ccr 760: on hart-davidson, et al

I like this paper because it’s based on practicality – on specific activities required in specific situations. Maybe it’s the case-study approach and the lens of phronesis that makes the conclusions usable and practical.

Content management as an activity (or “a type of conduct”) is understood, I think, by most practicing technical communicators. What the authors do well in this paper is present two situations in which the activity is shared by a range of workers who create knowledge, arrange information and make texts. It is this common decentralized activity that makes it extremely difficult to get a “culture of content management” to stick. It’s the problem of herding cats – cats that have their own thoughts (and competencies) regarding the ways information is created, published, and distributed.

In some ways, I think the authors’ conclusions have already been taken up by CMS developers – particularly by web content management system developers. Allowing users to “become more than just consumers, but also actual creators, editors, and manipulators of content" (26) is exactly what allows an organization to create and shape a culture of content (see Justin’s comments below for a great example). This is the empowering activity (phronesis) that allows CMS users to respond to highly contextualized real world situations that require specific work (world?) experiences.

In terms of actionable items based on lesson learned in both case studies, the authors give us a space in which to ask content-specific questions that do not necessarily shift the authority of meaning making solely to the technical communicator. Similarly, the authors ground their conclusions on an honest assessment of their own consulting activities: "But for many other organizations, writing practices are not so obvious and nowhere near the list of mission-critical activities. This means that our expertise, too, is off the radar screen. This is why it is true, we would argue, that while the moment of coming to content management may well give us an opportunity to prove ourselves valuable, we also need to be careful to develop sustainable ways of coming to content management that can make writing work visible and accountable as part of an organization’s thinking" (32). If you’ve had a chance to meet and listen to Bill Hart-Davidson, you’d recognize his voice and pragmatism in the preceding passage.

760: on pullman and gu

Of course I should have read the introduction to the special issue before diving into any of this week’s essays. I would at least have understood that the guest editors were creating an intentionally text-centric theme in which to consider CMSs and the common practices of technical communicators.

As with Whtimore, I find in the introduction a common hang up with CMSs: “Content management has a direct bearing on our field because a central issue in content management is the role (or a lack thereof) of technical communicators in the process of CMS design and implementation" (2). Maybe I’m just struck by the agency, relevance, and authority the authors are assigning to the technical communicator in the workplace. I realize my experiences are my own and limited to niche software development industries, but they aren't unique or exceptional experiences. I can honestly say that I’ve never worked with a technical writer, editor, or developer who saw themselves as THE SOLE content creators within their organizations.

The foundation of technical communication is cemented by collaboration, cooperation, and communication – synthesizing and shaping. As I understand tech comm, it has never been about the end product. I’ve always seen my efforts “as part of an endless flow of information” (2) – long before CMSs and similar systems began appearing. Have CMSs affected the way in which technical communicators think and practice? Absolutely. But involving technical communicators in the design and development of such systems will not make working in CMS-based environments any less problematic. The CMSs I’ve worked with and implemented were never intended to serve a single group of users –technical communicators. Rather, they were intended specifically to remove the reliance on "documentation specialists" and information gatekeepers – to allow other “symbolic-analytic” workers to perform the work traditionally assigned to technical communicators. If technical communicators are ill-served by CMSs, it is only because they are being de-valued by the machine.

The anger toward the CMS – the machine – is mis-directed and a little disingenuous. Is it necessary in the introduction to note that "CMS implementations have rarely been successful" and to provide financial statistics to support the claim? Trying to justify or argue certain positions using traditional ROI models has never worked for technical communicators. As our “value-add” historical narratives continually show, we have long wrestled with the difficulty of proving a return on investments in what we do and the information products we produce. Trying to make a similar move in a discussion about CMSs is just sloppy. What we need to do is move away from the tired old ROI arguments and explore more current fiduciary theories to IMPROVE our returns on investments in our practice and products. If we are going to treat what we do as business assets (as Pullman and Gu claim), we should find more creative and appropriate ways to consider how to reconcile our practices with all forms of asset capitalization, including the CMS.

wondering about whitmore's frustration

I just came across this sage advice from Hedley Finger. The reference to "pain" during a single-sourcing implementation brought Whitmore's essay into a little better focus. Finger's claim that a good single-sourcing implementation necessitates a "strict hierarchical structure for your documentation" makes Whitmore's visually-spatial CMS authoring environment sound down right tasty. Similarly, Finger's comments about a "strict folder tree structure and naming conventions for files and formats to facilitate batch processing via scripts" makes me want to run out and sign up for the next "Writing Like an Automaton" workshop offered by SkillPath.

But then there's this interesting tidbit from Finger: "This allows us to ramp up a new project quickly and gives the writers and artists a uniform environment in which to work." Ugh. There it is again -- pragmatism in the workplace. Just when you're feeling all scholarly and theoryish, you get slapped with the cold Mackrel that is the life of the practicing technical writer. It's been a while since I've been slapped as such, but I have scars dude. Yeah, I have the scars.

760: on whitmore's metadata and memory

I like Whitmore’s approach to this topic because his argument considers the relationship of classical, big “R” Rhetoric to technical communication. There are plenty of these arguments to be found, but Whitmore’s focus on the canon of memory is interesting in that it exposes another aspect of the non-fixed writing processes of technical communicators.

On the other hand, I find throughout the essay a sort of romantic narrative of the technical communicator – of the technical communicator has sole inventor, creator, manipulator, and producer of texts. While this may have been and continue to be the case in some organizations, by and large technical communicators have been reusing acontextual content and composing in “hypothetically egoless style so that their content could be seamlessly combined with other content” (91) for a long long time. This doesn’t diminish Whitmore’s argument, which I find compelling from a system design perspective.

Whitmore wants to make the CMS a tool that follows or adheres to "the ways in which memory can be enhanced to aid the tactical retrieval of stored knowledge during acts of composing" (95). As he admits in his footnote, some CMS vendors are using methodologies that encourage or allow users to generate custom or unique methods to retrieve and manipulate stored content (memories?) – “to better meet the cognitive needs of writers during composing so that the requirement for specialization [is] avoided” (92).

The “requirement for specialization” is something that stuck with me throughout the essay. Whitmore is coming at this issue from the perspective of the technical communicator – as if only technical communicators are users of these systems. In fact, CMSs are used regularly by a range of workers who actively locate and convert stored information into useful and actionable knowledge. To focus solely on the technical communicator – and to tie the argument into the changing role (economic, social and otherwise) of the technical communicator – fails to recognize the increasingly dynamic and important role CMSs play. They are not simple object brokers from which user guides and training manuals are created. Yes, CMSs do (admittedly) destabilize “traditional notions of authorship and ownership because writers operate at a further remove from their audiences and the information products..." (89-90). But on the shop floor, a machine operator calling a help screen of brokered objects from a CMS is likely not too concerned with “a sense of powerlessness and purposelessness” (90) as the creator of a knowledge product needed to complete a complex task.

Again, to back out to Whitmore’s broader argument, I like his concept of incorporating visual-spatial memory into content management and object brokering systems. We saw a tremendous advantage in data-driven software development with the introduction of 3-dimensional visual-spatial tools, such as OLAP. As Whitmore notes, “In fact, such visualizations would more closely match the three-dimensional metaphors such as that of the cube that other (often higher-status) knowledge workers like data miners and database engineers have employed for quite some time when attempting to visualize the structure of data in relational databases" (103).

There are lot of questions and threads we can follow with this essay: heuristics and metaphor in interface design; non-scientific taxonomies; the traditional tension between information scientists and technical communicators -- all interesting directions to go with this.

760: on wong

This was interesting and a little scary. The FB employee stated that there is this need to delete data because of space and performance issues, but goes on to note they’re snapping data multiple times a day and basically moving it out of the production environment. That still means the data is retained and accessible (and hackable).

And this is just to my point earlier -- people don't get it. They don't know what they're doing out there."...it’s all stored in a database on the backend. Literally everything. Your messages are stored in a database, whether deleted or not. So we can just query the database, and easily look at it without every logging into your account. That’s what most people don’t understand... We track everything. Every photo you view, every person you’re tagged with, every wall-post you make, and so forth."

And again to the point about technology shaping the issue, not end-users: "With Web 2.0, 3.0, where the model is basically get as much information out there as you can. Obviously, someone needs to step back and make sure there is some information privacy here, or at least as much as we can put in place."

So I'm thinking this isn't as complicated an algorithm as it sounds."It’s also messages, file posts, photos you’re tagged in with them, as well as your viewing of their profile and all of that. Essentially, we judge how good of a friend they are to you." Or maybe it is complicated. I hate these computer-geek stereotypes, but this is just funny: "You just can’t talk to these people on a normal level. If you wanted to talk about basketball, talk about graph theory. Then he’d get it. And there are a lot of people like that. But by golly, they can do their jobs."

The ease at which the employee could make altruistic claims of responding to the Iranian crisis in the same breath as talking about global market share and revenue was telling. Iran is a market for Facebook, not a community of people struggling to find global communication channels through which they express free and unfettered political views.

And finally, and most fantastically: "Hence I was able to ditch work, come have two pitchers with you, and I will literally be able to go back and get my work done." Does anyone else see a problem here? Booze Bag Jane goes back to work half-lit with access to 350 million profiles and every iota of data ever captured by FB.

760: on zimmer

I found Zimmer’s 11/08/08 post about Zuckerberg's philosophy of information more compelling than his post on Zuckerberg’s comments regarding FB’s new privacy policies.

I'm struck by this point: FB takes the position that privacy controls (features of the platform) are there for people to use. If people don't understand the controls or know how to use them, that's not FB's fault.
This position, while a bit indignant to some, really identifies a fundamental problem with the use of technology, particularly by Americans. Just yesterday, my CIO related to a small group that the rate of commercial technology adoption in Japan far exceeds that of the United States. One reason cited for Japan's adoption rate is that Japanese end-users are more likely to better understanding of the technology they're using than their American counterparts (apparently the Japanese actually read the manual). This understanding leads to a more rapid exploitation of the technology, in turn creating demand for a better, faster, stronger machine.

For me it's an interesting consideration as we work through this idea of privacy (or lack thereof) in cyberspace. Are the reactions we're working through representative of global concerns, or are they entirely Anglo-centric and an issue only for end-users who don't fully understand what it is they're doing when their tweeting, friending, blinking, and bonking?

As Zimmer notes, "Privacy means something different when we’re in the doctor’s office compared to in the classroom compared to on a social networking website." The problem, as I see it, is getting people to understand the implications of those differences in the contexts of the technologies they use every day.

760: on kirkpatrick

"The age of privacy is over..."

As many of the comments to the article reflect, I think we have to start by identifying the "age" we're talking about and the definition of "privacy" we're working with.

I completely agree with Kirkpatrick's assessment that "Facebook itself is a major agent of social change..." FB's position that, "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people" is anecdotal and sloppy at best.

On the other hand, Kirkpatrick's claim that, "Accessible social networking technology changes communication between people in a way similar to if not as intensely as the introduction of the telephone and the printing press" is a shoddy apples-to-oranges comparison. Privacy in cyberspace is not as simplistic as un-listing your phone number from Yellow Pages.

I think we would all agree that social norms have changed since the advent of the printing press and the telephone. Similarly, technology has changed in ways that draw vast communities of people "closer" together -- in intended and unintended ways. The basic concept of privacy -- of what people want other people to know about them -- has similarly been changed. I don't think, as FB claims, that systems are modified to "reflect what the current social norms are." Quite to the contrary, I think the systems shape and drive many of those norms -- they facilitate the openness and make possible the sharing of information in ways that people are not prepared to deal with.

On a wider scale, I'm a troubled that 8 sentences uttered by a 26 year-old can have such a dramatic impact on the daily activities of 350 million people. Maybe that sounds like crotchety-old-man-speak, but I have similar concerns with the likes of Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs.

760: on dias, et al. worlds apart, part ii

Chapter six begins with the claim: "... we have come to see that rhetorical purpose in workplace settings is in large part institutional rather than individual... and ideological rather than merely communicative" (114). This claim stuck with me as I worked through the case study of social workers’ writing activities at a large hospital. Particularly, how does that claim and the following statement jive with the net worked organization described by Spinuzzi: "The hierarchical structure of organizations creates economic and political semblances that work against shared goals and the continual growth of specialization" (114). In Spinuzzi we observer, I think, just the opposite—net workers constructing documents to fit organizational needs. While these documents (such as the spreadsheet that Fred maintained at Telecorp) could be classified under broad generic categories, they were constructed by individuals to meet specific organizational requirements. If Fred's spreadsheet was developed as a response "to what [was] perceived socially or collectively as sameness in situations," it was unique to his perception but designed to perform a specific organizational function.

Further into the chapter, I was more confused about what possible suggestions the authors could have in regard to teaching writing to undergraduates. In fact, they seem to complicate the problem of teaching writing by not directly addressing how or why we should engage students in genres that promotes particular ways of knowing and acting in complex socio-rhetorical environments. It seems the best we can do is generalize, which brings us back to extremely static and traditional treatments of workplace genres. While genres may be somewhat stable (120-122), I don't know that they're stable enough to teach even as simple documents through which to consider a standard set of requirements, environments, networks, etc. And yet, as I write this I'm thinking about the way I used generic documents to orient engineering students to design and development methodologies.

Dias et al. conclude, "So, although it might well be possible and even desirable to show students copies of workplace texts, and to have practitioners talk to students about the participation in those texts, the lived experience of texts is impossible out of their enactment" (134). Maybe this is why we feel we've done something particularly useful with WRT 407--embedding the writing instruction in such a way as to enact the design and development experience in the academic laboratory. Yes, the writing is shaped by the situatedness of the activity, but it is an activity that the engineers will perform time and again upon leaving the academy.

760: on dias, et al. worlds apart, part i

I like the way the authors present a range of different theories through which to consider two central questions: 1) what are the functions writing performs in the workplace, and 2) how do socio-cultural settings shape writing practices in the workplace?

Throughout the survey of theories and the descriptions/definitions of academic writing, I was asking myself, “If we don’t’ regard university education as preparation for the workplace, then what is university education for? Maybe it’s a definition of the “workplace” that complicates this for me. Yes, “…writing practices in the university do not translate into effective writing within the work setting” (5). Is it the practices or the genres in which these practices are exercised?

With those smaller nagging questions aside, I finished part one with a bigger question: When we teach writing in the university, what are we teaching? Can we address what the writer is doing in the workplace (26) without understanding (or perhaps predicting) the “subject’s orientation and motivation” in different contexts? When we teach writing, are we necessarily “tying the contextual to the social, by seeing texts as ways of doing things with words…” (43)?

“Because writing is acting, it is highly contextualized…” (3). Yes it is, and I think this is the most difficult aspect of teaching workplace writing in the academy – of establishing or creating appropriate contexts in which students write and communicate. “…a full understanding of writers’ processes and products cannot occur without close reference to their place and role in their particular contexts” (9). If what people need to learn is to engage in the activity (28), how do we replicate or create the environments in which those activities occur? Simulated work environments only go so far in the classroom. I’ve yet to see a classroom simulation that replicates the “density and complexity of the intertextual connections within which writers” operate in the workplace (37). It's the "close reference" were we seem to fail in the classroom.

I’m trying to jive this more focused concept of situatedness with the activities of the net worked worker. The socio-economic network is in constant flux, which implies shifting contexts in which net workers perform their activities. How then is it possible to teach contextualized writing when the contexts are always changing relative to the network and the net work? Writing in the workplace is “… regularized but not fixed; fluid, flexible, and dynamic; emerging and evolving in exigency and action; reflecting and incorporating social needs, demands, and structures; and responsive to social interpretation and reinterpretations of necessarily shifting, complex experiences” (23). As we noted in the study of net workers at Telecorp, “…writers rely on situation-specific knowledge in the preparation of texts” (8). The interconnected nature of net work – the cross-disciplinary, non-specialized activities—require “individuals to write as members of a group ... writers often work with others in preparation of texts within a wide variety of co-authoring arrangements…” (9).

One clue to teaching contextualized writing: teaching genre grounded in rhetorical analysis. “…it ties the textual to the social, sees texts as action and texts as in dialogue with each other…” (19). I’ve had this described in less formal ways by a number of writing teachers.

Regarding activity theory and the skills needed of the symbolic-analytic worker—the modern technical communicator: “… it is the subject or subjects who interpret what activity they are involved… the action of reading, depending on the goal, can realize the activity of play, or work, or learning (24-25). Can we substitute any net work activities for “reading” and make the same claim?

760: on spinuzzi chapter 6 and conclusion

Not having read chapters 1 through 4, I found myself making a lot of assumptions about the holes in Spinuzzi’s claims. It wasn’t’ until that back end of chapter 6 and the conclusion that I had a better understanding of his framework. This is a must-read text for any student of comp, rhet, or tech com.

The issues with training identified at Telecorp are, as Spinuzzi notes, typical of most organizations. The field work for the text was conducted in 2000. From my perspective, not much has changed since. Arguably, the same issues have been plaguing organizations for decades. As I noted in my previous post, I find it difficult to tie Spinuzzi’s and others’ work here directly to the “modern” socio-economic network of the information age. “…this was a function of the spliced organization, in which it became important not just to learn, but to identify who to ask…” (186). I had this same problem when I was slinging dough at Mario’s Pizzeria in 1982 – what did I need to know and how would I come to know it? Mario’s was a far cry from Telecorp, but the fundamental issue appears to be the same.

Disconnected learning (training) spread across multiple activities and domains is not unique to organizations that employ knowledge workers. One might argue, using the activity frameworks that Spinuzzi erects, that learning is simply another activity domain to which workers are connected. In fact, there has been a tremendous amount of research on how learning can be embedded into the daily activities of workers.
We would all agree (as Spinuzzi notes) that lifelong learning is a byproduct of a networked economy in which nomadic workers fill hybrid jobs that require them to collaborate across functional areas. Again, I have this sense that this phenomenon is not new – and realize that it being new isn’t really the point. However, it still feels like we’re trying to retrofit something here. Yes, that’s clunky, but I can’t quite but my finger on it. Was there ever a pre-information age production organization that didn’t struggle with “…how to retain and extend the insights of each as we continue to deal with rapidly changing work organizations” (197).

I do feel comfortable assigning Spinuzzi’s project, analysis, and claims to the “symbolic-analytic” worker theme I’m trying to string through the readings. “The vital rhetorical skills that were needed to support them [different functional groups] in a networked environment … were developed and supported informally through opportunistic volunteer mentoring” (194); “…rhetoric is a vital part of net work: net workers have to build turst and alliances, persuade others, negotiate, compromise, and haggle to build shared settlements” (206) and the implications for workers: they become rhetors, time managers, project managers, adaptable, liaisons – human APIs, information aggregators, strategic thinkers.

I also see Spinuzzi’s project fitting in nicely with research that considers documentation (technical, professional, training, etc.) as a built in activity to what workers (knowledge or otherwise) do every day. Through this perspective of the reading, I can see the groundwork to argue for structured information architectures and content management. This is certainly something that Telecorp would have benefited from. In the absence of these types of formal structures you get internal documentation that people develop out of necessity – just like at Telecorp. And yet, this “on the fly” documentation tends to be minimalist, practical, highly procedural, and not wrapped with a lot of unnecessary declarative information. It works, and maybe that’s just the point.

I did find interesting the emphasis on stories that contextualize workers learning within a company. I’ve long been interested in scenario-based instruction as a way to capture stories and narratives. What we’ve found in some of our work is that when a story (scenario) is not fixed and regularly reinforced, the stories morph as readily as textual genres do to be shaped for particular purposes. This, in turn, leads to misinformation and incorrect practices.

760: on spinuzzi chapter 5

Whoa!! That’s some serious field work. I like this text because Spinuzzi is accessible. Without over theorizing, he makes his analysis work because it is grounded in observed activity.

The concept of “net work” complicates some of the calls we worked through last week. For example, if the application of knowledge and information is what characterizes the technological revolution and information capitalism, what are we doing to prepare our students? Are we equipping them to understand, navigate and exploit the new distributed economy? "...negotiation becomes an essential skill" (143). Where are students getting exposed to these new life skills? Can we expect students to “skilled-up” in their humanities courses? I see in Spinuzzi’s analysis a case for rhetorical instruction. "It means making connections and circulating things: texts, money and its many representations, heterogeneous resources, and people. It means bringing different trades and activities into contact: massive influxes of social languages, genres, and chronotypes" (144).

Specific to technical communications, is there an argument to be made that all workers in the socio-technical network are performing the work of technical communication? Across the scenarios that Spinuzzi provides in chapter 5, we see workers in various roles performing the symbolic-analytic activities of trained technical communicators (activities we identified in last week’s readings).

The prominence of "texts" in the net worked organization (or, at the very least, in Telecorp) requires that all workers be symbolic-analytical workers. The net work enables socio-technical networks. Texts, in all of their various genres, function as sets of transformations, helping “to hold together and form dense interconnections” across the network (137). I don’t want to over-simply Spinuzzi’s claim here, but can we not use his argument to support a mandate to immerse writing and rhetorical analysis in the curriculum – any curriculum? “Texts are inscriptions that represent phenomena, belong to genres that construct relatively stable relationships, and function as boundary objects that bridge among different activities" (148). Does that statement not ooze big “R” and little “r” rhetoric with a good dose of Composition?

I realize it was necessary to link the field work and the analysis to broader concepts of economics, production, and the changing nature of work in an increasingly technology-enhanced world. However, in some ways I see the work in the scenarios as not that different from the work one would observe in, say, Thomas Edison’s laboratories during the early part of the 20th century (see Bazerman’s The Languages of Edison’s Light). The flow diagrams Spinuzzi includes in the chapter all seem to illustrate a modular approach to production rather than the net worked activities of sociotechnical network. In fact, the genre ecology diagram on 160 simply seems to illustrate how worker roles are connected through the circulation of common documents. Are we really seeing net work here? I’m certain it’s a perspective and I’ve missed something in the reading, but I’m struggling to see how different the processes and activities in the scenarios differ from the processes and activities of companies dating back well before the information age. What I do see in the scenarios is exactly the type of symbolic-analytic work we discussed last week. Spinuzzi identifies workers and roles with varying illiteracies, competencies, and access to tools and technologies.