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last.updated 6.12.06

 

Researching Digital Writing


Purpose

To introduce you to research methologies that have been/can be used for understanding how writers compose with digital technologies. This will give you some of the tools that you need to study the actual practice of local users.


Discussion & Lecture

  • What are the metaphors and narratives that we have seen about technology and digital writing? What are the realities that we have seen in local contexts?
  • What is reliability and validity?
  • We will walk through the process of a research project using the following exigence as an example: In spite of the technologies egalitarian potential, individuals who compose myspace and Facebook sites reify, rather than challenge, raced and gendered representations.
  • We will examine what the four articles contributre to our understanding of research.
  • Using one of the articles that we have already studied, address the following questions: What do you think about the author's research design? In what ways did (or didn't) it generate useful and credible data? What changes would make to the design? What information would you want the researcher to report? why?


DeWitt

  • p. 22. “To only value written culture (as academics typically do) implies that our students have failed themselves and that they come to our classes as empty vessels, lacking the abilities and experiences necessary for academic success. If the sound bite or other aspects of fragmented postmodernism form the texts of our students’ worlds, then we need to offer purposeful, alternative writing instruction that teaches them to make connections between sound bites, thus creating more complex texts.” This, I think, is the core of DeWitt’s point: to ask, can we, by stitching fragments together, develop an articulate conception of issues? By asking students to go beyond stating “that thing is cool,” to asking them to consider why it’s cool, what cool is, etc. But I wonder to what degree people are even capable of this anymore. Are we just trying to force an old way of thinking on a generation that can’t conform?
  • I was amused by his descriptions of his undergraduate writing experiences, and I agree that strict adherence to the teaching of “The Writing Process” can lead to these kinds of frustrating situations for students. However, does he devalue the “pre-writing” techniques taught as to proscribed? I tend to see the teaching of them as possibly synonymous with his desire to teach somewhat messy invention based research and thinking.
  • DeWitt stresses the importance of the act of noticing as a composition practice, yet there are no sample assignments or teaching strategies included in this portion of the text. What are some ways that communications technologies and "noticing" might be integrated to help students achieve effective reading and writing techniques?
  • Do computer programs such as TOPOI help students write better
    research papers? Can computers be utilized in this way, or are they taking the place of human instruction?
  • How should a future college instructor handle assessing students’ composition papers when academic discourse says that they should write their composition in certain format (five paragraph essay)? As Dewitt states on page 21, students will “come to our classes with worldviews, textual experiences, and with developed schemata, even if these stem from sources outside those that the academy tends to value.” How can we incorporate students’ views into the academic discourse of composition writing?
  • How would blogging change the dynamics of invention by enabling students to respond to an initial post and to build on one another's posts? It would seem that if properly orchestrated this could be a really effective tool for demonstrating the growth of knowledge base for the group and the connections made between threads and between individuals.

Charney

  • P. 590. “By producing numerous individual subjective studies, we have constructed a broad, shallow array of information, in which one study may touch loosely on another but in which no deep or complex networks of inferences and hypotheses are forged or tested.” In other words, Charney seems to be saying, research in composition studies is not progressive. Does this make her argument inherently unacceptable to feminist critics?
  • An argument can be asserted that all research is polluted by the bias or economic motives of the researcher and the only discernable differences that I can related to is that empirical research is more open to subjectivity because of its lack of formalized rules or scientific paradigm. Nonetheless, empirical research can still have validity and provide precedence if that is an identifiable consistency in this absence of a scientific formula.
  • Charney makes a strong argument for the support of interdisciplinary
    research and scholarship. However, does the burden on the reader/
    researcher/ critic become to great when, “publics involved must become and remain active critics?” Can we as readers ever be versed enough in the methodologies of other disciplines to the point where we can be effective critics of their scholarship?
  • Charney remarks that scientists need objective methods that are
    open to scrutiny and challenge. Is there such a thing as true objectivity?
  • Charney makes a case for a new kind of research methodology but fails to actually present research conducted in the way that she advocates. Wouldn't this be a much effective rhetorical device?

Hine

  • p. 63. “A holistic understanding of the Internet seems a futile undertaking in the face of this list.” Hine’s project seems to be to view the “Internet” as a kind of single object that can be studied through its various facets. Is this possible? Isn’t the Internet made up of parts that have no relationship to one another, that have to be studied separately? What do MUDs have to do with Gopher? How is CNN.com connected to instant messaging? Each of these has its own culture and users.
  • I found this reading to be quite convoluted; however, my limited comprehension permits me to make the point that in my reading an ethnographer represents a hybrid of a social worker and psychologist and this hybrid allows them to examine the reasons why individuals gravitate to the internet to establish communities, surf the Web or share in like interests.
  • How does blogging function in relation to Hine’s arguments regarding the difficulties the ethnographer has in gauging the reader/ viewer’s
    interactions with the text/ author? Does the new technology make the
    process easier, or just add another level of complication?
  • An interesting article- one which takes research to a new level. I couldn't help but think of Dr. Bombay's interest LambdaMOO's Dr. Jest, as Hine discussed objectivity in the making of ethnography. Surely "going native" (54) in cyberspace, to create an ethnography, is a necessary evil?
  • Is there merit in examining the "places" created online that people
    visit? For example, is there usefulness in knowing why characters on
    LambdaMOO sleep in a closet or why the living room is of importance?
  • While reading this chapter, it made me realize what is the authenticity of a college student’s writing, especially in an online class? Is it their writing and how can we be sure?
  • Virtual electronic social protests, such as the haunting of geocities, demonstrates a communal action if not a community. How would an enthnographer study a cultural phenomenon such as this?

Johnson

  • Why don’t companies spend as much time and money developing instructions for things as they do developing, say, computer games. Can you imagine what kind of spectacular tutorial could be developed for learning piano, or speaking Hindi, if a team of designers, programmers, musicians, information architects, and writers collaborated for 3 years to produce it? It would incorporate not just text, but real interactivity.
  • Although User-Centered Computer documentation may be useful in the use of particular programs, I question the feasibility of such an implementation because of the rapidly changing technology. Is there an issue of short shelve life of the User-Centered Computer documentation verse the more universal system –centered instructions because of the frequent change in technology?
  • So, given that the techie-geek system creator and his boss, the corporation who creates technology for profitability, currently stand in the financial position of power regarding the creation of computer documentation—how do we make them “play” with the technical writers and successfully argue for the writer’s place in a technology centered industry?
  • "Writers already are interface designers, in other words, but recognition of this technical communicator skill is rarer outside the realm of technical communication" (315). Can this be seen as having academic consequences? This seems like a severe setback for students (such as DeWitt's) who are learning how to "notice."
  • Who decides whether system-centered, user-friendly, or
    user-centered technical writing will be used for technology? Is it a
    company decision? Are writers more inclined one way or another? Does gender play a part how people write technically?
  • Great chapter! When we compose we need to think of the audience and how they we receive the information; however, the difficulty with writing instructions is that it is going to a very broad audience with different levels of education and life experiences etc. How does a writer compose instructions to make them look easy? I’m not sure it’s possible.
  • Why are the technical writers in major companies marginalized to the extent described in the article? If they were to employ some of the rhetorical methods they were surely trained in? They should be able to present an effective case about the value of credible, easily understood and user-centric directions/instructions (which have to be created once) as a cost savings measure to mitigate the costly labor associated with "customer service" and "support" call centers that often address issues that could be eliminated through clear, consise, well written instructions.