Preparing Future Writing Professionals for E-Work through Collaboration, Networking, and the Use of Social Technologies

Scholars and teachers of composition, rhetoric, and professional communication who use computer technology in research and instruction need to be aware of the trends in e-work. Such awareness will help them better understand the directions of professional applications of Online Communication Technologies (OCTs) and to help them better prepare their students to understand and use these technologies in the professional world. This knowledge can also help students participate more effectively in greater global discourse conducted via online media.

In this part of the panel, we’d like to consider three questions relevant to the preparation of future professionals for the use of e-work technologies. Instead of pretending to be able to provide ready-made answers to these questions, I’d like to use the notes below as starting points for the discussion of these important issues. The world of OCTs and of e-work is a quickly changing one. It is one in which global online access is increasing almost exponentially and business practices are changing daily These factors mean that theory and practice in this area of training in writing and rhetoric will remain very fluid and demand constant adjustments from faculty, students, and administrators. It will also require continual re-assessment as the composition of online audiences shift from local to international.

Key Questions:
To create a foundation for discussing these ideas, we wish to offer the following five questions:

• Question 1: How does the fact that an increasing number of college graduates are likely to find themselves doing e-work on the job change the goals and objectives of writing, rhetoric, and communication education?

• Question 2: How can faculty adjust to the new demands of preparing students for e-work without compromising core values and goals of education, such as the liberal arts ideal, the training in the foundations of rhetoric and professional writing, and so on?

• Question 3: How can instruction in and use of new writing and communication technologies, including multimedia technologies, be incorporated into professional writing and rhetoric instruction without diluting the essence of pedagogy and creating undue departmental and institutional tensions?

• Question 4: How will the increasingly global nature of e-work affect research, teaching, and practices related to writing, rhetoric, and communication?

• Question 5: How can we integrate new popular media (e.g., iPods) into our teaching and research practices in order to provide students with the full range of knowledge and experiences needed to communicate in the workplace of the future?

Our main premise is that when writing professionals engage in e-work, much of that work is collaborative, involving several authors, or even teams of authors, working towards common goals. Practices such as international outsourcing, moreover, makes these writing teams more international and intercultural in nature. The competencies that this work requires include the ability to

• Network with others
• Read and give constructive critique
• Understand how each team member contributes to the goal of the project
• Analyze and address the communication expectations of various audiences
• Recognize the uses and the roles of new/emerging media in relation to professional communication practices

Starting Points for Discussion:
We believe that discussions related to these issues can best be fostered by examining the following ideas and issues:

1. Learning and teaching of writing and rhetoric need to become more collaborative. In spite of the large body of literature, which, both directly and indirectly endorses the idea of collaborative writing and research, from the point of view of most students, writing is still a solitary activity. A vast majority of writing assignments in first-year and other writing and rhetoric classes are individual, not collaborative. As a result, students are required to be the “solitary authors� of self-contained texts. This practice not only contradicts many of the existing workplace practices in writing and communication, but also goes contrary to some of the widely-accepted theories in composition teaching.

We need to overcome the bias against collaboration in the classroom and towards individualized production of texts. This bias exists at two levels.

• Overcoming the bias against collaborative writing in the classroom.

Most traditionally-trained writing instructors are better trained to assign and assess individual projects. It is indeed easier to grade a set of papers written by individuals than to figure out how to gauge the contributions of each member of a writing team. Writing teachers need to be better equipped for assigning, helping students to complete, and assessing collaborative writing projects. Several notable contributions to the development of theory and practice of collaborative work in the writing classes have been made recently. Among them are publications by Cindy Moore and Peggy O’Neill (2004), Carrie Leverenz and Catherine Gabor (2004), and others. These authors provide instructors with practical suggestions for organizing and carrying out collaborative work in the writing classroom.

• Overcoming the bias against collaborative writing at the institutional and state assessment levels.

Institutional and state assessment models continue to value individualized contributions from students over collaborative ones. For example, at my institution, each year, our department collects hundreds of anonymous writing samples from first-year authors. The quality of the writing is then assessed by a group of writing faculty members and passed on to the state. The current assessment system is designed to privilege individually produced texts over collaboratively written ones.

Overcoming the bias against collaboration in preparing students for e-work in professional settings in important because most of that work in the academe and the professions is done collaboratively. The first step towards giving collaborative writing more value and weight, especially in rhetoric and composition in other humanities should be changing the attitudes of faculty members themselves towards collaboration. Unless we as faculty members learn to value collaboration more and give it more credit, including during tenure and promotion decisions, students will continue to look at collaborative writing projects as “the easy way out� of a more rigorous individual writing assignment.

2. Those of us who actively use new technological tools in teaching have probably heard our more skeptical colleagues worry that an over reliance on these technologies too much may erode such core goals of objectives of education as critical thinking,

The old maxim that available technology should not determine or even influence one’s teaching methods may not hold true in all circumstances anymore. Instead, there should be a recursive relationship between available technological tools for teaching, learning, and writing on the one hand and the teaching and composing theories and methods on the other. New writing and communication technologies, especially such “social� tools as blogs, wikis, social bookmarking systems, multimedia conferencing systems, and others have dramatically changed the ways in which texts are created and used. In fact, they have changed the definition of the word “writing� itself, expanding it beyond a self-contained work of words and into a connected structure authored by many, and in many formats and media. In order to keep pace with these changes and to prepare students to future applications of writing in professional settings, including e-work, educators need to learn how to use these tools critically and to help students to do the same.

Of course, simultaneously with adopting new OCTs into their teaching, educators ought to approach these new technologies carefully and critically and try to steer their development in directions which would not only uphold the business status quo, but also meet the evolving needs of students and institutions that educate them. Exerting such influence is importance in order to avoid dystopian futures like the one presented in the Flash presentation Epic 2014, by Robin Sloan and Matt Thomspson. In the story, Google and Amazon merge to create Googlezon which monopolizes the media scene and offers “customizable� news and consumer content to everyone. In an interesting parody of the “read/write Internet� idea promoted by many in the computers and writing community, Sloan and Thomspon paint the future of the media where “everyone is a contributor� and where news and other content are “shallow, not true, and worthless.�

Writing is as much about production as it is about connection. This idea was well explained by Johndan Johnson-Eilola in his 1998 essay “Negative Spaces: From Production to Connection.� In the essay, Johnson Eilola writes the following:

“Over the last twenty five years, we have enriched our work in composition studies by increasing our focus on the political and social roles of writers. We have replaced a concern for static product with a sense of texts as dynamic, social processes…."

But such renegotiations must also encourage us to think through the imprecations of those shifts at cultural, disciplinary, and individual levels. On the one hand, we insist that writing is social and that texts are not unified, bounded objects; on the other hand, we require our students to write single-voiced texts…we grade those objects by what they contain rather than by what they connect.� (31).

Johnson-Eilola thus argues that our teaching practices need to be in tune with the composition pedagogies and theories we espouse. When these lines were written, social and networking writing tools were, of course, not as widespread as they are now. This can only mean one thing: with the expanded influence of these online writing and communication technologies, we as writing and rhetoric instructors need to pay even more attention to the ways in which they can be useful to our students in their present and future careers.

As educators, we must therefore find a middle ground between shunning the new social technological tools for worry that they will make us alter our teaching philosophies and methods on the one hand and uncritically adopting the “latest and greatest� technological tools just because they are available. Later on in this presentation, we will try to suggest some practical ways to accomplish this.

3. At many institutions of higher learning, instruction in rhetoric and writing is fragmented. In part, this is the result of the strong movement to separate writing instruction from English departments. In many places, this separation has resulted in the creation of independent writing programs which are primarily responsible for freshman composition, professional writing departments, and new media departments and schools. For example, at James Madison University, at least 4 different departments offer programs or courses in some kind of writing or some aspect of rhetoric. This fragmentation can lead to inter-departmental tensions, especially when financial resources are limited. This, in turn, leads to the students’ fragmentary understanding of writing and rhetoric and to the claims from different departments that they “own� various aspects of the training.

We’d like to suggest the following steps to overcome the divisions:

• All schools and departments involved in the training of writing and rhetoric professionals should share expertise and resources to achieve the common goal of preparing effective and critical writers, readers, and collaborators. These resources include tech classrooms, special software and expertise in using it, and so on. While an administrative merger back into one unit may not be a feasible solution at many institutions, cross-departmental collaboration to benefit all students can still be possible. Some practical ways for faculty to collaborate include cross-listing and team-teaching of courses, inviting colleagues from other departments to speak to students in their classes, and so on.

• All involved should keep in mind that the goal of everyone involved in rhetoric, writing, and communication instruction on any given campus or at any school is the same—give students understanding of and proficiency in written communication and persuasion.

• Encourage collaboration among departments through cross-listing, team teaching of courses, sharing of facilities, and expertise of faculty.

• Frequently remind students why they are being asked to complete assignments that may not look like traditional “writing tasks� to them, i.e. assignments that involve the use of collaborative tools, such as blogs, wikis, social bookmarks, and so on, as well as of multimedia, such as images, audio, and video.

• In order to encourage critical adoption and use of new technological tools, faculty members should work closely with their universities IT departments in determining which technological tools the school invests and how they will be used. Institutions should also consider decentralizing technology support and expanding the availability of tools to different colleges and departments depending on their needs and pedagogical goals. One way to accomplish this goal without substantial financial investments is to tap into the potential of educational open source software. In addition, college and university administrators should consider creating and supporting “blended� faculty and technology positions. Such individuals are faculty members with in-depth knowledge of the technologies used for research and reaching in their field. As such, they will be able to advise fellow faculty. The idea of blended positions is gaining currency in educational and IT circles was supported in the most recent Report of Educause Center for Applied Research. According to the report, institutions should use the expertise of faculty members in different fields in order to decentralize and customize the delivery of electronic teaching tools.

4. The teaching of writing, rhetoric, and communication – particularly in programs or classes that focus on “professional� or “technical� aspects� – must become more international in focus. Businesses practices are now international in nature. Accordingly, an increasing number of workers is now participating in international virtual teams in which persons from and in different cultures use online media to collaborate on projects.

Effective interaction in these teams, however, requires more than effective writing skills. Rather, participants must have an understanding of how cultural communication expectations affect the rhetorical strategies used by individuals from different backgrounds. Failure to recognize or address such differences can result in costly miscommunications.

Unfortunately, most writing, rhetoric, and communication students receive little or no training in contrastive rhetoric or intercultural/international communication. Rather, such skills are generally relegated to “elective� or “optional specialty� courses. As a result, many students miss the chance to gain the training needed to succeed in their future work environments.

At a minimum, these courses in culture and communication need to be moved to the core of the writing, rhetoric, and communication curriculum. Ideally, notions of how culture affects communication would be taught across all classes in an overall program. This integrated curriculum approach would help students better understand

• The importance of intercultural communication in relation to professional writing practices

• The methods for addressing culture and communication issues in relation to a particular course/class topic (e.g., grant and proposal writing, editing, etc.)

Furthermore, much of the intercultural/international workplace discourse occurs via online media. For this reason, students must learn how to address cultural expectations not only through conventional assignments such as written reports and printed letters, but also in emails, blogs, chat rooms, and instant messaging. Thus, when teaching courses in “writing and media,� teachers should adopt the revised perspective of teaching “writing, CULTURE, and media.�

Achieving these objectives is no small task. Relatively few teaches of writing, rhetoric, or communication have training in the nuances of contrastive rhetoric or intercultural communication. For this reason, we need to expand our knowledge of these areas. Teachers could, for example, engage in more directed or more focused information sharing across divisions (e.g., composition, technical communication, and linguistics within an English department), departments (e.g., working with anthropology, psychology, and computer science), and universities (both domestically and internationally). We should even consider forming international partnerships that would have students from different cultures using online media to engage in collaborative writing exercises. Only through exploring such things can educators gain the knowledge needed to prepare their students for the increasingly global nature of online workplace interactions.

5. The young tend to be the quickest adopters of new media. As the young in many nations also represent a prized market demographic, their modes of communication often become integrated into business models for providing everything from advertising to customer support. For this reason, many corporations observe what media this group uses and how they use it. Such observation often leads to the later adoption of such media and modes into corporate communication practices – as has most recently happened with blogs.

For those of us who teach technology-based writing or communication, this industry practices creates an interesting situation. We educators are accustomed to being the authorities on how to communicate. As a result, our focus is on teaching students how to write vs. learning with them how to communicate. We therefore often miss out on a rich source of information on communication practices via new technologies. In so doing, we actually limit our abilities to help students, for we do not provide them with the kinds of media-based communication instruction that will mirror the range of experiences they will encounter in the workplace.

To address this “media gap,� we need to begin viewing the residents of our classrooms not only as students, but also as colleagues or collaborators. This model would be a dialectical exchange in which we present the more “conventional� approaches to writing in professional settings. Our student-colleagues could then discuss (teach US) about discourse via new “hip� media. Through this discussion, both parties can learn how to apply concepts of the “old� to the “new.� We can also mutually learn how we need to re-think conventional practices (and related teaching approaches) to address new forms of communication. Such teacher-student collaboration would have a great deal to offer not only teachers, researchers, and students, but businesses might also be interested in funding innovative teaching and research approaches related to the uses of new media. The result is a win-win-win situation for all.

Conclusions
Educators working to prepare students for the challenges of working in fast-changing, technology saturated environments face many challenges. In order to prepare successful writing professionals who are ready to take on those challenges, teachers must foster collaboration, flexibility and versatility, both among their students and among themselves. Such spirit of collaboration is well in line with the teaching and scholarly philosophies that many of us believe in and follow.

References
Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. 1998. “Negative Spaces: From Production to Connection in Composition.� Literacy Theory in the Age of the Internet. Eds. Todd Taylor and Irene Ward. New York: Columbia University Press.

Sloan, Robin and Matt Thomspon. EPIC 2014. Available at http://www.robinsloan.com/epic

Wedaman, David. 2006. “Supporting Specialized Academic Software: Is it Possible?.� The Bulletin of Educause Center for Applied Research. http://www.educause.edu/ecar