- The authors emphasize “the importance of educating students and colleagues about the ways technology impacts language, literacy, and communication practices and are thus a vital part of redefining graduate education and faculty development in digital teaching and research” (2).
- “Clay Spinuzzi (2004), ‘genre ecologies are constantly importing, hybridizing, and evolving genres (and occasionally discarding them), and these dynamic changes in a genre ecology tend to change the entire activity’ (online)…[We are] shifting toward a more socially constructed view of the technological literacy practices that impact professional identity. We see the development of such an identity as key to sustaining both departmental and institutional technological ecologies while remediating a longstanding print genre [the dissertation]” (3).
- “This experience highlights the need for us to take seriously how academic philosophy, pedagogy, and values impact the migration of texts into digital ecologies” (8).
Edminster, Mara and Blair write about their program’s development of electronic thesis and Dissertation submission program and the corresponding graduate digital studio they designed to support this new program. Unless one wants to create this new electronic program, there is little that can be taken from this chapter. Here are few ideas that can be used outside the context of this article:
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Dush asserts that “one of the more familiar textual theories in English studies - North American genre theory - might be translated into such a reflective and analytical tool… What I suggest is making use of the rich unit of analysis at the center of genre theory, the genre, by using it to periodically assess ongoing implementations of new textual practices. During such an implementation effort, a new textual practice with broad appeal - like digital storytelling - will likely be matched with a number of organizationally important recurrent situations and activities or problems looking for solutions… Pilots, or genre stabilizations, are particularly fruitful times for research and insight, with much to reveal about how a new textual practice fits with or contradicts existing organizational norms, as well as the potential it holds to expand and refine the range of available individual action and organizational activity at the site… I elaborate in some detail the methodology for what I call genre-informed implementation analysis , describing the genre stabilization as a unit of analysis and focusing on how a reflective tool, the genre inventory , can be used to analyze pilot efforts during an ongoing implementation… it encourages serious, long-term engagement with an innovation. This engagement pays dividends by both improving the odds that appropriate innovations are implemented and by helping the organization to scrutinize some of its preexisting norms” (3)
Dush sees genre similarly to the rest of the field as genres in response to recurring situations. “Looking at textual innovations with genre theory requires a major shift, in that the focus is not on an existing, long-standing genre, but a potential genre—a response that might be paired with a number of recurrent organizational situations and activities…By analyzing these temporary genre stabilizations to see if and how the new textual practice fits, clashes with, or offers new possibilities within these recurrent situations and activities, implementers can get a glimpse of whether the new practice has potential as an organizational genre” (5). She does not believe, however, that all genres are rhetorical. For her, rhetorical means that there is an audience intended outside of the writer. She maintains that “an organization and its genre ecologies mutually define or co-constitute each other—the genre ecologies reflect the organization and the organization reflects its genre ecologies…[O]rganizations are made up of people, social roles, values, norms, materials, and discourse; most all of these contextual factors are linked to and realized within genre ecologies” (7) The genre inventory includes looking at textual substance and form (themes, topics, structural features, media incorporated, language), cognitive and discourse practices (mental and language practices and skills used), social practices (who is involved and their social roles), and material practices (where is activity happening? What stools are being used? What documents and genres are used and/or referred to?) (10). The assessor looks at these areas before, during and after implementation. Dush also argues that this kind of implementation encouraged innovation. “The greatest advantage of a genre-informed implementation analysis is that it encourages sustained engagement with an innovation, engagement with the sort of depth that helps implementers learn about the needs of both the organization and the people within it…As Brenton Faber (2002) noted, ‘when people transgress genres, violate boundaries, and break with routine practices, change becomes possible’ (p. 172). In other words, new textual practices, although they face considerable obstacles to long-term sustainability, also bring with them the possibility of altering the range of individual action and large-scale activities in an organization” (14). In terms of ecology, Spinuzzi suggests that “the clusters yielded sums greater than their parts” and other “existing ways of talking about these [clusters] – genre sets, systems, and repertoires – seemed to assume different things about linkages, generally more linear things.” Ecologies are “dynamic, localized systems whose components might have developed in other environments before interacting in their current systems…[S]uch systems didn’t necessarily have to be that way – that these systems were emergent, not following predetermined paths.”
“In netwar analysis…networks are conceived as composed of interlinked nodes that provide alternate arrangements and resources to accomplish a purpose…Such networks can be interconnected in various ways, but the most yield comes from an all-channel network, in which every node is connected to every other…Like organizational networks, genre ecologies provide alternate resources to accomplish the same thing, resulting in easy rerouting and potentially localized efficiencies. Depending on the organization, unofficial genres can introduce ways to localize the work rapidly, allowing more discretion. The more genres, the more potential interconnections, yielding more flexibility and exploration - but also more instability, incompatibility, and information load. “ He ultimately decides that “the classic network concept is not a perfect fit. For one thing, these nodes (genres) are unique, so routing around a particular node means changing the character of the network. For another, genres aren't atomistic: they are more rhizomatic, trailing lines of association into other activities.” |
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