I was invited to give an Ignite presentation at SIGDOC 2013.
This was my first try at giving a presentation in this format, and I must say, it's much more enjoyable than the typical academic talk.
All of the photos here are from my ongoing fieldwork exploring the geocaching community. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this talk!
It begins a few days before the start of each semester. Tweets of frustration. Tweets of anger. Tweets of stupefied ambivalence. Tweets of unfettered rage. Many of the educators that I follow on Twitter have serious problems with Blackboard or similar “learning management systems.”
I’m no fan either, and I never have been. My first peer-reviewed publication attempted to describe why learning management systems are especially stifling for instruction in writing and rhetoric. I’m also sure that I too have tweeted something to the effect of “Blackboard/WebCT is horridly horrible” in the past. But I feel as though I’ve been harboring a dirty secret, especially when I read those tweets tweets of frustration.
I don’t hate Blackboard.
Over that last couple of years I’ve really backed away from a militant anti-LMS perspective in everyday practice, in large part because it’s simply not conducive to getting things done with what we have.[1]
A rhetorician, after all, makes do with what’s available.[2]
Because of any number of limitations, many instructors simply find ways to play their hands with the cards that they’ve been dealt. For me, this means working within the constraints of the LMS in the most effective way possible, and with the least amount of time, energy, and headache. I wonder if much of the frustration that instructors feel is borne of simply trying to make the LMS do more than it is actually capable of accomplishing on a day-to-day basis.
In point of fact, Blackboard does few things well. Its constraints are massive. Once acknowledged, this perspective actually frees the instructor (and students) to make a deliberate move toward metis.
So, let me begin with some basic premises: first, a locked-down LMS is simply not designed to facilitate public or semi-public discourse; second, the usability of Blackboard and WebCT (the two learning management systems with which I have first-hand experience) is notoriously poor for all users—instructors and students alike; and third, with its profound ontological and epistemic limitations and soul-sucking user experience, it makes sense to spend as little time in the LMS as possible.
Given these premises, then, of what use is Blackboard? Well, there are a couple of areas where the university-sanctioned LMS actually excels: first, it’s great at storing stuff; and second, it’s intentionally designed to facilitate assessment.[3]
I don’t hate Blackboard because I recognize and accept that its limitations are enormous, and as such, I don’t try to make it do anything beyond its extremely limited capabilities. Blackboard, therefore, doesn’t frustrate me in the least.
Here’s a quick rundown of how I use Blackboard:
That’s it. I use Blackboard to do basically the two things (only things?) that it does reasonably well: store stuff and provide private, individual feedback.
And because this is all I do with the LMS, usability improves by simple subtraction.[4] The homepage basically has nothing (I use none of Blackboard’s faux-clever mix and match modules for “assignments,” “announcements,” or anything else; I delete them all). I have a simple left-hand menu which lists:
The Discussions area contains one forum, called “Deliverables.” Within this forum there are several threads, each of which corresponds to a given assignment (e.g., “Practicum 1”). The first post in a given thread is my assignment description and any attendant documents; when students have completed a deliverable, they simply reply to a message in the thread and upload their document (or hyperlink).
I use Messages to give my students feedback; they have a running tally of exactly where they stand at any point in the semester by simply consulting their private messages.
To reiterate: my Blackboard experience begins with deleting almost everything the LMS suggests I use; then I add only the things that the LMS can handle with reasonable efficiency. I store stuff there so it can be easily retrieved by students, and I provide feedback that can likewise be easily retrieved and maintained throughout a given semester.
This scenario leverages Blackboard’s few strengths. It means students can upload huge files (like PDFs with video and audio files related to their qualitative studies), that they can safely retrieve copyrighted work (such as articles provided as part of the course readings), and that they can safely maintain a record of their achievement in the course.
For everything else, there’s our face-to-face discussions and the interwebs, where they can have meaningful public and semi-public interactions with authentic audiences.[5]
This is certainly not meant to shame anyone who tweets about the ontological frailties of Blackboard. I rather enjoy them, actually. Instead, I’ve chosen to take a more Stoic approach: some things are up to us, some things aren’t, and we would do well to focus on the things we can control, and those things alone. I don’t have the energy or influence to overturn my university’s LMS policy; I can offer my students interesting workarounds to the limitations of the LMS, however. ↩
I believe it was either Aristotle or Morrissey who argued that “Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” ↩
I can hear you screaming at you screen: “It’s terrible at assessment!!1!” Stay with me here; I don’t use it for assessment in the ways that the designer intended… ↩
Figuring out Blackboard’s Messaging UI, however, remains a serious problem for first-time users. I’m not sure how one could design a poorer messaging workflow. Honestly. ↩
A final note. I have a colleague who grew up in Berkeley; I grew up in the East Bay as well. When I found out he was from Berkeley, I asked him if he hated Piedmont, an affluent enclave in the Berkeley hills that I resented when I was an angsty youngster. He replied, “No, I don’t hate Piedmont.” He understood why some folks did, but he didn’t see the point of hating something like an entire city. “What good could that possibly bring me?,” he wondered. Any residual disgust I harbored towards Piedmont disappeared on the spot. ↩
[ NB: “Annotations” are occasional posts that explore selections from my research reading—articles or books—in rhetoric, technical and professional communication, and related fields. ]
Carliner, S., Coppola, N., Grady, H., & Hayhoe, G. (2011). What does the Transactions publish? What do readers want to read? IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 54(4), 341–359.
As I mentioned in my previous Annotations post, I’m a big fan of meta-analyses and systematic lit reviews. This recent piece by Carliner et al. isn’t exactly a meta-analysis, but it’s in the same ballpark,[1] and their analysis of what major journals in technical and professional communication have published in the last 5 years is really interesting to me (and, I hope, to you as well).
In addition to exploring the major genres and methods comprising the sample of articles they selected, Carliner et al. report findings from a survey of Transactions on Professional Communication (TPC) readers in order to determine what kinds of congruencies and gaps exist between what the TPC publishes and what TPC readers would like to read. One of the most interesting gaps they established was a desire among readers for more case studies, lit reviews, and tutorials; this is is especially surprising, since the TPC primarily publishes experimental and survey-based studies.
The impetus for the study[2] was a change in TPC editorship, and Carliner et al. “sought empirical evidence on which to base decisions about the future direction of the journal” (p. 341–42). In order to do so, the authors placed findings from the readership survey in conversation with their analysis of 5 years’ worth of peer-reviewed scholarship from: the TPC, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Technical Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly.
One handy subsection of this article is the lit review, which amounts to a review of previously published systematic lit reviews and meta-analyses. If I was wanting to know more about this methodology, the brief lit review provided here would get me off to a strong start.
As Carliner et al. note near the end of their lit review, the study actually contrasts “the content published by one peer-reviewed journal [the TPC] and other journals in the discipline with the preferences of readers” (p. 343, emphasis added). I think the italicized bit is key; if you’re an academic researcher in technical and professional communication, this article provides a very useful snapshot of the major journals in the field, the kinds of articles they publish, and the relationship among them.
Also useful, if you have an interest in conducting or evaluating systematic lit reviews, is the methodology section. I think the decision to adopt STC’s technical communication Body of Knowledge classification scheme is sound, and the authors provide a clear description of where and why they amended the scheme. They contend that the “full disclosure of the methodology and the dual coding[3] of each article ensures the trustworthiness of the data” (p. 345).
The authors provide findings for each journal, and then detail (in both table and narrative forms) findings across the journals—“the three topics that received the most coverage were: (1) Information Design and Development, (2) Deliverables, and (3) Academic Programs” (p. 347). “The three most common categories of research methods” across the articles in their sample were: “(1) Critical—Document Review, (2) Experience Report, and (3) Quantitative—Survey” (p. 347). The “critical document review” category, it should be noted, uses critical methods to explore texts without disclosing a sampling method or systematic methodology. My assumption is that most of the articles in this category were rhetorical analyses of one form or another.
The discussion of what readers of the TPC want was less interesting overall, but contains some very surprising tidbits. For one, though the sample was small (n=88, a 9.4% response rate), it was professionally diverse. Only 33%, for example, were academics, while 56% work in industry (p. 349). The survey used the classification scheme described above and asked respondents to rank the three topics of most interest and the three of least interest (p. 351). They did the same with research methods.[4]
As I mentioned briefly above, of most interest to readers were case studies and lit reviews, while survey-based studies and document analyses were of least interest. TPC rarely publishes case studies, and they publish a lot of survey-based work.
The authors note that the finding is somewhat problematic, as the term “case study” is broadly interpreted across journals. Personally, I follow MacNealy (1999) here, and see case studies as both systematic and rigorous, otherwise we’re not talking about a case study but a case history or experience report. I realize that I’m probably in the minority, though, and it’s a good idea if you’re conducting and writing about systematic qualitative case studies to clearly explain how your work is systematic, well-triangulated, and rigorous, so as to avoid the sometimes pejorative perception. But I digress…
Carliner et al. suggest that the survey findings indicate a “strong interest in research on communication in engineering workplaces,” and that “readers have a preference for applied research rather than the basic research that the Transactions has emphasized in recent years,” hence the preference for more in-depth (dare I say?) qualitative work (p. 352).
Overall, this was a fun read. The article provides a really nice snapshot of where we are in terms of current scholarship in technical and professional communication. And to me, it suggests a lot of opportunity for new kinds of work.
Carliner et al. include a detailed reporting of their methods, which means that their study is replicable, or better yet, extensible (by covering a decade’s worth of articles from these and related journals, for example). ↩
Really, Carliner et al. conducted two different studies and compared them in this article; for the sake of clarity, I’m referring to the article itself as a “study.” ↩
Two of the authors coded each article by first conducting a series of “norming sessions” where they jointly coded two full issues of each publication under scrutiny. Because of this approach, the authors didn’t provide any measures of inter-coder reliability. ↩
Interestingly, they did not include ethnography, usability testing, and experience reports in the survey… ↩
Here's the screencast for my recent talk at the 2010 Computers and Writing Conference held at Purdue University. It was a pleasure to present on a panel about virtual mentorship with Derek Mueller, Trauman, and Steve Krause.
