing project for longer than it takes to make a pithy observation. I click madly through Wikipedia like the Internet is about to die and I’ll be the one required to know who the Red Baron’s little brother was (Lothar) and that the Duesenberg brothers went on to put their automotive design features into cars for Auburn, or that General Electric makes some of the most terrifying guns in existence (electrically-powered Gatling guns used to destroy infantry machinery and personnel).
Now that I’m working on a dissertation, this otherwise innocuous problem (who can be faulted for curiosity? other than cats, that is) is the insurmountable peak, the immovable object, the moving target that is myself, my problem, and my dissertation. It is destructive to everything valuable in a dissertation, a scholarly study intended to launch a scholarly career of focused, disciplined inquiry. I’ve always known that discipline is one of my gifts. I’ve spent my adult life forging ahead when others quit, regulating food and drink, quitting smoking (I’m great at that one: I’ve done it dozens of times), getting papers graded and back on time, biking and walking rather than driving, reading and studying rather than watching television. But any of those things can be done by marshalling my body, and I find that there are times when I cannot marshal my mind.
The research question: was there ever a taller, more forbidding Everest? Is there a Tenzing to my Hillary, or am I not Hillary at all, but instead some weekend climber who believes that weekly, daily, hourly hard work can be forsaken for the purchased privilege of being carried to the top, snapping a quick pic on the cell phone and jetting back home to yodel about my accomplishments on Flickr and a commercial blog?
How does one get to the Research Question? I’m willing to bet that there are loads of heuristics, rubrics, and Venn diagrams from self-help academic guidebooks written by successful scholars who know, just KNOW, that their method will work for anyone. Like weight-loss and exercise machine infomercials, if I just had the faith in their product that they do then I’d shuffle off this mortal dissertation with aplomb and—most tempting of all—speed. Because speed is what I want now, a done dissertation and a good job lined up for the fall, the time when all us good academics spawn our way to new institutions and the “baths of all the western stars.”
I don’t think someone else’s method would work for me in finding a research question any more than someone else’s exercise routine would satisfy me. There might be the initial interest, the initial exercise that is different and somehow appealing, but in the end I’d go back to making my own routine, based on my own eccentricities, my own exercise goals, and my own resources. My own approach, in other words, has always been my favorite.
Sometimes, when the moon is just right, I tell my students that writing is like sculpting with clay: you pile enough material together, take some out, shape it around, and eventually you build up enough good material in the right proportions in order to have something that works, something recognizable to someone else as pretty, or useful, or valuable. Then I turn things around and say that writing is also like sculpting with marble. You begin with a huge glob of immutable stone, something heavy and hard to work with, and you make small cuts, chips really, and keep taking away and taking away until you’ve gotten the thing you wanted, the shape of your ideas. It’s this contradictory metaphor, of adding and subtracting, that daunts me in the search for my research question. I can add easily—that’s my talent, in fact, finding things that someone else didn’t know were there and adding them to the pile, seeing relationships between the stone monolith in front of you and the chips on the floor, some from other’s work, that still bear a resemblance to the mother stone which birthed them. But taking away? That’s hard. I’m a terrible pretender, and I cannot pretend that all the chips on the floor, and all the sculptures in the garden, aren’t all of a piece, the same piece, the same pursuit that drew us all to the quarry.
So now I’m looking at 20 some-odd pages of pre-proposal, though it’s really just a preamble, and I see things about service courses, textbooks, the value of technical communication, stakeholders, research methods, program review, timelines, and (of course) technology, and I don’t see the dots. I can’t see the dots. They’re there, apparently others can see them, but I can’t find them consistently, and if I can’t find them how am I supposed to connect those dots? For me, each dot is a galaxy, a waiting storehouse of content and intrigue, and the lines between them are just the most obvious state highways going from one place to another—there’s one right there, it’s out in the open and it’s not interesting, but what I really need is some altitude, some distance, so that I can see the outlines and say, “Ahhhhh, this is a picture of. . .” Something. Some arrangement of pixels that means something, that can be expressed in a sentence, but not just any sentence, a particular rhetorical construction that begs the existence of another rhetorical construction—a question. I’m good at the “quest,” part—I can look and learn and look and learn, but it’s the formulation of what I’m looking for that has me in a bind, so tightly wound up that I cannot see the ropes, only know that they’re preventing me seeing what’s really there, where the knot is, where the skein is tied, or even to recognize the skein at all. The yarn of my studies is too far into my skin; I can’t see it for the pain.
But there’s a way to do it, I just know there is and if I keep looking, scanning, browsing, I’ll find it. But the scanning and browsing has to be within me, not without; essential rather than accidental. What am I looking for, and how do I compile what I already know into that question?
Can program review research methods be modified to inform TC service courses fast enough to keep up with changes in workplace writing?
I don’t know. It sounds wrong, feels wrong, in my head when I read it. There’s not enough there, not enough material, stone, chips, and there’s also too much there, too many nouns, and too many loose ends (what does “fast enough” mean?).
How about –
Can a program review method be developed that accounts for the potential for rapid change in workplace writing, and can that method be applied to TC service courses?
For my money, that’s two questions, not one, but they are closely related and maybe that counts for something. More stone, less chips, though, so that’s good. But, as Fred Kemp has pointed out, I should avoid a yes/no question.
My most current version of this question is below:
What is the most effective research method for practical, responsive curricular change within TC service courses in order to keep pace with changing workplace writing genres and writing tools?
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Note to my family
Howdy! I wanted you to see some pictures of where I'm staying as well as pictures of my friends.
This first picture is of Fred Kemp and Ritu Raju. Fred is my dissertation chair, which means he's my teacher. Ritu is from India, and she's one of my classmates. 
This is my room. Can you find my computer? Can you find my hat?
This is my room. Can you find my computer? Can you find my hat?
This is one of our classrooms. You can see Fred, my teacher, at the front of the classroom leading the discussion. Can you find my hat?
This is my very good friend, Kendall. She has two daughters.
I want you all to know that I'm working hard and that I love you very, very much. I miss you and love you! I'll be home in 12 days.Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Closer to a defined goal
Worked some more on my diss proposal this week. I'm still struggling with defining what I'm looking for and how to justify that. It's a long, uphill battle, but it's getting more and more fun. When I initially began the proposal process, I really didn't enjoy writing it. I felt I needed to write in an academic tone and with academic pretense.
I've given that up. Instead, I'm writing in my own voice and having a blast. Now when I open up my document and begin working I feel like I'm putting together the pieces of a puzzle. And not only am I enjoying it more, but I'm writing more accurately: my definitions are more tightly couched within a context of use. That's satisfying.
I'm wondering now if I can define software into "production" software, such as Word, FrontPage or InDesign, and "communication" software such as email and IM. The exciting part is that IM is such an important part of my own scholarly pursuits that I'm tempted to define it as both communication AND production software.
I've given that up. Instead, I'm writing in my own voice and having a blast. Now when I open up my document and begin working I feel like I'm putting together the pieces of a puzzle. And not only am I enjoying it more, but I'm writing more accurately: my definitions are more tightly couched within a context of use. That's satisfying.
I'm wondering now if I can define software into "production" software, such as Word, FrontPage or InDesign, and "communication" software such as email and IM. The exciting part is that IM is such an important part of my own scholarly pursuits that I'm tempted to define it as both communication AND production software.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Diss Grants Group
These represent a sort of rough draft of researching granting opps. I looked around for stuff related for my own interests; however, I included ones that sounded interesting. Help yourself.
FY 2006-2007 Discretionary Grant Application Packages from the US Department of Education:
http://www.ed.gov/fund/grant/apply/grantapps/index.html
Intel in Your Community
http://www.intel.com/community/grant.htm
ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowships
http://www.acls.org/difguide.htm
Lindbergh Foundation
http://www.lindberghfoundation.org/grants/?CFID=1649118&CFTOKEN=46388928
MacArthur Foundation - Knowledge-Networking Awards
http://www.dmlcompetition.net/networking.php?CFID=1649118&CFTOKEN=46388928
FY 2006-2007 Discretionary Grant Application Packages from the US Department of Education:
http://www.ed.gov/fund/grant/apply/grantapps/index.html
Intel in Your Community
http://www.intel.com/community/grant.htm
ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowships
http://www.acls.org/difguide.htm
Lindbergh Foundation
http://www.lindberghfoundation.org/grants/?CFID=1649118&CFTOKEN=46388928
MacArthur Foundation - Knowledge-Networking Awards
http://www.dmlcompetition.net/networking.php?CFID=1649118&CFTOKEN=46388928
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