"I Drank What?" -- A Look at Where We (Might) Have Gone

I just saw a really awesome analogy for what I'm about to try doing here -- Paul Andersen's description of moving from a regular classroom, which is like a schoolbus that all the students get on and the teacher drives everyone to the same place, to a class where everybody gets in their own car and heads out for a rendezvous the teacher has given them a map to. No one is terribly surprised when not everybody shows up at the rendezvous. 


So as the teacher, I'm sitting here in the last week of class wondering, where'd everyone actually go in the journey this course has presented? Most of you have shown up at the rendezvous, but what routes did you take to get here, how did your experiences vary, and how, thus, has your learning varied?  You who are reading this have all shown up: what do you actually know, now? I'm the bus driver, but since you weren't really on the bus, I dunno.  I'll find out as I read the reflective work in your final exams, but for now, me = in the dark.


I thought, then, that perhaps since I do know where the bus went, maybe it would be a fitting final-week post to say something about that. It would let you compare notes between where I would have had us all go, and where you might have gone along the way. To get straight to it, then, here is some of what I would have liked you to learn during the course -- what I hope you will believe and act in accordance with, on down the line.


Writing is rhetorical: situated, motivated, contingent, interactional, and epistemic. There are few universals in writing, and most of those are questions. (Who will use my writing? What do they need and want it to do? What is the exigence for it? What will make this writing "good"? etc.)  No modalities or genres of writing, therefore, are inherently superior to any others, and none are inherently inferior: their value varies with the rhetorical situation, which will render some genres and modalities better and others worse.


"Writing" includes both the acts of composition and of inscription: inventing and designing (together, composing) material, and inscribing that material into a text. It is crucial to understand writing as the entire development process of a text, from recognizing an exigence through the entire lifetime of development and use of a text by writers and readers.


Writing is by definition technological because it requires tools, and this reality presents two major implications for writing. First, tools are rhetorical constraints that powerfully shape the text they create by affording some designs and not others. Second, a master writer must thus by definition be a master of writing tools, in some way. Being a master or writing tools will certainly not be sufficient to guarantee the development of effective writing in any given rhetorical situation, but it will be necessary to creating the most effective possible text.


Different technologies used to write reveal different aspects of writing. Electronic, networked writing technologies demonstrate writing to be an intensely visual and intensely collaborative activity in ways that 500 years of alphabetic-paper writing technology and Enlightenment, hyper-rationalist culture masked. 


Lastly, I'd like to suggest a few basic stances of effective writers in a digital age -- those who adopt these as defaults will tend to be more able writers with current technologies.

• Effective writers in a digital age think in terms of designed documents and texts, rather than only in terms of the words in a text, understanding that the impact of a text involves not just what it says but what it looks like, because its looks are part of its use.
• Effective writers in digital technologies understand and rely on the relationship between alphabetic text and image. Digital writing demands images (unless, of course, you're me writing this blog, but then, check the links) and the farther we go into the digital age, the stranger pure alphabetic texts will seem to users, except for very specialized uses where images actually get in the way of the text's use.
• Effective writers in a digital age think in terms of audience values and implications, and for multiple audiences in time and space. They understand primary and secondary audiences, compound rhetorical situations, and especially audiences through time.
• Effective writers in a digital age think not about how their writing will be read, but how it will be used. The writing exists to allow its readers to accomplish something with it, whether that's as narrow as winning a building contract or are broad as being entertained by it. Effective writers now ask, how well can this document be used?
• Effective writers in a digital age join the network: they link actively and extensively to other writers, thinkers, and readers.
• Effective writers in a digital age are effective remixers. As a writer in digital environments, you need to develop your own personal ethic of remix: of what exists, what will you take, and how, and what are the boundaries of its use for you? The very nature of writing today is copying; what will your ethic of copying be?
• Effective writers in a digital age think ahead about how their work will be re-used and re-mixed by other writers. They think, automatically and always, about permissions and licenses. They think about the nature of copyright and how invested they are in it. They think about the balance between giving their work away in order to develop demand for it, monetizing their work through direct sales or through advertising, and about what they will consider illicit use or theft of their copyrighted material.
• Effective writers in a digital age plan primarily for a text's electronic life rather than its paper life. They think in terms of texts "born digital": you don't convert a text from paper to online; you convert it, if necessary, from online to paper. 

Values for Research, Or, How I'd Like You to Think about Researched Writing

In last week's chat, some questions about research came up that helped me realize 1) that you all aren't mind-readers and 2) that there is much about research that I would typically say in a class that I've not yet said here.


A blog post -- even a monster one like this -- can't make up for what would usually be several days of interchange that would make clear "Yes, I'm serious about this approach," but I do hope that no one can walk out of an upper-division writing course of mine thinking the same way about research that they did when they entered it. So, I'll take a shot at it. (I'm posting it, for the moment, largely unedited -- never a great idea, but I'll come back to it throughout the day and clean it up.)


If you've had a typical education, you have an at best wary and more likely tortured relationship with researched writing. That relationship hinges on two central ways of thinking that you've learned over years of schooling:

1. Research is a treasure hunt. Its point is for you to search for the perfect sources on your topic in order to learn something to say, and then transmit that information in a stack-o-facts to readers, simultaneously rewriting it to synthesize the ideas of many sources into your thesis, and to "give credit to" those sources as most of what you say in the paper you wouldn't know to say without them. Often how this actually plays out is that you write on a topic you've already made up your mind about, search for the perfect sources that say just what you already think, and then quote them in your paper so that your statements can be authoritatively "backed up."
2. Researched writing is about facts: it must be objective and therefore impersonal. *You* are not allowed to be in your writing. You may not use the word I; you may not include your own opinions; you must cite the sources of most of what you say. You must write with reserve, cool distance, and lack of passion, because anything else would expose subjectivity that doesn't work with research writing.

Here's the problem. That model describes about 95% of research done for school and about 2% of professional research both in and out of the academy. And it does so for the worst reasons: students are presumed to be empty-headed idiots, not capable of participating in adult conversation, and thus not capable of writing like the grown-ups do. So throughout school, you're taught to write like students instead of being taught to write like pro-researchers. The likelihood is that this continued even through your College Writing courses and into at least some of the courses in your major. 

Below are some contrasts, and they are the ones I favor in research done for my courses. This is gonna get a little long, but I hope you'll find it interesting.

Research is not the transmission of factual information, but the collaborative building of new knowledge

• The purpose of professional researched writing isn't to transmit factual information; it's to build new knowledge through argument. Research publications are where new ideas, findings, and arguments are tested with other expert readers. Settled facts -- ideas that are non-arguable because everyone in the conversation already agrees with them -- are taken as known information and not published as research at all. 
• Related, professional researchers don't start research projects by seeking a broad topic; rather, they start with a question no one's been able to answer satisfactorily yet, on a problem that other expert readers agree is important. If they have that kind of question, they know they'll be writing to develop new knowledge rather than to transmit existing facts. 
• Notice how in both the previous points, "other expert readers" keep coming up. The whole game pre-supposes an ongoing conversation in which many people are participating. A long time ago a super-influential rhetorical theorist, Kenneth Burke, likened these conversations to being at a party. You come late; a knot of your friends are clustered around talking. You join them, listen for a bit, add something to the discussion based on what they've just been saying and what you don't hear them saying yet that fits the conversation. This continues for some time, then you drift to another conversation, but that one continues on without you. Eventually you leave the party, which goes on without you. In this analogy, "research" broadly is that conversation; the others are "sources" and you find a thing to add to the conversation that is not what they said but relates to what they said.
• There are some harsh corollaries to this reality. In professional research, you have to talk about things others are already interested in, or you first have to argue about why others should be interested. If other people find your contribution to be in some way wrong, they're gonna say so, often brutally. (Kind of like being the loser at the party who everyone walks away from.) In other words, because research is an argument carried out in conversation, people argue back. 

Researched writing is therefore not dry, objective, factual reporting; it is rhetorical storytelling

• Understanding that research is people arguing in order to make new knowledge should already make you suspect that it lacks pure objectivity. What, after all, does rhetoric teach us about communication broadly and argument specifically? That is is opinionated, motivated, and situated. 
• Researchers choose some questions and not others: there is already opinion simply in what they choose to talk about. And researchers have passion for their subjects: they are motivated to build new knowledge in response to their research questions, because they're deeply interested those subjects. And usually, that interest and passion arise from some way that the problem they're working on hits home for them personally in their specific situation (or coming out of their life history).  
• Please don't read me as saying that research ought to be objective and that thus our subjectivity, however inevitable, is a failing. Research would not be what it is--what has brought us to the state of human knowledge we're in (which is not great but a helluva lot better than 1000 BC)--if it were not a subjective enterprise. 
• What research does have in common with 1000 BC, though, is storytelling. Like learned human communication has always been, researched writing is story. Researched articles in the sciences actually have a narrative section that describes the research that was done. But more broadly, researched writing says "Here's what I think, here's why, and here's why it's important." That's story. It's also story because, again, you're not telling us "facts" -- your argument is a series of claims that you're supporting with the best evidence you have. It is something you could preface by saying, "Let me tell you a story...."
• Because they are writing about subjects they're passionate about, and because the research is the writer's story of what they think and why, researchers are in their writing. This is why professional researched writing usually uses "I". Because we're no longer (as we were half a century ago) trying to claim that our research is objective when it isn't, there's no longer a good reason to keep the writer separate from the research. There is a risk that too much self-reference will make the reading seem to be about the writer rather than about the researched subject, and nothing does self-reference better than "I," so most writers do use it sparingly, and usually in the intro and conclusion of their work where the message is "Here's what I think." But when using "I" will clarify and simplify the writing, they do it. You should too. 
• Can you put your own opinion in your paper? Well, let's see: you're supposed to be arguing for a way of looking at things that we haven't seen before, and you're supposed to be saying what you thing. Yes, please: we would like your opinion. The reason we actively seek your opinion, are not "bothered" when you write it, is because we expect that your opinion is deeply informed by the conversation so far and by your research on the problem. When we say "opinion," we don't mean "the thing I just believe without any knowledge or reasons"--we mean, you have studied this problem for weeks or months or years; what do you now believe about it, and why? This will be an opinion, and a welcome one. 

Researchers are not using sources the way(s) you were taught to

• When you look closely at what pro researchers do with sources, they almost never use them the way you've primarily been taught to: to "back up" their arguments. It comes back to conversation: when you're standing in that group at the party and George says, "There's just no way we're ever going to Mars--we don't have the resources," you don't turn and say "We just don't have the resources to go to Mars -- George said that." 
• But what you might say is, "So George says we don't have the resources to go to Mars, and Jane figures that it would take 10 times what we can afford. I have to tell you, I don't think so either -- I think when you look at A, B, and C, you can see that even more clearly than they've said." Or you might say, "When George says we don't have the resources, he's right in many respects but he overlooks these things."  In other words, pro researchers site sources in order to establish the "platform" from which they're speaking -- to create a "jumping-off point" for themselves that lets them relate what they have to say to the conversation that's already been. 
• Another reason pro researchers cite sources is to save time and space by "bundling" ground already covered into source references.  That looks like, "We know that Mars contains plenty of oxides for developing fuel to get home (Slatter, 1972; Mickley, Harris, and Brown 1983; Sheets and Arnold 1991, 1993, 1997a, 2002; Hank and Jones, 2007.) Because they're conversing with a group of peers, they can reasonable assume that their readers either have read all these previous studies, or can easily access and read them as needed, and so they can shorthand 7 articles worth of research into one sentence. Incredible space-saver. 
• In such an example, we also see the true purpose of documentation. It's not to "avoid plagiarism" or to have a way to know whether the writing is any good or not; it's a research aid that the writer gives the reader. If the point is to say something new in relation to the existing conversation, then readers need a shorthand way of knowing what the writer considers the conversation to have been to date. The documentation gives that: who's talked before, and when, and what have they said?  Author, title, date. 
• It also means that there's nothing holy about any given documentation style. Having a standard system (you might know MLA, APA, Chicago) makes it much easier for readers to make sense of the compressed notes that point them to the sources -- but which standard system matters a bit less. Readers are more concerned with the function: Can they tell who's talking? Can they go read that person firsthand if they wish? Are you as a writer using their time well? 

So, last, thoughts on some common questions students have about sources. Different profs give different answers; here are mine:

"How many sources do I need?"  How tall is a tree? How long is a rope? IT DEPENDS. You need as many as you need to convey a sense of the conversation and to provide the context for what you're arguing. Ideally, you read everything on your subject, and you read work that connects to it. But of course, the world is not ideal, so in reality, you should read everything you can. And of that, you won't cite a lot of it, but you should be writing with a sense of connection: "What I'm saying here connects to what X has said, in these ways."  If you write in that mindframe, you'll find yourself citing much more than if you're writing in the mindframe of "what can I cite here to back me up?"

"Do I have to use in-text citation / document my sources / do a works-cited page?" Academic research, which you're doing, uses academic documentation styles, like MLA, APA, Chicago, CBE, etc. However, the genres you're writing in will treat documentation in a variety of ways. If you do a video, your sources might be "Credits." But you might also do a "Bibliography" screen. Powerpoints make doing a reference page easy as breathing. Blogs and websites tend to do more with links, but you might look at how Wikipedia handles documentation as a guide. In other words: You must document sources. How you do so is considerably flexible. Just have a clear, understandable system that you use consistently.

"What kind of sources are okay to use?" Think rhetorically: the kinds of sources you use depend on what you need them to do. Scholarly sources are necessary to help define what the conversation has been so far. But they won't help you much if what you want to know is what skateboarders are saying about your research question, because most academics aren't skateboarders. For that, you need sources in which skateboarders are talking.  Use what you need. 

Measuring Success in Inefficiency

This post started as a reply to the discussion thread on Savannah's May 29 post, but quickly got out of hand, so now it's my own post. :-)  One of the things I wanted to talk about in summing up last week's reading is education, especially given so many of your stories and comments. (I actually assigned Robinson as an example of design -- his critique of the design of our education system based on a failure to understand that an 1800s system is not designed to meet our current circumstances, and is only allowed to continue because we are so busy doing unto others what was done unto us when we were in school. My point was design, but since we're in the talk about the system being critiqued, well, I have a few opinions about that too. ;-) )  So this has turned into an opening salvo in something like Phaedrus's "Church of Reason" lecture. 


It just makes me heartsick to hear experiences like you guys are recounting here -- it's unconscionable that anyone in university employ would do their job such as to make students feel like burdens or to feel untaught. I wish I could assert with evidence that your experiences are unusual; I can't, and in my gut I don't know *what* the norm is for student experiences with faculty. 

What is doubly frustrating about it to me (a different frustration than those of you whose educations are directly affected by it) is that the university system I love is so capable of giving students who seek it superb experiences (for tons of examples just read the university's news page), and yet so often that capability seems to be untapped and wasted. We have in these places an incredible opportunity for students to work with faculty on subjects of their passion, and (frankly) for faculty to help students gain passion for subjects they're initially not engaged with. We waste so much opportunity when faculty act as you describe. I too know faculty to whom students are clearly a bother, and I want to wring their necks for their misuse of their privilege to be in this place and have you people to work with. 


With tales like yours, it's no surprise that there's so much pressure for "reform" on universities. But think with me on this -- I don't want to argue against any of you wishing for better experiences, so the following screed is not an attack on your dissatisfactions. Rather, I think if you look, you'll see that what you dislike will only get more common if we further than we already are start treating universities as businesses. I think the problems you encounter come from us acting too much like a business already, rather than not enough like one. I want to throw in an oar for, no, a university is NOT a business unless it's made to be one -- and then it's a business and not a university anymore. 


To support the last clause first, I give you University of Phoenix, the factory of higher education. Its measure of success isn't learning but efficiency. (In case you hadn't noticed yet in your life, learning isn't efficient and can't too well be made so. There's too much "no, not that way, try it again" involved.) The job taken on by Phoenix isn't what university classically handle -- the development and dissemination of thoroughly studied and tested knowledge -- but rather the pre-packaging of relatively pointless information optimized to the attainment of degrees. In a hurry. With as little human interaction as possible. Wait ... that sounds like exactly what you're complaining about here already. Difference is, at Phoenix and similar (or worse) for-profits, it's not a breach of trust -- it's the way the system is designed.


Put the profit motive in higher education and you get assembly lines for humans. Period. (The irony doesn't escape me that in lower levels of education the exact opposite is true: the assembly lines are public and the place to be treated as an individual are in privates.) And you damn sure don't get any new knowledge formed. From DeVry (perfectly good for technical education in knowledge that has long since been standardized and could be taught in a decent high school if we had any of those in this country) to Phoenix (sufficient for what it is but pretty much taking the "higher" out of "higher ed"), when education goes for profit, the teachers aren't learners and discovers anymore -- they're lecturers. Ironically enough, the adjunct model of bringing in non-teaching professionals and paying them a pittance to lecture to a class -- precisely what Kevin cites experiencing -- is *the standard business model* at for-profits, not the poor-final-option it is at MSU when the state won't fund hiring a needed full-time teacher who might have some loyalty to the institution, concern for the students, and incentive to do good work so as to be kept on in a very hard-to-get job.


(I know the obvious counterpoints that a) it's getting awfully common at MSU too, particularly in certain professional colleges, and that b) plenty of full-time, tenure/able faculty are equally guilty. I hope not as many, but I don't have stats on that.)


So, why *aren't* universities businesses? Because they cannot be made efficient or profitable given the intellectual work that they do. They depend on failure to get their work done, and failure is expensive, inefficient, and slow. It is not good for shareholders. It is not good for stock prices. They depend on vast amounts of time for innovations to be conceived, tested, modified, tested, published, repeated at other institutions across the world, modified, retested and repeated and republished, until you've got something worth knowing. Virtually every major corporate lab in the U.S. from the 20th century has been shut down or spun off because that process just cost too much for shareholders -- with their demands for instant profits -- to stomach. (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc.) It takes YEARS to highly educate human beings, and it can't be assembly-lined because the damn things insist on being *individuals*.  When you rightly complain about the bureaucracy you encounter at MSU, what is actually the problem?  A one-size-fits-all inhuman process that is trying to treat you like a business. 


(My claim that higher-ed can't be profitable and still do what it does is highly arguable. Please feel free to argue back. Maybe you'll hit on a way of making it so -- we just don't have one yet. By the way, "private" does not mean "business" or for-profit -- most private college and universities in the U.S. are not-for-profit.  Especially the ones you've heard of!)


So: most of what you know and experience in your modern world is a result of university basic-research that was expensive, slow, and inefficient. It is a result of professors who are paid to sit on their asses and think (think so hard it's literally physically exhausting); and it is the result of students who haven't showed up for just "the information" but instead to grapple with ideas too big for them to understand immediately, and in doing that grappling, to in fact discover things their profs hadn't known yet. I share your criticisms of faculty who get in the way of this by failing to invest in their students, or trust them, or credit them with being smart and having something to contribute, or who give their students no time and basically say "teach thyselves!"  (To the extent online courses make me uncomfortable, it's because it feels like too much "teach theyself!" is going down.)


Students who really, truly want not to have to think, but rather to be given a dumbed-down book, not talked to, and take a quick series of tests to prove you can find information a book, just like we all learned to do in 8th grade, should want to make college a business. Or, at that point, eliminate it altogether, because we could get the same thing from wikipedia, as long as we don't ever expect to be able to actually edit it.

I think when it sounds like students want that, in most cases it's because we faculty have failed to offer them anything better, so they look at what they're getting and say, "Why aren't I signed up at University of Phoenix?"


But here, I think, is my bottom line. I don't need to imagine or treat you guys like "customers" in order to do my job well -- "my job" being to do right by you and to make your brains pop loose in wonder at the new ideas -- and I don't need to make a profit and I don't need shareholders pressing for a profit . I am not offering you a product, or a service, that you are purchasing. You and I, we are sharing an experience that, if it goes as I'm meant to ensure it does, will change the way you think and plant seeds that none of us know right now what they'll grow into. You in turn are changing the way I think, because you're noticing things I don't and calling my attention to other aspects of our experience than I'm used to seeing. Together we are investing tremendous amounts of time in something intangible and untraceable: ideas and ways of thinking. We are sojourners and wonderers in a land none of us fully understand, and our job together is to understand it more. That's what I'm here for, and that's what I wish you were here for, because frankly, you don't need me or MSU for anything else. Anything else, you could be getting somewhere else cheaper and quicker. What I'm asserting, of course, is that what I'm here for and what I wish you were here for is vastly more valuable. 


Us, getting to wonder together, that's worth the price of admission (you guys) or getting paid 50% of corporate market value for a doctoral degree (me). It is all about this experience. And it does kill me inside to hear of times when your experience is not that, but rather being walked away from by your faculty. My desire for reform would be, let's only have faculty who understand the nature of university work as more than research and more than lecturing but rather some amazing combination of both in which students are fellow travelers. That'd be worth the money, and if we can't achieve it, we might as well close our doors.