Not surprisingly, the seminar was demanding intellectually: after a few days, some of us took to referring to it as “research boot camp.” That’s what it was. We first met the night of July 31, and finished our work August 12–just about two weeks. We had one day off: the middle Sunday. Every few days, new visiting scholars joined us to speak to their expertise: Charles Bazerman gave an overview to situating research in the larger field, and Cheryl Geisler offered a two-day workshop in coding data and discourse analysis. Dartmouth professors John Pfister gave a crash course in statistics, and Jonathan Chipman in visualizing data. John Brereton offered excellent advice about grants. Chris Anson and Les Perelman spoke to assessment and situating research in larger institutional frameworks. The last two scholars to join us, Neal Lerner and Chris Haas, spoke to research design and ethical research. We concluded with two days of presentations in which participants summarized our research design and described what we learned during the seminar, with Haas and Lerner offering commentary. Throughout, all of the visiting scholars were available for office hours and individual consultation–for me, some of the most valuable time I spent at Dartmouth.

The seminar felt like a week, or maybe two weeks, of graduate school every day. Seminar organizer Christiane Donahue planned the calendar very well, keeping us busy but providing time for individual work. Some days, especially early on, consisted of eight hours of intensive seminars. Some were divided between morning seminars followed by individual work, consultations, and group work. None of the activities suffered for want of attendance and participation. Even optional night and weekend classes were very well attended. All of the participants lived in Fahey Hall, a dormitory on campus; classes were held in a common space on the ground floor of the building. It wasn’t hard to find attendees hanging out and working in the common space on the first floor, and it was downright easy to seek help with seminar work: for example, after Geisler concluded her lectures on Friday, I suggested all interested attend a “coding party” on Sunday afternoon. About eight people showed up and worked for two hours, coding each others’ data and reviewing segmenting and coding schemes as well. This good-natured work ethic stuck for the entire seminar. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all work and no play: I definitely enjoyed local beer culture with Scott Whiddon, Molly Oberlin, Justin Lewis, Tara Lockhart, and other attendees. We got to hear Charles Bazerman sing opera during a much-needed first Wednesday social. But it was great to collaborate with a group of people serious about learning and getting things done.

Much of what I learned during the seminar was focused specifically on the transfer research Neil and I are doing. As always, I took notes carefully–55,000 words in seminars, group work, and on my own. I’ve shared my wordcloud. I boiled those notes downs to eight pages of takeaways after the seminar, but can focus on three things here:

First, our research design was too complex. Neil and I wanted to use multiple methods of data collection in order to achieve the complexity we believe is necessary for understanding our research questions about writing in the major–learning about the activity systems in which our participants work. But planning for multiple kinds of data collection is cumbersome. Better to achieve complexity by focusing on case studies driven by interviews–and learning to become a very good interviewer. Here are the changes I proposed in my presentation:

Secondly, I failed to separate assessment and research. Part of the reason for the over-complex research design Neil and I imagined arose from prioritizing institution-focused goals (including all of WIU’s diverse constituencies–transfer students, first-generation college students, etc.) over research goals (gathering a manageable amount of relevant data). Ironically, over-prioritizing WIU needs could mean not meeting them as the study collapsed under its own weight.

Third, I left the seminar with a list of methodological questions to approach as I continue to learn the art and craft of empirical research:

1. What principles can guide our comparisons of information from different sources?
2. How can we measure the quality of our interviews—given the difficulty of research into transfer?
3. How can we be genuinely beneficent to our participants, on the short and long term?
4. What mechanisms can help us apply lessons learned from this study to future work?
5. What support structures and resources will help us move the project forward?

All of the seminar leaders were very helpful, but I want to mention two in particular. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen any academic work as hard as Christiane Donahue did for the entire the two-week seminar. It seemed like she was up before everyone every day. Before all else, she created a fantastic intellectual experience for us, providing quite a bit of it personally by speaking to transfer, research design, and other specialities while offering us individual help. In addition, she arranged trips to the local grocery, helped us get access to scholarly resources on campus, and woke up in the middle of the night to help seminar attendees who’d locked themselves out of their rooms. With Kathy Herrington, I was very glad to sneak around Hanover a bit and put together a basket for Tiane which recognized how helpful she was for all seminar attendees. Secondly, Chris Haas: her talk on research ethics came at the end of the seminar when many of us were borderline exhausted. But it was invigorating, and thought provoking too. I went straight from her first talk to a chair and wrote Neil immediately to say, “Hey, we’ve got to think about this.” The two three page handouts she provided were very dense, giving me two or three specific things to think about. After I returned to Macomb, I wrote Haas with some follow-up questions, and she traded email with me, providing some very helpful suggestions and things to read–and strong encouragement as well. Much appreciated.

Quite a nice exclamation point to my year of retooling. A wise choice for all of the audiences I noted above: people like me looking for a mid-career change, early career scholars with projects develop, or graduate students looking to establish a firm grounding in research methods. I’m looking forward to following this year’s Dartmouth Seminar, and getting together with my cohort at CCCC in St Louis.

I went to campus three days this week, my teaching days Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Limited mobility means I have to get systematic about things which I imagine most of us do ad hoc: a checklist for getting out the door, since I can’t run home to get things I forget, and I’m more forgetful than usual on pain medication; keys in the left pocket, phone in the right; planning my movement around the building and campus, since our elevator is slow; cutting back on coffee, since 15 minute round trip walks to the union just aren’t gonna happen. Etc. I already have daily checklists for class, and use our groupware calendar extensively. So that’s not a very big adjustment. I’m lucky that my classroom is about 50 feet from my office.

I’ve had a lot of help. Multiple colleagues have offered to drive me to and from campus. Our department office manager Barb Arvin did a fantastic job getting me a few accommodations for teaching without walking. In less than 24 hours, she got a rolling desk chair for my classroom–much easier to scoot around for group work and the like than to use crutches– and got Physical Plant to fix my sticky door lock and slow down the timing on the door closer to the bathroom I use most often. She and my department chair gave me rides to and from a meeting. My students have also been very gracious. Every day before and after class, students have volunteered to help me carry books, open doors, and the like. Small things, but add up to a tremendous difference, and I appreciate them very much.

At home, things are going well, too. Friends brought food the first weekend after my surgery. John and Karen brought greens from the garden. Since I was planning to go to a conference, we had already scheduled sitters so Erin could go to book club. They came over to help with bedtime, since what I could do was limited, to say the least. AJ brought a great math activity from her block teaching to share with the girls, and Elisa worked her baby whisperer magic on Amelia the next night. My parents arrived Monday, taking over most of the chauffeur and taxi duties from Erin, and helping with housework, harvesting tomatoes in kale in advance of our first freeze, etc. I’ve been able to help in limited ways, like reading books to the girls, prepping food, and directing Madelyn during pick-up-around-the-house time.

I’ve made some little adaptations to get around, like wearing my fingerless bike gloves most of the time, since my hands get a workout from the crutches, and wearing a backpack most of the time as well, so I can carry things around school and the house. One of my travel mugs fits right onto the handle of my crutches, which is nice. We’ve put a stool into the bathroom so I can put weight on my left knee while I shave and sponge myself off (no showers for now). And at times I give up on standing and just sit down to do stuff–like the other day when I couldn’t find one of my NA beers in the fridge (no real beer because of pain meds). My mom put zippers into two pairs of pants for me so I can get them over my cast, and modified a hat to fit my foot. All in all, while crutches are certainly an inconvenience, I’ve figured out ways to keep up some of my normal activities, with help from others. I’m glad my parents visited–they were helpful, and Madelyn and Amelia were thrilled to see them.

Erin deserves the most credit here. She’s been simply great, never blinking despite adding an array of duties to her mama schedule. I never forget how wonderful my wife is. But now it’s especially apparent. I’ve recruited friends to help her get some time for herself. After I hang up these crutches, I’m going to invest some serious energy into that project.

Today is our sixth pajama party for the girls’ birthdays. Breakfast at dinnertime, Erin’s choice. We count 70 people on our RSVP list. Gonna be a full house, to say the least. Erin and my mom put together the “haunted closet” which the kids love. I’ll be cutting up some pineapple soon and helping make some other things. And so far today I’ve been off the pain meds (yay!) so maybe I can have a glass of beer with my pancakes.

Though I missed MWCA, Neil and I have kept up our research schedule. We’re halfway through the second round of student interviews now, and we’re contacting faculty members to make arrangements to interview them. This weekend, we’re answering a call for proposals for the Kairos special issue on multimodality and writing across borders. Friday afternoon, we spent an hour and a half catching up, planning our work for the rest of the year. We decided to start using a weblog to write regularly about our progress. I’ll have more to say about that shortly.

What else? Not much. Getting to and from the university, helping with parenting, and keeping up with research is enough. Wednesday and Friday, I was booked pretty much solid 9-5: and exhausted at the end of the day. Certainly, I’ve had no problems sleeping since my surgery! As my leg heals, perhaps I’ll be able to do more–but I’m not going to overdo things. Better safe than stupid. This coming week, I meet with my surgeon Thursday; he’ll remove the staples and put on a new cast, and we’ll talk about my rehabilitation. I’m going to ask if I can switch to a VACOcast achilles boot a few weeks after that. It would be great to be able to walk before February.

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.

So I took a deep breath, decided it was time to retool, and pushed the pause button. Instead of writing more essays which were primarily theoretical and historical, I would read broadly in method and do my best to add empirical research methods to my toolbox. I began that work by reading some qualitative research textbooks recommended by Jameison. I also returned to texts I had read and taken notes on over the years, asking, what’s going on here method-wise? I also started imagining how I might investigate long-standing questions about ease not only by going to the archive, but through other means.

In late December 2010, I found out my proposal for ATTW 2011 was accepted. The following excerpts from reviewers’ comments were telling:

• “It is not clear from the proposal if the author is drawing on original studies that reveal ‘new patterns of use’ and that go on to demonstrate/recommend new usability evaluation techniques?”
• “The nature of the study that would be presented in the session is not clear based on this abstract.”
• “Arguably, this presentation does seem to be somewhat speculative but if the author has solid supporting data then I can see it being a solid contribution to the program.”

Each reviewer referred to empirical research in some way. Each one asked, Where is your data? And I realized the question I’d asked myself not long after Jamieson’s visit was right: Where is my ability to produce reliable data? 

Once I committed to retooling, I applied to the Dartmouth Seminar for Composition Research, and I asked my colleague Neil Baird to help me to develop an empirical research project focusing on writing transfer, writing in the major, and transfer students. I posted the tag cloud I made from Dartmouth notes here, and I’ll soon follow up with a longer post. And I hope to begin writing more about the collaborative work Neil and I have been doing, as a way of taking up some of Christina Haas’s suggestions for being a more effective empirical researcher.

So no, I don’t have a list of articles I sent out to share–better, I have a new way of doing business that has changed the way I approach research, assessment, and other spheres of my academic work.

Jeff and I are quite honored to count From A to <A> among the previous award winners. We are also grateful to the University of Minnesota Press for a smooth publication process.

And here’s another shout-out to our contributors. The strength of the book is theirs. Thanks again, folks.

My calendar shows 16 weeks left. The length of a semester.

Diigo? I like the look of the interface, and the social aspect looks extremely promising, groups in particular. But import from Delicious is broken; only the first 255 characters of notes come through. Since I use notes extensively (especially for CF) that’s a show-stopper. And Diigo seems equally focused on user tasks other than entry of bookmarks. The rapid addition of features might be cool; it’s certainly preferable to Delicious’s model, near-complete neglect, though I worry about bloat. I guess I’m unusual in spending a fair amount of time tagging and annotating entries, rather than just clicking “Add” and taking whatever tags are recommended.

So, back to a little more experimentation, the proverbial drawing board. Which may end up being Pinboard. If it wasn’t for their “anti-social bookmarking” ethos, I’d have made the move already.

wget http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/download/patch/ojs-2.3.3-3_to_2.3.4.patch.gz
gunzip ojs-2.3.3-3_to_2.3.4.patch.gz
patch -p1 < ojs-2.3.3-3_to_2.3.4.patch
php tools/upgrade.php upgrade
php tools/upgrade.php check

which I did recently.  The coders working on the project are attentive to problems, regularly answering questions in support forums, even those which amount to, “I can’t get OJS to work on Red Hat 7, please help!” (Like any open source project, OJS attracts its share of users with minimal budgets and thus minimal access to up-to-date servers.) Right now, I’m not worried about the way it looks–a common and well-justified complaint–I can tweak that later with some CSS hacking, and perhaps return something to the project with interface design improvements.

Not long ago I went to Illinois Wesleyan to hear a talk by OJS project lead John Willinsky. He focused more on open access than OJS, mentioning the software only a few times. Willinsky spent a lot of time discussing the practical side of open access, which I appreciated. This was, in large part, response to a question raised during the introductions. One of the officers of the Midwest Sociological Society attended, asking (I’m paraphrasing): “Is open access going to erase the $270,000 we get from journal subscriptions?” A good question. After the talk, I looked, and discovered MSS provides a $10K stipend and $2,500 travel budget to the editor of its journal The Sociological Quarterly. That’s peanuts compared to the budgets of medical journals, but for a small outfit like Composition Forum . . . we could do a lot with that money. So while, like Willinsky, I’m completely committed to open access from an ethical perspective, I’m eager to find ways to adopt OA models while preserving revenue streams–and without going toward the author fee model. Particularly for the humanities, that’s not a sustainable way forward. Willinsky spent the most time describing a model where libraries would work directly with scholarly societies to form cooperatives which perform the same tasks currently performed by commercial publishers and database middlemen. Money which now goes to profits and data munging would be replaced by direct access to data and smarter reuse of existing library labor and infrastructure. Willinsky sketched this possibility out very quickly. In retrospect, I wish he’d spent more time on it.

I found out about Willinsky’s talk from Cheryl Ball, who is doing some OJS-related work of her own. Cheryl and the rest of the Kairos team recived an NEH grant to write plugins and modifications to the OJS codebase so it can handle Kairos-style webtexts. We had ulunch after the talk, and discussed that project and other stuff. I agree that sort of work is the way forward, and a large part of the reason I’m working with OJS: even though it may be overkill for a small journal like Composition Forum, my current approach to making the journal–wrangling HTML from Word files via custom scripts, followed by more custom scripts to deliver it–isn’t any better. Especially where metadata is concerned. Hopefully, as we use OJS, we can realize a more generalizeable solution.

• Madelyn and Amelia turned 5 and 2. Busy and busier–you pick. Both are avid readers; both would be on the computer eight ours a day if allowed.
• Lots of travel. We visited family in Florida (January) and Alabama (March). Our longest trip was a fantastic tour of parks in Utah and Arizona. In late September, the girls and I enjoyed a one-night camping excursion in a local park. I predict even more travel in 2011.
• My essay “Beyond Star Flashes” appeared in Computers & Composition 27.1, and From A to <A>: Keywords of Markup was published.
• Sick, I struggled through ATTW and part of CCCC, and finally gave up and left early. WPA went a lot better.
• Jeff, Thomas, and I met in Portland to drink local brews, eat good food. And I started brewing beer again. That’s continued with no major hiccups, except two broken carboys (augh).
• All of us got bike upgrades. As the girls get older, we’ll be using them a lot more.
• We said good-bye to Lumper, our girl cat.
• Erin and I painted the back and front porches, and got a new driveway. Other than that, not very many big house projects this year–a lot of small stuff.
• My sabbatical is going well. It’s a little more than half over, and I’m pleased with the retooling, reading, and writing I’ve accomplished to date.

Happy new year, everyone.