In October 2010, not long after I committed to retooling, I approached Neil to see if he wanted to collaborate to study transfer, since I knew from our research group he had experience with qualitative research. Like me, he was interested in the transfer research of Elizabeth Wardle and other scholars, and agreed that our writing program needed to better understand transfer student needs and other changes reverberating from WIU’s adoption of the “2+2″ model. I outlined the work I imagined doing to Neil, shared the Dartmouth Seminar application, and suggested we apply for a University Research Council (URC) grant as well. This is WIU’s featured internal grant, up to $5,000 “intended to promote research or its scholarly equivalent in appropriate fields by providing ‘seed’ money for the initiation of new projects.” We began meeting regularly in November, sharing readings in writing transfer, methodology, and working on the grant application as a way to begin designing a study. As Neil and I talked, we realized our long term research interests shared a key commonality:

• I was refocusing on ease, the array of specific practices which favor simplicity and transparency over complexity and difficulty, and discovering strong correspondences between qualities discouraged by ease yet conducive to transfer.
• Neil had long studied the negotiation of writerly identity which occurs when writers learn the particular worldviews, genres, and tools associated with the communities in which they seek membership. Imagined as conflict, this negotiation could hinder transfer.

That is, we realized both ease and negotiation might operate as barriers to transfer, and we could shape our study around this concept and the institutional needs we agreed were most pressing. Thinking big, and with some previous studies we liked in mind, we begin imagining a multi-year project which sought to collect data from multiple sources, answering the oft-discussed difficulties of studying transfer: surveys, interviews with faculty and students, and case studies which included analysis of student writing. Piloting the research would begin in 2011-12, most of the work would take place in 2012-15. We named the project “Transfer @ Transfer,” since our target is writing transfer in the upper division, and it’s a given at Western that includes many transfer students. By December 15, we had our application to the Dartmouth Seminar ready to go, and we were thrilled to see our acceptance in early January. At the time, these were our research questions:

1. What successes and failures do students have as they move from writing in general education courses to writing in their majors?
2. What strategies do students use to transfer writing skills and knowledge from writing in general education to writing in the major? Baird: how do students negotiate rhetorical and ideological conflicts between two or more activity systems? Dilger: does ease (making easy as a strategy for mitigating complexity and difficulty) play a role?
3. What differences in transfer of writing skills and knowledge, if any, exist between students who satisfy writing requirements at two-year and for-profit colleges, and those who do so at WIU?

In January, Neil and I began writing the URC grant. We began to articulate our research design more explicitly: we sought to collect data which would allow us to understand the activity systems involved in transfer. For this reason, we imagined a three-stage research design: surveys designed to generate preliminary data and help us recruit students and faculty for more in-depth interviews and case studies. We planned to interview faculty and students at WIU and area community colleges which send large numbers of transfer students to WIU, followed by case studies of students at WIU and perhaps community colleges as well. Given the many different student and faculty demographics in which we were interested, we thought a fairly large number of participants would be required to be able to effectively answer questions raised by our institutional exigences. Faculty interviews would allow us to understand how transfer was (or was not) discussed in the classroom, and would help us understand better understand students’ experiences. We assumed, based on the literature, that talking with faculty would be needed to help us understand what students could or could not transfer–to get access to students’ thought processes, and to help us learn more about things students might not even be conscious of. With methods on our minds, Neil and I proposed a roundtable on transfer research methodology for the Midwest Writing Centers Association conference, October in Madison.

In March, the online component of the Dartmouth seminar began–email, telephone consultations, and group video chats with Dartmouth facilitators and other participants. These conversations helped Neil and I begin to see the limits, or rather the over-extensions, of our research design: the amount of work we imagined was just too large. (After one email exchange with Charles Bazerman, I checked a spreadsheet I had built to project our workload, and discovered an error which underestimated some required time by a factor of 5. Doh!) So we began to scale back the size of our study while keeping our diverse data collection methods. That is, we still felt that our research required a rich set of data to work with in order for us to understand the activity systems in which our writers moved, and to gain access to the discursive processes involved in transfer. We believed workload could be addressed by reducing the number of participants in each leg of the study, and finding ways to be more efficient (including more than one student from the instructors in the study). By the time we submitted the URC grant in April, we had made changes which reflected this thinking, and we submitted a research design to our IRB as well.

Three items of good news came in May when we found out our proposal for MWCA was accepted, we were awarded the URC grant, and our IRB protocol was approved. At this time, we were still planning to use surveys for the first stage of the study, with the hopes of targeting summer courses, but it soon became clear that wouldn’t work, since there were so few writing in the disciplines courses being taught. We also had trouble scheduling interviews: there just weren’t that many people around WIU or our local community colleges. My travel schedule didn’t make things any easier. We did get to interview four WIU faculty, and those interviews gave us a lot to think about. But we didn’t get as much work done as we planned.

When I traveled to Hanover for the Dartmouth seminar, I had the opportunity to sit down with Chris Anson and Neal Lerner, describe our intentions in detail, and get feedback about our plans. Independently, both Anson and Lerner suggested further changes would be wise. They agreed that Neil and I needed to find ways to get at information which would not necessarily be articulated by students. But they suggested that we didn’t need to work both sides of the problem–community college and writing in the major–to fully understand it. And, again independently, they suggested a different approach: rather than multiple kinds of data collection, turning to stimulated recall or techniques like those used by Flower and Hayes. Over the next few days of the seminar, I realized we might drop everything but the case studies, reconceptualizing those around interviews, and reintroducing other types of data collection if needed. Rather than spending a lot of effort to develop and execute surveys, interviews, and other instruments, then building an analytical framework to bring their data together, we should focus on interviews with a small number of students, and broaden data gathering only if it became necessary. I wrote up my ideas and shared them with Neil, and we quickly came to consensus about a new design.

That brings us to the current time. Neil and I recruited participants by visiting writing in the disciplines classes in August and September, building a pool which satisfied us in terms of demographic and curricular diversity. We made contact with ten students and interviewed them all once, with very interesting preliminary results. We’ve continued refining our design and our goals, and submitted a proposal for the CCCC Research Initiative. Over the next year, we’ll interview our participants four or five more times, collect their writing, discuss it in depth, talk to their instructors, and learn how writing transfer happens for them. As we move forward, I hope to keep up with our study here. Reconstructing what we did from email, meeting notes, and other archives is possible, but it would be far better to have a more formal record.

I’ve already started working on the project I’m proposing to take to the Dartmouth seminar. Starting in the Spring 2011 semester, Neil Baird, Joan Livingston-Webber, and I will be collaborating on research with several overlapping objectives. I’m happy to say my department and college are eagerly supporting this work, and I’m building a large network of other interested parties, from our professional development center to our WID committee.

Our first and most important goal is establishing structures which will address what might be called the data problem. Recently, a large number of WIU students failed the Illinois Basic Skills Test. As you might imagine, this is causing some consternation, since passing is required for graduation. (Update 12/15: See my comment below.) Unfortunately, we don’t have enough data of our own to help us better understand the test scores–or the way writing at the university works in general. We aim to change that through collection of student writing, interviews with students and teachers, and other forms of direct observation. During the Spring 2011 semester, we will begin this work on a small scale, honing our methodology in preparation for a wider deployment come Fall 2011.

Secondly, we are hearing a lot of anecdotal reports about problems with student writing, particularly in upper-division classes, as students move from writing in gen-ed to writing in their majors. Given current research on transfer (the sources Clancy names, and others like Downs & Wardle), we suspect difficulties arise when students go to the transfer well, and come up dry. With this in mind, we want to find out what strategies students use, or attempt to use, as they try to write for courses in their majors. Do they even try to adapt what they were (presumably) taught in composition? When they run into problems, how do they react? What support networks do they call upon? Neil and I will call upon earlier research (for him, negotiation; for me, ease) to understand students’ attempts to move between the different activity systems involved in these transitions.

I’ve previously discussed some implications of “2+2″ model, which imagines bachelor’s degrees as two years at community colleges followed by two years at universities. (Assuming perfect progress, availability of courses, etc.) As Western whole-heartedly embraces this approach, more of our students are satisfying writing course requirements at community and for-profit colleges, rather than in our writing program’s two-year composition sequence. This is our third focus: what differences, if any, exist between students who take required writing courses at Western, and those who take them at community or for-profit colleges? In other words: how do transfer students transfer writing skills and knowledge?

1. Common definitions of plagiarism always include intention. That’s true for professional organizations like CWPA, and for Western, like most universities. But intent is very hard to prove, making enforcement processes cumbersome and time-consuming.
2. Definitions of plagiarism also focus on acknowledgment and citation. Western’s policy repeats “without acknowledgment” four times in its definition. Does this mean any use with a citation is okay? Certainly, policies give that impression. We focus too much on “Is it cited?” without asking about the quality of the citation itself.
3. Though policies often differentiate between plagiarism and resubmission, most weigh both as academic integrity offenses. Students, on the other hand, are far less likely to see resubmission as wrong. In a class Jamieson visited, one student said something like, “It’s my paper. I can do what I want with it.” Little wonder students have this attitude, given much of the “it’s mine” orientation of intellectual property discourse in and out of the academy.
4. Rebecca Moore Howard‘s concept of “patchwriting” drives much of the Project’s work. Jamieson shared student writing which fit the definition (quantified given their approach), comparing it to sources to show that while patchwriting might not fit the definition of plagiarism, it isn’t good writing. The most obvious implication: writing courses need to spend far more time working with the nuts and bolts of quotation, paraphrase, and summary. Since students work across disciplines, their exposure to norms is wildly inconsistent: what’s okay for the humanities is too much quotation for the social sciences, etc. This makes using others’ texts even more difficult to learn.
5. We don’t talk enough about reading in writing courses, and we don’t read enough different kinds of texts. The (overstated) literature/composition divide serves us quite poorly in this regard.
6. Faculty present reacted audibly when she showed that 91% of student citations come from the first four pages of their sources–and 78% from the first two pages. Jamieson suggested many students rarely go past the abstract or introduction of an article, which would certainly cause problems if they tried to summarize or paraphrase: it’s hard to write summaries, but even harder to write summaries of summaries.
7. Jamieson noted the Citation Project exists, at least in part, to address the dearth of empirical work being done in English studies. At a time data is driving education more and more, we continue to ignore data-centered research or even look down upon those who perform it.

One implication, besides the need to address reading and use of texts more forwardly in courses. Because I am thinking a lot about standards, I have spent a lot of time recently looking at the CWPA Outcomes Statement for FYC. The Citation Project’s work provides another reminder that standards and policies always have impacts which are not intended and poorly understood. Should making citation the focus of policies mean we obsess over documentation styles but neglect other areas, and suggest, even implicitly, that students should follow? Standards, then, have a didactic role whether or not we’d like them to. That doesn’t mean everything we’d like to be taught will be; recall the gap on resubmission Jamieson’s surveys pointed out. Nor does it mean standards and policies must be engaged directly to have tremendous impact. All students must deal with the impact of policies on course design. File all of these reminders under “obvious,” sure, but do file them lest standards be developed ineffectively.

Sandra Jamieson and Maurine Magliocco

That’s just content. From a delivery perspective, Jamieson was also quite good, structuring her talk around a central question, using local examples to make her argument, explaining her assumptions, pacing nicely, and pausing only a moment when her PowerPoint didn’t cooperate. She spoke equally well to both students and faculty, judging by the number of students who stayed for the whole talk then asked questions afterward. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so pleased about good delivery, but given the number of poor talks I’ve seen at conferences and otherwise, I’m always happy when speakers perform well and I can tell students, “Do what she did!”

As I believe she has done every year, Maurine Magliocco attended the lecture and participated in the discussion afterward. I’m thankful for her engagement and generosity. Her gift targets a need the university is increasingly pressured to address. Even (or especially!) at a teaching-oriented institution like Western, conversations about research are necessary, particularly when they articulate deeply with all levels of English studies. Certainly, this is true for The Citation Project’s research, and for everything Jamieson shared with us.

To consider if this project would be worth it, I want to break down the work involved:

1. List the types of web sites created or maintained by people and organizations in English studies.
2. Find (and/or develop) lists of sites which fit those categories.
3. Establish criteria for site quality (keeping in mind variance between types–for example, online journals need more attention to metadata than departmental web sites).
4. Develop methods for individual and aggregated evaluation.
5. Evaluate a representative sample of sites.
6. Consider methods for repeating this work periodically, developing collectively maintained indexes, building automated validators, etc.

While I’ve been thinking about all six of these things lately, the first of these seems, well, more “firsty” than, say, the sixth, which might actually be spread throughout the whole process. So, what kinds of English sites are out there? Here’s the list I’ve come up with so far.

1. Web sites
   1. Department
   2. Faculty
   3. Organizations (scholarly, student, etc)
2. Weblogs (standalone)
3. Web-based scholarly editions
   1. Hypertext
   2. Variorum
4. Indexes or meta-sites
5. Digital archives
   1. Scholarship (institutional repositories)
   2. Primary material
6. Social networks
   1. Facebook-style pages
   2. Ning-style community sites
   3. Twitter-style post-streams
7. Scholarly journal sites
   1. Online journals
   2. Companion sites for print journals

Any others? (Thanks to Chris Morrow for suggestions already integrated above.) There’s a lot more to think about here, and more posts will certainly follow.

As usual, I turn to computing for inspiration: what about Agile? There’s a strong parallel between many writing programs and traditional software development methods Agile position itself against. Both are focused on single products which take years to develop and change infrequently. Both are organized in a “waterfall” pattern, with clear delineation between stages, and linear progression: programs are designed, coded, debugged, and shipped; in composition, students are tested, placed, and sequenced. Both traditional development and traditional composition assume, perhaps unwittingly, that customers will keep coming back—and have to keep coming back.

I think we can adapt Agile’s core values to build a new philosophy for writing programs. What would it mean, like the Agile folks, for writing programs to favor the left side of these oppositions?

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools: focus less on the processes and tools of our composition course sequences, and their assumed knowledge transfer to upper division courses, and more on evaluation of student writing capacity and engagement. Increase attention to individuals, and seek more interaction with other parts of the university.
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation: be more willing to experiment, sacrificing formality for innovation. Break out of course- and track-oriented thinking when possible. Seek curricular structures which allow for changes which don’t require a lot of paperwork. Provide documentation with form and content consistent with other principles here, but never at the cost of production.
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation: here “customer” can be read broadly, both as students (yes, I know that raises eyebrows) and other educational institutions. In the first case: do we turn often enough to students (directly and indirectly) when determining requirements, tracking them through programs, and understanding their progress? In the second case: how do we approach working with community colleges? High schools considering dual enrollment? Other areas of the university?
4. Responding to change over following a plan: might be the most difficult to disrupt since universities love their strategic plans (especially WIU; “Higher Values in Higher Education” is locked down as the main feature on the WIU web site). For me, the approach should be allowing change to feed back to revisions in the plan. Management should also ensure the freedom to respond exists, avoiding micromanagement or imposition of interpretations of plans in a manner which crushes individual ability to respond to (or even anticipate) change.

Certainly, we can map some things already happening in writing programs onto these broad ideas: WAC hopes to build university-wide relationships; portfolio assessments ask students to think about writing over long time spans, etc. But the point here isn’t to find correlations between existing practices and Agile; that may be interesting, but it’s more evaluative than generative. Rather, I want to conceptualize approaches and practices better fitted to what I see as the strengths and weaknesses of our programs today–not last year’s, or those from five years ago.

I’ll post another update once those 10-day numbers come out.

• Good sessions. I didn’t skip a single time slot. I enjoyed Bump Halbritter’s talk, which used Donald Murray to talk about what it means to be innovative (rather than just saying, hey, what I’m doing is innovative). The research project Shirley Rose, Barbara L’Eplattenier, and Lisa Mastrangelo are starting looks fascinating–updating surveys about WPAs from the 1980s. Several interesting discussion sessions focusing on dual enrollment. And I was very interested in the MA in Teaching Writing Michelle Sidler and Elizabeth Woodsworth are developing at Auburn and Auburn Montgomery.
• On the other hand: I went to (part of a) session which began with the presenter complaining about the hotel, apologizing for the poor quality of the talk, and distributing a handout which approached something completely different than the program. I suppose I should be used to this by now, but it still irks me. I left and found something better.
• My panel, with Jeff and Joe Bizup, went well, and I had good follow-up conversations with John Brereton and Jim McDonald. More on that soon; I’ve got more ideas about the slow numbers we’re seeing at Western–given that many others are dealing with similar issues.
• Time well spent with Susanmarie Harrington, Duane Roen, Chuck Paine, Charlie Lowe, and many others. I also met Dylan Dryer and Carra Lee Hood, both recently published in Composition Forum.
• No running–I’m still resting my feet and hoping I don’t have a serious case of plantar fascitis. Until today, I’ve had no symptoms, but this morning my right foot is bugging me for no apparent reason. I rode a stat bike once, and I’m getting home early enough today to ride as well.
• As usual, traveling with Jeff suits me. We both get up early, and we both like to eat. Thursday we headed to Monk’s Cafe right after we hit Philly. Mussels, belgians, sour ales, yum. We split veal sausage and duck sandwiches. Walking back to the hotel, I spotted a Russian River handle at Tria. It turned out to be Russian River Registration. Jeff nearly leapt over the bar. “We’ll take two!” Delicious.
• Given that I seem to have survived eating red meat, I may have to try some more soon. It’s been a while.
• Friday, the WPA organizers wisely skip hosting a meal, so everyone gets to enjoy the city. I went to Eulogy and Triumph with Jeff and Michael Day. Russian River Consecration at the former, and IPX, a good double IPA, at the latter.
• We left the hotel this morning at 9.10am. Thirty minutes later, we were at the airport and through security. Wow.

Kudos to Linda Adler-Kassner, Eli Goldblatt, and the other CWPA folks involved; they did a fine job. I don’t remember hearing where next year’s conference is. But I expect to be there.

At least on the short term, declines in gened are a serious problem for us, since it makes up a large part of our coursework. I suspect that’s true of many English departments. The issue might press on my department a little more heavily than most since (a) we recently rewrote the English major to use 200-level geneds for much of the the required “core” of courses (changes not yet on the WIU web site), and (b) I’ve also heard many of our majors are recruited through general education. Though I’ve never seen any proof of the latter, obviously, if it’s true, gened declines would be doubly troubling, since we’d see cascading impacts in our 300 and 400 level literature and writing courses. (One indicator the “gened recruiting” hypothesis is not true: while our number of majors has declined in the past 10 years, the rate of decline hasn’t matched the loss in geneds we’ve seen.)

On the writing side, the numbers look like this. (I have similar numbers for literary studies, but only the past four years.) Here’s enrollment in our three comp courses expressed as a percentage of lower division undergraduates enrolled:

Comp enrollment 2001-2010

By semesters, from a high point of 50.2% in Fall 2002, we are at 43% in Spring 2010. A similar pattern emerges if we consider annual numbers: the headcounts for the last three years, respectively, were the lowest for any of the last ten. It will be very interesting to see if next year’s numbers continue this trend.

For me, the big takeaway is simply expressed: I think we can count on students taking more general education courses in community colleges. I’ve read some articulation agreements and the like this past week, and I don’t think we can do much to stop it. And the more I think about it, I’m unsure that’s the right response anyway. So we’ve got to diversify our roster of courses and strengthen the non-gened parts of our programs. I have a feeling that won’t be easy, though it may be less difficult for the writing side of the department than for literary studies.

Summary: Gwendolyn Pough’s call for papers, “The Remix: Revisit, Rethink, Revise, Renew,” is strikingly pragmatic. As she argues for more cross talk with others outside rhetoric and composition, she puts the field first. While reaching outward is valuable, reaching inward is more important, and better internal cross talk will lead to external cross talk as well. In that spirit, I offer three suggestions for improving scholarly conversations within the field, with an eye toward our emergent database logic:

1. Make links a core part of every unit of discourse we value.
2. Improve the accessibility of our discourses, via better web accessibility, better metadata, and converting to open access.
3. Develop standards for web-based content in English studies, ensuring a base level of findability and compatibility with other scholarly work.

I

We convene under the rubric of remix: a theme sharply different from those in recent memory. Gwendolyn Pough’s call for papers, “The Remix: Revisit, Rethink, Revise, Renew,” has stricken me, from the moment I first read it, with its literal nature:

How do we rethink our strategies in dealing with the national, state and local policies that have an impact on our classrooms and the students we teach? [...] Louisville, our convention site, is a city that has been remixing itself since the early 1800s when the invention of the steamboat caused industrial development to explode, thus paving the way for it to become the largest city in Kentucky.

Many of the usual tropes are present: open-ended questions, nods to the local culture of the conference site. But metaphors of streets or waves are absent. I read her call, then, for its pragmatic approach as much as its content: encouraging us to speak directly to specific practices, relationships, and intersections with cultures outside the walls of this hotel. In the spirit of writing to the CFP, I adapt Pough’s pragmatic stance toward the subject of this panel, scholarship, databases, and the remix.

Last night, the CCCC Research Committee sponsored a panel called “Remixing our scholarship for audiences and stakeholders outside of Cs.” An email promoting the event suggested, “This discussion should be of interest to all those invested in making our research reach the ears of those who do not read our professional publications or attend our conferences.” The panel answered the following questions:

1. What communication or publication venues should Cs members consider in order to obtain a larger audience for their research?
2. What are some recommended strategies for leveraging our research to influence stakeholders outside our organization?
3. What are some examples of arguments based upon our research that have failed to influence those outside of Cs and what lessons can we learn from these failures?
4. What groundwork do we as an organization need to undertake before we can effectively reach the ears of larger audiences?
5. How might our research agendas need to change if we want to maximize our influence with administrators and other non-Cs stakeholders?

As you might guess from my title, “Mutualizing the Mix,” I share this goal. For databases, that means targeting Google, not CompPile, so we might more effectively make policy. Or so we might hear Cindy Selfe and Barbara Cambridge talk about their appearances on Oprah, or their TED talks, rather than op-eds to counter Stanley Fish’s in the NYT.

Pough calls these kind of conversations by several names, including “cross talk,” a term which raises the spectre of garbled discourses. Indeed, transcriptionists often write “CROSSTALK” when people on television talk shows yell at each other, and the result is unintelligible. Given that I’ve put Oprah on the table, that’s a little troubling. But “cross talk” points to a specific kind of remix: conversations, not “mashups,” or “cut and paste.” Let’s face it, the former is far more appealing to most compositionists, and conversations will certainly outnumber mashups at the conference this week.

The CCCC Research Committee event took place before the conference. Pough suggests the opposite approach, when she writes, “I’d like for the 61st meeting of CCCC to encourage cross talk within the field and begin to revisit, rethink, revise and renew our field.” Within the field, to begin to renew the field. Within the field, before we reach out of the field. We must first consider how we mix with each other, that we might more effectively encourage others to mix with us as well.

So my presentation today offers an eventually-outward-looking “Mutualizing the Mix” as an effect of an internal mutualizing of our conversations, our cross talk, however noisy they may be. Speaking of links, accessibility, and standards, I will encourage specific practices and a particular database logic. These practices are necessary if “remix” will grow beyond a conference theme to the more productive internal conversations which can support extra-disciplinary dialogue.

II

What can we do to give our scholarly conversations more momentum? First and foremost,  we must reconceptualize the link as a core part of the database and an essential component of every unit of discourse we value. While this seems obvious, it’s worth noting how many of our conversations aren’t linkable. Articles in Composition Studies, JAC, and many other journals don’t provide single article links. Readers can point to an issue, but not an article itself. This presentation? There’s no unique URL for it on the convention web site. All presentations, via search, share a single URL. This is the norm, unfortunately. We need to transform our scholarly conversations, formal and informal, so we can link to them from other conversations, formal and informal, and ensure links are a primary attribute of our emergent database logic.

I’m using the phrase “scholarly conversations” deliberately because links are crucial not only for formal, published scholarship, but also for work such as weblogs, notes, syllabi, and conference presentations. For the purpose of cross talk, we should not differentiate between these forms. As Alex notes, Google and YouTube are archiving them anyway, assuming they are on the public web.

More conversations on the public web, and linked to the public web, means that we’ll have a chance to do more effective reading of each others’ work: again, a key element of conversation. Ann Blakeslee and Rachel Spilka have pointed to structural problems in technical communication research which decrease the readership of journals; I’ll argue that similar problems affect all of rhetoric and composition. Reading, and response, are both facilitated by better availability and better interchange.

Tom Coates pointed out that permalinks transformed a collection of disconnected blogs into a blogosphere:

It may seem like a trivial piece of functionality now, but it was effectively the device that turned weblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenomenon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities. For the first time it became relatively easy to gesture directly at a highly specific post on someone else’s site and talk about it. Discussion emerged. Chat emerged. And—as a result— friendships emerged or became more entrenched. The permalink was the first—and most successful—attempt to build bridges between weblogs. It existed way before Trackback and I think it’s been more fundamental to our development as a culture than comments.

Stable, direct links transformed blogstreams into resources which readers could return to over time. Citations provide some of this functionality. But directions to a link aren’t the same as a direct link. You can’t hand the former to a robot. Not to mention that our citation formats handle URLs in disturbing ways. While Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and a host of other services have built robust communities around exchanges of links with corresponding metadata and commentary, rhetoric and composition too often opts out of these discussions by trafficking in unlinked media.

How do we correct this problem?

1. Give everything a URL. This can be direct or indirect: the object itself, or an object or page which points to it. Like the pages for articles in databases Alex is discussing.
2. Strive for link stability. Linkrot is probably unpreventable. But mechanisms such as the Document Object Identifier (DOI) reduce its impact. At the least, we need to be responsible about redirection. Ideally, we’ll push our professional organizations to participate in these efforts.
3. Concatenate links into feeds. Links become linkstreams, and moving through them tells a story of its own. Feeds make data manageable, keeping cross talk from becoming noise, and facilitate participation from non-human agents.

As Derek notes, data interoperability should be the long-term goal for curators of rhetoric and composition databases: an automatically generated and updated web of citation and influence which tracks works cited and citing. If you’re familiar with the ACM Portal, you know the sort of thing I’m talking about: here is a page for an article, including the list of articles which cite it.

Ideally, this would be open to all elements of conversation: not only scholarly articles, but conference presentations, weblogged reactions, and theoretical antecedents as well. We are a long way from that goal. But we will never achieve it until we represent the elements of our cross talk with stable, reliable links.

III

My next focus is accessibility, a term with at least three meanings relevant for remixing rhetoric and composition.

In a technical sense, accessibility means ensuring everyone can read, hear, or touch their way through our discourses. Our cross talk must be accessible to all kinds of users, in all kinds of contexts. Do our journal web sites work with keyboard navigation? Do our presses offer digital files to consumers for Braille rendering or text-to-speech? Are social media we use friendly to assistive technology? The list goes on. As a field, we simply must do better here. Clay Spinuzzi, Karl Stolley, John Slatin, and others have provided exigence, frameworks, and examples to follow. In brief, we can’t cross talk with those who can’t read, hear, or touch our words.

At the C’s research event last night, Mike Palmquist advocated a stronger commitment to open access publishing from our field. I was pleased to hear that, though I’d hoped to hear it from more than one of the seven panelists. Derek is pointing out several ways access restrictions delay the circulation of our scholarship and shift decision-making about curation to third parties who may or may not share our disciplinary goals. At my university, we no longer subscribe to TCQ, JBTC, Computers & Composition, and other journals on my regular reading list. And more cuts are on the way.

Date: Feb 25, 2010
To: Department of English & Journalism
From: Bill Thompson, University Libraries
Subject: Cut to Library Budget

The Provost has asked the library to cut 3.5% (or approximately $55,000) from its materials budget. No decision has been made as to how these cuts will be achieved: whether to cut print subscriptions, monograph budgets, database subscriptions, a mix of all three? If you have any ideas, please share them with me.

We can’t afford them all, so we have to make decisions. The impact is clear: raising barriers to each other’s work makes cross talk less likely. I have the resources to subscribe to these journals, and I do. But my graduate students must rely on ILL, or borrowing copies of journals from me, if I have them. I understand some of the economic arguments against open access. But for me, the ethical arguments crush them flat. Restricting access to our scholarship, much of which is at least partially funded by the public, is the wrong choice for us now and in the future. We gain nothing from this but preservation of an outdated publishing model. At the very least, all of us need to take advantage of pre-print clauses in publication agreements, and post our scholarship in findable, accessible ways.

Accessibility also means using language, and forms, which enable cross talk over and through cultural, disciplinary, departmental, and institutional barriers.  Here’s one way to imagine those structures as a continuum–imagine crosstalk between your area of rhetoric and composition, and:

1. the general public
2. other academic disciplines
3. other areas of English studies
4. other areas of rhetoric & composition
5. inside your area itself

Again, at the Cs research event, Kathi Yancey pointed out that we do a poor job of partnering with other departments at the university. Forget about #1 for now. Can we get from, say, #2 to #5? Or #4 to #5? Looking at our scholarship, sometimes I wonder. Many of our journals have poor metadata: article abstracts which fail to move outside very focused disciplinary language—if they have abstracts at all. Missing, incomplete, or impoverished keyword sets. We can’t talk about each others’ work if we can’t find it, or easily work through what’s out there to find what’s most relevant. Here, for example, is an abstract from Composition Forum, the journal I work with:

This article looks closely at some of the lingering stereotypes that Composition Studies holds toward Web surfing and queries the resulting literacy hierarchy against our students’ reading and writing practices that take place online. This article claims that while good progress has been made in the way of revising twenty-first century definitions of (digital) composing, the academy has yet to fully revisit its boundaries of legitimacy surrounding (digital) reading. Additionally, this article contests the academy’s use of technology vis-à-vis email, Blackboard, or blogging as a placating attempt to integrate technology into the classroom without genuinely validating our students’ dominant literacies or their digital lives. This article leans on the theories of feminist composition pedagogy as it calls for the field to decenter its authority and revise curricula to incorporate critical digital literacies.

I’m not sure this abstract allows, say, someone from women’s studies to make an educated decision about the relevance of this article for a project about women and the web. I have my doubts, frankly, about what it offers a rhetoric and composition scholar. Too bad, because it’s a good essay. Accessible abstracts and metadata won’t get us tenure, but they are equally important to the influence of our work in a world where Google Scholar is the way that influence is determined.

I want to close by talking about standards. In the first chapter of Standards and their Stories, Susan Leigh Star and Martha Lampland write, “We hope to contribute here, in a modest way, to the dulling of the impulse to standardize everything that seems to grip modern organizations. We are not, in any sense, against standardizing—only against society’s romance with it” (4). I’m with them in wanting to transform that romance into a more productive relationship. Ideally, our professional organizations–NCTE, CCCC, ATTW, RSA, etc–would work together to standardize they way they publish and archive scholarship, creating common infrastructure which could serve the diverse needs of all areas of rhetoric and composition. I’ll argue this effort can and should extend outside the field. When I look at efforts like the pre-print server Arxiv.org, I have to ask myself, “Why aren’t we doing that?” We might not be as well funded as high energy physics researchers. But certainly, we are no less culturally relevant.

At CCCC 2008, I suggested that scholarly web sites in our field, including journal web sites and archives, should follow a common set of standards intended to improve findability and usability:

1. Facilitate access to journal web presences.
2. Provide a high degree of functionality.
3. Whenever possible, facilitate connections with other scholarly discourse.
4. Help readers shape the future of these standards.
5. Help authors achieve compliance with these standards.
6. Help editors implement these standards.
7. Follow established standards for metadata exchange.
8. Provide incentives for participation.

These guidelines include the two items I’ve already discussed: stable, reliable links and accessibility. In Protocol, Alexander Galloway suggests that standardization can be tactical, in a bit of a contradiction: tight restrictions on technical details allow tremendous freedoms. Forget No Child Left Behind; that’s hierarchy, not protocol. Like the Web Standards Project (WaSP), I believe open standards facilitate diverse collaborations, and I hope to promote their constructive use through advocacy, documentation, and presentation of high-quality examples. That is, I want to follow their production oriented approach, not the proscriptive method usually associated with standardization. Given a common approach, we can begin to develop the kinds of infrastructure Arxiv.org provides to scholars in the sciences, or ACM Portal for computing.

Western is fairly open to open source. I say “fairly” because while I can think of several cases where open source software is readily available and used on campus, I can also think of several examples of software procurement where open source was basically eliminated from day one. Overall, I’d say the climate could be better. Folks like me who want to install and support their own software on WIU servers aren’t prevented from doing so by policy. But we do have to contend with a very outdated web server. That’s what drives me to wrecking.org for my WordPress installs; it’s much easier to keep the software up to date there.

Having said that, Clancy Ratliff reminded that many people aren’t so lucky, when she wrote to ask about my use of open source. It’s not unusual for IT staff to object to open source software because of security, privacy, problems obtaining support, a lack of standardization, or all of the above–whether or not such problems exist. So, as Clancy asked:

How should faculty respond when university IT staff members express suspicions about open source software, and refuse to install it and/or support it?

What exactly are they afraid of?

I think Clancy’s second question points to the answer for the first. First and foremost, faculty need to fully understand the grounds for any reluctance to install software. Many (most!) IT staff work with limited resources and have epic demands on their time. They’re not really afraid of anything; rather, they simply don’t need more to deal with. For example, I used to get a single course release (from a standard 3/3 load) in exchange for service as department technology coordinator. That was about half what it should have been. Hell, maybe a third. So I made decisions based on the amount of time involved, refusing most time-intensive projects out of hand. It didn’t really matter what the project was; if it was labor intensive, the answer had to be “No.”

So let’s back up a step: faculty should think carefully about the way they make requests. Obviously, emailing the helpdesk, “Plz install OpenOffice in r computer labs kthxbai” isn’t going to cut it. But it’s often equally ineffective to drop a two- or three-page request email into a system administrator’s inbox with cc: to the department chair. Rather than ask that something be installed, ask to meet to discuss possibilities–and don’t invite the chair. A little dogfooding really helps: when students ask for deadline extensions, alternative assignments, or things which make unexpected demands on our time, how do we react? More favorably, I think, when students make open-ended requests which invite us to help shape them.

I suggest this framework:

1. An initial meeting to discuss the project in general terms;
2. Research which answers questions about the scope of the installation;
3. A proposal which shapes the request as a project with desired outcomes, a schedule, and a primary contact.

Imagining the installation and use as a project shouldn’t unnecessarily complicate things. Rather, a project framework can clarify what’s expected of all parties, for how long, and for what purposes. Above all, that documentation makes it clear faculty will communicate with IT staff about the project, and not expect them to go it alone. And if it turns out that internal or external funding will be needed, turning an initial request into a grant proposal won’t be difficult.

Research should address the following:

• What, specifically, are the software and hardware demands of the installation?
• What support needs will be generated? Who will need help? When? With what expected turnaround time? Who can provide help? When? At what cost?
• Consider support alternatives: should help requests be diverted to faculty, TAs, or others? If so, will additional funding be necessary?
• Clarify the time frame: is the product to be installed and maintained for a single semester? For an academic year? Forever?
• Why is the software needed? For a single class? Multiple classes? An entire program?
• Is similar software is already on campus–maybe not in the building, or even close by, or even on this campus? Is that alternative acceptable? Why or why not?
• Will the software create unnecessary risks to computer security or stability?

Security is last here. It’s first for many. As Clancy continued:

Are they afraid that, say, OpenOffice contains spyware that could compromise the privacy of student records? That hackers can, via the open source application, send worms and such into the university network? Other stuff too?

What’s your advice for faculty who want to get open source software installed in university computer labs but have to deal with this obstacle? Are there sources in particular that you recommend, sources that offer evidence that open source software is generally secure?

I’ve had proposals for installing software shot down because of security risks, real and otherwise. I’ve refused them myself. The risks are real. However, for me, arguments which compare the relative security of open source and proprietary software miss the point completely. All computing is risky. Rather, I suggest that faculty research the security and securability of specific software involved. Have project developers, and third parties, audited the codebase in the past? What mechanisms for reporting bugs exist? How do developers typically respond to bug reports? How often is the software updated? How are updates installed? Can the software be installed on a “sandbox” server, or access-controlled in some way?

Again, asking IT staff what questions they have is a good idea–not in a predatory manner, but with forward thinking in mind. With answers to these questions, staff can better understand the risks involved with a particular software package, and the measures necessary to minimize the chances that risk will develop into actual problems. On the other hand, faculty can point out refusals to install “insecure” software which are unfounded.

Finally, faculty should help establish a means for evaluation of the use of the software over time. Two related parts:

1. Is the software actually being used by the expected population? If not, it should be discontinued, and the reasons for non-adoption investigated. On the other hand, if adoption is enthusiastic, will additional resources be needed? Might others be interested in helping scale up the installation? In that case, evaluation shows good reason for continuing maintenance and upgrade cycles.
2. I wish we (big we: higher education, and little we: geeks who teach writing) had more data on the comparative quality of the software we use to do our jobs. I’ve used WordPress for discussions for a long time, and had varying reactions to it from students. But I’ve never heard a student praise WebCT. As higher education gets more and more data-centric, we need ways to make the arguments I outline here in terms which administrators will be willing to engage.

I’m interested to hear what others think: how would you answer Clancy’s questions? Why? What problems do my answers raise, or ignore? What have you done to get the software you would like to have in your classrooms, on your campuses?