Author: ksoakes

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Overview for Week of 6/22

I’ll be getting you feedback on your recent posts and on your focusing flowchart within the next 24 hours, so please be on the lookout for that, and use that to get started on your research for sources for your research portfolio.

Read on for the particulars of what’s due this week, but first, let me give you a bit more of the Big Picture of Unit 2.

big picture

In this Unit, you will be assembling a set of sources–representing a mix of voices of various stakeholders, a variety of source types (including primary, scholarly, and others), and a range of perspectives. Your primary tasks in this unit will be making decisions about what sources to include and becoming conversant with those sources. In this unit, we’ll focus on these elements:

  • locating sources (working with the SU library databases and other tools)
  • evaluating sources (assessing their value, credibility, and utility to your project)
  • writing about your sources (in a couple of note-taking and discussion exercises, and in longer annotations that are part of your portfolio)

You’ll be building a research project with these and other sources down the road in Unit 3. This unit will let you take your time developing a strong foundation for that work, so that your research can be intentional, critical, and productive (and not just quote-dropping or patching together other people’s words and ideas). This will allow you to make something new, a valuable contribution to the world of knowledge on the subject you choose to explore.

So, here are this week’s tasks.

Reading:

  • “Four questions to protect your organization’s culture during COVID-19
  • chapters 6 and 7 of TSIS
  • chapter 2 (“Forwarding”) of Rewriting

Writing and discussion work:

  • 2 note-taking exercises (1 due Wednesday, and the other due Sunday)–this begins with you locating possible sources, and then working with 2 different techniques spelled out on this notetaking techniques handout
  • discussion posts (your posts due Wednesday, replies to classmates’ posts due Saturday). Here’s the link to the prompts:

    Discussion prompts for Week of 6/22

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Overview for Week of 6/15

We begin Unit 2 this week, during which each of you will identify and begin to plot out your research path and assemble a body of sources to carry your inquiry along. For many of you, this will mean continuing to build on something you learned in Unit 1, but you are not limited to that topic. Our work will continue to unfold beneath the big umbrella of “diversity and organizational culture,” but as you’ve seen from how your classmates have taken up this work, there are a whole lot of possibilities to explore. Read on for an overview of this week’s assigned work.

Readings

Writing Assignments

Blog post in which you list at least 5 rhetorical moves you see Bogost making in “The problem with diversity in computing”–in other words, 5 different places in the text where you see that how he says something helps you as a reader understand what he is trying to say. Think about how he works to make a connection with the reader, how he introduces key ideas/evidence, how he tries to make a point stick.  Quote these briefly so we know what you’re talking about, and try to name/explain what you see him doing there (due on blog by Wednesday, 6/17)

Complete the Focusing Flowchart exercise on Blackboard (due in Unit 2 dropbox by Sunday, 6/21)

Discussion work on blog. See this post for the prompts and instructions (due by Thursday, 6/18): 

Discussion prompts for week of 6/15

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Discussion prompts for week of 6/15

As we move forward into Unit 2 this week, our focus will be twofold:  identifying and practicing rhetorical strategies (thinking about how we say what we do) and working to articulate the specific issues we’re interested in exploring further beneath this big umbrella of organizational culture. This will be foundational to the larger work of Unit 2: exploring.

For this week’s discussion work, please respond to question 1 and either of the other questions. Your posts are due by Thursday, 6/18–an extension from the original date, as you have a brief analytical exercise due by Wednesday (see the Unit 2 schedule of assignments and the associated dropbox on Blackboard).

  1. Our primary purpose in Unit 1 was to expand the body of shared knowledge on the subject of diversity and organizational culture, and each of you has made an individual contribution to that effort. Now I’d like you to review your classmates’ contributions to see what they’ve added–click on “canon” in the tag cloud to read these. What have you found interesting and significant in what you’ve read in their posts? Please be specific in naming the issues that have stood out to you and in pointing us toward 1 particular media element (graphic, video, link, etc.) that really made an impression on you. Taking these contributions as a set, how are you seeing the idea of “diversity and organizational culture” differently?
  2. “Flashpoint” is one of those buzzwords used in lots of different ways, in fields as far removed as management and gaming and exercise and chemistry. And since it’s proven to be so flexible, in rhetoric, too. For our purposes, it refers to a sort of rhetorical spark, a moment in the text when we see an important genesis or shift—when something important suddenly becomes clear. Pick such a flashpoint in “The Problem with Diversity in Computing,” and walk us through your chain of thought using one template from TSIS that’s designed for presenting the reaction you want to capture. (Chapters 4 and 5 of TSIS offer lots of ideas)
  3. Crafting effective transitions can be a real challenge for writers, but we can learn a lot from examining how others approach the task. Consider how Bogost uses transitions to develop his argument by focusing on a specific passage—the movement between one paragraph and another or between one section and another. How does he lay the groundwork for the move? How does he pick up on one of those pieces to move forward with? Be specific—quote and analyze in detail.

Please categorize your posts as “Discussions/Homework,” and Tag with “unit 2,” “week of 6/15,” and [your name]. Read through your classmates’ posts later this week, and respond where you see fit.

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Wrapping up Unit 1

Let’s start pulling some things together. Here are a few lessons from our first unit of the course that I hope you will carry forward in our next projects:

  • We need to understand a text’s rhetorical situation before we can work with it—over the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at some sets of texts that talk around some of the same issues but from different angles. Looking closely, we can trace many of these differences to facets of their writing situation: i.e. different audiences, different purposes, different credentials/experiences of the authors, different contexts. In order to figure out how much stock to put in folks’ ideas, what ideas of our own we might build upon them, or how to use these sources to help explain ideas to other people, we MUST first understand the texts themselves and where they’re coming from.
  • Understanding a text’s rhetorical situation also gives us a window in to whether and how it works, and what we might learn from its example as writers—we can see how writers try to appeal to their readers (using 2nd person, anticipating and responding to their concerns, styling their text to be visually engaging). We can see how writers build their arguments (linking evidence to claims, providing the reader with opportunities to follow their chain of thought back through hyperlinks to sources or citations). We can see writers drawing on their personal experiences to tell us stories about how they came to wonder about something and how they developed their understanding of it. By watching how other people do this work, we prepare ourselves to do it, too.
  • We need a variety of tools—we’ve examined how-to texts (from Harris and TSIS) and content-focused ones; we’ve watched videos; we’ve discussed. We’re coming to appreciate the complexity of our big topic area and to see how we’re only really going to make progress toward our understanding by engaging with a variety of resources and voices. That’s not just an academic exercise for us in this course; that’s a core guideline for research. As researchers and writers, we will also need that multi-faceted set of perspectives if we’re ever going to make progress toward understanding. AND we need to use a multitude of tools in presenting our ideas to our readers—whether that’s templates, graphic representations of data, varying levels of formality, etc. Furthermore, this sort of diversity of perspectives and approaches is a core value for organizations–an essential component of fair and effective collaboration.

So let’s continue. We’re growing our body of knowledge this week through accretion—each of you is adding something to it with the article you’re going to explain to the rest of us, and reviewing your classmates’ posts will be an important part of this week’s work. As we move forward, we’ll continue to learn from each other even as we head down individual research paths.

One final point, summary isn’t just a hoop for you to jump through. It’s how you test yourself to ensure that you’re conversant enough with the text to work with it in your own writing. If you can’t effectively summarize it, you probably shouldn’t be working with it in a project, because you can’t be sure you’ll fairly characterize its perspective and utilize its full value. A careful definition and description of a source (as part of a summary that also details its main take-away points) is a necessary precondition to be able to work further with that material.

Ready to move on? The unit 2 assignment sheet is available here and on Blackboard. Take a look, and let’s get ready to go.

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Drafting your Unit 1 blog post

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been working with a shared body of readings that have given us some insights into workplace cultures and, in particular, the challenges, complexities, and value of diverse workplace cultures. Now that we’ve got a foundation of knowledge, it’s time to build on that by expanding our reach into some of the questions and issues these readings have raised for us.

Each of you is contributing to that expanding body of knowledge by suggesting an article to the rest of us. Your Unit 1 blog post will provide a summary of this text in addition to your commentary about what we can learn from this text and why it should be part of our shared canon of work on organizational culture and diversity. Read on for some pointers.

Let’s think first about the summary piece.

Unlike the other summaries that you’ve been writing, your readers (us) have not read the piece that you are summarizing, so that really raises the stakes for the work that you do in your summary. We’ll be totally reliant on your explanation of what this source is, what it does, and what it says, so please be sure to read through the comments that you’ve gotten from me on your prior summaries, to review the Handout on summary  here or on Blackboard, and to consider what we’ve learned from the TSIS and Harris readings.

A few reminders: 

We need to know precisely WHAT you’re summarizing—what kind of text is this? Can you tell us a little something about the author and/or publication that would help us understand something about this piece?

We need to know what the authors are DOING in this text—are they reporting a list of facts? Are they making an argument? Have they conducted their own research? Reporting someone else’s findings? Responding to some other argument they disagree with? Diving into a public controversy? The authors might have several purposes in their text—help us to understand what their purposes are (to use Harris’s term, their project) so that we can really get what this text is. Verbs can really help you here–select action verbs that really help to pinpoint the work the author is doing (arguing, advocating, explaining, addressing, debating, contesting, etc.)

We need to see the BIG PICTURE of what the author is saying—as a rule, we don’t need the sequential play-by-play, but we do want to have some clarity on the overall point of the piece, as well as the major sub-points that add to our body of knowledge.

Make sure you name the author and article you’re discussing—there should be no ambiguity here. And if there are multiple authors, credit them all the first time, and thereafter, you can use the first author’s last name and “et al” if there are 3 or more authors. (Technically, APA style requires that you only use “et al” if there are 6 or more authors, but come on….. If you’re submitting for publication in a professional or scholarly journal, follow that rule, of course; elsewhere use your judgment.) Please include a full bibliographic citation at the end of your blog post, detailing all the publication information for this particular article. (Again, remember to consult the assignment sheet for the criteria that your source must meet.)

Let us see what you’re working with–use the “Add Media” button to provide us with direct access to the article you’re contributing. If it’s a web-based source (on the open web), insert the link using that button. If the article is from a subscription database, please link it as a PDF. See my post from earlier this week, linked below, for instructions on how to do that.

Overview of Week of 6/8

Now, let’s think about the commentary piece. Think about your audience and your purpose.

Remember that you know what we know–that shared body of knowledge built from the texts we’ve read together. Feel free to draw connections/contrasts with other pieces we’ve read and discussions we’ve had.

Write in your own voice–you don’t have to adopt the scholarly tone of the articles that you’re working with. Write as if you’re speaking to us. Be direct.

Remember that your task here is expand our knowledge, to complicate the discussion we’ve been having by injecting something new and explaining its significance. Tell us what you think this article means, what you think is important about it, why you think it matters, what you want us to learn from it.

Please categorize your draft post as Expanding the Canon, and tag it with “draft,” “week of 6/8,” [your name], and “canon.” This will help me and others to easily identify what’s what.

One final request–please double-check all of your recent posts to ensure that they are properly categorized and tagged, and edit them as needed. When I’m grading posts, I sometimes have to go hunting to find your work, and that’s not especially helpful. You’ll find the instructions for tagging and categorizing in each of the prompts, which you can easily access by clicking “prompts” on the tag cloud. Contact me with any questions.

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What makes a source “scholarly”?

Note that the Unit 1 assignment calls for you to choose a source from a scholarly or professional journal. As I’m reviewing your summaries, it’s clear that not all of you have done this. Read on if you’re not sure what I mean by “scholarly,” or if you’d just like a little refresher, and then see my next post (linked below) for some more pointers about crafting your draft.

Scholarly journals are different in some important respects from popular magazines, the kind that you see at the checkout line at the grocery store or on the display in a bookstore. You can see some of those differences just at a glance–

  • non-flashy covers (really the opposite of flashy–like this: )Image result for journal of management
  • few to no advertisements (and those that are present are typically announcements about various professional conferences and publications)

Those visual differences are just the tip of the iceberg. Here are some other critical differences between scholarly publications and popular magazines:

  • authors published in scholarly journals are credentialed experts in their respective fields who typically specialize in certain topics–as opposed to professional journalists who might write about a range of topics that they haven’t spent years studying, maybe a different topic every week or every month
  • articles in scholarly journals are aimed at a fairly narrow audience of other scholars/professionals in that field who will understand the often highly-specialized jargon they employ (and who can make sense of their various graphs, charts, formulae, etc.)–as opposed to popular magazines that aim for a broad readership to increase circulation/sales
  • authors of scholarly articles must demonstrate the legitimacy and solidity of their research to their readers, and so you’ll see in-text citations for their detailed data and analysis–as opposed to popular publications that are not so focused on clarifying their research methods and giving readers access to all of their sources
  • articles in scholarly journals have been peer-reviewed, read by a panel of other experts in the field who have endorsed their methodology as sound and their findings as important contributions to the field of study before agreeing that it should be published–as opposed to popular magazines where there is not such a rigorous process of critical review

Professional journals are a bit less stodgy in terms of their visual appearance and a bit less rigid in their review process, but are nonetheless going to feature work by practitioners who are experts in their field, as opposed to journalists who may be more free-range in their topics. And they will typically utilize a pretty research-heavy approach to share information with their readers, other practitioners in the field, who are intent on staying on top of the latest news and research. They may be a bit flashier in appearance than scholarly journals (more images, more reader-friendly formatting), but are still going to have very visible research in the form of footnotes or in-text citations/links and a references list.

You’ll find easy access (and some research assistance) on the SU library website. 

Your focus for this Unit 1 canon addition needs to be on scholarly or professional literature. If that’s not what you had in your first draft, it’s not too late–please keep searching, contact Karen with questions, and re-submit a new summary by the end of the day on Wednesday. You can then take an extra day to assemble your draft, and submit that by the end of the day on Thursday. That way you can make a truly valuable contribution to our growing body of knowledge.

Please see this post for some more guidance on assembling your draft:

Drafting your Unit 1 blog post

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Discussion prompts for Week of 6/8

This week you will be watching three TED talks and reading another article that all intersect with our big umbrella topic of organizational culture. (Think of this like a Venn diagram:

Venn diagram

I think this can be a helpful analogy because it is much the same tactic that we take in research: we are not simply looking for the one “perfect” source but rather for a source that interacts with our ideas in someway that move them forward. And the more voices we hear from in that research (the more perspectives we incorporate), the more likely we will arrive at a fuller understanding of the topic we’re examining.

For this week’s discussion I would ask that each of you respond to question #1 and then either #2 or #3. Please categorize your list as “Discussions/ Homework” and tag it with “week of 6/8,” “unit 1,” and [your name].

  1. We use the term “rhetoric” to discuss how we make arguments (what we do and how and why, not just what we say). Since a hefty portion of your work in this upcoming Expanding the Canon blog post hinges on rhetorical analysis, let’s do some practice–working with one of the TED talks for this week (Heffernan’s, Fried, or Salecl), talk to us about what you find interesting in their rhetorical approach. How do they engage the audience? What kinds of strategies do they use to explain their ideas? What do you think is interesting or significant about the way that they present their arguments and appeal to their listeners?
  2. Choose one of the talks that you watched this week and examine how this speaker works with evidence. What kind of evidence do they use? How do they explicate the connections between their evidence and their claims?  Be specific. How do they walk the audience through their argument? What are some of their argumentation tactics that you find effective? Note that you will need to watch the talk at least a second time, and take notes while you are doing it; you can also access a full transcript of the talk on the TED website.
  3. Choose one of the talks, and discuss how this presenter adds to our body of knowledge around organizational culture. Who is the speaker/author, and what kind perspective do they contribute? (You may need to do a quick Google search to get a sense of who they are.)  What kind of connections do you see between this take and other things we have been learning about organizational culture? If you were to make a Venn diagram (or a few) articulating the connections between this text and other ones that we’ve read, what would it look like? You can have some fun with this using an online Venn creator like this one or by sketching it out by hand and incorporating the image(s) into your post):

    Venn Diagram Maker Landing Page

    Please post your responses by the end of the day on Wednesday, 6/10, and respond to at least 2 of your classmates’ posts by the end of the day on Saturday, 6/13.

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Overview of Week of 6/8

We’ll be closing out Unit 1 this week, so that means your first Unit assignment deadline is approaching (Sunday, 6/14).

Read on for an overview of how we’ll be moving toward that:

Look for feedback from me in the next couple of days on the summary of your article that you submitted yesterday. You’ll work with that feedback to finalize your summary, which will become part of your Unit 1 blog post (along with your commentary on how this article would enrich our understanding of the specific organizational culture issue/area you’re exploring). Be sure to review the unit 1 assignment sheet. Consider your purpose carefully.

show & tell

While you’re waiting for that feedback, start thinking about and looking at your options for a media component (link, video clip, image, etc.) to incorporate into your post. You’ve got a lot of latitude to work with here. I suggest using the assignment’s purpose as your starting point. Here’s what I mean: while you’ve read this article (probably multiple times by now), your classmates probably haven’t. You’re suggesting that this text ought to be part of our canon, that looking at it would enrich our knowledge and understanding of this important issue. You need to show and tell us how that’s the case. You’ll be offering summary, analysis, and commentary. The media element is there to round that out. For example, your media component might:

  • provide some background knowledge that would be crucial to our understanding (i.e. through a link or a video)
  • contain some visual context for the scope or complexity of the issue (i.e. an infographic) or assist with our understanding of change over time or comparison (i.e. graph, chart)
  • offer an opportunity to explore this issue further (i.e. through a link) for those who want to learn more

You may incorporate more than 1 element if you would like; just make sure you have at least 1. Also be sure to attend to the following:

  • if using a link, make sure it is functional–use the “Add Media” button in the +New Post window to “Insert from url”
  • if using an image, make sure it is high-resolution so that it’s legible–again you’ll use the “Add Media” button to “Upload files” and “Insert into post”
  • if using an image, provide a caption that includes the source information (where you found the image–the actual web page, not just “Google search”)
  • whatever your media component, be sure that you explain its relevance in your post–don’t leave your reader to draw their own conclusions about its significance. Walk us through what you want us to learn from this item.

Here’s the other work on tap for this week:

  • draft of your blog post (let’s extend the deadline here to the end of the day on Wednesday, 6/10)
  • a few TED talks to watch (linked from Blackboard) for more perspectives on diversity and organizational culture (and in preparation for this week’s discussion)
  • discussion work on the blog–see the prompt here:

    Discussion prompts for Week of 6/8

I’ll be reading your drafts (due Wednesday) and getting you feedback by the end of the day on Friday. Your final version of the blog post is due by the end of the day on Sunday, 6/14.

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A quick(ish) note on this week’s work and what we’re trying to do here

As you’ve probably noticed, you’re submitting all of your work this week through the blog, including the summaries, rather than through Blackboard. That’s by design. You’ve had a chance to receive some private feedback, and now it’s time to open up your audience a bit–this way you’ll have the opportunity to give and to receive feedback from one another. You can learn a lot by seeing how others summarize the same text as you–what they prioritize, how they define the source, what works well in their approach that might be different from your own.

Moving forward in the course, much of your writing work will be public in this way–on the blog, with your classmates reading and responding. That will provide valuable experience with writing for an authentic audience, which in turn will help you to improve your rhetorical agility. That’s a key aim of this course–to think about the ways in which writing and research are situational, flexing and adapting our work to our distinct purpose, audience, and context.

Now, obviously, this requires a degree of trust, and in a fully online setting where we don’t see one another’s faces and don’t have those same kinds of human interactions that we’re accustomed to in a classroom setting, we will need to work intentionally to build that trust. Trust will make it easier to put our writing out there, to accept constructive feedback, and to offer up our own valuable insights.

Here, I think that our growing knowledge of organizational culture can be a real asset. We know that cultures are built–they don’t just happen–and that they are manifestations of our shared values. I propose that we take a little time this week to reflect on what values we want to be sure we enact in our class community, in this organization that we’re making.

I’ll go first–one of the features of this section that I really value and that I’d like to build on is your openness about the diversity of your backgrounds and experiences. As a group, we represent different generations, different professional fields, different geographical areas, different ethnic and racial groups, and I really appreciate how you’ve been willing to sharing those differences and the unique perspectives you’ve developed as a result. I hope you’ll continue to do so. I think that communicating from where we are–honoring and acknowledging how we are situated–is really important.

Would you please chime in and comment on this post with your thoughts about the culture you’d like to see us build in this online community? What value do you propose we share? What practices do you propose we try to enact? What would you like to see us do/not do/prioritize/avoid?

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Overview of Week of 6/1

Now that we’re getting our feet under us in terms of what organizational culture is, why diversity and inclusion are part of the conversation, and how thinking about rhetorical situation can help us to engage with complex texts, it’s time for us to build on that.

As a group, we’ve all been working with the same set of texts, and that gives us a shared foundation of knowledge. What I’ve tried to assemble here is a set of texts that function as a canon–works that are essential to an understanding of the subject matter, important and influential works. But there’s so much more out there to explore, and that will be your primary work for the week–looking around to locate an additional text that you think should be part of the canon.

Canonical works are substantive–building on careful and thoughtful research. They provide new insights and ideas, and don’t simply re-present known information. They work well for their audience, so that they can contribute to the world of knowledge.

Chances are you’ll need to look at several articles to find one that does all this and that meets the particular criteria that are set forth on the unit 1 assignment sheet . The SU libraries’ website is a good place to start here. You can use the Advanced Search functions there to help filter the results so they meet some of the basic criteria to start with. You’ll find a number of useful tutorials on the library site if you’re not already familiar with using it. This search tips page is a good place to start.

(A quick note on using SU libraries vs. Google Scholar–you’ve already paid for the SU services and won’t ever bump into a paywall; on Google Scholar, you often will. The library also provides free research support, which you can’t get on Google.)

So, where to begin? Here’s an overview of your tasks for the week:

Reading assignments:

  • chapters 2 and 3 of TSIS
  • chapter 1 of Rewriting by Joe Harris (PDF on Blackboard)
  • “Understanding key D&I concepts” (PDF on Blackboard)
  • your selected article (that you plan to contribute to the canon)–to write an effective summary, you will need to read this carefully and probably more than once. Be sure to consult the close reading handout and the handout on summary.

Discussion/writing assignments:

  • write a 100-200 word summary of either the Kaplan and Donovan article from this week OR the Austin and Pisano article from last week, and submit this on the blog (categorize as “Discussions/Homework”; tag with “K&D” or “A&P” as appropriate, along with “week of 6/1,” and [your name] (due Weds., 6/3) 
  • respond to 2 of this week’s discussion questions (available here). Categorize as “Discussions/Homework”; tag with “week of 6/1,” “unit1,” and [your name]. (due Thurs., 6/4): 

    Discussion prompts for Week of 6/1

  • respond to at least 2 of your classmates’ discussion posts on the blog (due Sat., 6/6)
  •  write a 200 word summary of your selected article. Include a link to or PDF of the article you’re working with, and reference the author and title of the text you are summarizing. Categorize this as “Expanding the Canon”; tag it with “summary,” “week of 6/1,” and [your name]. (due Sun., 6/7)