Overview

The data collection for this project is complete. Students in writing classes at Michigan State University kept either digital or paper logs that record each time a writing "event" takes place, an event that moves them closer to completing a writing assignment.

The log data was then uploaded to a software application, created by Bill Hart-Davidson, which then creates visualizations of the writing processes of student writers.

Currently, the WIDE PIs are analyzing the collected data.

Details

The project has two phases. The first phase of the project is synthetic and historical; it explores in detail the research literature within and outside rhetoric and composition concerned with understanding composing as the coordination of elements such as writing in multiples spaces, with multiple actors (people and technologies), and utilizing multiple sign systems. We anticipate that this review will be useful on its own, but we also anticipate that it will shape the second, empirical phase of this project. This second phase addresses the problem that few studies have examined: how writers coordinate these elements.

Seeing Composing Distributed in Time and Space and within Technological and Cultural Contexts

The empirical aim of this project—to uncover where, when, and by what cultural and technological means composing happens in the lived experience of student writers—poses some interesting methodological challenges. We understand composing to consist of not just one, but a series of “communication events”—moments of conversation, of drafting or sketching, of reading or re-reading, and so on.

Research Questions:

• How does the day-to-day activity of composing unfold in the social and technological scenes that constitute emerging literacies?
• What strategies for coordinating socio-technical resources reveal themselves to be important, particularly effective, and/or persistent literacy practices?

Figure 1: A Visualization of a Communication Event Model