waiting on writing

Here's one: Have you ever been so busy writing that you don't have time to stop and write? How about this: Have you ever written so much nothing during the day that you don't feel like writing much of anything at night? Yeah, well that's been me for about two weeks.

My prompt to get to thinking about what I'm writing? Gorton's Ladder of Learning. I saw this model some years ago when I first started looking at technical communication through an instructional design lens. Much of what we do as technical communicators is applied learning theory. This time around, I got to thinking about the ladder in the context of what we're trying to do in online learning environments.

Simply put, Gorton's ladder runs like this from bottom rung to top: Unconscious incompetence, Conscious incompetence, Conscious competence, Unconscious competence. Overlaying these rungs are the situational teaching styles that best suite the capabilities and proficiencies of the learners located at various points on the ladder. For example, a "director" type instructor is appropriate for learners that stand on the Unconscious incompetence and Conscious incompetence rungs. A "coaching" type of instructor is similarly more appropriate for learners that stand on the Conscious incompetence rung and further up on the Conscious competence rung (you get the picture).

In regard to online learning: It seems that learners suited for online instruction stand somewhere on the Conscious incompetence and Conscious competence rungs, taught best by a coaching/supporting type instructor. In regard to mastery of the subject matter, the goal is to move the learner to Unconscious competence with an instructor who can simply facilitate movement through the content.

I know I'm oversimplifying this, but it's kind of a neat way to think about what it is we try to achieve with online learning. If unconscious competence is not an outcome for the course, it's almost always a goal for the instructor.

virtual skills

I've been thinking again about the "s" word in higher education. An associate dean who also manages our workforce development initiatives forwarded and interesting article about 21 century skills requirements in the UK. I'm still not sure why I should particularly care about what the UK is doing in regard to preparing their future workforce, but I'm sure it's not that dramatically different from what we need to do here.

What I keep finding across all this reading is the (almost) tired old gripe about college graduates lacking written communication skills. The added twist is that employers are now associating "written" communication skills with an employee's ability to exploit computer-based communication. By exploit I mean the ability to navigate and create content in a range of computer-based spaces, not necessarily computer-based tools.

While there clearly needs to be a lot of work here at SU on how well we address the communication skills requirement, I'm wondering (in the wake of a recent mini-seminar discussion), how prepared are students before they get to college? Anecdotal observations indicate that college students today are generally more proficient in the Web 2.0 spaces, if only that they are coming into the classroom with some awareness of these spaces. In more than a few cases, they're awareness is greater than their instructors'.

Our challenge -- the challenge of writing instructors -- is to find ways to embed Web 2.0 and the 3.0(?) virtual spaces into our instructional activities. These instructional spaces differ from our traditional writing spaces is that they allow students think about content differently. How differently is something I'm curious about.

Random association: Web 1.0 and recently 2.0 spaces require skills for identifying and aggregating content. Web 3.0 spaces require skills for creating content. And yet, how do those skills differ?

reworking the core

I’m coming back to this idea of a core heuristic – of a basic set of assumptions we come to interfaces with. I seem to remember bumping into this a few years ago working through some text on visual rhetoric. I also think there's something to be co-opted from work that Louise Phelps and Janice Lauer have done in regard to heuristics.

I’ve been working on a small project with SUNY Upstate Medical University. They were looking for someone familiar with Blackboard (they also run the SUNY Learning Network, but the faculty seem to prefer Blackboard). After an initial meeting, they realized they needed someone to do design and development and Blackboard configuration. They have about 200 PPT slides with progress checks in the notes, which are used to supplement an ass-in-seats course on evidence-based medicine. The project: convert the PPTs (the only “content” available for the course, of course) into Blackboard-compatible files.

Phase one was a predictable mess -- but a clean mess, if you know what I mean -- a straight conversion of slides to Dreamweaver-templated HTML. Coursebuilder pop-ups present the progress checks. Lots of white-space. The “modules” are accessed from the Blackboard nav bar. Inter-course nav is a simple Next/Back sequence. Nothing crazy and the only script used is in the progress checks.

We invited six second-year medical interns into a computer lab and had them work through the content, making it clear that the product is far from a complete online course. Without exception, each of the reviewers commented on the inability to “see” where they were within the space of the course. This one point was present in almost all of their feedback, which gets me back to my point.

These reviewers – all well-educated and articulate – were unable to clearly explain what it is they wanted out of the interface. They used words like “file view” and “bookmarking” to explain the inability to located themselves spatially within the course content. It’s a phenomenon that I think is part of this universal heuristic that most users bring to an interface. Maybe it’s our familiarity with book-bound texts and the way we come to use TOCs, indexes, and x-refs within a text. Maybe it’s based on our exposure to directory structures and file relationships in our personal computing. Or maybe it’s just a human requirement to be able to locate oneself within a space – be it a textual, visual, physical, or emotional space. There’s something here that converges with a range of disciplines. Now if I could just (re)focus my efforts on my exams, I might have time to work through this a bit more.

social network cutlure

Sticking with this theme over the last few days... sort of like when you get that stupid pina colada song stuck in your head.

One of our assignments for the social networks mini-seminar is to "consider the culture of social network spaces." I thought I'd start with trying to get a better sense of who is actually using these spaces, aside from the scholars, academics, and crazy people on reality TV shows talking about their MySpace pages.

There are 34 senior engineering students taking WRT 407 this year. On Thursday I asked, by a raising of hands, the following questions (responses included):

Who has a Facebook profile? 9 students
How many check Facebook daily? 2 students
How many check Facebook at least once a month? 4 students (including the two who check daily)
Who has a MySpace page? 3 students
How many check MySpace daily? 1 student
How many check MySpace at least once a month? 2 students (including the one who checks daily)
Who uses other social network spaces? 2 students
Who uses social networking spaces, such as Linkedin? 3 students

I'm not sure what the survey results imply. When I shared with the class that the totals seemed low compared to what I excepted, one of the most promising students in the class said, "We're engineers, what did you expect?"

Now on the surface, that reply was (and is) kind of funny. It's a lot like lawyer jokes: you always laugh at them, but then pause to consider the reality of it. Engineers (and I'm speaking about the computer and electrical engineers I'm most familiar with) are not so much different from other students as they are more serious. I am, of course, making broad generalizations here. But for the most part, the engineers I've worked with over the past five years are focused, serious, and God-awful busy. Maybe it's the same with other pre-professional disciplines.

So my point: Based on my far-from empirical survey of senior engineering students, I can conclude that not all college students are on the grid plugged into social network spaces. And really, that's all I conclude without getting myself into some one-dimensional break-down of personality traits. Maybe there's a dissertation topic in here somewhere?

the "ing" difference

I'm big on clarity when it comes to the terms we use, particularly in professional and technical documentation. It's no wonder that I was exuberant over Madeline's description of the difference between social network spaces and social networking spaces. With appropriate reference to the scary-smart Danah Boyd, here's what Madeline gave us (paraphrased from notes):

A social network space has the following three characteristics: 1) Constructed boundaries understood and recognized by all users; 2) Within the bounded system, the user controls the groups and individuals with which to interact; 3) The user is active within the space, it doesn't count if you're not doing something.

A social networking space is used explicitly to make online (virtual?) connections that will be translated into off-line (non-virtual?) connections.

Mad's description is useful for me because it provides a starting point from which I can consider how these different spaces can be used in online learning situations. My question about virtual/non-virtual is in reaction to something Mad said about how we treat online spaces as "virtual" -- as if the interaction in the spaces is not real. I'm going to delve into that a little later because it bumps up against many of the discussions we have with faculty about the nature of online teaching and learning.

And with that, I'm now officially on Facebook. Yes, woefully late in the game compared to my peers, but there nonetheless... and already wondering about the relative creepiness of it.

human factors II

I’m preparing for another WP mini-seminar; this one regarding social networking and how it can be incorporated into the writing classroom. In re-reading the seminar description, I was feeling a little inadequate. I’ve never used Flickr, tried LinkedIn and thought it was a little goofy, don’t have a MySpace, and never have the time to see what Friendster is all about.

But then I got to thinking about what it is I am doing in regard to these technologies. I’ve spent a fair amount of time considering how to leverage these spaces for distance or online learning. In fact, the AcademHack does a great job of exploring the relationships of these ever-morphing spaces to learning and teaching in general. And in most cases, reading about what others are doing successfully is enough for me to make a decision about a particular type of technology or virtual space in an online course or program we are designing. Can I justify the move by saying it’s the nature of the business and there’s only so much time I can commit?

Here’s the other thing that sort of gets in the way for me: I read all of these experts proclaiming that 12-25 year-olds are the plugged-in generation. People in this age group need these virtual social spaces just like people my age needed the pizzeria or the mall. And while virtual worlds, such as SecondLife and There, are attempting to create some sense of physicality online, the human element is glaringly absent. Maybe I’m limiting myself and my definition of human element. How is online social networking any different from the intertextuality of a novel? For all of my soap-boxing about the importance of textual elements in online spaces, why do I have such a hang-up with social network? And why am I exploring this on a blog - arguably the most prolific, if not the most ubiquitous, of current social networking space?

Regardless of my hang up, I’m certain I’ll learn something useful in the mini-seminar. I always do.