The final exams for Comp 101 have been given. The piece is a short paper the topic for which is drawn from a hat. The individuals in the course are expected to write a proposal claim; they’re to get in and out quick and detail a problem, provide a solution or a straight proposal, provide reasons and advantages, and supply support and evidence from a min of two sources. I see it as an excellent example of a long weblog post with links to data, authoritative sources, and a minimum of fluff, such as “For eons, people have been struggling with power grids.”

In such a work, students need to avoid generalization and get to a solution to a distinct problem. Here’s an example of the compressive mode vs the general approach:

When the lights went out in New England, people demanded a new way to ensure sparks.

Not

All across the country power is hard to get.

Or the writer should start with a signalled reference

So and so, Director of Research at so and so, remarked on the day the lights went out in Greenwich, “Wow, we should have seen that one coming” (page number).

The series on research that can be linked to via the category to the lright specifically created for the purpose of storing “the series” isn’t over. But I feel the need refer to what the parts were about. They weren’t, number one, an initial search for cohesion. They should be incohesive. In the grand scheme of things, why did I write this:

In a way, people must be freed (freed in the sense of the provision of alternative, reasonable points of view) of what they have come to believe about themselves and their world (I cant write about skateboarding in school. Its not academic enough. Better that I write about the Death Penalty-thats original). Or, Im a failure, for example. I have to go to a community college rather than a university, so I must have done something wrong. Im mediocre because I got bad grades in high school. We know that systems of education are complex designs with multiple meanings. What is a school is a question that has everything to with how a school looks, smells, and feels. In Connecticut some schools may be falling apart, thus Connecticuts education system is shabby, and, more importantly, the lack of organized response by planners and decision makers tells us a lot about what they believe about educating people in Connecticut. The idealist in me claims this: buildings where people learn should be spacious, luminous, branching, maze-like and filled with trap doors, flexible, echoing, exciting, sexy, dignified, messy, filled with incomplete projects, completed projects, music, argumentation, films, bright computer screens, lots of books, and teachers just jittery with the possibility of it all; it should be filled with tools, art, and dangerous chemicals. Business people should be in and out of the place, excited themselves; politicians should enter the rooms with awe of what they helped to build, and the students should be allowed to come and go at will.

What does this paragraph have to do with the topic under consideration: research and writing?

I would argue that the research series is a rough draft and therefore should be met with skepticism, especially by the person who wrote them. What were they? Did the ideas really go anywhere as a series on research.

In starting, what I really had in mind were the graphic illustrations of the weblog tool as a means of storing and categorizing ongoing and developing ideas and how they might lead to “structuring” thinking. Indeed, when I started research and writing I, I had the image of the punchline already in my mind, but some foundation for why had to be established. The series is as of yet incomplete.

I’ll be teaching two Freshman Composition courses in the Spring semester and, as ever, will be leaning on “editing” as key to competent writing and structuring ideas, and, yes, a little research.

We’re going to start with a simple question: why do we like or dislike dogs.

I said that skateboarding is a favorite of the Great Lettuce Head. But, it seems to me, really, that the subject matters only in so far as it can fit the requirement teachers propose for a freshman comp course. In this case the student has “chosen” skateboarding as “his/her” subject of academic pursuit.

In this case the writer uses a fairly straightforward map to visualize topics related to the subject. The topics may have come from a brainstorm or a conversation. The subject/topic relationship could easily lead to divisions in a paper, in this case: skateboarding, its history and its qualities as a sport. Of course, each related topic could also become a focus of research, and it should in this it’s a good idea. In the skateboard case each topic is deep enough for study. The map is a visualization of the thought process and helps writers “see” how the subject fits in the big picture.

The next image illustrates how topic development can be organized in a weblog environment. For example, each topic generated from the cluster map could be given its own Moveable Type category. In this scheme, the weblog looks like a double-entry journal in a conventional loose paper organization scheme. It also allows writers to concentrate their study onto the topics, providing a space for development. The students own reflections and analysis on a topic can develop over time as insight occurs. Students can also react to various readings on the law and history as they concern the subject, isolating sources, source types, listing links to online works, and “writing” in quotations, analysis, paraphrase practice, and bibliographic notations.

The work that develops here is also open for viewing by other students and the professor, where comments may allow questions and the introducing of other ideas that the writer may have missed. In the online environment, the work becomes fluid, flexible, and open to critique. This use of the weblog is devoted only to the writing, student response to critique, and collection of ideas, so that the tool becomes a procedural and storage space. Drafts of paper sections, writing exercises, and other issues could each be organized into categories in this type of work log. Here the technology becomes an organizational aide. Moreover, the writer isn’t tied to any one type of category or post. Weblog organization mirrors the original mapping scheme of the subject “skateboarding” and its topics.

As the writer works, the tool’s hypertextual applicability becomes more obvious, and the student can play with it to suite their needs. This is the importance of understanding the tool. Butcherpaper and charcoal pencils might do just as well, however. Thus no specific tool has to play a required role in learning. In other words, Word doesn’t need to be the only game in town.

The word processor is another matter altogether since its working document structures are file dependent, hence its use as a writing process tool is more “hidden.” In my mind, hypertext tool more closely match thought process schemes. Others may disagree about this, but the disagreement is not damaging to conclusions having to do with preference. In Creative Writing I have students create mutiple files of a poem in progress. The word processor in this case works well as a “part” of the process leading to the completion of the skateboard study. In a expository or research task, the student may cut/paste writing into the WP from the weblog, reformat, revise in Word or WordPerfect, get all the Works Cited forms correct according the standards, print and submit for evaluation.

All of this, it must be emphasized, sounds easier than it actually is in practice, as all veteran writers know. There is no “best” way to develop ideas in writing. The methods must be understood and controlled, however. The pencil/paper method is fluid and dynamic. The writer may list, draw arrows and circles, lay numerous pages onto the table top for assessment and evaluation. This is impossible in a word processor (more closely matched in hypertext, though). The writer cannot, however, format the physical paper into draft copy by some sort of magical folding; they still have to “transfer” information onto other pieces of paper or type their ideas into the word processor’s “headspace.”

I said in another post that students and teachers must learn information management. This may sound cold and technical. It may indeed be a poor choice of words. Nevertheless, what does it mean? I want to consider one approach in the context of a freshman writing course.

Lets say we have a task, to explore a subject. First we have to understand what we know about a subject by getting it down somewhere. An initial writing pose might be a reflective, self-search or a bit of brainstorming. The subject doesnt matter. The situation and technique does. This may or may not be a lengthy process, necessitating analysis, numerous drafts, and play with a comfortable structure: descriptive, comparative, or evaluative. An extension of this could be an examination of a subject that may not interest the writer. The outcome to this initial sortie may be a tentative claim or conclusion or a sort of settlement on definition or clarified of a notion.

Second, we want to test what we know by assessing someone elses call on a topic related to or oriented to the subject; we want to test what we know against the view of another writer or disputant. Here we need to understand what weve written and understand what were reading.

As we flesh through 1 and 2 (these are a means of getting into the writing coursesome methods require reading first) we need to consider how the writing process is shaped or controlled by the writing tool. We could record what we know with a word processor, PowerPoint, a notebook, a weblog, or with a stick and some sand. Shouldnt the writer have to understand how each will change or affect the subject physically? There are so many ways of writing.

I may learn that I dont know enough about one method to find what I know. The typewriter ribbon breaks. I dont know what all those buttons mean on the tool bar of Word. I cant get my file structures correct on the installation of Greymatter or my service provider doesnt have Perl on the server. If I have time, Im going to have to learn a method of recording, a writing method. Maybe theres a one credit WP course out there. If the teacher in a comp course wants everything word processed, is it the teachers responsibility to make sure that students know the WP? Isnt the tool part of the creative process? Ideally, students should have a common understanding of tools because the tools affect writingof course, a WP has already redefined drafting methods. The writer might save over a working draft, leaving the drafting/editing process flat and disjointed.

In composition the lucky student may latch onto a subject of study and keep that subject till graduate school; this is possible. In Contemporary Fiction I asked students in a research proposal to define a subject to cover in research; this subject could also become the subject. In comp it could be skateboarding or light. In Contemporary Fiction it could be the Samurai tradition with Yukio Mishimas story Patriotism as a means of providing focus. In CF, students may or may not understand the term research, but this course can only be taken after the year-long comp sequence, so I assume that a student has basic knowledge of source evaluation, use of the library, an understanding of citation methods, and a basic understanding of research. Some students do fine; others need to review these issues; some students assume that research is another form of general explication; some students leap right in.

Now, I want to stop and continue with skateboarding as my objective, my subject. I have a compulsion to study it. I love skateboarding. Skateboarding to me is everything. Skateboarding is a favorite of the Great Lettuce Head.

Models of qualitative and substantive analysis provide keys to controlling an abundance of source materials by putting them into perspective. Id like to talk about one. Call it Limed or acidic qualitative analytics. Tart and spicy thinking. Here we emphasize quality over quantity and relevant understanding of new and traditional communicative spaces: web pages and books. Here we emphasize understanding the writing situation and its conventions over writing for its own sake, purpose, position, and ethos over general and vacuous opinionating. We emphasize and organize what we know now so that we can determine what needs knowing to overcome a distinguishable problem and to be able to explore different kinds of problems. As Susan Gibb writes in a comment under this post, Research would be starting with an idea based upon knowledge, then seeking to confirm or refute. A very focused process. To probe more specifically, I think the emphasis must stem from understanding the knowledge Ms. Gibb points to as a first cause. If the subject is ale export, I must first attempt to grasp my knowledge of export, ale, and the idea of an economy, then do a little reading for groundingto zone in on what I know. Eventually, as the research proceeds, understanding ale export in the Middle Ages may help me to understand NAFTA now–maybe.

In spicy, engaged intellectual hunts, students can write about The Matrix and make it relevant to some other issue, such as Homeland Security or the effect of digital technology on narrative. As a reader and a writer, I first place skateboarding onto the intellectual plate (I tell myself, this is what Im going to be doing) then try to put it into some context: this activity means something: it has to do with transport, history, the meaning of sport, freedom, and law. Thus, to write about skateboarding means that we can also explore law, public space, a contemporary sense of individuality, and culture.

In a way, people must be freed (freed in the sense of the provision of alternative, reasonable points of view) of what they have come to believe about themselves and their world (I cant write about skateboarding in school. Its not academic enough. Better that I write about the Death Penalty-thats original). Or, Im a failure, for example. I have to go to a community college rather than a university, so I must have done something wrong. Im mediocre because I got bad grades in high school. We know that systems of education are complex designs with multiple meanings. What is a school is a question that has everything to with how a school looks, smells, and feels. In Connecticut some schools may be falling apart, thus Connecticuts education system is shabby, and, more importantly, the lack of organized response by planners and decision makers tells us a lot about what they believe about educating people in Connecticut. The idealist in me claims this: buildings where people learn should be spacious, luminous, branching, maze-like and filled with trap doors, flexible, echoing, exciting, sexy, dignified, messy, filled with incomplete projects, completed projects, music, argumentation, films, bright computer screens, lots of books, and teachers just jittery with the possibility of it all; it should be filled with tools, art, and dangerous chemicals. Business people should be in and out of the place, excited themselves; politicians should enter the rooms with awe of what they helped to build, and the students should be allowed to come and go at will.

Neither parents nor children should be forced to have anything to do with it, but the choice to ignore learning space shouldnt go without consequence. The idealist in me claims that architects, teachers, and law enforcement people should work together to build the above mentioned space, and when a new one is needed the students who graduated should be called upon to build it.

This is a metaphor for mind.

Of course, such spaces already exist in books, on the web, and federal court, in Montaigne and Alice Munro and Shelley Jackson. In a way, for me, ignorance is a kind of denied access to spaces that are interesting and dangerous. We should risk the loss of democracy in our attempts to understand it, not kill its potential beauty because we fear its loss.

Sarina Salemi writes:

According to my instructor, who was the chair of the history department this year…they hope that by traumatizing (my exaggeration) the education majors with this class, these future teachers may take the time to teach this in high school, where it should have been taught in the first place.

Doesn’t this boil things down a little narrowly. Will the education majors in their teaching positions get to choose? You’d need more Kuciniches in education, S.

And Susan Gibb writes:

While some things learned in a classroom MUST stick with us if they are relative to our future career choice, for example chemistry to a chemist, the reason for a well-rounded education is to learn a thought process more than the subject (algebra or a foreign language to someone who will never use them). So if the Jupiterians should show up, we have a more diverse background of knowledge to draw from to deal with it, and a few different learned approaches to figure out how to greet them.

Doesn’t everyone have a thought process, though? Aren’t some better than others?

In a way, Susan’s use of the weblog form discloses an analytical and changing sense of thought and expression. Her mind will be on display. More on this in a bit.

The classroom is designed space, architectural and mnemonic. The things we do in college are also designed. Do we need colleges? My answer is no. Do we need smart people to learn about health and healing? Yes. Must college be the place to graduate professional citizens? No, but its probably as good a way as any other. There are, however, other ways, such as professional apprenticeships.

I find it absurd that education is sold. I find it absurd to sell it in semester chunks. Heres a course on Biology. It lasts 3 months. In this bio course all that you need to know will be covered in 3 months. I say cut it to two weeks. I say extend it to 6 months. I say lets write all our papers in Power Point or draw them in crayon or in acrylic. Lets do photo essays or films to express our understanding of cell mutation.

Design. Art.

A year-long comp sequence should prepare people to express themselves in an economics course, sure, to execute a case study. It should also teach them to be flexible and to anticipate other writing situations. British Lit demands a different kind of writing than marketing. But the goal is the same: understanding and persuasiveness (and more). There are also hidden goals: to understand the bureaucracy, to learn who needs buttering, to learn that people will be judged by their grammar, to learn that life isnt fair, to learn that life is fair, to learn that stock issues in a policy claim necessitate an understanding of facts and value judgments, to learn that some people dont believe in god and have a different view of the minimum wage. To learn that writing is really a negotiation with space, to learn that the invention process is another way of thinking through memory.

Writing involves numerous and often contradictory skills: organizing time, mapping ideas, gathering data, establishing a subject, memorizing vocabulary and methodologies, learning subjects and their conventions, understanding failures in logic, making distinctions, channeling curiosity, learning and executing editing standards, anticipating audiences. None of these are under expressed ownership by any single department in higher education. The English Department doesnt own writing. It doesnt even own literature, just as the Law School doesnt own the law. Citizens own that or should.

Effective writing comes with time and practice. Since Im a visual thinker, I find it useful to think of writing as research as a subset of architecture: writing is design, construction, and the understanding of a kind of space which admits all other spaces. Writing is a cognitive map; writing is shared memory; writing is analysis; writing is the promulgation of image exchange between people engaged in conversation. Writing is a room where we sit and think. Writing expresses engagement.

I could generalize that most people dont know what light is. They know it as illumination, brightness, awareness, but its physical nature is a mystery. Its that thing that comes out of a light bulb. Is it matter? Is light shot out of the eye? Is it a beam of corpuscles? What did al-Hasan have to say about this? Who figured the speed of light and how was it figured? Whats Snells Law?

I want people to understand the research process (I want to understand it better as I develop essays on memory and other things) in a composition sequence, whether the course runs through the modesdescription, narration cause and effect, for exampleor a combination of modes, argumentation, with some amount of rhetorical approach. But theres also another issue: communicating findings in an elastic, flexible manner that makes sense and establishes authority for the writer. Authority: this writer knows what theyre talking about; they know how to get ideas across to a reader. Its one thing to know about light, its another thing to explain and interpret al-Hasan, to summarize an article from a periodical, to avoid plagiarism, to synthesize what others say in ones own work, to write cogently about a subject. Writers are surrounded by texts; they need to be engaged with them.

In a way people who are connected to institutional learning must be information managers, however one wants to define information, and they have to learn to distinguish between the different ways that sources can be used and when to use them effectively. They have to be able also to handle their own ideas and to keep control over them using alphabetical trowels. But how? In what form? Then why that form (this, in my mind, is a question of media)? I could simply claim that people will use the methods of the Modern Language Association and leave it at that. I could expect people to learn about Snells Law and to express what theyve found.

The question is why. Is it all about textual engagement? Is my mind a text?

I would generalize that if most people heard that life existed on Jupiter, they wouldnt think much of it, unless thy also heard that that life had crowded onto ships and was on its way to enslave planet Earth. This is why science fiction writers make aliens nasty rather than innocuous. It keeps us interested. Do you buy this?

In my literature courses I expect people to write a research paper (thus to be able to write one). In British Literature, we work with multiple forms of assessment: classroom discussion, short answer and essay riffs on take home exams, and a research paper on some topic not really detailed in lecture or discussion, such as Nennius or the export of ale and its influence on the London economy in the Middle Ages.

But what does it mean that I expect people to know how to write (hence to execute) a research paper? Is this a responsible statement? Does it reflect changing methods, conventions, and expectations? Professor Sally Terrell and I have talked about this subject for years and we’re having frequent and serious discussions about it now as we continue to evolve as teachers in an evolving department at an evolving school. And now Susan and Jason have also become a part of the conversations.

What do I mean when I say research, and how do people interpret that term? In my own mind, I hear research and think the laboratory. Research and Development. AT&T. I see people focused on pages illuminated orange by library lamps. I hear the nuts and bolts being tightened on atom smashers. I think citations, quotation form, thesis statements, and ornery teachers who can sniff a comma splice from under a ton of blue cheese. I hear groans. Research depends on what we are asked to do and what we happen to be doing and where we happen to be. In this age we need to know things. I may want to know how to enroll in school. I call the school and ask. This is a kind of research: I have a question that needs answering.

To define research we need simplification. Let’s say I want to learn about skateboarding. I just have this compulsion to know about it (or maybe I have a compulsion to know about algebra or light or a potential job). Let’s say I’m lucky: as this compulsion is surfacing I happen to be in a composition course where I’ve been asked to write an essay about something that interests me. This is what I call lucky strike.

Were products of the Enlightenment. We ask questions that cant be satisfied by the priest or rabbi. The priest may have an opinion about Steven Winebergs conception of the first three minutes of time, but to argue with the math would take more than theology or faith. There are things that it may be important to know before one becomes an economist. Maybe some logic and ethics would be nice. The same goes for the literary critic, the teacher, or the computer programmer. Computer programming, I assume, is more than just programming. In America, the programmer is also a citizen.

Would this programmer care if the Jupiterians were on their way?

This is one of those “when I was in college posts.” During my first two years in college database organization and storage of catalogued information was just being introduced into the library at the University of Texas at El Paso, a beautiful, spacious, and massive structure built in Bhutanese style architecture.

As a writing teacher now I’ve been able to follow how information storage and dissemination has changed and has changed teaching. Researching Darwin in school I had four basic choices: periodicals (primary and secondary), newspapers, books, and interviews with experts (primary source research). I don’t remember having a hard time with this, but I do remember doing the prepwork, the “gathering,” reading the books, studying the books, obsessing over the focus or thesis, writing notes on note cards and hammering out the paper on a typewriter. It was a big deal. It never stopped being a big deal.

Even in graduate school, we were basically surrounded by the book stacks and humanities journals.

At Tunxis we’re beginning to consider how much effective “research” a student can reasonably be expected to do in first year writing and composition courses given the extent and kind of sources in existence in print and in digital. How will considerations and decisions made about this effect curricula later on? The MLA’s list of works cited notations is fairly extensive and, in a way, that’s the problem. (Often the problem is hard to explain, too). There’s the book, the web page, the scholarly project, CD-ROM, DVD, the online digital video versions of PBS’s Nova, the weblog, and so forth. Fine by me, really.

The question isn’t always that there is so much. It’s what does it mean for teachers and students. When I was in school I ran to the library or scrounged inside Johnson’s office, looking through his books. It wasn’t easy. It felt manageable. People doing research would say, “I’m off to the library for some books.” Moreover, there was physical continuity in the process as research was taught. What does this continuity mean? For the student it may be a question of conventions and artifacts: “what are those numbers on the EBSCO search result?” The way a database represents volume, number, and source differs presentation to presentation, context to context.

And this is just the physical apparatus . . .