Networked knowledges: Student collaborative digital composing as communicative action

Communication Design Quarterly 2.1 November 2013 33

Networked Knowledges: Student Collaborative Digital Composing as Communicative Action Guiseppe Getto

East Carolina University [email protected]

Abstract

As Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) utilized in workplaces, classrooms, and community organizations continue to proliferate, it follows that the kinds of knowledge necessary to assemble those technologies in order to engage in effective professional communication are becoming increasingly complex. This article details a study conducted of two student teams engaged in a service-learning class in which they were tasked with producing high-quality digital products—a mini-documentary and a simple, but interactive website—for client organizations—an art classroom in a local public school and a mentoring initiative within a local non-profit. The main findings of this study are that students mobilized a variety of resources and created a flexible network of technologies, knowledges, people, and modes of communication in order to address issues pertinent to their clients. In addition, I argue that the most important resource students mobilized was knowledge itself, indicating that one of the most important aspects of digital composing may be in-depth, practical knowledge of technologies, modes, and the genres they involve. Ultimately, the implications of this limited, classroom-based case study are that a situated understanding of how to assemble knowledges for the effective design of communication within a given communication infrastructure may be more important than access to the most cutting-edge modes and technologies, especially when working with resource-poor organizational clients.

34 Communication Design Quarterly 2.1 November 2013

“In a knowledge society, the work of citizenship is knowledge work.”—Jeffrey T. Grabill

As Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) utilized in workplaces and other community spaces continue to proliferate, knowledge workers and engaged citizens face both a crisis and an opportunity in the ways they think about and enact communication in a variety of contexts. As many researchers have noted, this proliferation has created a new flexibility in the organization of communication tasks, knowledge-making, and learning (Bay 2010; Brandt 2005; Graham & Whalen 2008; Spinuzzi 2008). It also follows that such flexibility requires new forms of coordination and collaboration among professional communicators, forms of coordination that can, as Spinuzzi (2007) noted, help “sociotechnical networks hold together and form dense interconnections among and across work activities that have traditionally been separated by temporal, spatial, or disciplinary boundaries” (p. 268). Additionally, these new forms of coordinative work, forged within a slew of ever-changing media, technologies, and social groups, will require their own unique sets of skills, practices, and knowledges.

In order to investigate the impacts of this kind of networked knowledge-making in a classroom setting, I traced the composing processes of two teams of service-learning students engaged in the production of digital projects—a simple, but interactive website and a mini-documentary—for client organizations.1 Research questions centered on the ways students utilized various resources available to them during composing, in the context of the networks of resources they found available:

1. What communicative resources (e.g., familiarity with particular technologies, learning experiences, etc.) did students utilize before enrolling in a service-learning class that requires them to perform digital composing for an external audience?

2. What communicative resources did students utilize during their actual service-learning work, and how did these resources compare to past resources students had used?


To answer these questions, I collected a variety of data, including video-taped observations of student collaborative composing and process documents students produced along the way. Ultimately, I found this research situation to be exceedingly complex, interesting, and educational, both for myself and for my student participants and their clients. As I detail below, however, this research may also hold important implications for the way professional communication educators, researchers, and practitioners think about networked knowledge making.

I begin by detailing my methodology for data collection and analysis, followed by a discussion of specific findings regarding the types of knowledge I was able to classify—technological, modal, and generic. In the interests of space, I focus on describing how students designed communication through knowledge work by using technologies to assemble modes into genres. My goal will be to trace how each team mobilized past knowledge in service of the present communication situation, and how this mobilization impacted each team’s assembly of specific modes and technologies into recognizable genres. I then describe how this research project has served as a pilot for future research into networked knowledge-making within professional organizations. In conclusion, I suggest that design of communication researchers, teachers, students, and practitioners might contribute to local communities by strengthening communication infrastructures through similar kinds of research work, and that this kind of contribution can reflexively instruct us in how professional communicators work to learn in a networked environment.

An Embedded Classroom-Based Case Study of Multimodal Discourse

Because it is difficult to see collaborative knowledge making within a digital composing process, I focused on three main objects of inquiry for the current study: moments of collaboration participants engaged in, modes they utilized during collaboration, and technologies they utilized. My goal was to assemble these research components into an “embedded case study” of each student team’s composing process, as Yin (2009) defines it: a case study that contains multiple units of analysis (p. 50). In addition,


these objects have important precedents in writing process and digital composing literature.

Knievel (2008), for instance, has demonstrated the problems with approaching collaboration with a consensus-based model in mind, advocating instead a messier, more grounded approach to collaborative writing research. Noël and Robert (2004) have made similar claims, arguing that we should not approach empirical studies of collaborative writing with a priori models of successful collaboration that blind us to new ones. A variety of researchers have also demonstrated that multimodal communication, in particular, complicates collaboration processes by introducing new components into these processes, components which inevitably result in new forms of interaction between communicators, modes, technologies, and genres (e.g. Graham & Whalen, 2008; Hull & Nelson, 2005; Jones, 2008; Ranker, 2008).

Thanks to Kressian models of multimodal discourse, however, digital composing researchers have mostly focused on how various modes of expression (e.g., text, video, image, hypertext) become resources for meaning-making within specific writing situations, rather than focusing on the complex social situations in which these modes are mobilized (e.g., Bezemer & Kress, 2008). As Prior (2005) contended, however, these studies have largely relied on a structuralist model of meaning-making that is potentially problematic as a framework for empirical study.

In line with this critique, Prior et al. (2009) argued for a mediated and dialogic approach to multimodal communication, an approach envisioning communication as “distributed over time and space and among people, artifacts, and environments and thus also laminated, as multiple frames or fields coexist in any situated act” (p. 18, emphasis removed). In this vein, empirical studies that focus on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are better precedents for the current study, as they typically contextualize how technology usage is impacted by, and impacts, broader infrastructure (e.g., Slattery, 2007; Whittemore, 2007; Potts, 2009; Spinuzzi, 2009).2

In order to build a case study of knowledge-making processes behind student digital composing that foregrounds the kind of


systems-based thinking Prior argues for, I also employed a methodological approach known as Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA). According to O’Halloran (2011), SF-MDA involves the cross-examination of multiple modes of communication situated in their social contexts. It is predicated on the theory that a given mode of communication affects the delivery of a particular message, even if the same content is represented in different modes. Derived from Halliday (1978) and his theory of social semiotics, SF-MDA focuses on how communicators make meaning via a variety of distinct modes, with a mode defined, as Bezemer and Kress (2008) argued, as a semiotic resource used for the purposes of representing meaning within a specific communication situation (p. 171).

So, at the same time that SF-MDA admittedly begins with a Kressian definition for modes, by cross-referencing multiple modes of communication and how they are impacted by, and impact, the specific social context they are deployed in, SF-MDA lends itself to a more grounded approach to communication, an approach that focuses as much on social systems as on individual modes, as I have claimed elsewhere (Getto & Silva, 2012). Evidence of networked student knowledge making was thus collected and analyzed in a holistic and contextualized fashion in order to ensure modes, technologies, and moments of collaboration were understood as part-and-parcel of the broader communication situation, and thus that the case study of each student team preserved this complexity. I did this by videotaping student interactions so that I could analyze moments of collaboration, technology usage, and the deployment of modes at a granular level, and by collecting documents and preserving them in their original forms for analysis (e.g., HTML, Word, iMovie asset, etc.).

At the same time, this methodology risked data overload—a problem common to strongly-descriptive qualitative studies—as each student team’s writing process was exceedingly complex when observed at a moment-to-moment level. To compensate for this, and because this was teacher research, I negotiated appropriate moments of data collection and observational guidelines with participants before I began data collection, first by conducting a pilot study with a previous class that helped me


understand what moments of data collection were feasible, and then by negotiating moments of data collection with actual participants. Beyond best practices in teacher research, such as those articulated by Ray (1993), this collaborative approach also stems from best practices in ethnographies of writing, such as those articulated by Cushman and Monberg (1998), Horner (2002), and Brown and Dobrin (2004). Encouraging researchers to focus not only on collaboration within and reflection about participant discourses, these thinkers also emphasize how material conditions impact the researcher-participant relationship and, as a result, the usefulness of the knowledge derived from the study.

In other words, my guidelines for observation and data collection were wrought through rhetorical knowledge making with participants, as Ray (1993) would have it, because I thought this was the best way to understand participant communication practices (p. 146). Because I had power over student participants, I foregrounded a different ethos when I turned the camera on. Besides documenting informed consent and class policies indicating that nothing observed during research could affect student grades, I also was careful to work with student schedules as though they were any other kind of participant, and to remind student participants that my observations of them were entirely optional and dependent on their continuing consent to allow me to film their composing lives beyond the classroom.

This complex, iterative design of the study in response to the above exigencies resulted in the following moments of data collection and observational guidelines:

Data Collected

Video-taped interviews with individual students before they had completed any team-based work

Video-taped observations of student collaborative composing sessions and meetings with clients

Final projects and process documents students produced along the way —resulting in forty-four total written documents collected, which ranged from word processor documents to HTML and iMovie files


Short, informal interviews during observation if I was unclear on what I was seeing

A group interview with each student team and their client at the end of the semester, during which I also performed a member check by presenting some edited footage depicting patterns I’d noticed during initial data analysis—approximately thirty total hours of video footage were collected, one quarter of which consisted of initial student interviews before projects began

Observed Groups

Team 4-H consisted of four students—Kirk, Shalin, Emily, and Alex—who were tasked with producing a simple, but interactive website for Dave, a local non-profit leader who ran the 4-H Mentoring Initiative.3 Kirk, Shalin, and Alex had a working knowledge of web design, while Emily described herself as a very proficient web user. I observed this team collaboratively composing and meeting with their client five times for approximately ninety minutes each time over the course of a semester.

Team Eric consisted of three students—Ivory, Val, and Courtney—who were tasked with producing a digital video for Eric, a local art teacher who was interested in showcasing his innovative art projects for other teachers. I observed this team collaboratively composing and meeting with their client eight times for approximately ninety minutes each time over the course of a semester.

Observational Guidelines

Because I was most interested in the social system within which modes, technologies, and collaborative activities were deployed, my focus during any given moment of observation was social interaction. While making sure to document all modes and technologies students utilized during composing, as well as when and how they utilized them, the camera was most frequently pointed at students themselves, in order to record the rich and complex degree of social interplay that occurred during composing and collaboration.


Data analysis was also rhetorical and iterative. Early into my analysis, I realized that the initial objects of inquiry (modes, technologies, and moments of collaboration) were too broad to become final tags for coding. After coding my first snippet of data, I began to differentiate these original tags into several sub-sets depicted below.

After completing analysis of all observational data in this manner, I triangulated patterns that emerged within composing behaviors with patterns in written texts and interviews, mostly by selecting key vignettes from observational footage and trying to make sense of how vignettes compared to interview footage and written products. Through this triangulation, plus member checks conducted during final interviews, knowledge work as communicative action slowly emerged.

Figure 1. Tags for of all coded video data

Name of tag # counted in all video data

% of total tags Tag # %

Prod: MentM 184 19 Col: Sugg 199 21

Prod: MentT 116 12 Col: Quest 78 8

Prod: UseM 23 2 Col: Delib 225 23

Prod: UseT 48 5 Col: Util 52 5

Total 371 39 Total 554 58

Grand total 922

Table Key

Prod: MentM: students mentioned a mode during their production process

Prod: MentT: students mentioned a technology during production

Prod: UseM: students made use of a mode during production


Prod: UseT: students used a technology during production

Col: Sugg: a student made a suggestion regarding the project

Col: Quest: a student asked a question that was actually a tacit suggestion

Col: Delib: a student deliberated with another student by challenging the suggestion of another student

Col: Util: a student utilized a suggestion from another student or their client

As students leveraged meaning-making resources through their team networks in response to client needs, in other words—networks embedded in a larger communication infrastructure—the systemic function of their composing behavior began to emerge. This systemic function is best described as the mobilization of different types of knowledge to produce a digital product useful to their clients. To track this transition from communicative action to communication genre, my analysis had to tie together past knowledge, present knowledge, collaborative behavior, technology usage, usage of modes, and products produced. What follows is an accounting of some of the most important aspects of this student knowledge work, with a focus on how students transitioned from past knowledge to present product.

Many Knowledges and Networks—One Communication Infrastructure

Student participants were placed in a complex communication situation, a situation that impacted, and was impacted by, the available communication infrastructure at Michigan State University and their clients’ organizations. One team’s client, Eric, requested a high-quality digital video of his art students doing a variety of projects that would serve as a showcase to inspire other art teachers as well as material for documentary contests. The other team’s client, Dave, wanted a simple, but interactive website for his mentoring initiative that would enable mentors, mentees, and prospective mentors and mentees, to get up-to-the-minute social media updates. Because of this complexity, and because I thought it


was an essential professional practice, I helped students form teams with one another, teams that would function as composing networks.

From their inception, I foregrounded knowledge as the main tie binding these networks by encouraging students to prioritize which clients for the class they wanted to work with based on which skill sets the partners were looking for, and also by making individual placement decisions based on the sum total of skill sets within prospective student teams. I did this by assigning a “Student Learning Goals Worksheet,” which invited students to take inventory of their technological, writing/research, and social skill sets, and to track their progress in learning new skill sets over the course of the semester (see Appendix A). This worksheet, assigned in conjunction with the first major assignment in the course—a reflective essay on literacies, technologies, and citizenship—would become a benchmark for me to form teams for the third major assignment in the course, the “Community Media Remix” (see Appendix B).

My pedagogical goal throughout the class was to encourage students to engage in what Spinuzzi (2008) called net work, a term that involves the assembly of people and technological components and that attempts to describe the way this work is “enacted, maintained, extended, and transformed; the ways in which knowledge work is strategically and tactically performed in a heavily networked organization” (p. 25). In this case, the simulated ‘heavily networked organization’ was the class itself, as well as the elements of MSU infrastructure and partner organizations that supported the class.

Compared to knowledge-based networks, a communication infrastructure can be defined as the total system of available individuals, sites, networks, modes, genres, knowledges, technologies, and materials, given a particular communication situation, a system that, for Star and Ruhleder (1996) “emerges for people in practice, connected to activities and structures” (p. 112). A communication infrastructure is composed of all the elements that enable communicative work, in other words, including, according to Grabill (2007), standards/conventions, cultural and communal practices, identities, and diverse purposes and needs, as


well as more technological and structural elements such as hard-wired networks, technologies, and information systems (p. 40). Individual student participants could be described as working within their specific networks—nicknamed Team Eric and Team 4-H within the class—networks that were nested within the total system of available communication resources at MSU and client organizations.4

Through observing and analyzing how participants leveraged certain infrastructural elements during their networked composing work, I would ascertain two important findings:

1. Students leveraged specific and identifiable types of knowledge throughout their composing processes in response to this complex communication situation.

2. They did so by making connections between types of knowledge that they had accumulated through past experiences with various modes, technologies, and genres, and new knowledge invented in response to the demands of the current situation.

This student knowledge work, I argue below, can teach us something about how communicators use knowledge during digital composing, especially communicators who must master a significant learning curve during communication work. Student participants used knowledge as a form of communicative action in response to the demands placed on them, in other words. They mobilized past knowledge and invented new knowledge in order to assemble modes, technologies, and genres into products that met the communication needs of their clients.

Mobilizing and Inventing Communicative Knowledge

Student participants entered the research situation with a panoply of knowledges regarding communication technologies, modes, and genres. Though each participant professed a different comfort level with specific resources, each participant was fluent in enough forms of digital communication not to be intimidated by complex tasks like image manipulation, HTML coding, digital video capture, and digital video editing. Throughout interviews, in fact, students displayed an intuitive understanding of complex digital


composing tasks, an understanding that appeared very mundane to them. In the words of Emily, the self-professed least-skilled member of her respective team (Team 4-H):

E: For publishing things like Powerpoint and stuff I was never taught how to do it. I just did it. Like… just… easy…

Me: You just tried it out?

E: Yeah, because we had to do it for some class but I never-no one ever like walked me through it because it’s just so basic.

All students interviewed made similar claims about technology: it was something they could adapt to their needs. Participants had no delusions about tasks they were not capable of doing at their current level of expertise, but they felt confident enough that, given time and effort, they could learn just about any communication technology, mode, or genre.

Such confidence with communication, in addition to the brief histories of technology usage I was able to elicit through interviews, exemplifies a collective repertoire of communicative knowledge for each group dating back years and including long-term immersion with the newest available consumer-grade software, hardware, and devices. These were students who had never wanted for access to technologies they valued, in other words, but for whom levels of familiarity with particular technologies varied significantly. This most likely explains why out of all observed composing sessions and meetings with clients, student interactions were tagged for discussion of technology only 12% of the time, and were tagged for the use of a new technology only 5% of the time. 20% of the time, in comparison, interactions were tagged for discussion of a mode, and if we compare discussion tags to usage tags: students spent nearly five times as much time discussing modes and technologies as they did using them.

This makes sense when we think of student participants as reasonably proficient communicators who have confidence in their technological abilities. At the same time, however, students were asked to negotiate a complex rhetorical situation that heavily


involved a communication infrastructure they were relatively unfamiliar with. Without replicating the analysis of MSU’s available infrastructure by Devoss, Cushman, and Grabill (2005), allow me to summarize some of the key components of this infrastructure that concerns the current discussion:

Individual user-communicators and knowledges: myself, students enrolled in the course, and clients; respective past individual knowledges (modal, technological, generic); individual purposes, value systems, etc.; knowledges embodied by the course itself, which included the availability of and methods of accessing campus computer labs, the MSU wireless network, and the digital video cameras mentioned below; the course’s curriculum and attendant learning goals, homework assignments, major writing assignments, key terms, etc.; preliminary audiences for student projects identified by community partners before the course began.

Networks: the class itself; student teams; client organizations – a mentoring initiative within a local 4H chapter and several grade levels of art classes within a local elementary school; the Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures department at MSU and its attendant standards, requirements, and resources (including digital video cameras available for students to check out).

Sites: computer labs in the MSU library that included a networked computer, a Smartboard, and some software; the classroom the course was taught in, which included a wireless Internet connection, and a technology podium and overhead projector; student dorm rooms that included wireless Internet; other locations on campus that students used to meet with their clients, such as a student eatery, all of which were wireless hotspots; Eric’s art classroom in Okemos Elementary School that included a networked computer and digital video camera as well as Eric’s personal laptop.

Technologies: students’ laptops and installed software, including Dreamweaver and iMovie; the MSU wireless network and a variety of web applications and resources accessible from it (including open source web templates, royalty free music files, and best practices for composing in a variety of digital


genres); Eric’s personal digital video camera and other devices available through the WRAC department, mentioned above.

Within this larger infrastructural framework, student participants would make hundreds of small, moment-to-moment decisions that moved their project in many directions at once, but overall there was a progression toward a finished product, a genre recognizable to both student teams and their clients. Their knowledge work within this infrastructure in many ways resembled the work Spinuzzi (2008) observed during his study of a telecommunications firm. As he summarized, this work is: “deeply interpenetrated, deeply rhizomatic it has multiple, multidirectional information flows. Yes, work may resemble a process… But within the black box, work is performed by assemblages of workers and technologies, assemblages that may not be stable from one incident to the next and in which work may not follow predictable or circumscribed paths” (p. 137).

Likewise, student communicative paths through this infrastructure involved the messy assembly, often through trial and error, of technologies defined as tools used for the production of their projects, as Selber (2004) would have it (p. 40). Further, students assembled technologies by mobilizing past knowledge and inventing new knowledge in response to the demands of the current communication situation, as two of the members of Team Eric did during their initial meeting with their client:5

Courtney: We were gonna do the music and everything—we just wanted to showcase it in kind of more an organized way or do you want it like less organized?

Eric: That’s a good one…[looks at camera] You waiting for an answer? [everyone laughs]

E: I have to think on it…I think that’s kind of cool. Then we can just make up like the little icons like on movies, we’ll have like first, second, third, fourth, and fifth. And they can just click on that movie and go to it. We’ll do that like in iDVD—

C: Like the different chapters—


E: Uh-huh.

C: So it will like play through anyways but you’ll have, if you want to scene select you can like kind of do that [to Val] Can we do that? I mean, I don’t know…

V: Yeah, depending on what, like, editing thing you can make it in like a DVD format. Did you want it on like Youtube? Did you want us to like upload it to Youtube?

E: Probably, yeah. Probably do that kind of thing… You both—you’re going to use a Mac for this?

C: Yeah. We’re going to.

V: Who did you want to see—like, who did you want to be able to see this video?

E: Anybody.

V: Anybody?

E: Yeah, we’ll make it for Youtube, then Channel 21. It’ll be Bob who does our broadcasting—

V: Like for Lansing Public Access?

C: It’s like the local broadcasting?

E: Yep! And then he’ll put it up on TV for like fillers between his shows and stuff.

In the above exchange, students mention tools for producing a video such as Youtube, Macintosh computers, editing software, and iDVD. More importantly, however, they display past knowledge regarding several of these technologies—such as Val, who is aware of how to produce a digital video in DVD format. Students also can be seen here mobilizing this knowledge to meet the demands of the current communication situation, such as when Courtney asks Eric to describe the generic requirements of the video at the beginning of the exchange.

Further, student communicative action involved defining, categorizing, and ultimately assembling various modes of


communication, or as Bezemer and Kress (2008) defined them: resources for making meaning (p. 171). These resources were conceptualized by students as the basic building-blocks of their specific projects, or as the smallest units of meaning that could be manipulated. These modes were also highly dependent not only on past student knowledge of similar communication situations, but also on the identified genre students were composing toward, as exemplified by the following exchange during Team 4-H’s presentation of their initial website draft to their client:

Shalin: This is our website that we made.

Alex: A mock-up… The links, the top thing doesn’t work yet, because, y’know… Nothing works really yet, just because we wanted to show you the basic layout we have so far. Well, it’s pretty simple…

Dave: That’s what I need, pretty simple.

A: Yeah, I don’t know what else to add to it—

D: So, you know, as long as you got those-yep, you got all headers there I was looking at.

A: And like, for the, uh, those buttons, those really wouldn’t be…I feel like there’s a different way to do it so that you could integrate the actual statuses from Facebook and Twitter there. So those are just kind of like placeholders.

D: Gotcha. I like that.

S: Especially Twitter, I know you can have like a running feed or whatever.

D: Sure. Sure.

A: And that would definitely be easier to maintain because then you’re just typing news into Twitter and Facebook than editing this.

In this case, Facebook and Twitter updates were tagged as modes because they were treated as basic resources for making meaning within the social media-infused website students were creating. Alex mentions the ‘actual statuses’ that viewers of the website


would see as opposed to Facebook and Twitter, the tools for delivering those statuses to the website and its audience. Here he is displaying both a past knowledge of the ways users navigate social media websites, and is addressing this knowledge to Dave’s need to update website visitors from the site’s landing page.

This probabilistic form of knowledge-making indicates that students were leveraging what Lee (2007), following several others, has called “perceived affordances,” a term grounded in the belief that “text-making practices are not determined by what the resources naturally offer but are shaped by how people perceive what various representational resources can or cannot do for them” (p. 227). In each team’s process, in other words, there was significant evidence that students were using their perception of available resources within the broader communication infrastructure to mobilize specific resources in relation to their client’s needs. There was a constant tension between infrastructural, communicative, and moment-to-moment demands that participants navigated with surprising fluency.

Iterating Toward Genres

Each observed composing session, discussion, and product produced revealed complex moments of collaboration, meaning-making, and tool usage, but as students mobilized past knowledge in order to assemble modes and technologies at a moment-to-moment level, they also began to classify these assemblages as recognizable genres. Alex’s process document from Project #3 exemplifies this process (see Appendix C for full document):

At first my group thought that the first template we had chosen was the best in terms of usability and looks. But after getting accustomed to it, it was found to be complicated and not user-friendly. Specifically, the navigation from page to page was a little confusing to set up. There was a navigation bar on top, a navigation drop bar on top, and then another navigation section on the left. The way the example was presented had different things in each navigation area, but I don't think that would have worked with Dave's preference for simplicity.


As Devitt (2004) contended, such a rhizomatic composing process is an argument for a more situational consideration of genre. As she argues:

people construct genre through situation and situation through genre; their relationship is reciprocal and dynamic. If genre responds to recurring situation, then a particular text’s reflection of genre reflects that genre’s situation. Thus the act of constructing the genre—of classifying a text as similar to other texts—is also the act of constructing the situation. (p. 21)

I saw evidence of student knowledge-making, in other words, when students made communicative choices by using technologies to assemble modes into genres, choices that were responsive to their growing understanding of the type of digital project they were working on and the social networks and overall communication situation they saw that project as part of.

All told, each team would assemble a sizable amount of resources in service of their projects:

Modes and technologies Team Eric utilized during the composition of their “Mini-documentary”

o Modes: Shots, camera angles, video footage, transitions, audio snippets, snippets of iTunes songs, snippets of royalty-free songs, photographs of art projects, text.

o Technologies: iMovie, iTunes, Eric’s video camera, WRAC video camera, library computer labs with Smartboards, various websites such as those that made royalty-free music available, individual student laptops, wired and wireless Internet connections.

Modes and technologies Team 4-H utilized during the composition of their “Splash page”

o Modes: Tweets, hyperlinks, text, colors, the 4-H logo, the 4-H Mentoring Initiative mission statement.

o Technologies: HTML, open-source website templates that were available for download, Dreamweaver, Twitter, library computer labs with Smartboards, various websites


such as those that made free website templates available for download, individual student laptops, wired and wireless Internet connections.

Certainly, there were a variety of other resources students encountered and considered while composing within the broader infrastructure of MSU and their clients’ organizations, but the above were the resources that stuck, that became tools to produce—or components of—their final genres (see Appendix D for final versions of these genres).

Again, this knowledge-making and resource-assemblage was iterative and rhizomatic, or was filled with stops and starts, setbacks, decisions that led to failure, and the inclusion and exclusion of various resources. Technological, modal, and generic affordances were perceived simultaneously by student teams, in other words, though often by different individual members at different times. During composing sessions with Team 4-H, for instance, all four members were most often engaged in some kind of related but separate activity, activities that ranged from revising HTML code in order to alter an open source web template to Googling technological problems they were encountering to making over-the-shoulder suggestions while someone else composed. 4-H also engaged in significant asynchronous forms of coordination by frequently communicating over e-mail between meetings.

At their first real composing session outside class, as Alex’s above process document exemplifies, the team developed and classified one mock-up as meeting generic specifications for their client’s simple website or “splash page,” only to later throw out this mock-up. Using the knowledge gleaned from this composing session, Alex, the identified communications person of the group—or person charged with being the liaison between the team and their client—would throw together another mockup based on another template he found while browsing the Internet, seeking group approval only after he had something to show the rest of the team. With minor refinements wrought through meetings with their client, Dave—who preferred a very hands-off approach to the project—and the composing of a sustainability guide to aid their client in publishing and maintaining the site, Team 4-H’s


composing process reached its climax with Alex’s design of that second mock-up, a mock-up that would strongly determine their final design (see Appendix F for student sustainability guides).

Like Team 4-H’s workflow, Team Eric’s composing process was similarly messy, but Team Eric’s knowledge work was also very different in its overall shape of iteration. Team Eric’s process was less coordinated and more collaborative, for instance, by which I mean that Team Eric worked together more, often in the same room, and work was shared more evenly. They relied less on e-mail and other asynchronous forms of communication, and instead preferred to talk in class or with Eric in person. They also typically focused on one process at a time, as a group, rather than breaking off into a lot of different tasks. This probably had much to do with the fact that their identified genre was a “mini-documentary” which required them to shoot several hours of footage of Eric’s art classroom. Probably also because of this form of primary interaction, they discussed the project with their client more often and elicited more feedback from him.

In addition, the modes, technologies, and generic elements they composed with were radically different than those used by Team 4-H, and required a prolonged period of capturing, uploading, editing, and exporting/rendering digital video and photographs. In two composing sessions, the team created a rough draft of their project that they felt met Eric’s needs and wants. They showed it to him and he had few suggestions. Despite this, team members asked him several follow-up questions about where to go next. This is the pattern that would continue for the remainder of this group’s composing process: students utilized Eric’s knowledge of digital video and his preferences as a resource that they mobilized in relation to other resources they found, including Val’s understanding of video production from her experience producing videos for public broadcasting in high school, and the knowledge that Courtney and Ivory possessed concerning iMovie, a technology Val had never used.

Given these overall similar, but in many ways dissimilar, communicative paths through the same basic infrastructure, it is arguable that as networks of communicators do work, leveraging available resources in order to accomplish specific communicative


tasks, this communicative action affects infrastructures in various ways, sometimes making interconnections between resources within an infrastructure stronger or weaker depending on how these resources are leveraged. It is also interesting that student net work, as depicted above, though admittedly more weakly linked than more engaged and durable forms of net work, roughly followed the same workflow patterns of professional communicators working in industry, such as those Spinuzzi (2008) studied. This seems to imply, as I mention in closing below, that placing students and other communicators who need to work-to-learn through a complex communication task into relatively loosely-structured social networks, networks where communicators are forced to find their own path through available infrastructure, may be the best way to kick-start innovation and invention.

Implications and Future Research Directions

Student participants successfully navigated a communicatively, technologically, and infrastructurally complex situation, in that they produced projects that met or even exceeded the expectations of their clients. They did this by leveraging past knowledge, as well as modes, technologies, and genres to meet the demands of the current communication situation. Further, this limited, classroom-based case study implies that a situated understanding of how to assemble knowledges for the effective design of communication within a given communication infrastructure may be more important than access to the most cutting-edge modes and technologies, especially when working with resource-poor organizational clients.

It also indicates that it is difficult to account for the types of learning resources students and other pre-professionals will need from moment to moment. The students studied displayed a high aptitude for this type of knowledge work, and a willingness to work hard to make connections between past knowledge and knowledge required within the communication situation I placed them in. One question this study raises is what would happen if the opposite were true: would pre-professional communicators who were not as motivated to succeed rise to the occasion in such a loosely-structured environment? Or would they require more


direct instruction in how to manage their workflow? Such questions seem to call for an ethically dubious empirical study of student failure, a study that would be as difficult to scaffold as it would be to conduct in good faith, given the ethics of teacher research.

Instead, I have turned to organizational studies of clients who partner with my service-learning classes. When I originally began the above study, I was very concerned with the impacts student knowledge-making would have on client organizational infrastructures. Would these infrastructures be improved through student communicative action? Or would clients just become dependent on outside help? I quickly discovered that the data collection requirements of studying a complex student-client communication workflow made it impossible to focus simultaneously on workflow taking place within student teams and client organizations, however. In order to answer these and other questions, I have begun case studies on several organizational clients – at time of writing these include a science research center and museum that has asked for help with content strategy for their website, and a technical writing firm that maintains a free, wiki-based warehouse of technical documentation and has asked students to create documentation for repairing broken devices. It is my hope that these case studies, which utilize the same basic methodology for data collection and analysis, will teach me as much about successful networked knowledge-making as they will about why a given project does or doesn’t succeed.

Anecdotally, the majority of knowledge-intensive service-learning projects I have completed over the years have been at least moderately successful, resulting in positive impacts on client knowledge of the specific genres students worked in, and longer-term opportunities for collaboration between myself, future students, and the organization. A minority of the time, projects seemed to fall flat and were completely rejected by client organizations. If I could make an educated guess as to the main mitigating factor affecting the relative success or failure of a knowledge product, and its attendant knowledge-making process, I think it has something to do with the strength of connection between student knowledge-making practices and those taking


place within client organizations. My hypothesis, going into these organizational studies, is that when these knowledge-making practices closely mirror each other student projects will have more impact, and that projects will have less impact when practices are strongly dissimilar.

In any case, my focus remains on networked knowledges themselves, rather than on the modes and technologies communicators utilize via these knowledges. Based on the above findings and my anecdotal experiences teaching knowledge work as a form of service learning, from courses in introductory composition to web authoring to technical writing, I have come to believe that knowledge itself is one of the most important, if not the most important, resource for effective communication design. Though I do not have empirical findings on student or client knowledge-making failure, yet, my experiences with the occasional, and probably inevitable, failures both within student teams and between teams and their clients seem to have less to do with basic modal or technological proficiency than they do with communicators’ conceptualization of the entire situation. When communicators understand the purpose, audience, and overall context for a given knowledge-making practice and product, they are much more likely to be motivated to learn any proficiencies required for effectiveness. I’ve learned from my students and clients, in other words, that it’s important not to put basic proficiencies before overall knowledge context when teaching effective communication design.

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End Notes

1 Though listed as a composition course, the creators of the course—including myself and some colleagues at Michigan State University—designed it to be a feeder for our department’s Professional Writing program, and thus to meet the composition program’s requirements by introducing students to genres favored in professional writing, such as an impact/needs assessment that included qualitative research of a given client organization’s target audience, high-quality digital projects, and documentation on how to maintain the digital projects students created. More about the course itself can be found here: https://www.msu.edu/~rivaitje/WRA135Video1stDayS10.mov.

2 It should be noted that Graham and Whalen (2008) are a notable exception to this as researchers who focused mostly on mode and genre but also foregrounded the complexity of the situation they were investigating.

3 During the consent process, all participants indicated they wanted their real first names used as identifiers in write-ups.

4 For a complete analysis of MSU’s infrastructure, see Devoss, Cushman, and Grabill (2005).

5 The third member, Ivory, had a scheduling conflict and wasn’t available to attend the first meeting.

Documents

Networked knowledges: Student collaborative digital composing as communicative action