I’ve been teaching graduate communications courses for the past year. Evolved from a standard writing course, I teach students to think of communication beyond the page. The texts for the course are Duarte’s (2008) slide:ology and Zander & Zander’s (2000) The Art of Possibility. But, where’s the writing textbook, you may ask? It’s a controversial choice and initially a hard sell to both students and writing colleagues, but slide:ology is my choice for a graduate communications textbook. Like most Ph.Ds, I spent 4 years in undergrad and 6+ in graduate school writing many, many papers and no one ever told me to prioritize my message. As students, we get so caught up in demonstrating proficiency and competence and as teachers, we get so mired in correctness of method and form, that we often forget to consider audience need and our main communication purpose.
My students, of course, take it for granted because no matter what the lesson topic, my first questions for them are:
who is your audience?
what is your message?
A simple and obvious concept once it’s made explicit, but one that’s often forgotten in graduate and undergraduate writing. I know many students who desperately wish their advisors/committee members would comment on their ideas, rather than their grammar. Writing is such a challenging skill to cultivate and often the reviewers have their own hang-ups, which end up as feedback (or no feedback) on graduate papers. Duarte’s (2008) book inspired me to pay attention to the ideas in student work first and then focus on writing/presentation choices as a way to clearly convey these ideas.
During the first class, I talk about the importance of a main message, and then we discuss their target audience. I use an audience needs map from the Duarte Design slide:ology Workshop (which I highly recommend!) which prompts students to answer a series of questions about their audience. In graduate school, I had a vague sense of my audience–professors, people with more experience in the field–but I never really asked myself, why are they attending my presentation? or why are they reading my paper/article? As undergraduates, we often write for an audience of 1, the teacher, who we assume is familiar with the material and is reading because he or she has to. We’re not trying to interest them, we’re not trying to compel them to keep reading. Thus, our writing is often dead.
So, I started thinking about my audience. Why do they sacrifice their lunch hour to attend my brownbag talk? Why do they sacrifice weekends and vacation times to read my writing? What are they looking for? What are they hoping to find? Maybe the answer is still partially because they have to, but I think our readers are expecting more. At the graduate level, professors and other colleagues read our work because they are interested in the topic and maybe because they’re looking for something new…a twist on an old idea, a unique approach…whatever it is, they’re spending time on our writing in the midst of many demands on their time. They’re looking for our message, right? Oftentimes, student writing is lacking just that.
I tell my Environmental Science graduate students to write for a tired executive reading on a plane. The executive is deciding between reading the policy brief, completing more pressing work, sleeping, or watching an in-flight movie. Within a couple minutes, maybe even seconds, he or she is going to decide to skip the reading or turn to the next page. I don’t encourage my students to be sensational, but simply compelling.
Duarte’s book is an ideal resource for a graduate communications course because it guides audience analysis and offers strategies for engagement. I believe it’s possible, with practice, to learn to be compelling. My second text, Zander & Zander’s (2000) The Art of Possibility further complements the unusual focus of this course. I’m teaching my students to represent their data beyond graphs and charts, to communicate their message in beautifully connected paragraphs instead of following a formula, so I need a text that opens them up and makes them feel, well, possible.
My students affectionately call it “the little yellow book” and the day we talk about the assigned reading from it, I can usually tell who has read it, because they’re grinning. This past quarter, we discussed it mid-way through the course and I noticed a marked shift in our interaction: everyone was talking! Zander and Zander’s “lead from any chair” concept had certainly resonated with them. They seemed to finally get why I ask each of them to lead a discussion, post to our course blog, and share their writing materials…because they have a valuable and necessary contribution to make to our learning process. After this class, students become dependably more participative.
Of course, with any course, there’s missteps and material that doesn’t quite catch on, but for the most part, I find the course fulfilling to teach and receive overwhelmingly positive feedback from the students. University-level writing instruction needs to provide more than static writing assignments — we need to provide students with a strong understanding of their responsibilities as communicators and guide them in developing a toolkit that will allow them to be flexible in response to communication tasks in the workplace and life generally.
I just read an interesting article that reminded me of another interesting article that presented a counter viewpoint, but I can’t find it. I don’t remember the title or author. I returned to the site where I initially found a link to the article, a compiler-type site, and the listing is no longer available. All I remember is that it was a researcher’s reflection of spending a summer in the stacks at the Bodleian Library trying to unravel a mystery in French history. Without my remembering any specifics, the terms listed in the previous sentence are too broad to yield anything useful. I’ve searched the usual places, desktop folders where I put interesting articles, stacks of papers beside my desk, my del.iciou.us tags, even the download folders on the various computers I use. I likely read it in July and it is now October, so my browser’s history files are also of no use. In moments like this, I think of Vannevar Bush’s prescient memex, which for the most part has been realized by the Web, but still lacks trails, recorded paths that can lead us through our thought processes as we moved through online information.
While the back button, history function, tagging, and downloads certainly help, they are limited. The trails function described by Bush would re-create the serendipitous moment in which, by moving between certain contents, we understood, discovered, realized some new knowledge (see page 7 of his 1945 article, “As We May Think”). Interestingly, his description of the state of information warranting the memex is applicable post-Web:
“The prime action of use is selection, and here we are halting indeed. There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene.”
Perhaps now information is not encased within stone walls, but I often find information based on search engine results, recommendations from friends, or recommendations from compiler-based websites. Often, these recommendations are ethereal, disappearing if I don’t remember the exact search terms, forget to tag it, or delete the e-mail. True, much of this is a user problem, but my struggles raise interesting concerns, (1) although information is certainly more accessible, are we finding the highest quality information, or simply the most popular? and (2) can trails be created that preserve our search and find processes?
We have an interesting relationship. Every time I want to leave, something pulls me back. Mostly, it’s our shared network of friends, the memories, and the promise of more to come. The truth is, I can’t pull myself away, as much as I’d like to.
Facebook is truly a seductive distraction. Psychologically, it’s interesting. If five years ago, someone said I’d trust a website enough to list most of my friends, announce where I’m traveling, and even post pictures, I wouldn’t have believed them. And yet I do, nearly daily. I’ve watched friends who began with noble resistance get sucked in. When it started out as just a place for college students, I thought it would be a fun diversion while I was in graduate school. Actually, I convinced myself that as someone who studies how people process information on the Internet, that I should really use it for work. I started out carefully trying to maintain professional distance; now, I have to stop myself from posting anything too personal.
Last year, Facebook opened up to everyone, no more need for a .edu address. At first, I didn’t want to friend my offline friends because I didn’t want to mix communities. Plus, Facebook was a place to stay in touch with people doing similar research, a place I could dip into when I wanted inspiration, say, from a few friends who always post interesting articles.
Back in April, I received a friend request from my mother-in-law. I didn’t respond, initially. I’m very close with my mother-in-law and she certainly knows more about my daily life than the majority of my FB friends, but I felt like it would be a violation of my privacy. Privacy? Facebook? It’s almost an oxymoron. People who really believe in privacy aren’t on Facebook. The rest of us are broadcasting the exciting minutae of our daily lives, collecting friends, posting pictures…sure, we have some control, but for the most part, we’re on Facebook to share not protect information. I accepted the friend request and am glad I did.
I know these aren’t new questions, but in what ways does Facebook mediate our friendships? I remember when talking on the phone was my preferred way to stay in touch with friends. It mediated communication, too, limiting the way we communicated (not face-to-face), when we communicated, where we communicated. Facebook seems different, though, because there seems to be more identity construction around the friendship given the very public space and the increase in loose ties (people we would probably never call to discuss our day, or even the weather for that matter) — first, we decide whether or not to friend each other, then we decide to what extent we are friends — full profile, limited? Are we close enough to comment on each other’s status? Do we use chat and e-mail to stay in touch, too, or are we just an extra in the friend count? Are we even interested in the other person’s status updates, or have we hidden them? We have a new way of communicating with each other, “poke” seems to have gone away, but we can “like” and “unlike” what each other posts, like we’re voting, or just supporting.
Do we feel more connected because of Facebook? A few months ago, an article in Adbusters cited Virginie Despentes, author of King Kong Theory, as saying “consuming pornography does not lead to more sex, it leads to more porn.” Is Facebook the same?
Does Facebook lead to more friends/social encounters or more Facebook? I’m still pondering the answer, though I suspect it’s the latter, or maybe that the two have become enmeshed. In the meantime, much as I attempt Facebook fasts, I enjoy keeping in touch with my geographically-dispersed friends too much to leave…for now.
I was reading the twitter transcripts from a recent conference and it struck me that the most prolific tweeters weren’t necessarily contributing the most meaningful insights to the backchannel conversation. In fact, given the audience, those with the most to contribute seemed to be relatively quiet…perhaps they were participating in a live discussion, or maybe paying attention to the developing argument before posting an opinion. Yet the prolific tweeters were conferred an authority by other tweeters that seemed solely based on their volume of postings. I’m concerned that as we move more quickly toward information on demand, the fastest typist wins. This is not to say that the fastest typist doesn’t have a contribution to make, or that in some cases the fastest typist should win, but I worry, with so much available, we may stop at the fluff before reaching the substantive information.
Is Twitter providing a venue for superficial lamentations, or is it encouraging meaningful dialogue? The brevity of posts suggests the former. In fact, the brevity combined with the instancy of tweets seems to encourage knee-jerk emotional responses. Although I can think of many profound one-liners (Thoreau and Emerson come to mind), most of the Tweets I’ve seen are more of the “I’m bored” or “this speaker is clueless” variety: possibly interesting to a few, but not particularly inspiring. In the case of the recent conference, much of what was posted in the morning felt more like teen angst than provocative comment. Some attendees posed interesting questions that sparked meaningful dialogue, but much of it was dominated by posturing or rants about lacks in the presentations.
Yesterday, while waiting for a flight in the Denver airport, I picked up a Barron’s article, but didn’t get a chance to finish it. This morning, I figured I’d quickly access it through the UCSB Library and finish reading it. I want to share my convoluted journey of information access and suggest solutions.
The article, “Glad Men,” appeared in Barron’s Magazine. My first problem was that I didn’t know the actual title of the publication, so for searching, I tried “Barron’s,” with and without the apostrophe, and “Barron’s Magazine.” I think there’s more to the title, but going to their website for a quick check didn’t help…the image of the magazine cover is small enough to not be able to read the masthead and clicking on the picture of the cover just links to text, text that you need a subscription to read.
So, first I tried our “Electronic Journals” catalog, then Melvyl, then Pegasus. I did this loop a few times, trying different publication titles. Then, I went into our “Electronic Indexes & Databases” catalog to access Proquest, where I spent about five minutes with no luck. As a last resort, I signed onto an online chat with a librarian, who did the same loop with no luck — my hope was that with her extensive knowledge of library cataloguing, that she would wave a magic wand and then explain to me what I missed. After five minutes, no luck. I was starting to think that the article wasn’t worth the time to retrieve it, but now it was more of a quest.
Frustrated that the librarian couldn’t help me, I switched tactics and searched on the article title, starting in Melvyl and moving to Pegasus. This search brought me to that magic page in the library search where you can enter all of the information you know about the article and it searches for you. Why can’t this page be our start page? It found the article in one of the Dow Jones…something…databases and after a few more clicks, I had my article.
Granted, the entire process took about 25 minutes, which is still exponentially faster than pre-Internet, but why was it so convoluted? Part of the problem, of course, rests with me, the user. I could have started with the article title instead of trying to track down the publication. A larger problem, however, is that none of the library catalogs talk to each other. This isn’t just a UCSB problem, this lack of communication seems pervasive [...those of you with more experience in library databases please weigh in]. Each time I changed my search term, I had to re-visit the individual catalogs that may hold my data. More concerning, is that the librarian who tried to help me seemed limited by the basic search attempts that they teach us in those excessively boring library skills workshops.
So, in the end, why did I find it when the librarian couldn’t? I think because I spend more time confused in the stacks than she does. Throughout my academic career, I’ve spent a lot of time trying and re-trying searches, checking different databases, and basically experiencing many failed attempts before finally locating my information target. I’ve always felt as though I’m missing some crucial training or logical understanding of the library information access system, but the truth is, it really doesn’t make sense. Why, for example, do I need to conduct separate searches for books than newspapers, and another one for journal articles? What if I’m not sure if Barron’s, though titled as a magazine, is actually categorized as a newspaper?
I realize that part of the problem with privately held content is that many different groups own it, which is why access is limited to whatever database has permissions/subscription, but there needs to be a better way. We know that filtering the massive amounts of information available is our next grand technological challenge, so how are the libraries addressing it? Although I’m accustomed to the lightning-fast search results Google delivers, in the case of library research, I wouldn’t mind if the results took more time [say, 5 minutes], if they streamlined my search. What if, on the main page of the library website, we could enter all of the information we knew about a given article and bots could hit all of the possible catalogs to which the library subscribed? I don’t know if this would violate subscription permissions or if it’s technically possible given the different databases involved, but it would certainly improve access to research.
Reflecting on my process this morning, I couldn’t help wondering, if I’m having trouble finding information, and my research focus is literacy and online information processing, how do our undergraduates fare, who have much less experience? I wonder how many students abandon their searches in frustration after unsuccessfully grappling with the library’s convoluted search system? Is it possible to streamline our library’s search system, combining all databases under a single search umbrella?
Motoko Rich’s latest article in her Future of Reading series for the New York Times, “A New Assignment: Pick Books You Like,” describes Lynne McNeill’s use of reading workshops in her junior high classroom. Instead of reading assigned texts, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, McNeill encourages students to select their own books and present them to the class. Of course, an advantage to this approach is that students are more likely to be interested in, and therefore motivated to read, texts they choose. Proponents say that this positive experience could encourage a habit of life-long reading. Other supporters say at least students are reading, even if the quality of the books are lower. People who challenge this approach are concerned that students will lack a shared literacy about reading — if each member of the class is reading a different book, it’s difficult to discuss specific constructs of literature, for example, irony, or develop a shared understanding of themes such as man vs. nature.
But at least they’re reading.
For now, I’m not going to argue that students are reading now more than ever before because the majority of their communication is textual. Reading, like any skill, is developed over time, through practice. So, while the content of their reading may not compare to the literary canons, it still contributes to their overall literacy. Should we dumb down classroom texts to make reading itself more attractive?
Part I: Reading
First, are these readings dumbed down? McNeill uses poetry in class presumably to teach literary conventions and to develop a shared vocabulary for discussing the books students are reading. Potentially problematic is that short pieces of literature are used to illustrate concepts of structure and theme, rather than sustained discussion of longer texts. Part of the reward of struggling through a classic work is learning bits along the way, usually about storytelling, themes, and often historical context. Poems certainly serve a storytelling function, but lack the rich narratives of longer works.
Another advantage to assigning difficult texts is the side benefit of making unassigned texts more attractive. In Lev Grossman’s “Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard” article in the Wall Street Journal, he addresses the sexiness of popular novels. Grossman describes this “literature of pleasure” as evolving from the supermarket racks — delicious storylines of mystery, adventure, and romance that feel like guilty pleasures to read.
Indeed, as Matt Groening and Scott McCloud will attest, there is a certain satisfaction in reading texts perceived as subversive — for example, sneaking the comic book into the classroom. In fact, comic book authors are a compelling example of people who developed a life-long reading habit in spite of assigned canonical readings. Perhaps if they had been allowed to read comic books in class instead of Great Expectations, they may have been more engaged in the classroom, but it’s precisely this feeling of disenfranchisement that makes comic book reading so attractive. Would Bart Simpson exist if Groening had a more positive schooling experience? How did the canonical texts, or discussions of them, contribute to his storytelling skills?
Reading difficult texts also teaches us something about the rewards of doing so. Generally, when it comes to school work, the easy path is more attracitve. So, when asked to choose between a selection from the “Twilight” series or Lord of the Flies, students will likely pick the easier text. Reading, like other aspects of schooling, such as sports and math, teaches students life-long lessons. Finishing a difficult text, much like hitting your first home run, not being selected for a team, successfully applying an algebraic formula are more than rites of passage, they are building blocks of character. Through these experiences, students learn about themselves, they learn to overcome obstacles, they discover how to deal with frustration or even failure. They make decisions about how, in the future, they will persevere or retreat. Sure, classical literature is at times unattractive, and as a teacher, I would never intentionally inflict un-fun moments into the learning experience, but much of any training, whether it’s to be an athlete, musician, or scholar has its un-fun moments. Maybe, for example, soccer players shouldn’t have to run laps during practice, but should instead do an activity that is more preferable to them. Perhaps musicians shouldn’t practice at all, because it’s unpleasant.
Over the past week, a few articles have caught my attention, all in one way or another addressing the future of reading. What if the future of reading isn’t so different from the present? Sure, in the future we may be floating in our anti-gravity reading rooms and whatever we’re reading will light up and talk to us, but I’m not convinced that the cognitive process will be very different. Most discussions of the future of reading are concerned about the content delivery, which matters, but isn’t as important as how we comprehend the content.
As we’ve seen with the Internet, although access to information has increased, the cognitive challenges it presents — locating information, evaluating sources, integrating concepts into a new understanding — are not very different from those of traditional literacy. Certainly the amount of information and the speed with which we access it has increased, and this most definitely places a heavier load on our cognitive process. However, literacy, whether practiced online or offline, requires certain cognitive skills that seem to transcend time and medium.
So, if my dream of living like the Jetsons is ever fulfilled, I will likely still be reading left to right, still struggle with synthesizing concepts, and still need to evaluate the credibility of the source I’m reading.
Online literacy is currently a moving target. Whenever a new online communication tool emerges, it seems that those who study it attempt to re-define literacy practice in terms of the new tool’s features…for example, engagement, participation, dynamic content, data filtering, hyperlinks. True, a moving target is hard to study, but if we know a little about targets and a little about motion, we have a starting point. When I first started my study, I tried to compose a definition of literacy, based on the literature I read. I cast a broad net and studied perspectives from library science, communication, education, educational technology, composition, media studies, computer science, psychology, art, new media, sociology, even geography. What I realized is there are things we know about literacy and how to study it that transcend the medium. We know that learning can be measured using established retention and transfer tests. We also know that literacy practices can be studied using think aloud protocols and writing assessments. While these methods are neither infallible nor comprehensive, they provide a starting point to anchor the target and to understand what it is we’re aiming at. The next step is to test these measures in preliminary experiments by first narrowing the type of literacy practice we wish to study and then leveraging the combined strength of quantitative and qualitative approaches.
The Trouble with Information: How students gather and evaluate online resources.
Intro: Increasingly, university students are required to find and synthesize online resources to complete academic assignments. I’m interested in studying the process students use to complete these assignments…where do they start, what are their priorities, where do they go and how much time do they spend on the search process versus the composing process?
To answer these questions, I compared undergraduate and graduate student performance on a writing task that required them to gather information online and briefly respond to a writing prompt.
Drawing on Flowers and Hayes’ (1981) cognitive model of composition, I am studying the gather, evaluation, and integration processes involved in writing academic texts. I’m using an expert-novice comparison to get at differences in source use (Wineburg, 1991). To cast a broad net, I’m using a combination of established qualitative (Coiro, 2007) and quantitative (Azevedo & Cromley, 2004; Brand-Gruwel, et al., 2005; Holscher & Strube, 2000; Lazonder, 2000; Metzger, Flanagin, & Zwarun, 2003) models of studying online literacy practices. I started my study with two main questions:
1) how do experts and novices differ in their overall process when engaging in an online academic research task?
2) which, if any, of these practices predict the quality of the final product?
I define experts and novices by years spent in school. Ideally, I would like to compare faculty and/or researchers with undergraduates, but for this study, my experts are pre-service teachers (graduates) and my novices are first-week freshman (undergraduates).
I use a mediational model that first examines how the two groups differ and then identifies predictors of high performance.
Method:
data collected during Fall quarter 2007
154 participants
65 experts (TEP students enrolled in Copeland’s “Teaching with Technology” course)
89 novices (first quarter freshmen enrolled in Writing 2 and 2E courses)
Procedure and materials:
Held in Phelps computer labs, each session lasted 70 minutes
Participants were first given pre-questionnaire that included questions about domain knowledge and interest, technical skills, and general demographic information. [show sample]
Participants were then given a prompt and told they had 50 minutes to write a 1-2 page response using information they found online. [show prompt]
During the gathering and composing phase, students were told when they had 30 and 10 minutes remaining.
After students submitted their work, they completed a post-questionnaire which included questions about their process (which sites they used, how they evaluate credibility) as well as follow-up questions about domain knowledge and interest. [show example]
Once students left, log files were collected from each computer. [show example] Log files included information about computer actions: how many sites they visited, how many times they revised their search term, how many times they returned to a site, how many links they followed within sites, and keystrokes (e.g., text entries and copy/paste).
Analysis:
Developed rubric to score student written responses. [show rubric] The main challenge was figuring out how to measure use of source materials, specifically, how to measure critical engagement with these materials. Used a combination of counting (quantitative) and holistic (qualitative) scoring.
Findings in progress
I am in the process of analyzing my data. What do you think will be a difference in the way experts and novices begin their search? My hope was that experts would use a database or at least Google Scholar or Eric Digests to begin their search. My preliminary results show that 82% of the expert participants and 72% of the novices started with Google. Less than five participants in each group started with Wikipedia, Dogpile, or ask. One expert started with Eric and one novice started with Google Scholar.
Furthermore, as I start the paper scoring, I’m finding that a majority of participants in both groups used the top five Google results for their first or second search terms. At first, this finding was a bit disheartening, but then I found that the preliminary differences seem to lie in how each group uses the source. For example, experts tend to consider the implications of the source material rather than simply inserting it into their texts.
Participants in both groups use personal experience and observation, but differ in the ways they use it — a few of the experts evaluate their experience in terms of other source materials, while most of the novices use personal experience/observation to make unsupported generalizations.
Future directions:
–Complete data analysis
–Conduct textual analysis using Pairwise to quantify degree of re-mixing (Jenkins, 2007) occurring in student academic texts (compare student texts with web pages they visited).
–Study usage patterns in non-academic settings: task-specific and recreational browsing among different age groups.
