Invention – how can this be mapped to design theory? Should it be mapped? What are the unexplainable moments in the design process? What about system theory? Some cross-over with sociolinguistic analysis.

Digital diagesses? Holy crap!!!!!! Isn’t this just how points of references influence knowledge creation? The methodology of knowledge creation – can it be applied outside and beyond the classroom? How is this stuff different from the journaling techniques we were teaching 20 years ago?

Concepts, purpose, context, audience… notions of representation — particularly visual representation – decisions we make about representation and the ethics of the tools and technologies we use to create those representations.

Concepts of “no-spaces” and “non-spaces” – identity, place, naming and what it all assumes. For starters, it assumes perspective.

The public pedagogy and rhetorics of de-location… How is making documentaries different from exercises of observation, description, and narration? We’re teaching the same thing through new media.
Writing exercised that have the student document the moment.

Documentary and amplifying. How does amplification not change the moment? At what point does the documentor pass from objective observer to subjective story teller?

Again, how is this different from teaching observation and the role of subjectivity? I’m not seeing the connection between documentaries and the notions of de-location and moment. Maybe I’m tired.

The moment and interaction. Why does interaction have to assume some level of engagement? I interact with the world around me all the time. But I choose to engage only those elements that are important or necessary. Perspective.

Notions of apparatus theory. IBM’s information mapping techniques… Carroll’s minimalism… Goodfriendson’s drill down approach, Berger’s “Ways of Seeing”

The visual element functioning as declarative AND procedural information—even serving the serialistic learner – objectifying the self!!!

He’s right, of course. While I never considered my blog dead, there was a nagging notion in the back of my head that I’d never find the time in foreseeable future to get back to it. The discipline of blogging is worth the effort; to make it a regular part of your day.

There is the challenge of sticking to my guns. Two boys, work, teaching, being, doing, etc. I’ve vented as such before. ‘nough said.

A few months back I read Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post Coloniality by Sara Ahmed. Through Ahmed's text I realized how underserved I have been by theory in my practice and in my scholarship. I liked Ahmed's way of doing theory. It jives with my preconception of how theory serves and is done by the researcher. I see in Ahmed’s method a form of popular theory that serves to extend or forward some understanding. How the researcher does theory is a matter of method.

I spent 10 years in the Air Force randomly "contacting" people from every state in the U.S. While we were oversees, we made contact with hundreds of people from just about every country in Western (non-communist) Europe. Over the span of 10 years, that’s a lot of nodes to randomly connect with. Simple math seems to suggest that the more nodes you connect with, the more likely your chances of experiencing a small world phenomenon.

Watts was talking about connectivity and relationships. I’m thinking more about the likelihood of running into one of the many nodes we randomly connect with over the span of a lifetime.

Two weeks ago I’m strolling through WalMart with my little guy looking for batting gloves and some playing cards he and his buddies are into. I randomly pass this guy in the aisle. He looks at me, I look at him. We both make that lame half-nod acknowledgement men make to each other when passing in close quarters. Four or five steps later I’m thinking, “I know that guy, but from where?” At around step ten, I stop and turn around. I look up and the guy is doing the same thing; standing in the aisle with this puzzled look on his face. I walk back toward him and it hits me, “Mike D***. It’s D***.” By the time I get to him he’s putting a hand out. I shake his hand and say/ask, “D***?” He says, “Yeah, but you gotta help me out here man.” I tell him my name and there’s a flicker of recognition, but it takes a minute or so of bantering about mutual friends and places for him to fully place me.

Here’s the thing. I met D*** in Germany in 1987. We worked in the same medical unit. We played softball, basketball, and golf together for four years. I met his fiancé during a camping trip/softball tournament in ’89 (I think). D*** is originally from Tennessee. I’m originally from New Jersey. Our nodes intersected for a few years and then we disconnected, but does the connection remain?

He’s living in Cicero now because his wife is finishing up her Air Force career in recruiting. I think he also said that she has some family in the area. I’m here because Helen grew up in Syracuse and her entire family is sprinkled around from here to Buffalo.

Obvious question: What are the chances of running into D*** in a Cicero, NY WalMart some fifteen plus years after I initially connect with him? Watts and Urban would say the chances are pretty good, but not because of simple math. They would propose a more sophisticated model to account for the seeming randomness of the meeting. Regardless of the explanation, these types of meetings are always amazing.

I’ve got to call D*** to set up a round of golf. Catch up and fill in the holes. He was always a good egg. Laid back and completely unexcitable. A hell of a good golfer, and he could place a softball anywhere on the field. When things idle back, I’ll ring him up.

In 760, we’re continuing to look at the features of the genre of academic writing. Yesterday Derek asked, “Are socially constructed mental models the same as or different from genres?” Ty and Carolyn mention that when Bahktin talks about the social, there exists some interface in which the discussion happens – in which a mental map is constructed. Geisler, it was suggested, may be trying to cover the gap between the individual and the social. This is one way of seeing how the motives of one person writing in a situation moves within a genre—and moves the genre—in which they are working. The mental model is an “interior” conception. In this way, Geisler is addressing the same “gaps” in genre as the genre theorists. “Mental models may be overalys that mediate between ordinary conversational practice and more specialized way of knowing” (186-7).

The model-mapping, yes the mapping—that’s where I’m going with this. Like Geisler’s socially constructing mental models, model-maps are created in response to directed and undirected behaviors (social and program respectively). Mental model and model-map constructions intend to “fill” gaps (declarative or procedural knowledge gaps) with metadata, and to format that data into acceptable and usable forms. In both model constructions, gaps are filled by filtering new knowledge, defaulting to existing knowledge, or overriding existing knowledge with new knowledge. And in both cases, language-dependent “adapters” translate between what is known and what is required, producing a knowledge set best suited for the task.

OK, so maybe I’m confusing the treatment of a mental model with a physical modeling technique. Maybe a model-map could be created to represent a mental model? It might be an apples and oranges thing. Or maybe not. It seems that the activities embedded in and required of mental models are similar to those activities associated with model-map constructions.

This needs a fuller treatment.

First, Berkenkotter and Huckin co-opted Anderson’s conceptual work and applied it to make some sense of their own research. This is a move we’ve noted as natural (or at least common) in scholarly writing—-research builds on existing bodies of knowledge and often looks to cross- and inter-disciplinary work for concepts, terms, and techniques that lend themselves to the research at hand. (We’ve also noted that this can be the fun part of research).

The second thing that struck me about “the Nate” research was the way in which the appropriation of the two terms (procedural and declarative) complicated our analysis because the authors did not provide an expansive enough treatment of Anderson’s conclusions. It isn’t enough to say that Anderson simply stated xxxxxx. They needed to provide more context-—to explain the questions, problems, and concerns against and in which Anderson's concept was developed.

Or maybe not. Maybe I’m responding to some of our efforts in class to map declarative and procedural to the activities of acquiring and articulating knowledge. Maybe I’m just expressing my uneasiness with minimalism (and Caroll’s zealously in the late 90s) and thinking that folks like Anderson should get something more than a single citation, particularly when their terms/concepts are used as a central strand in someone else’s research.

Note to self: Revisit Anderson’s article on declarative and procedural information. Differentiate this against how Berkenkotter and Huckin use these terms in their analysis of Nate. The analogy that we want to create is one that considers genre as constitutive of both declarative and procedural knowledge. It is affected by this knowledge and contains/reflects this knowledge.

As we were wrapping up a discussion of Bawarshi, I said, “You know, technical writing just doesn’t concern itself with invention. Maybe that’s why genre isn’t such a big deal to me.”

Well, other than that statement being completely absurd on a lot of levels, I think it speaks to what I’m recognizing in my own teaching (thanks in part to Vandenberg's review of Bawarshi and Devitt) as this deterministic view of technical documents. There just doesn’t seem to be a lot individual agency in the practice-based pedagogical models around which I try to build my courses.

When I look at how we work through validation scripts, I think (I hope) that I’m preparing students to better manage the “discursive transactions” and modes associated with a particular type of writing activity, not necessarily a particular type of document.

Vandenberg notes that beyond the possibilities identified by Bawarshi, there is “considerable capacity in genre theory to complexify inquiry into contact zones for example, by accounting for the interrelated functions of texts and people who construct and maintain them” (542). I think that Technical Communication (with technical writing being a single activity within that discipline) extends that accounting to those who use and reuse texts--beyond the range as considered by Composition, Rhetoric, English, or Linguistics.

Which brings me back to my original weak effort to retract (or at best to qualify) my silly ass comment about invention and technical writing. Technical writing instruction does concern itself with invention, but not in reaction to current-traditional or post-modern process theory. It looks to invention as a situated activity--an activity that lends itself more to genre theory than others I’ve considered (for example, Bazerman, Bizzell, et al work on discourse communities). At the undergraduate level, I’m thinking it’s more important to expand the student’s understanding of how documents work in, for, and with certain contexts (begin to build their “mutual knowledge” of genres) than it is to focus on trying to explain or describe the moment at which the document comes into being.

That's probably what I should have said at the end of class.

For example, I write a user guide for a piece of software. The user guide is published in hardcopy and distributed with the software. The user guide is a user guide because of all the contextual considerations that make it a user guide. Then, some monkey’s ass decides to save development costs and says, “Let’s PDF this user guide and distribute it with the software as the online help.” At a very very very rudimentary level, this is an example of single-sourcing (a horribly pathetic but all too common misunderstanding of the essential nature of single-sourcing). But there we have it: the user guide that I wrote has been repacked (different media) and redistributed (different environment) as a help file (different purpose). It has the exact same content and form (structure) as the document I authored, but it’s no longer a user guide, it’s a help file. (And yes, it will fail the user miserably because it is not a help file, it’s a user guide. This is another soap box I can pull out at a later date).

That’s just some quick thoughts. I’ll have to revisit this with more time point back into Devitt, Prior, and Miller.

****

Genre is performance-based; pulling text out of a situation. Genre is what and how readers do. Genre is “always already existing.” Basically this saying that often we do something, but we don’t’ recognize the implications until after the fact. Genre essentially exists through a recognition of the implications. You can refer to a capital “G” genres or small “g” genres as things that ebb and flow. Genres have potential to exist and recur or not; there must be some sort of friction.

*****

Genre is dependent on the rhetorical aspects of the artifact, without rhetoric, the genre is none-existent. It seems that Devitt’s context of situation, context of culture, and context of genres is rhetoric.

Category and Activity. Genre has to be described as activity and in classificatory terms (but doesn’t the thing that labels the activity invoke a classification?). The graduate seminar is a good example of genre as activity. There is not text that is the graduate seminar, but it is a genre. The activity has to be brokered by an approved body (institutional, political, etc.). So what is the brokering?

To say that something starts with user (participant) is to reduce genre to a matter of individual agency. If we think of genre as performative or emergent, we are still involved in created that genre as participatory. Devitt and Bawarshi are restoring the individual to the social. Social context merely constrains us to a particular range, but does not prescribe our activity.

The problem with this type of circular thinking is trying to figure out the ways in which we are influenced by out social conditions and contexts while still being true to our “souls”—of how all of our personal choices are constrained by social contexts.

****

There is a power superstructure inherent in all genres—the who and how certain genres get defined, labeled, and categorized.

Repurposing form from an understood and known genre for a different purpose is an example of how form functions separate from genre—of how genre isn’t only about the form. For example, consider the use of the “Web Content Management for Dummies” text to sell/position a particular system. Another example is email and the memorandum. Modern day email systems have co-opted the form and certain elements of the memorandum, but arguably functions in ways never intended (or considered) for the memorandum.

I chose Devitt simply because I liked the more concise summary of what we’ve read and discussed to date, with the exception of Bawarshi (although Devitt does seem to reject “situation” as genre, which I don’t’ think would set well with Bawarshi). Which sort of leads to a general theme of expanded situation -- like how is "context" not situational?

My first set of questions is in regard to this summary: Can we teach writing without addressing form? If we can’t, how do we teach form so it is not prescriptive—so as not to integrate the “notion of how meaning is made [through a lens of] inseparability of form from function” (5).

In discussing the knowledge of the primary and “contextual genres,” Devitt seems to be rehashing Giddens’ “mutual knowledge.” “Knowing the genre, therefore, means knowing such rhetorical aspects as appropriate subject matter, level of detail,…” (16). My second set of questions is in regard to this summary: What happens when a writer creates a document to address a specific situation (in a specific situation) while ignorant of the contextual genres and rhetorical strategies others have used before? What do purpose, object, and motive reveal about genre in this situation?

I have trouble getting my head around those parts of Devitt’s summary that try to make sense of the cyclical nature of genre (genre theory?). “A genre is named because of its formal markers; the formal markers can be identified because a genre has been named. The form regularities we can observer in genres do not alone create the genres; they result from the genres” (10). “…formal features physically mark some genres, as as traces, and hence may be quite revealing. But those formal traces do no define or constitute the genre. The fact that genre is reflected in formal features does not mean that genre is those features” (11). “If genre is based on recurrence at all, it must be a recurrence perceived by the individuals who use genres…. Paradoxically, then, people who recognize recurring situations because they know genres, yet genres exist only because people have acted as though situations have recurred” (21) [see my first set of questions for why I have trouble with this]. “People construct situations through genres, but they also construct genres through situations…. Once the genre is chosen, however, the genre reciprocally acts to shape the situation” (22). “… genre [should be] seen not as a response to recurring situations but as a nexus between an individual’s actions and a socially defined context. Genre is a reciprocal dynamic within which individuals’ actions construct and are constructed by recurring context of situation, context of culture, and context of genres” (31).

A general statement: In (re)emphasizing culture, Devitt is invoking rhetoric, without coming out calling it as such. “What fills that void [descriptions of external influences on genre] is not only cultural context (ideological and material baggage) surrounding or every action and situational context (the people, languages, and purposes involved in every action), but also generic context....” (27-8). Seems to me all of that is big “R” Rhetoric.

Devitt’s last paragraph on page 22 provides a good question on the heels of our analysis of the structure of Bawarshi’s text. It made me think of the folktale of the student who submitted a three-page dissertation and had it accepted. It made me wonder about how much leeway we have in regard to our scholarly writing. “What readers will likely note is a problem of genre, either noting a flawed text that violates the genre or concluding that the writer is trying to change the genre (the interpretation probably depending on whether the writer is a student or an established scholar, ….” (22).

All “things” (not just textual things) have structure. As such, all things have the potential – the motive for some type of action. Intention is the internalization of motive—the agency that enables actors within structures to act.

Motive = the a priori reason to act
Intention = the way in which the actor acts

Intention, then, represents the (small “r”) rhetorical moves the actor makes—a space in which Rhetoric and Genre overlap. This is the space in which genre is rhetorically sound (Miller’s concept) because the foundational genre (both why and how the motive and intention are invoked) and that which is created ultimately reflects the experience of the actor who interprets and creates.

It makes sense in my head. Sort of.

Derek and Krista provided good resources on which to ground some of my reading. It’s a peripheral question, but as I worked through Bawarshi (for a second time); I kept stumbling across aspects of his analysis (which considers the “genre” of invention – invention as typically understood as something that occurs prior to or during the writing process).

This is not very well thought out (I have breakfast to make for a 10 year old)… Today in class, if time permits, I’d like to see if we can’t reconcile the “blog as genre” question with the following statement from Bawarshi (against all that we know about the “blog” as a socializing and potentially mobilizing tool):

…[Genres] maintain the desires that elicit their use—socially sanctioned motives for ”appropriately” recognizing and behaving within certain recurring situations—which become part of our intentions as social agents and which we then enact rhetorically as social practices (96).

There’s an innocence about this type of camping that’s being forgotten. Maybe it’s about halcyon days and imagined pasts. Remember the old comic strip Fred Basset? I can’t remember if the basset hound’s name was Fred or if that was his owner’s name. Regardless, there was some sense of “outdoorsmanship” that I took from that comic. I got the same feeling about Mr. Ed – yes, that Mr. Ed. Wilbur was into fishing and hunting. His house was this sort of Coachman style ranch that just oozed country living.

Here’s a weird reference to place what I'm struggling to describe: Remember somewhere toward the end of Dirty Dancing? The owner of the resort is explaining to his young manager that the world is changing—that people don’t want to spend summers at woodland resorts. Everything prior to that world change is what I think I’m getting at.

I sat with Sam around the campfire, laughing at the skits and struggling to remember the words to old campfire songs. I watched how the older kids looked out for the little guys—how they patiently showed them the right way to light a camp stove and stow their gear. How they made sure even the smallest kid had a chance to carry the ball during an odd version of Capture the Flag. And I wondered how many other kids could benefit from that camaraderie and friendship.

Dennis and I used to spend entire Saturday’s on the lake fishing. He moved to Arizona when we were 10. Sometime the following summer I found out Moz liked to fish. He and I wasted too many weekends sitting on someone’s (anyone’s) dock, not catching many fish but having a blast. I tried my first bit of Red Man chewing tobacco on one of those docks and experienced my first bout of nicotine poisoning shortly thereafter. I wonder if Moz still likes to fish.

My brother loves to fish. We’ve talked about a trip to the Delaware Water Gap for a couple of years now. I’ve thought about taking the boys. I know they’d be bored out of their minds within the hour, although Sam seem to have enjoyed the couple times we’ve gotten up to Caughdenoy Dam the past few weeks. I’m taking advantage of it while I can (in a selfish sort of way). Maybe I should just go to the Gap with Joe. Spend some lost time with him.

We've read Miller, Bahktin, and Giddens (I don't know who Giddens is or why he's important). After a rich, sometimes amusing dicussion, I oversimplied "genre" by asking (on the heels of Rachel's similar question) if "the blog" can be classified as a genre. Much debate ensued when Collin pointed to an interesting distincition Carolyn Miller makes between literary genres and rhetorical genres.

I'm tired and I need to do some bedtime reading with Sam, so let me summarize my conclusion: The "blog" is not necessarily a unique literary genre. It is, however, something of an amalgam of different rhetorical genres. I like this conclusion because it's easy for me to get my head around. It's simple. No silly-ass taxonomies (at least not yet) to contend with. And I like the distincition between literary genres and the more "active" rhetorical genres.

Much to learn and sort out. But I think genre theory in general can help me work through some of the questions I've been writing about in regard to the textual aspect (near requirement) of online learning.

PS: Mets are off -- and it's a good thing. Willie looked like he was going to blow a veiner last night.

PSS: Helen goes in for her eye surgery tomorrow. She'll do great. She's the strongest person I've ever met.