Barbara is the author of Interaction Design for Complex Problem Solving: Designing Useful and Usable Software (Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier, 2004) and co-editor with Rachel Spilka of the award winning Reshaping Technical Communication: New Developments and Challenges for the 21st Century (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003). She has published numerous articles in technical communications journals and conference proceedings and in journals and proceedings in the fields of human-computer interaction, graphic design, nursing informatics, and engineering education. She also holds a patent in Visual Discovery with teammates in industry. She teaches graduate courses in information visualization and digital discourse in the School of Information and in 2000 was presented with the ACM-SIGDOC (Special Interest Group in Documentation) Rigo award for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement.

Rhetoricians Without Borders: An Ecological Tale from Healthcare
Networked writing and communication are vital for producing new knowledge in such activities as analyzing problems in distributed networks, improving the care of chronically ill patients, and preparing arguments for public policy debates. Yet research in these areas shows that designs for the digital systems supporting these activities commonly obstruct domain specialists from achieving their purposes. Unfortunately, designs often only address the easy-to-formalize aspects of this knowledge work, thus providing only piecemeal support for work that is contingent, dynamic, multi-staged, multi-dimensional, and emergent.

This talk argues that computing specialists have to re-conceptualize their efforts if they are to ensure truly useful support for the interconnected information, interpersonal exchanges, arrangements, and compositions of data and thought involved in complex knowledge work. Rhetoricians must at the center of these design initiatives from inception on. Rhetorical orientations and methodologies complement with the most important consideration for usefulness – namely optimal user control for work-related purposes. This objective, moreover, has the potential to unify the interests and perspectives of diverse stakeholders. The talk discusses an 18 month field study of chronic care managers’ practices in relation to clinical information systems to show why advocating for user control from an ecological perspective matters, how to respond to threats of cooptation, and the central role rhetoricians without borders can play in these developments.

Mr. Austin has over 25 years experience in public policy leadership. He is a nationally recognized leader in economic development, education and community revitalization. Mr. Austin currently is leading a Great Lakes Economic Initiative for the Brookings Institution, designed to improve the economic vitality of the Great Lakes states. Recently, Mr. Austin served as Policy Director for Michigan’s Governor-appointed Commission on Higher Education and Economic Growth and was principal author of the Commission’s report. He co-authored the influential report Revitalizing Michigan Cities, with Michigan Future, Inc., and has spearheaded efforts of Michigan’s new Department of Labor and Economic Development to reshape Michigan’s economic, workforce and urban development agenda. Austin advises city and state governments, federal agencies and officials, as well as national foundations, corporations and labor organizations on a wide variety of issues.

Early in his career Mr. Austin served as President of the Flint Roundtable, a multi-sector CEO leadership organization in Genesee County focused on regional education reform, where he developed nationally recognized education programs. In addition he was a member and ultimately chairman of the Genesee County Road Commission. Mr. Austin has served as a special assistant to Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, and a senior advisor to the Massachusetts Secretary of Economic Affairs.

Austin is a published author on education, workforce development, urban and community revitalization, and public policy reform. He received his Masters in Public Administration from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and a Bachelors from Swarthmore College in Economics & Political Science, Phi Beta Kappa. Austin has also been acknowledged as an Education Policy Fellow by the Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL).

Mr. Austin has been married 18 years to his wife Terese. They and their three school-age children reside in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Defining a Great Lakes Economic Agenda: A project of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program
The Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, in partnership with a network of academic, public policy, business and civic organizations, has initiated a multi-year research and policy development initiative to improve the economic vitality of the Great Lakes region. The region led the transformation from an agricultural to an industrial economy, which afforded several generations of prosperity. Today the Midwest faces significant challenges in remaking itself to thrive in a global, knowledge economy. Brookings will assess the economic and social challenges faced by the region, and working with a wide range of leaders in the political, corporate, civic, and academic sectors, develop a vision and action plan for how the region can leverage its assets to successfully pursue a high-road economic strategy. The analysis will be widely disseminated to inform the region's business, political and opinion leadership, and public policies among the states within the region. In addition this analysis and recommendations will inform the debate leading up to the 2008 Presidential campaign, which will hinge on the swing states within the region, as well as the thinking and agendas of our current and future federal officials.

At the University of Illinois, Ann teaches courses in participatory action research, social justice in the information professions, pragmatic technology theory and philosophy, community information systems, and social informatics. With university students and community volunteers, she also teaches community librarianship classes for high-school youth at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center and leads an after school program for new Spanish-speaking immigrants at the B.T. Washington elementary school in Champaign.

Ann is co-director of the Community Informatics Initiative (http://www.cii.uiuc.edu) and co-founder of Prairienet, the community network serving East Central Illinois (http://www.prairienet.org). She is also a member of the Community Inquiry Lab (iLab) collaborative, whose participants span the globe and work to create open source software to support community inquiry (http://ilabs.inquiry.uiuc.edu).

Ann currently serves on the advisory boards of the Association for Community Networks (http://www.afcn.org) and the Community Informatics Research Network (http://www.ciresearch.net/). She is the Associate Editor of the international Journal of Community Informatics (http://www.ci-journal.net).

Community Inquiry and Informatics for Youth
At the turn of the century, the American Pragmatists (including Charles S. Peirce, Jane Addams, John Dewey, and William James) developed the concept of “community inquiry” as a framework for democratic and collective engagement in learning across all spheres of life. Community inquiry assumes that everyone in society has valuable knowledge to share, and that knowledge creation is a continual process of critical experimentation with both ideas and action. Community inquiry also explicitly incorporates basic social values--peace, justice, and kindness--as critical elements of knowledge processes. “Community informatics” is the emerging field of research, practice, and policy that looks at how information and communication technologies are used to help geographic communities achieve their goals. This presentation will trace the basic theory and practice of community inquiry as applied to an ongoing informatics project at the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School in Chicago’s Paseo Boricua community. Here, youth are creating digital inquiry units to guide their investigation of issues they face as Paseo Boricua community members, such as environmental justice, the shaping of gender identity, and the experiences of immigrants as they settle into a new culture.

In The Violence of Literacy
Elspeth Stuckey writes: Literacy, like communication, is a matter of access… The violence of literacy is the violence of the milieu it comes from, promises, recapitulates. It is attached inextricably to the world of food, shelter, and human equality… To elucidate the violence of literacy is to understand the distance it forces between people and the possibilities for their lives. (94)

This violence can be exacerbated by the addition of technology. More than fear of “violence”, some minority students feel that there is some kind of conspiracy that keeps them marginalized in cyberspace in much the same way that minorities have historically been oppressed by the hegemony. For them, the use of technology in the classroom (technology that has historically been prohibitive in cost) adds another layer to the oppression. “Other” students are not only technologically disadvantaged because of race and socio-economic status but because historically they have had little interaction with technology. This unfamiliarity means that they are further behind their non-minority classmates from the beginning. It’s as if educators are “raising the bar” before all students are able to clear the original height. I argue that pedagogy should take into consideration “historical access” as well as the more well-known material access. It is only when we consider the history of technology that we can hope to build a learning environment that is equally productive for all students.

Toward a Praxis of New Media: Sustainability and Capacity Building in an MSU Cherokee Nation Collaborative

A praxis of new media unfolds at the intersection of critical, digital, and community literacies in order to produce transformative knowledge products with all stakeholders. To illustrate this praxis of new media, I will show the results of a collaborative between MSU and the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma in which educational materials are produced with and for the Cherokee Nation. This collaborative depends upon MSU students enrolled in WRA 417: Multimedia Writing, a project-based professional writing course. Students in this class read hundreds of pages related to the Cherokee Nation's history, write research papers that form the content of the site, and learn two software packages in order to create educational interactive media with and for the Cherokee Nation. These materials are then launched on the Nation's website and distributed on CD during the Cherokee National holiday.

Using a multiliteracies framework, I will point to the designs of meaning and material capacities necessary to develop and sustain this work. I show how this collaborative builds upon the capacities already present within the Cherokee Nation as it challenges the resources and capacities of the university. I argue that particular alignments of material and intellectual resources must be in place for a praxis of new media to be sustainable and build stakeholders' capacities.

Rethinking Plagiarism in the Digital Age: Remixing as a Means for Economic Development?
(See also James E. Porter profile)Composing in the digital age is different < electronic copying-and-pasting, downloading, and filesharing change the dynamic of writing. With digital writing technologies now in ubiquitous use, plagiarism makes sense. It is a common practice (common in print culture, too), perhaps even a literacy skill. Larry Lessig understands that writing in the digital age requires "remixing"; he argues for flexible intellectual property regulations that foster writing and allow innovators to create new products out of old. Remixing is how individual writers and communities build common values; it is how composers achieve persuasive, creative, and parodic effects.

Yet the issue is complicated. We believe in fair use and recognize that textual theft, fraud, and misappropriation are problems. But plagiarism is a complex issue fraught with circumstantial variations that the popular press and many academics side-step. Academics must resist public efforts to turn us into "plagiarism police." If we slip into that role, we risk supporting media conglomerates that promote restrictive copyright laws, strangle educational fair use, and limit copying and remixing. These composing practices are not only necessary to writing in the digital age, but they are also necessary for innovation and, we suspect, for economic development. We thus need to find an ethical middle space that fosters digital writing practices essential for building communities, cultures, coalitions, and economic partnerships.

Time, Technology, and Text

Much has already been written suggesting that texts be viewed as a kind of technology. In my talk, I take up the question, “what kind of technology?” Using my recent work on the personal digital assistant (or PDA), I suggest that much is to be gained from understanding the object of rhetorical interest, the text, as a technology of time. In some ways, suggesting that texts are technologies of time is not surprising. Standard analyses of narratives, for example, suggest that a narrative text manipulates our temporal perspective by providing the balance between the already done (for the narrator) and the not yet done (for the audience), a balance that enables the development of a narrative “point.” In academic argument, persuasive texts also are well understood to involve the manipulation of time as a set of already-published texts are, though a literature review, brought into conversation with the author and her readers as co-present interlocutors. My work on the personal digital assistant has directed my attention to some less obvious manipulations of time by texts. In the body of this paper, I look at three of these texts: calendars, personal management systems (Daytime, etc.), and the personal digital assistant. I then compare these textual technologies of time to other more obvious technologies of time — standardized time, clocks, and watches. My goal here is to understand the way that a simple text like “Fold the laundry” written in a personal digital assistant in deeply embedded in the culture of Western technologies of time and what this might suggest for those of us concerned with texts and their effects.

Difficulties and opportunities for scholarship and the academic institution in the digital economy
Digital data processing has ushered in an intellectual and economic era that is previously unmatched in the opportunities provided for access to content, the power and flexibility with which new content may take form and be produced, as well as the ability to create derivative work. Given this situation, universities would expect to find themselves in an era of explosive creativity accompanied by new economic opportunities, but instead (or in addition) find themselves faced with new forms of challenges for scholarship, teaching and the creative arts, administration and policy, and possibly their very future. I’ll ask and briefly describe or discuss the following questions . . .

• How do we best equip faculty and students to take best advantage of (networks, storage and access, software, the classroom environment, …)?
• How should we best comply with existing and emerging laws, while maintaining a proper amount of “academic headroom” for teaching and creativity? (copyright, fair use, and “inducement of infringement”; management of student content; notions of privacy; data and identity security)
• How should universities balance the competing urges to operate “public” or “private” computing domains?
• It’s not just “how we teach” but “what we teach”. How do we take best advantage of these challenges to engage students in the traditional fundamentals of liberal education and the bases for informed citizenship: creativity, communication, respect for intellectual property, ethics, economics? What value does the university (as a place; as a community) add in the digital age?
• To what extent should universities help students avoid the high-stakes consequences to which their digital behaviors are now exposed?
• How can academics find an effective voice to influence the direction of legislation, especially when the most effective voices tend to be those of industries bent principally on maintaining the economic status quo?
• To what extent should “creative destruction” (or, “creative reconstruction”) be loosed to drive economic development?
• What might we be losing in the conversion from manuscripting to digital composition?

Jeff will give the closing remarks

Groups Being Groups: Knowledge Work in Social Collectives
Whether formally or informally, explicitly or tacitly, the work of groups writing  (creating content) together involves the crucial interplay of communication with others in the group, with curated repositories of information, and with secondary repositories of information. This dynamic, once limited to describing the work of experts in knowledge-intensive fields, is increasingly a pattern for living, working, and participating in day-to-day activity  in the context of  an emerging  global information society (Zuboff & Maxmin, 2005).

This dynamic suggests interesting new projects and institutional alignments between groups who study and teach writing practices and those who study and teach archiving and information preservation. This paper will sketch a theoretical framework, illustrated above, for these new alignments, addressing researchers in digital writing, information systems design, and library and information science.
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Models for Text Ecologies: Artifacts, Gizmos, and Spimes

Although interactive communication environments during the last several decades (email, Web sites, SMS, etc.) have revolutionized key factors in how we communicate with texts, most of the texts we use remain relatively isolated. The continued reliance on print (which isn't necessarily an evil thing), the relatively inflexibility of HTML codes, and other factors have contributed to an environment in which texts are separated from each other by default, and only joined together manually, through hard work by dedicated writers (and readers).

In this talk, I'll discuss one framework for understanding connections among objects in our world, as laid out by Bruce Sterling (and other theorists and designers) in a series of publications and talks over the last several years. Sterling's framework relies on the increasing amount of interconnection among realworld objects. As objects evolve from artifacts (isolated, handcrafted objects) to gizmos (mass produced, highly customizable objects) to spimes (extremely data producing and sharing objects), they begin to construct an ecology of automatically shared information of specific objects in use. Such information, because it is shared automatically and pervasively, becomes part of the process of redesign and revisioning, a sort of automatic cultural history of object development and use.

The development of spime objects suggests important opportunities and challenges for writers and readers. How might we use concrete information about our texts as they are used? What sorts of information might be shared automatically? What are the ethical concerns involved in texts as spimes?

Copyright in Increasingly Digital Academic Contexts: What it Takes
The first words in the title of the first United States copyright law are: An Act for the Encouragement of Learning. In the dozen years since the Mosaic browser put a public face on the Internet, we have witnessed an unprecedented flurry of revisions to U.S. copyright law, but few of these revisions speak directly to this foundational goal of encouraging learning. One revision that purported to do so, the TEACH Act (or Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization Act of 2002) offers an object lesson in what academics stand to lose if they fail to intervene in the legislative process. The TEACH Act announces itself as an Educational Use Copyright Exemption when in practice, the Act circumscribes rights that most academics have long taken for granted, including, for example, the right to screen motion pictures in the classroom. My presentation will focus on identifying what, specifically, has been taken from academics, and from the general public, in the recent revisions to copyright law. I will close by articulating ways for academics to offer practical and meaningful leadership in reversing the depressing arc of 21st Century copyright law.

Porter's research focuses mainly on digital rhetoric - that is, the art of communicating with/within computer-networked environments and in technical/professional writing contexts. He has publications forthcoming on digital communication ethics; digital writing research methodology; the economics of digital delivery and distribution; and the impact of copying, downloading, and filesharing on writers' notions of intellectual property and authorship and on their composing processes. He is currently working on a book examining ethical issues in conducting digital communication research.

Rethinking Plagiarism in the Digital Age: Remixing as a Means for Economic Development?
(See also Danielle Nicole DeVoss profile)Composing in the digital age is different < electronic copying-and-pasting, downloading, and filesharing change the dynamic of writing. With digital writing technologies now in ubiquitous use, plagiarism makes sense. It is a common practice (common in print culture, too), perhaps even a literacy skill. Larry Lessig understands that writing in the digital age requires "remixing"; he argues for flexible intellectual property regulations that foster writing and allow innovators to create new products out of old. Remixing is how individual writers and communities build common values; it is how composers achieve persuasive, creative, and parodic effects.

Yet the issue is complicated. We believe in fair use and recognize that textual theft, fraud, and misappropriation are problems. But plagiarism is a complex issue fraught with circumstantial variations that the popular press and many academics side-step. Academics must resist public efforts to turn us into "plagiarism police." If we slip into that role, we risk supporting media conglomerates that promote restrictive copyright laws, strangle educational fair use, and limit copying and remixing. These composing practices are not only necessary to writing in the digital age, but they are also necessary for innovation and, we suspect, for economic development. We thus need to find an ethical middle space that fosters digital writing practices essential for building communities, cultures, coalitions, and economic partnerships.

Weaving and Splicing Networks
Knowledge work involves directly connecting or networking activities that in the past have contacted each other only through intermediaries. Different trades, fields, and disciplines, with their different social languages, genres, and chronotopes, both merge and emerge with increasing rapidity. Consequently, traditional developmental accounts of work development no longer provide close fits for knowledge work.

In this presentation, I contrast two understandings of work organization: "weaving," an evolutionary, developmental account based on Marx and subsequent activity theory work, and "splicing," a discontinuous, political-rhetorical account based on actor-network theory and related scholarship in science and technology studies. Drawing from a study of a telecommunications company, I evaluate and illustrate each understanding. I conclude by discussing the implications for developing an activity-theoretical account of activity networks.

Institutional Dimensions of Academic Computing
Literacy work today inevitably comes into contact with the formalized structures of academic computing (and not just those associated with file-sharing activities). Email, for instance, relies on a centralized server with standardized authentication protocols, while online research involves library database subscriptions and interfaces customized to local settings. As these examples indicate, no literacy event is an island unto itself: Writers invariably depend upon such institutional resources as Internet backbones, remote access services, wireless networks, spam filters, computer classrooms, and more. Also, there is more to take into account than just hardware devices and software programs. I have argued elsewhere for a considerably broader characterization of what constitutes a computing infrastructure, one that incorporates use contexts. By this I mean the spaces (physical, pedagogical, bureaucratic) within which computer-based activities are inevitably situated. According to a more expansive perspective, the formalized structures of academic computing contain not just wires, silicon chips, and the like, but various agents, values, practices, and forces, all of which have particular histories and tendencies. Such contextual aspects, which can be shaped to some extent through micropolitical action, have an immediate and direct effect on the literacy activities of both students and teachers.

Given what is at stake, it is somewhat surprising that the field has not engaged itself more energetically in the task of conceptualizing and critiquing the institutional dimensions of academic computing. Although computers and composition specialists have concentrated on a wide range of important issues, this work has tended to focus more on students, teachers, classrooms, and writing programs and less on the larger contexts within which people and programs are situated (see "Institutional Critique: A Rhetorical Methodology for Change" in College Composition and Communication, 51, 2000, by James Porter, Patricia Sullivan, Stuart Blythe, Jeffrey Grabill, and Libby Miles). My presentation offers several perspectives on the ways institutions mediate academic computing. Using the postmodern mapping and boundary interrogation methods of Porter, Sullivan, Blythe, Grabill, and Miles, I provide several contingent spatial explanations, snapshots really, of the dynamics of complex institutional systems involving digital writing practices.

Knowledge Work in the Digital Economy: Supporting Collaboration in Distributed Teams
In today's economy, knowledge work is often group work, tasks are complex and multidisciplinary, and needed expertise may be highly distributed among a large and dispersed population of workers. These conditions create challenges for effective collaboration, which in turn has stimulated the development of a broad range of systems to support distributed group work. In this presentation, several key challenges faced by distributed knowledge work teams are described, with a particular focus on two classes of problems: those associated with information distribution, and a general set of problems loosely grouped under the rubric of awareness deficits. Several common technical features are overviewed that are designed to supply missing awareness information as well as the information artifacts that are the focus of knowledge work. Although many of these features are becoming commonplace in commercial software and on the Internet, it is still important to recognize that group technologies are social technologies that evolve in unanticipated ways as they are socially constructed by participants. Finally, the presentation concludes by briefly considering how findings from studies of group collaboration systems can inform our understanding of emerging Web-based collaboration platforms such as wikis that help to coordinate very large-scale, distributed knowledge work.

Think Globally of Local Writing Practices
With the fast development of digital networks in the age of globalization, an emerging writing practice in one locale is diffused rapidly across the globe. Cross-cultural studies of some of these writing practices indicate that writing practices usually develop different communication patterns while responding to local cultural and rhetorical traditions and then take on different use trajectories in various locales (Straub et al, 1997; Straub, 2001; Thatcher, 2001, 2005). However, these examinations tend to focus on comparing and contrasting local differences without linking them to the impacts of globalization and its digital networks across the globe. The same problem can be found in technical communication and digital writing research. As Starke-Meyerring points out, much research is interested in examining “the local situatedness of communication practices” which ignores “local-global interplay” (p.483, 2005) and fails to realize that “[m]ore is going on locally than just local practice” (Brandt & Clinton, p.343, 2002).

By comparing the use trajectories of mobile text messaging during the past six years in American and Chinese contexts and examining the dynamic interactions between the local and the global, I argue that, in this age of globalization, emerging digital writing practices are not just responses to recurrent situations within local institutions, but are part of the global “uptakes” (Freadman, 2002) forming an open, globally networked genre system with their local variations. We cannot ignore the global nature of digital writing practices, and more efforts are needed to develop a global vision and a critical view to investigate digital writing practices and understand the dynamic interactions between the local and the global embodied in digital genres.