Thinking Globally, Composing Locally: Rethinking Online Writing in the Age of the Global Internet

Thinking Globally, Composing Locally

Thinking Globally, Composing Locally

Rethinking Online Writing in the Age of the Global Internet

Edited by

Rich Rice

Kirk St.Amant

Utah State University Press

Logan

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https://doi.org/10.7330/9781607326649

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rice, Rich (Richard Aaron), editor. | St.Amant, Kirk, 1970– editor.

Title: Thinking globally, composing locally : rethinking online writing in the age of the global Internet / edited by Rich Rice, Kirk St. Amant.

Description: Logan : Utah State University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017025369| ISBN 9781607326632 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781607326649 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Language and the Internet. | Intercultural communication. | Composition (Language arts)—Study and teaching. | Media literacy—Cross-cultural studies. | Digital communications—Cross-cultural studies. | Education—Data processing—Cross-cultural studies.

Classification: LCC P120.I6 T47 2017 | DDC 808.00285—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025369

Nicholas Alexander Brown composed the graphic panels that appear at the beginning of each section in this book.

Cover illustration © Ekaphon maneechot/Shutterstock.

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction—Thinking Globally, Composing Locally: Re-thinking Online Writing in the Age of the Global Internet

Rich Rice and Kirk St.Amant

Section I: Contacting

1 Digital Notebooks: Composing with Open Access

Josephine Walwema

2 Disjuncture, Difference, and Representation in Experience Mapping

Minh-Tam Nguyen, Heather Noel Turner, and Benjamin Lauren

3 Lessons from an International Public Forum: Literacy Development in New Media Environments

J. C. Lee

4 Reconstructing Ethos as Dwelling Place: On the Bridge of Twenty-First Century Writing Practices (ePortfolios and Blogfolios)

Cynthia Davidson

5 Considering Global Communication and Usability as Networked Engagement: Lessons from 4C4Equality

Liz Lane and Don Unger

Section II: Conveying

6 Ludic Is the New Phatic: Making Connections in Global, Internet-Mediated Learning Environments

Suzanne Blum Malley

7 The MOOC as a Souk: Writing Instruction, World Englishes, and Writers at Scale

Kaitlin Clinnin, Kay Halasek, Ben McCorkle, Susan Delagrange, Scott Lloyd Dewitt, Jen Michaels, and Cynthia L. Selfe

8 Resources Are Power: Writing across the Global Information Divide

Amber Engelson

9 Activity Theory, Actor-Network Theory, and Culture in the Twenty-First Century

Beau S. Pihlaja

10 Examining Digital Composing Practices in an Intercultural Writing Class in Turkey: Empirical Data on Student Negotiations

Mª Pilar Milagros

Section III: Connecting

11 Writing Center Asynchronous/Synchronous Online Feedback: The Relationship between E-Feedback and Its Impact on Student Satisfaction, Learning, and Textual Revision

Vassiliki Kourbani

12 Clicks, Tweets, Links, and Other Global Actions: The Nature of Distributed Agency in Digital Environments

Lavinia Hirsu

13 Connecting the Local and the Global: Digital Interfaces and Hybrid Embodiment in Transnational Activism

Katherine Bridgman

14 Globally Digital, Digitally Global: Multimodal Literacies among Bhutanese Refugees in the United States

Tika Lamsal

15 Glocalizing the Composition Classroom with Google Apps for Education

Daniel Hocutt and Maury Brown

Afterword—Navigating Composition Practices in International Online Environments

Kirk St.Amant and Rich Rice

About the Authors

Index

Figures

2.1. SOS Automobile Registration Experience Map

2.2. Ben’s Rad Coffee Shop Experience Map

2.3. Minh-Tam’s Rad Coffee Shop Experience Map

2.4. Heather’s Rad Coffee Shop Experience Map

4.1. Emily Madsen, ePortfolio Work History Page

7.1. Visual Public Service Announcement on Biking to Work

7.2. Rhetorical Composing MOOC Participants Share and Respond to Peers’ Work in the Google+ Community

10.1. Yoda’s Bar Graph Indicating Number of Adverts with Sexuality Content

10.2. Doğa’s Figure to Showcase the Participant’s Reasons for Following a Famous TV Figure

10.3. Pink’s Bar Graph Showing Number of Participants under Each Attitude toward Photoshop

10.4. Selin’s Definitions of Visual Controversy

10.5. Original Survey Snapshot of Furkan’s Remediation Project Slides

10.6. Selin’s Remediation Presentation Pictures

14.1. Facebook: Multiple Languages in Action

14.2. Priya and Her Group on FB

14.3. Priya’s Writing Sample

Tables

2.1. Analytical Categories

5.1. Our Contexts and Audiences for the 2014 Conference on College Composition and Communication in Indianapolis, Indiana

5.2. 4C4E’s Three-Phase Approach to Networked Engagement

6.1. Participating Institutions, Instructors, and Students

6.2. Analytic Coding Scheme for Instructions

6.3. Example Successful and Unsuccessful Introduction Post Titles

10.1. Selin’s Representation of Instances of Categories in Each Video (Data)

10.2. Doğa’s Representation of Partcipants’ Responses in Terms of Relationship to Their Bodies

11.1. Error Categories Used in WRC Marketing and Analysis

11.2. Student Revision Analysis Categories

11.3. First Draft Summary of Students’ Errors

11.4. Second Draft Summary of Students’ Short-Term Revision Behavior

11.5. Types of Student Revision

11.6. Students’ Revision Behavior Outcome

11.7. Second Draft/Summary of Individual Student Results

11.8. Second Draft/Types of Student Revision

15.1. Differentiating Google Drive Sharing Strategies

15.2. Heuristic for Implementing Google Drive for Collaborative Composing

15.3. Illustration of Glocalized Processes and Entities

Acknowledgments

It is impossible to acknowledge all of the people who have helped support and bring this collection together. It has been a successful example of the process of contacting, conveying, and connecting. Of course, our contributors deserve credit first and foremost. Each chapter has gone through many revisions and updates over the last several years, as diverse scholarship and perspectives regarding intercultural and global technical communication emerge constantly. Our contributors’ students, and well as our own students at Texas Tech University and Louisiana Tech University, inspired the need for this research. Students reviewed ideas and writing in this collection indirectly and directly as part of our engagement as integrated scholars in our teaching, research, and service. Our colleagues from our institutions, from professional conferences we attend and present at, and from the international schools we’ve worked with, have helped enormously.

Rich Rice was awarded a U.S. Fulbright-Nehru Scholars Award in 2014, which enabled him to focus his research on global technical communication and this collection. Thank you, sincerely, Fulbright. His serving as a visiting research scholar in India at the Central University of Kerala in 2011, Delhi University in 2014, and Ashoka University (also in 2014), was instrumental to this work. Serving as a visiting research scholar in China at Southeast University in 2017, too, was very helpful. The research was sponsored by Texas Tech University in a variety of ways, too, such as through the TTU Transdisciplinary Research Academy; the Teaching, Learning, and Professional Development Center and the Multicultural Course Transformation Project; the Humanities Center; the Provost’s Office; the Service-Learning Faculty Fellow Program; and the College of Arts & Sciences. The Council for Programs of Technical and Scientific Communication provided a research grant in support of this work. And we thank Dr. Kanika Batra, whose scholarship and insights in postcolonial literature, gave an important interdisciplinary eye to the project.

Kirk St.Amant wishes to thank Mark D. Hawthorne and Victoria Mikelonis—whose combined mentoring introduced him to computing, culture, and communication—and Beth L. Hewett and Christa Ehmann Powers for providing the initial opportunity to examine the teaching of writing in international online spaces and he wishes to thank the Eunice C. Williamson Endowment made possible through the State of Louisiana Board of Regents Support Funds. Kirk wishes to especially thank his daughters, Lily St.Amant and Isabelle St.Amant, for being a continued source of inspiration for all he does.

We also wish to thank Nicholas Alexander Brown, who is a doctoral student in Rhetoric and Composition at Texas Christian University. His research examines multimodal rhetoric and comic books, and he composed the graphic panels at the beginning of each section in this book. And a sincere thanks goes to Michael Spooner (associate director), Laura Furney (assistant director and managing editor), Dan Miller (production and marketing designer), Kylie Haggen (editorial assistant), and Charlotte Steinhardt (sales and marketing assistant) at the University Press of Colorado. We also thank Utah State University Press, manuscript reviewers, and the entire editorial staff who helped prepare this collection for publication. Without your work and service this publication wouldn’t exist. Please, continue to share it with your colleagues and students.

Thinking Globally, Composing Locally

Introduction

Thinking Globally, Composing Locally

Re-thinking Online Writing in the Age of the Global Internet

Rich Rice and Kirk St.Amant

Audience—it is one of the central components of the writing process. We consider audience carefully, first, to meet a group’s reading expectations. In some cases, the audience is created in our minds. It’s imagined, and we address presumed reading preferences the best we can (consider Ong, 1975). In other cases, we conduct specific sorts of research (e.g., rhetorical or audience analyses) to learn more about a group’s background and communication needs. Using this information as a guide we attempt to craft targeted messages (such as St.Amant, 2015). Regardless of the process, one key tenant remains the same: when we write, it is to convey information to a group in a way that recognizes the communication needs of group members (Caroll, 2010).

Online environments add new levels of complexity to understanding audience because the notion of group changes. In such environments, audience is always more diverse, varied, and in many cases global in scale. We must adapt, and we must do so quickly. To successfully invoke online audiences that are global in nature, the writing process requires a kairotic approach of working to contact participants in just the right way, to convey just the right information, and to connect with readers at just the right time in a sustained or even transactional process. Thus, communicating online involves moving beyond traditional borders or notions of groups, exploring functional more so than political geographies, and valuing economic, social, and cultural ties rather than only territorial group tensions (Getto & St.Amant, 2014).

The Global Nature of Online Audiences

Online media often give us a means to bypass such boundaries of space and time. That is, information communication technologies allow us to almost instantly share information and ideas with individuals half a world away. Thus, when we write online, our audience theoretically becomes anyone who has is interested in our topic and who has online access. Moreover, the global spread and distribution of online access also allows an audience to quickly and directly respond to our ideas. As a result, the rhetoric triangle—which traditionally includes reader, writer, and text—must expand to include location and modality. Where and who our audience is, in addition to what tool they’re using to access our content, must be considered carefully. Audiences today are often large and diverse; they also have the potential to be relatively interactive. All of these factors come to bear when we consider the question Who is our audience in the age of global online access?

Let’s examine this question further. As of this writing, the potential international audience for our online work is huge: some 3.7 billion persons worldwide, and growing rapidly. It is also a culturally diverse one, comprised of some 353 million with online access in Africa, roughly 385 million persons online in Latin American and the Caribbean, 637 million in Europe, 142 million in the Middle East, 28 million in Oceana/Australia, and almost 1.9 billion individuals who have online access in Asia. (For the most current statistics on international online access, see The Internet Big Picture [2017] through Internet World Stats: Usage and Population Statistics [2017] at http://www.internetworldstats.com.) Such a degree of diversity in global cyberspace, moreover, is a relatively recent development.

At the turn of the millennium, only 361 million persons worldwide were connected to online environments (The Internet big picture, 2017). In addition, most of these individuals were located in North America—particularly the United States and Canada (almost 1/3 of all individuals with online access) or in Western Europe (almost another 1/3 of all individuals with access) (Internet users in the Americas, 2017; Internet penetration in North America, 2017; Internet in Europe stats, 2017). The majority of today’s Internet users, by contrast, represent not only a greater percentage of individuals from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but also an increase in the number of online participants from emerging economies. For example, as of this writing, the number of individuals with online access in China alone (some 722 million persons) is almost twice that of the number of Internet users in the United States and Canada combined (roughly 363 million persons). Similarly, India’s 465 million persons with online access constitutes over half the entire population of Europe (roughly 739 million persons). Moreover, it is in these emerging economies of the world where the prospects for markedly increasingly online access are the greatest. China, for example, saw the number of individuals with online access within its borders grow from 22.5 million persons in 2000 to over 700 million by 2017—and this number accounts for only half its total population (Internet penetration in Asia, 2017). Thus, as global access to online environments continues to expand, it will likely be non-Western cultures and the citizens of emerging economies that account for a large percentage of this growth. While not everyone is reading what we write, of course, this gives significant cause for rethinking contexts surrounding audience.

Rethinking Writing Contexts for Online Audiences

Scholars around the world are calling for changes in education to focus on preparing students for becoming global citizens (Darling-Hammond, 2010). Such change must equip students with twenty-first century technology skills needed to become employable, prepare individuals who live and work with diverse cultures, and focus on solving complex world issues (Zhao, 2009, 2010).¹ Given all of these complexities, those of us who teach or research writing or communication studies must consider what these factors mean in terms of writing online and intercultural communication competence. For example, who is our intended, actual, and inadvertent audience? Who can we communicate with via writing through these environments, and how do we do so effectively? How can we use online writing to engage in greater international discussions as well as to create greater international communities? What sorts of intercultural communication competencies must we develop and foster? These are but a few of the questions for which we must consistently rethink our answers.

In truth, this situation can seem overwhelming. The challenge becomes determining the best initial step or framework to consider in trying to address these questions. The purpose of this collection is not to answer every nuanced question related to writing online in global contexts. (Online writing is forever evolving.) Indeed, we want to suggest that new answers must be developed for each unique context, ingroup/outgroup relationship, and audience. Rather, the overarching objective of this volume is to identify areas that can serve as starting points for fields within technical communication and writing studies and can help individuals focus on and approach frameworks they can use to begin to understand varied and diverse contexts for online writing. Central to this objective is creating a model or approach that can guide how we think about, examine, and address online writing situations in terms of composition and rhetoric when borders or boundaries are more fluid and ever-changing, even hyperconnected.

Rethinking Perceptions of Global Communication

Most of us have encountered the concept of the borderless world. The central notion is that online media have leveled many of the conventional limitations of space and time by providing near instantaneous access to people around the world. So prevalent has this notion of open international online access become that a relatively new metaphor of the flat earth has entered the public consciousness. Popularized by New York Times journalist and writer Thomas L. Friedman, the flat earth perspective represents the idea of a world free of boundaries and barriers. It is a world in which a convergence of online access, geopolitical developments, and economic approaches allows for information, ideas, and digital goods and web-based services to move across the globe as easily as a hockey puck seems to slide across the flat surface of an ice rink. We know this to be a less than perfectly true framework.

The paradigm, in fact, can be misleading. Consider extending the metaphor. As anyone who has traversed an ice rink can attest, just because the surface of the rink appears to be flat and open does not necessarily mean that surface is smooth or even. Rather, such surfaces tend to be covered by a wide array of dips and divots and cracks and bumps that create a certain degree of pull or drag or friction on any object that tries to move across. In much the same way, an array of technological, political, economic, cultural, and linguistic factors can exist and create a similar kind of pull or drag or friction that affects how smoothly or quickly or directly information can move from point to point in global cyberspace. Thus, while the earth might appear to be increasingly flat from the perspective of international online communication, it is far from frictionless.

These aspects slow, shift, or impede movement, affecting the supposedly smooth travels of ideas, information, goods, and services across the seemingly flattened realm of international online spaces. As with an ice rink, these friction points in global cyberspace can vary from the easily observed to the seemingly imperceptible. In every case, such friction points affect the free flow of information across the globe. Thus, a key to navigating international online writing contexts is to first identify friction points, attempt to understand them, and then devise writing approaches for specific audiences that allow us to account for or address friction points through effective communication practices.

This collection approaches the study of online writing in global cyberspace by keeping friction points in mind. The idea is to identify areas that appear to add to friction points or obstruct the effective flow of information when trying to share our online writing with greater global audiences. Doing so provides those of us engaged in technical communication and writing studies with a mechanism for identifying friction points associated with such writing contexts. We can then examine ideas of context and audience in further detail in the hopes of developing online writing strategies or approaches that effectively account for and address them. How do we proceed?

Reconsidering Approaches to Writing Online

Friction points and the flat earth concept clearly relate to the notion of audience. With the hockey metaphor of flattened spaces, the puck we wish to slide across the ice is content or what we have written, texts we compose when we use writing to share our ideas with others. When we use online media to connect to or write for greater, global audiences, our goal is to use texts to convey information to that audience in ways that are easy to access or to be coherent or understandable and well considered or usable. To do so, we must account for friction points that could affect aspects of access, comprehension, and usability across a range of globally distributed readers. In this way, there are three main kinds of friction points: those that affect access (can your audience get to what you have composed), those that affect comprehension (can your audience understand what you have composed as you intended it), and those that affect action (can your audience make use of or act upon the information provided as intended).

While these factors are very broad in scope, they can be examined, understood, and addressed in terms of three sorts of variables: (1) technology, or what technologies (e.g., hardware, software, and networking) are used to compose and to access online texts; (2) culture, or what aspects of language, rhetoric, and culture need to be considered when creating texts to share ideas with international online audiences, and (3) laws, or what legal aspects (e.g., censorship, data disclosure, and copyright law) affect sorts of texts individuals can create, share, and access via international cyberspace (see St.Amant, 2013; St.Amant & Rife, 2014; Sun, 2012). These categories are broad, but they represent starting points for identifying where friction points can occur. For those of us in technical communication and writing studies, the question becomes what kinds of friction points must we identify, examine, and attempt to address to work effectively within and when preparing our students for writing online in larger global contexts (see Internet world users by language, 2017; and Most common languages used on the Internet as of June 2015, 2015, to help consider the complexity).

To address this question, we propose the 3Cs of writing in global online contexts. The objective of this approach is to isolate the study of writing-related friction points into three central, overarching realms connected to using online media in order to compose for globally distributed readers. When writing online for broader, international audiences, individuals attempt to accomplish three, interconnected general and overarching processes—contacting, conveying, and connecting:

• Contacting: To share ideas and information effectively with a global audience, the writer must be able to access or make contact with that audience. To this end, the first and perhaps most important step of writing online for greater global audiences involves selecting the online medium or media that allow one to contact the targeted audience effectively. Section I: Contacting contains chapters spanning the use of digital notebooks (Josephine Walwema); experience mapping (Minh-Tam Nguyen, Heather Turner, and Benjamin Lauren); literacy development in international public forums (J. C. Lee); ePortfolios and blogfolios (Cynthia Davidson); and 4C4Equality and usability as networked engagement (Liz Lane and Don Unger).

• Conveying: Just because one can contact a given audience to share a composition does not inherently mean that audience will understand the ideas conveyed or the writer’s purpose for sharing that information. Conveying becomes readily apparent if a given international audience responds to or acts upon a given composition in the manner intended or unintended by the author. Thus, this friction point involves factors that can affect an international audience’s ability to comprehend conveyed ideas and desired responses or actions intended by the author. Section II: Conveying contains chapters spanning connections in Internet-mediated learning environments (Suzanne Blum Malley); massive open online courses (MOOCs) and world Englishes (Kaitlin Clinnin, Kay Halasek, Ben McCorkle, Susan Delagrange, Scott Lloyd Dewitt, Jen Michaels, and Cynthia L. Selfe); writing resources across the global information divide (Amber Engelson); activity and actor-network theory (Beau S. Pihlaja); and digital composing practices in Turkey (Ma Pilar Milagros).

• Connecting: It is one thing to share information globally via an online medium. It is a far different exercise to use online media to create a system of interaction whereby author and reader continually shift roles and exchange information to engage in a greater discussion. Thus, maximizing the potential of writing online in global contexts involves connecting in ways that build a continually interacting community around a shared area of interest. Section III: Connecting contains chapters spanning writing centers and online feedback (Vassiliki Kourbani); distributed agency in digital environments (Lavinia Hirsu); transnational activism (Katherine Bridgman); multimodal literacies among Bhutanese refugees in the United States (Tika Lamsal); and glocalization through Google Apps for Education (Daniel Hocutt and Maury Brown).

The central notion of the 3Cs approach (contacting, conveying, connecting) is that composing through text and other media is a powerful mechanism for creating and maintaining communities in international contexts. Consider what global strategist Parag Khanna (2016) calls connectography, which is how connectivity has enabled us to build a global network civilization and work toward overcoming some geopolitical problems. When done effectively, online composing is ideally suited for creating greater global communities around shared interests and objectives.

In technical communication and writing studies, we can use this 3Cs approach to identify, understand, and address various friction points that can affect the success or effectiveness of writing in online global contexts. Doing so allows us to achieve central objectives related to connecting with global audiences, in order to do the following:

• Identify potential friction points that could impede the exchange of ideas when writing in international, online contexts;

• Understand how an item creates friction or affects aspects of contact, conveying, and/or connecting when writing in global online contexts; and

• Develop approaches for addressing or mitigating friction points when writing online to ensure participants meet the objective of effectively engaging with global audiences.

In technical communication and writing studies, we must focus more on the expanded rhetorical triangle to better understand complexities of audience and purpose.

By using this 3Cs approach to guide our research and teaching practices to address these factors, those of us in technical communication and writing studies can better understand and better prepare our students to compose online in the age of global cyberspace. Of course, these areas are broad and in scope, and vary significantly with each context, as the contributors in this collection demonstrate. We offer a polyvocal perspective in this collection, with views from a variety of scholars, positions, and approaches. As such, this collection builds on the work and approach of Blake Scott, Bernadette Longo, and Kathy Wills’s (2007) Critical Power Tools: Cultural Studies Approaches to Technical Communication. Our text explores ways in which we can understand embodiment (Fleckenstein, 2003, 2009; Fleckenstein, Hum, & Calendrillo, 2007), as well as technological ecologies and sustainability (DeVoss, McKee, & Selfe, 2009). That is, with diverse genres and voices within this collection we work to (inter)connect a representative picture of writing research related to global contexts.

Specifically, entries in this collection represent examples that explore these 3Cs areas to overview how a particular friction point can affect composing online for globally distributed audiences. There are five chapters in each of three sections. Each chapter provides insights for better identifying and understanding friction points, and models how we in technical communication and writing studies might approach this idea of friction points in our research and teaching practices. Thus, chapters contained here are informational (they provide an overview of a given idea), exemplary (they provide a model for how to approach the idea of friction points in teaching and research), and foundational (they offer starting points from which others can launch further inquiry into a given friction point area). It is the hope of the editors that readers will view these collected entries as an invitation to engage in a greater discussion of and debate of these friction point issues and overall practices related to writing online for global contexts.

Note

1. See, for instance, the Global Learning, Information Literacy, and Intercultural Knowledge and Competence rubrics from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) VALUE Rubric Development Project (AACU, 2017).

References

AACU. (2017). VALUE rubric development project. Association of American Colleges and Universities. Retrieved from https://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics

Caroll, L. B. (2010). Backpacks vs. briefcases: Steps toward rhetorical analysis. In C. Lowe & P. Zemliansky (Eds.), Writing Spaces Readings on Writing Vol. I (pp. 45–58). Anderson, SC: Parlor Press.

Darling-Hammond, L. (2010). The flat world and education: How America’s commitment to equity will determine our future. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

DeVoss, D., McKee, H., & Selfe, R. (2009). Digital writing research: Technologies, methodologies and ethical issues. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton.

Fleckenstein, K. (2003). Embodied literacies: Imageword and a poetics of teaching. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Fleckenstein, K. (2009). Vision, rhetoric, and social action in the composition classroom. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Fleckenstein, K., Hum, S., & Calendrillo, L. (2007). Ways of seeing, ways of speaking: The integration of rhetoric and vision in constructing the real. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Getto, G., & St.Amant, K. (2014). Designing globally, working locally: Using personas to develop online communication products for international users. Communication Design Quarterly, 3(1), 24–46. https://doi.org/10.1145/2721882.2721886

The Internet Big Picture. (2017). Internet World Stats: Usage and Population Statistics. Retrieved from http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Internet in Europe stats. (2017). Internet World Stats: Usage and Population Statistics. Retrieved from http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats4.htm

Internet penetration in Asia. (2017). Internet World Stats: Usage and Population Statistics. Retrieved from http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats3.htm#asia

Internet penetration in North America. (2017). Internet World Stats: Usage and Population Statistics. Retrieved from http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats14.htm#north

Internet users in the Americas. (2017). Internet World Stats: Usage and Population Statistics. Retrieved from http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats2.htm

Internet world stats: Usage and population statistics. (2017). Internet World Stats: Usage and Population Statistics. Retrieved from http://internetworldstats.com/links.htm

Internet world users by language. (2017). Internet World Stats: Usage and Population Statistics. Retrieved from http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm

Khanna, P. (2016). Connectography: Mapping the future of global civilizations. New York, NY: Random House; https://www.ted.com/talks/parag_khanna_how_megacities_are_changing_the_map_of_the_world

Most common languages used on the Internet as of June 2015. (2015). Statista. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/262946/share-of-the-most-common-languages-on-the-internet

Ong, W. J. (1975). The writer’s audience is always fiction. Publications of the Modern Language Association, 90(1), 9–21. https://doi.org/10.2307/461344

Scott, B., Longo, B., & Wills, K. (Eds.). (2007). Critical power tools: Technical communication and cultural studies. Albany, NY: SUNY.

St.Amant, K. (2013). Finding friction points: Rethinking the flat earth model of globalization. conneXions: International Professional Communication Journal, 1, 125–132.

St.Amant, K. (2015). Reconsidering social media for global contexts. Intercom: The Magazine of the Society for Technical Communication. Fairfax, VA: Society for Technical Communication. 16–18.

St.Amant, K., & Rife, C. M. (Eds.). (2014). Legal issues in global contexts: Perspectives on technical communication in the international age. Amityville, NY: Baywood.

Sun, H. (2012). Cross-cultural technology design: Crafting culture-sensitive technology for local users. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744763.001.0001

Zhao, Y. (2009). Catching up or leading the way: American education in the age of globalization. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Zhao, Y. (2010). Preparing globally competent teachers: A new imperative for teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 61(5), 422–431. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487110375802

Section I

Contacting

To access and communicate effectively with an audience through the use of online media. Friction points include topics related to the technological, the linguistic, and the cultural.

1

Digital Notebooks

Composing with Open Access

Josephine Walwema

Abstract

Online media have brought previously disparate communities together and have altered how people around the globe interact. Complicated problems now profit from degrees of collaboration never before possible, and the writing classroom can create opportunities for learning with online media in this context. Using online media such as digital notebooks can facilitate dialogic inquiry where participants can interact with peers from other cultures as they compose locally for global readerships. This chapter relates promises and challenges of such multicultural composing processes in digital spaces.

Keywords: collaboration, invention, cross-cultural rhetoric, digital notebook, online media, participatory writing technologies, transnational

Introduction

The global proliferation of online media and Internet access enables individuals from different cultures and nations to interact in different ways. Activities such as crowdsourcing, crowd funding, user reviews, and social media groups are a few that characterize online interaction. Moreover, such interaction is not limited to nation states. It is often global, fueled by open access to content and passion for causes. Because digital media allow people around the world to access more content more quickly, the capacity to bridge the gap between local concerns and international dialogue is now possible. Live tweets from crisis spots around the world have, for example, informed the reporting of media organizations such as The New York Times, but with a more globalized focus (see The Choices Program: Teaching with the News). If this paradigm can revolutionize the news and impact global dialogue, what new, global context for teaching writing as a transnational literacy practice[s] does it offer (Hawisher, Selfe, Kisa, & Ahmed, 2010, p. 58)? Digital notebooks, in turn, represent a ready platform for students to interact and collaboratively compose with peers locally and globally.

Digital notebooks describe a range of participatory writing technologies in which a topic initiated by the writer is opened up for collaborative engagement with others. Because the collaboration begins at the conceptual level, the process allows for a cumulative flow of information where, through a back and forth, participants add, comment on, correct, and edit content. Here is how writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who originated the phrase digital notebooks, openly invited the site’s dedicated group of commenters (who he calls the horde), On things I am not sure on, I’ll state my opinion rather gingerly and then hope my commenters can fill in the gaps (Coates, 2008, para. 1).

Coates’s used the phrase Talk To Me Like I’m Stupid to invite commentary on various topics ranging from Hermeneutics, Revolutionary Island, Locke’s State of Slavery and War, Victorian Fashion, to Financial Derivatives (Coates, 2011). He was rewarded with comments (content) explicating topics beyond their dictionary definition. Coates turned his comments section into a remarkable array of analyses, discussions, debate, and virtual reading group where people learned from each other. Such a form of crowdsourcing helps engage citizens in public issues by blending data, video, and social networking tools. It connects writers with the communities they serve by leveraging their knowledge and lived experiences to generate knowledge from the ground up.

Unlike the easy displays emanating from simple Google searches, the kind of knowledge that comes from this active back and forth is significant for its ability to shape the reality of its immediate audience. And that is an important element in interactive and collaborative global composing because it demonstrates that a genuine intellectual community can be formed, even on Internet.

I contend therefore that digital notebooks hold enormous promise for knowledgeable and skillful collaborative composing and open up more global communicative possibilities for students. Further, digital notebooks come with a built-in pedagogical system that (a) broadens the perspectives of the writer, (b) prompts real time revision, (c) heightens the writers’ audience awareness, and (d) promotes metacognition through self-reflection. In this chapter, I examine how digital notebooks can support collaborative composing and promote transnational literacy practices.

The Integration of Online Media into Composing Practices

Making online media a regular composing space—akin to word processing—is still a work in progress. The extant literature on online media in composition tends to emphasize ancillary components such as peer review (Bradley, 2014), revision, or online reflective practices of student writers (Ross, 2014). Other literature (e.g., Kirby & Crovitz, 2012) suggests ways to incorporate technology into writing, but in so doing, implies it is an add-on. Moreover, such literature draws from functional approaches to composition as means for teaching skills (Guth & Helm, 2010) rather than as forums that can promote collaborative educational experiences among disparate global learners. Further, articulated differences between so-called traditional composition—where the technology of word processing is an instrumental tool of writing (Porter, 2009)—and new media in which the actual work of composing occurs, suggest the need for more work.

Those shortcomings aside, the consensus on online media indicates it has heralded a writing and reading renaissance (Garcia, 1997) or, as Lunsford puts it, a literacy revolution (cited in Thompson, 2009) that permeates the composition class. Studies of online media have also led to it being referred to by various names, including the following:

• Digital (e.g., Porter, 2009; Eyman, 2012; Losh, 2014)

• New media (e.g.,Wysocki, 2004; Ball & Kalmbach, 2010)

• Multimedia (e.g., Faigley, 2003)

• Multimodal (e.g., Kress, 2005; Selfe, 2007; Palmeri, 2012)

• Online (e.g., Warnock, 2009)

• Web writing (Santos & Leahy, 2014).

Such dissimilar terms, as Lauer (2014) notes, depend more on the audience to whom we are speaking than any external definition of the term itself (p. 73). Currently, the term digital is evoked to refer to cutting-edge technologies of meaning—making and managing content.

As indicated, digital notebook technologies and related approaches to writing are increasingly gaining widespread use. They cultivate an inquisitive culture that appreciates uncertainty and encourages interpretation. In the process of creating meaning, absolute truths are set aside and complexities examined, making for a more informed writer. The implication is digital notebooks are spaces that allow for unbridled access to a global connected community that can collaboratively contribute to, compose, and critique ideas to prompt real-time revision, reflection, and review. Digital notebooks are collaborative software applications that allow several people to work together in real time.

Aside from individual writers, MIT runs Climate CoLab for an online community of people concerned about climate change. Here, individuals brainstorm and share ideas on how to combat climate change in their own localities before sharing those solutions globally. Thus, while Web 2.0 has seemingly integrated the tools of collaborative composing, education 2.0 remains an aspiration (Carr, Crook, Noss, Carmichael, & Selwyn, 2008, p. 1). Given their obvious scope of communication in the twenty-first century, digital notebooks, are products of our time that can influence how we make meaning. They deserve their place in the composition classroom.

Because the potential of digital notebooks highlights the ability to improve students’ language skills along with their intercultural communicative competence (Guth & Helm, 2010), educators can leverage students’ social-media skills into academic composing strategies. Students can be taught to use these spaces for educational purposes because, as Thorne and Black (2007) find, online exchanges support more meaningful interactions rather than fixate on learning the content. Students can thus interact in situ to initiate and further global conversations on issues of interest within the writing classroom.

Composing Globally

The nature of communication has fundamentally changed. We are now grounded in the networked textual and image world in which we can instantly and globally communicate. Thus we don’t simply draw information from the web; we actively participate in and contribute via blogs, social media platforms, and comments sections of online articles. It is thus essential composition teachers train students to be participatory in a world that has radically redefined what expertise means. To compose successfully in the twenty-first century, one must excel at verbal and written expression and at the use and manipulation of images.

One of the more promising approaches to building expertise is through collaborative composing. To promote collaborative composing in this global context, educators have to work closely with students through direct instruction to engage the theory of composition and guided application of practice using digital tools. Educators also need to be guided by identifying barriers that can affect how students interact and collaboratively compose with peers from other nations and cultures. Such barriers are numerous, but I focus on two:

• cultural differences

• linguistic differences including communication expectations, patterns, practices, and the language of interaction

Granted, addressing cultural and linguistic barriers veers into intercultural communication. However, one of the ways rhetoric examines the available means of persuasion is through assessing the role of social practices in meaning making. Because this essay focuses on composing collaboratively for textual production, examining the sociocultural aspects that shape meaning is important. As such, educators and students will need a repertoire of complex and interrelated skills (Cook, 2002, p. 7) and multiliteracies pertinent to the twenty-first century—in short, a hybrid of literacies (Cook, 2002, p. 7; Selber, 2004). For this author, the literacies most applicable to collaborative global composing are

• digital literacies—to collaboratively compose; instantaneous and wide access; direct reach

• rhetorical literacies—to address specific audiences, purposes, and medium of delivery

• cultural/social literacies—to negotiate meaning by learning local communication patterns

To develop these literacies learners need to develop a cosmopolitan and global perspective necessary to look beyond their own communities. The concept of cosmopolitanism, understood here as an embodiment of cultural identity formation and promoting global citizenship through transnational communication (Appiah, 2006; Hull, Stornaiuolo, & Sahni, 2010, p. 331), can help bridge cultural communication differences among students.

Competencies for Collaborative Writing in Global Contexts

Here, I discuss the competencies necessary for participating in/co-authoring digital notebooks.

Digital Literacy

When we speak of digital literacy, we speak of a functional literacy beyond the ability to comprehend the core competencies of the Internet (Giles, 2005, p. 900) in which students can search, navigate, assemble, and evaluate texts for their information quotient. We aspire, instead, to a digital literacy of multimodal texts. To be digitally literate, as Lanham (1995) asserts, is to be skilled at deciphering complex images and sounds as well as the syntactical subtleties of words (p. 200). Lanham’s definition