Blogging: Links in Chains of Literate Action

The 2011 Computers and Writing Conference has been widely lauded in recent days as one of the best iterations in the conference's history. I echo those sentiments: the venue was spectacular, the people—as always—were wonderful and supportive, and Ann Arbor is a lovely city.

I participated on a roundtable exploring the following: Is Blogging Dead? Yes, No, Other. With eight participants, we limited our talks to three minutes, leaving lots of time for audience interaction. The panel was organized by Steve Krause, and one of my fellow presenters, Bradley Dilger has done a fine job of corralling some of the discussion before, during, and after the roundtable.

The general feeling was that our session engaged the backchannel in a way that few others did at this year's conference, and part of that is attributable to: 1. the nature of our topic, and 2. the format, which explicitly took emphasis away from individual presenters and attempted to foster what Scott (1967) calls "collaborative critical inquiry."

Put another way: it was a lot of fun to deliver a 3 minute talk, and then sit back and listen to the thoughts of my fellow panelists and audience participants (those co-located and distributed). Basically, I spoke for 3 minutes, then didn't say anything until the last 10 minutes or so of the session. And I learned a lot more that way.

My talk is below. I encourage you to have a look at Bradley's post—he's updating periodically to capture some of the post-roundtable reaction, including a Storify perspective on the session.

Exploring a Sustainable and Public Information Ecology

In September, I published a paper in the Proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group for Design of Communication (SIGDOC); it has recently been published at the ACM site.

My paper details findings from a qualitative study of a professional conference, drawing from Nardi and O'Day's (1999) Information Ecologies and Activity Theory to explore the public writing activities that I observed and catalogued. I collected a few different kinds of data for the study—observations of planning meetings, observations of activities at the three-day conference, written public artifacts on the organization's blog and in the Twitter streams of conference participants, and interviews with several of the participants (and planners) themselves.

As I was coding data from the study, one of the key activities that I encountered again and again was something called tummeling. Tummeling can be seen as the intentional facilitation of conversation and engagement within online communities—often by someone who curates ideas and content while connecting previously unaffiliated individuals from overlapping social groups.

I am indebted to Kevin Marks for sharing this concept on Twitter and in Google Reader (he is, in fact, an active tummler). I think I would have struggled to characterize some of the key activities that emerged from the data had I not been made aware of this concept and its role in fostering online engagement.

Based upon the data, I argued that tummeling was a key factor in bolstering the sustainability of the online and physical community that I studied. Since I was privy to pre-conference planning meetings, I learned that the digital sustainability and visibility of the organization was a key goal heading into the conference.

Interestingly, I don't think most involved in those planning meetings envisioned phatic communication through an application like Twitter as being a large factor in fostering that sustainability.

The data says otherwise.

Tummeling activity and online phatic interaction clearly extended the organization's reach and visibility while promoting connections that were sustainable beyond the three-day conference. These activities were largely extraorganizational; in other words, they were driven from below—by attendees—rather than from above—by the organization itself.

The organizers, to their credit, realized that blogging and microblogging activities needed to be leveraged in some way. They were intent on trying new ways of extending the organization's reach.

Findings from this small-scale study indicate how organizations might better foster tummeling activities in support of visibility and sustainability efforts. Part of the challenge is met by simply promoting tools like Twitter—embracing and encouraging the tummlers who are in some way connected to (though not necessarily a part of) the organization.

You can get a pre-publication version of the full paper below, or the official version at the ACM Portal.

Digital Publics and Participatory Education

Last week, an article that I worked on earlier this year saw publication with the open access journal Digital Culture and Education.

Back in January or thereabouts, Christa Teston and I were talking about different collaboration opportunities, and I suggested that we prepare a manuscript for a special issue of the journal. We put together a plan to explore the complex of blogging, backchannel communication, and Google Reader as a way to open up classrooms to broader public participation, drawing primarily from experiences in my Fall 2009 senior seminar at BSU.

Following Schön (1983), we took a reflective practice approach, inviting three participants as coauthors. Garrett Cox was an undergraduate in the model course, and he contributed a participatory perspective from inside the curriculum. Bolutife Olorunda was a student participant from the edges of the curriculum, and his perspective details his experience as a self-directed participant motivated by interests in the core subject matter. Finally, Noah Dunker, an Information Security professional from Kansas City, MO, contributed a participatory perspective from well outside the curriculum, as a public participant in the course, unaffiliated with BSU.

While the manuscript wasn't a good fit for the special issue, it was reviewed positively, and invited for inclusion in the next issue. In the article, we make an argument about operationalizing collaborative knowledge work within a specific curriculum and pedagogical approach—enacting a form of participatory education in digital publics.

In the process, we also detail a fairly novel approach to guided discovery (Clark & Mayer, 2003) and student blogging as a literate practice. Finally, we suggest practical methods of incorporating feeds—via Google Reader's "Bundle" feature—as a primary source within a given curriculum.

The abstract for the article is below, and the full piece can be found at Digital Culture and Education.

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This article—a collaborative exploration between instructors, students, and members of the broader, digital classroom community—explores how the strategic incorporation of sociotechnical networks and digital technologies facilitates literate practices that extend the classroom in productive ways. The article builds toward coauthors’ reflective practices (Schön, 1983), or “participatory perspectives”, had during an undergraduate English Studies course at a mid-sized, public, American university. Specifically, participants argue that these literate practices afforded not just information sharing, but the opening up of a traditional classroom to include broader digital publics and collaborative knowledge work (Spinuzzi, 2006). Toward this end, we ground literate practice in scholarship that attends to public writing in online spaces, and theoretically frame our argument using Jenkins et al.’s (2006) principles of participatory education. We then detail the specific curricular approach deliberately designed to create digitally connected publics and end with generalizable significance of coauthors’ participatory perspectives.

[ Finding Grooves ] Conversations + Spreadable Media

I gave a talk last week (3.26.10) at the Center for Media Design, responding to previous presentations about two of Ball State's most successful immersive learning programs, iMedia and SportsLink. This year, the CMD has sponsored research talks from Emerging Media Faculty Fellows, and more recently, presentations about our innovative immersive learning opportunities for undergraduates.

Brad King and I have been engaged in learning about both iMedia and SportsLink, and our backchannel conversations about opportunities for using social media platforms to extend SportsLink's brand resulted in an invitation for each of us to share those ideas with the university community last week.

I had a lot of fun with this talk, and worked from a looser script than I'm used to. Both talks fostered some great discussions, and I think we're all really invested in seeing these programs develop and prosper. Below is a screencast of my talk; as always, I welcome questions and feedback!

Epistemological Movement and [ Web-Scale ] Ambient Research

I've recently been invited to an NSF-funded workshop at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on Examining Web-Scale Research Collaboration. Not only am I very much looking forward to working with and learning from an interdisciplinary group of prominent scholars, I'm excited by the recent convergence of events and opportunities around my development of the notion of ambient research.

In addition to the workshop, my thinking through the particulars of ambient research and the movement of knowledge is reflected in my recent presentation at the Conference on College Composition and Communication and a manuscript that's being considered for what I think will be an important edited collection in technical and professional communication. These events are buttressed by my ongoing collaborations with Christa Teston in Rhetoric and Writing Studies research methodologies and practices and Paul Gestwicki in computer supported collaborative work and information visualization. Interestingly, this work also coincides with my forthcoming Computers and Writing panel, where I'll present on digital collaboration and mentorship with Derek Mueller, Steve Krause, and Ryan Trauman.

In short, I'm moving toward exciting in situ and empirical research and practice of the kinds of things I've been discussing for the last 18 months or so.

Participants at the NSF workshop were asked to circulate abstracts detailing their work ahead of the event, and I've provided mine here. This abstract reflects some of the ideas I discuss in the manuscript I mentioned above, so if some constructs seem to receive short shrift it's because I didn't have the space to expound on them the way I would have liked in a one-page abstract.

As always, I welcome feedback and conversation!

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Much of my work is motivated by the desire to better understand distributed, collaborative knowledge work in hybrid spaces. Swarts and Kim (2007) define hybrid spaces as the "meshed and material places" where "information is not only a commodity; it is a frame on the world around us" (p. 212). My research, then, considers the following lines of inquiry: what do hybrid spaces look like in everyday organizational practice? How are they comprised, and what holds them together? How does knowledge move within these spaces as we move within them, and as they in turn move and shift around us? What practices enable meaningful “thinking and doing” (Haas, 1996, p.19) for knowledge workers in such spaces?

I draw on theories of knowledge work developed primarily in Professional and Technical Communication. Both Johnson-Eilola (2005) and Swarts (2007) explicitly link concepts in distributed knowledge work to Reich's (1992) figurations of the symbolic-analytic, where professionals work "within information, filtering, rearranging, transforming, and making connections to address specific, specialized problems" (Johnson-Eilola, 2005, p. 19). Johnson-Eilola (2005) argues that "symbolic analysts are people we might think of as technical rhetoricians working in the datacloud" (p. 19). Spinuzzi (2006) suggests that knowledge work “tends to be organized in distributed, heterogeneous networks rather than in modular hierarchies” (p. 1). A key component of knowledge work then is its distributed quality; Spinuzzi (2007) argues that "distributed work is the coordinative work that enables sociotechnical networks to hold together and form dense interconnections among and across work activities" (p. 268). He notes that this kind of work is "deeply interpenetrated, with multiple, multidirectional information flows" (2007, p. 268).

Following Grabill and Hart-Davidson (2010), my research is interested in "what writing does, not in what it means" (p. 1) in knowledge work environments. In other words, surfacing and tracing the literate activity of knowledge work can help us determine writing's formidable role in enabling "sociotechnical networks to hold together" (Spinuzzi, 2007, p. 268). For Grabill and Hart-Davidson, writing practices and activities are "epistemologically productive" (2010, p. 1), an assertion that foregrounds writing as heuristic, actionable, and explicitly social in the organizational and networked ecologies (Nardi and O'Day, 1999; Spinuzzi, 2003) of knowledge work. Attention to the practices of rhetoric and writing—what writing does—is paramount to our understanding of the ways knowledge moves at web-scale.

Movement, then, is a key characteristic of knowledge work in hybrid spaces. Though we have come to accept a burgeoning "ambient awareness" (Thompson, 2008; Spinuzzi, 2009) as a function of always on, always connected devices and networks in hybrid spaces, I argue for more intentional practices of situating knowledge work within heuristic frameworks of ambient informatics for the purposes of research and production. What does writing do at web-scale, how does it draw and hold people together, and how might it be leveraged?

I argue that our understanding of knowledge work in hybrid spaces is productively yoked to our ability to accept and manage continual movement, which I explore as a function of distributed and collaborative knowledge flows. Epistemological movement—manifested most often in and through writing work—not only articulates and holds together the material and ephemeral components of hybrid spaces, many of its strongest connections are often found in the interstices, and thus remain invisible for knowledge workers not attendant to the continual movement characteristic of hybrid spaces. Drawing on ambient informatics, my work suggests ways that the knowledge worker can practice ambient research, taking advantage of knowledge flows at the interstices of hybrid spaces.

[ Persistent Backchannels and Social Graphs ]

This a screencast of my brief roundtable talk for the 2010 Conference on College Composition and Communication in Louisville, Kentucky. I was thrilled to be a part of a panel called "(Almost) Live at the Cs: Re-visioning Conference Networks."

This screencast details my opening position statement; I argue that interstitial writing work is the sinew of persistent social graphs--the stuff that holds together and articulates (in the sense of "joining and mediating," following Hall, 1980 and Johnson-Eilola, 2005) complex sociotechnical networks. As always, I welcome feedback and conversation!