Feb 27th 10 Posted by justin in CCR760

CCR760 – CMS in Technical Communication – Just Notes

Technical Communication Quarterly 17(1) 2008

“Guest Editors’ Introduction:  Rationalizing and Rhetoricizing Content Management” by George Pullman and Baotong Gu

• The authors argue that we’ve been practicing CM for years through work like single sourcing, knowledge management and course management (Blackboard, etc.)
• This issue is an attempt to move technical communication from the static sphere of document design to the dynamic horizon of content management.
• Why do CMS’ fail?
  • Complexity across organization need representation
  • You have to change people’s writing habits for the good of the organization
  • CMS’ allow for relatively little improvisation which might demotivate users.

• For CMS to be successful:
  • End user emphasis (documentation specialists)
  • User needs

• Why do technical communicators need to care?
  • CMS’ change the way we think about writing because they require a strict separation of form and content to allow for seamless repurposing of content, data mining, reduplication of effort control mechanisms, and writing in collaborative spaces.
  • Tech. Comm’ers aren’t currently involved in the implementation of CMS – IT job.
  • We’re already doing work on single sourcing and knowledge management in the field.

“Coming to Content Management” by Bill Hart-Davidson, Grace Bernhardt, Michael McLeod, Martine Rife, and Jeffrey Grabill

• The authors use a rhetorical approach to explore CM in its capacity to guide technical communicators and others in the process in their decision making about knowledge creation, information arrangement, tools selection, and workplace practice design.
• In the two studies (one of a professional organization and the other at Michigan State libraries) the authors explore the dynamics of CMS as well as the complexities of content management and focus on relationships between people and information as well as the needs of end users.
• They argue that Tech.Comm. doesn’t understand a lot about CMS.  These elements include:
  • How to balance information and people needs
  • How to define the role of communication and technical communicators in the CMS practice
  • How to interpret the impact of “fine-grained changes in writing practices” brought about by the CM practice on the work of writing
  • How to understand writing practices where “market, organizational, and rhetorical vectors intersect.”

• The authors note that Tech.Comm. is poised to help small businesses and nonprofits make the transition to a new infrastructure supported by CMS.
• To understand the relationships among actors, stakeholders, and organizations in CMS, the authors turn to Latour’s “tracing associations.”
• The adoption of the CMS was a move toward creating a perpetual convention of the NPO (national professional organization).
• The idea of an audience must assume multiple user “roles” rather than users – i.e., some users will come as members to pay dues but will come as professionals at a different time to make connections.

“Content Management and the Separation of Presentation and Content” by Dave Clark

• In this article, Clark undertakes the separation of form (presentation) and content in CMS.
• Clark recognizes that the separation of form and content is not a new concept; however, he also notes that no content is ever truly separated from form.
• Within CMS’ Clark suggests understanding this separation two ways:
  • Content as completed written texts and presentation (form) as structure, navigation, and visual style
  • Content as being modules (modules are sections, paragraphs, sentences, even words that are broken down and reassembled to build custom documents on the fly) and presentation being output structure, navigation, visual style, and genre definition.

• These new understandings of what CMS do to content and form change the way that Tech.Comm. thinks about CMS’ because there are now new business pressures, new complexities in task and process management, changes in what it means to write “genres”,  new user expectations, and standardization and enforcement of form.

“The Rhetoric of Enterprise Content Management” by Rebekka Andersen

• Andersen argues that ECM (enterprise content management) is usually adopted by business leaders who see the technology as a production process model that increases efficiency and reduces production costs.
• These new production process perks include:
  • Bigger ROI (return on investment)
  • Reduced time to market of product and product info
  • Increased worker and process efficiency
  • Improved content quality
  • Increased knowledge sharing and collaboration (more corporate control)

• Technical communicators often aren’t involved in decisions and implementations of ECM because they are not participating in the discourse of the business world.
• To address the Tech.Comm. absence with respect to ECM, Andersen recommends that Tech.Commer’s raise the visibility and accessibility of their scholarship to go beyond the focus on end users and rhetorical problems.  Further, Tech.Commer’s should also complicate ECM’s mission of providing a technical solution of sociotechnical and rhetorical challenges of empowerment, collaboration, quality, usability, and technology adoption.
• Substantivist perspective of technology – technology has an inevitably positive impact on an environment.
• A lovely quote: “Many knowledge workers tend to view technology as neutral and tend not to be trained to or have the time to notice that adopting interactive communication technologies is yet another method for organizations to regulate and control information flow and worker productivity” (72).
• The collaborative, social nature of knowledge in the ECM environment disallows private communication and imposes tighter strategic control over technical communicators.
• This might provide you with a way to discuss tech comm. In relation to piracy – the issue of control.

“Metadata and Memory:  Lessons from the Canon of Memoria for the Design of Content Management Systems” by Stuart Whittemore

• Whittemore looks to the canon of memory to think about how data can be stored and retrieved in CMS.
• W. recognizes that the relationships between different pieces of information in a CMS (metadata for example isn’t easily integrated into the writing process; hence, the memories of workers are overstrained) are not explicitly created; further, they are often technically linked, but the user-input doesn’t see that relationship.
• The writing process is reduced to assembly line granularizations wherein writing occurs as an assemblage without reference to the rhetorical situation.
• Metadata functions to track “views” or the task circumstances and display conditions under which users of a document actually encounter text objects”
• This metadata awareness for distributed, granularized CMS’ is almost impossible for single authors to be able to do.
• Memoria provides a “concern for retrieving and adapting existing knowledge to the exigencies of shifting rhetorical situations” so that CM delivery can be improved.
• To improve this, W. recommends the adoption of mnemonic systems for the design of the memory tools in CMS.
• Spatial and physical visualizations (a la Cicero and Quintilian) of the writing process that integrates metadata would be one method of allow writers to concentrate on keeping “certain pieces of metadata” available during composition.
  • This would include 3-D models of data for granular placement and
  • This would also provide on-the-fly spatial representations of large-view designs-in-progress for projects.

Feb 27th 10 Posted by justin in WRT624

WRT627 – Wikinomics & Lingua Fracta (Ch. 3)

Lingua Fracta:  Towards a Rhetoric of New Media

Collin Gifford Brooke

Chapter Three:  Proairesis

• In this chapter Brooke hopes to demonstrate what he calls “proairetic invention” or “a focus on the generation of possibilities, rather than their elimination until all but one are gone and closure is achieved” (86).
• Brooke recognizes the tension between social models of invention in rhetoric and composition and the conception of the solitary author romanticized by literary studies.
• Hermeneutic invention “relies on the relative sturdiness of a final object and the negotiation of meanings within it.  In other words, much of our theorizing about invention in rhetoric and composition remains bound by the particular media for which we invent, and for the most part we invent (and ask our students to invent) for the printed page” (68).
• Brooks notes that the act of invention involves both the practices of reading and writing simultaneously (and the role of authorial power wrapped up in those processes); however, those actions don’t have to be on a zero-sum continuum.  In other words, in the act of invention, the process of reading 75% of the time doesn’t necessarily lead to a 25% writing allocation; rather, the reader’s own motivation is the wildcard because it (might) push against the political structure of the text itself.
• The function of the hermeneutic – in Barthes’ text S/Z as well as in the search engine’s like Google – is to virtualize a situation to highten our expectations (and narrative pleasure) so that when closure is achieved we are content with the new “tidy unity” we’ve been presented (76).
• The function of the proairetic is to leave a system open – social bookmarking systems like delicious.com and cite-u-like provide open systems where reader/writers are able to not only catalogue information, but also:
  • Make bookmarking available from any location with a connection
  • Provide additional information (tags, notes) on sources and
  • Make the bookmarks available to a large group of people.

• In doing these things, SBS “draw connections between users, pages, and tags. . . that generates an associational network of sources “endlessly proliferating. . . according to no overarching principle of rational design” (83).  This is characteristic of the type of invention Brooke imagines for new media – proairetic invention.

Wikinomics:  How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Tapscott and Williams

Chapter Nine:  The Wiki Workplace

• This chapter highlights how the “Geek Squad” – Best Buy’s team of “geekish” computer technicians” provide a model for collaborative virtual environments as workplace communication tools.
• This model preferences bottom-up collaboration strategies that highlight the knowledge of the workers on the front lines rather than a dated managerial capitalism.
• As the authors note, “We are shifting from closed and hierarchichal workplaces with rigid employment relationships to increasingly self-organized, distributed, and collaborative human capital networks that draw knowledge and resources from inside and outside the firm” (240).
• The new manager should quit trying to establish an agenda for moving forward and recognize the agenda of the workers and serve it (243).  This sounds pretty good, but only to a degree.
• A new collaborative ethos is present in a generation of workers nursed on “instant messaging, chat groups, playlists, p2p, and online multiplayer video games” (247).  New management would do well to adopt some of the processes.
• Lots of binarization:  Older generations preferred “value, loyalty, seniority, security, and authority” while the N-Gen’s norms reflect “creativity, social connectivity, fun, freedom, speed, and diversity” (248).
• Most workers actually spend time fixing exceptions rather than working on regularized activities.
• The new economic model for the US will resemble the small, incremental patching practices that software companies undertake – rapid incremental innovation, over and over and over again (256).
• This new wiki world will change the ways we think about:
  • Teams – self organized
  • Time allocation – provide time for independent creative products
  • Decision making – adopting a crowd mentality
  • Resource allocation – using demand based pricing structures instead of static pricing.
  • Corporate communications – using personable, less-managed forms of communication like blogs to allow the CEO to be more personable (really?  I think this will date fast).

• The new workplace will also change a couple of other things:
  • New workplaces – digital home spaces and on the road instead of at the office building.
  • New economics of work – the distributed capitalism that Zuboff and Maxmin hint at.
  • New sources of identity and security – our new sources of identity and security will come from the relationships within our communities of practice with like-minded peers.
  • New intermediaries in talent market – get ready to farm yourself through temp agencies a lot in the future.

• From Chapter 10:
  • Changes in the wikiworld are the result of:
    • Peer producers apply open source principles to create products madeof bits—from operating systems to encyclopedias.

• Ideagoras give companies access to a global marketplace of ideas, innovations,and uniquely qualified minds that they can use to extend their problem-solving capacity.

• • • Prosumer communities can be an incredible source of innovation if companies give customers the tools they need to participate in value creation.
    • The New Alexandrians are ushering in a new model of collaborative science that will lower the cost and accelerate the pace of technological progress in their industries.
    • Platforms for participation create a global stage where large communities of partners can create value and, in many cases, new businesses in a highly synergistic ecosystem.
    • Global plant floors harness the power of human capital across borders and organizational boundaries to design and assemble physical things.
    • Wiki workplaces increase innovation and improve morale by cutting across organizational hierarchies in all kinds of unorthodox ways.

Feb 21st 10 Posted by justin in CCR760

CCR760 – Videos for Google Wave / Interface Screens

I’m creating a couple really quick and admittedly dirty videos for Google Wave navigation.  Please don’t critique them as I spent little time editing and just went for some coverage! 

This video covers Google Wave Interface navigation:

open source video, video platform, open source video editor

And here’s one for how to create a Wave:

open source video, video platform, open source video editor

Here’s a screencast on installing gadget extensions for use in new blip’s.

open source video, video platform, open source video editor

Here’s a screencast on how to use robots in Google Wave:

open source video, video platform, open source video editor

So that’s it for now.  I’ll post more when I get the chance to explore Google Wave more.  If you need an invite, lemme know! 

Also, here are some interfaces across time and space (literally) that represent the sorts of shifts that Johnson-Eilola sees in interface complexity and “surfacing” in chapters 3 & 4 of his work:

Feb 21st 10 Posted by justin in CCR760

CCR760 – Datacloud – My Indictment: Dug the Book, What About that Broader Context?

I found this text to be interesting and a bit disconnected.  I think that J.E. is grappling with similar themes that have been brought up by other theorists in the past couple of years; most notably, I see the work of articulation as a response to complexity and the multiple enacted subjectivities of the postmodern object.  J.E. says as much in his book; however, I think had he worked closer with some Actor-Network theorists like John Law and Bruno Latour he might have gotten a bit more mileage out of his articulation.

I guess my criticism of J.E. here is rooted in the fact that he invokes a neo-Marxist theory to explain multiplicity without attending to the class structures/theories that undergird that invocation.  What I mean is that J.E. is discussing a particular kind of professional: the Symbolic-Analytic worker.  This worker doesn’t look like the sort of worker I’m terribly familiar with (unless from books or slick retirement-program advertisements from AIG); in fact, the “architects, systems analysts, investment bankers, research scientists,” etc. that J.E. describes as the worker bee in the information economy occupy an admittedly small sector of the overall workforce.  This is especially the case if one considers the web page manipulating computer lab student worker who lacks systems thinking (at least in this articulation of his workspace) and whose work is characterized as “routine production” (75).  These new harbingers of capital in a shifting economy that values instead of production are a cultural myth propagated by proponents of globalization instantiated a little over a decade ago by Bruce Lehman and the Clinton administration.  Before you call me a crazy-man, here me out.

Working under the advice of then Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and international economic advisors for the Clinton administration (like J.E.’s favorite Labor Secretary Robert Reich), Bruce Lehman (who I actually think is a pretty nice person) orchestrated a movement to shift the U.S. economy toward an ideas-based model of production.  As a result, the manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy would be outsourced to other nations around the world.  In exchange for all the lovely new manufacturing work that would be coming to their “developing” nation, the government of the country would need only obey by U.S. intellectual property standards and serve as export economies to our support economy.  The idea is pretty fantastic as it allows the population of the U.S. to engage in consumptive practices that disassociate the material consequences of those practices while developing Symbolic-Analytic work to sustain the economy of ideas.  Other international organizations like the WTO and WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization – the U.N.s IP monitor) would push the ideas economy model in other countries of the West while countries in the “Global South” would be coaxed into the manufacturing economy with promises of trade alliances and “Development” incentives.  All the while, the ideas economy – where power lives – would remain in the control of postindustrial nations like the U.S.

I know I’ve been really shorthanded and probably overly simplistic in my description of this process; however, I draw out this long line of connections to demonstrate that sometimes I feel as though some technical communications scholars don’t pay close enough attention to the damaging practice of reifying Symbolic-Analytic work in light of multiple factors including:

• The unfortunate position of the Global South in relation to the ideas economy of the post-industrialized West.
• The employable number of symbolic-analytic workers in the ideas economy is incredibly small compared to the number of workers who will need paychecks in the post industrialized U.S.
• The fact that an ideas economy is really itself unenforceable in light of communication technologies that allow for the illicit trafficking of intellectual property over disparate, untraceable communication networks.  This illegal trade results in counterfeits thereby removing the need for an ideas-economy overlord in the first place.

So, despite the fact that I think J.E. makes some really smart observations about the role of the interface and workplace ecologies in the life of the Symbolic-Analytic worker, I’m a little miffed by the lack of articulating that worker in larger socio-cultural networks; further, a recognition of those larger socio-cultural networks might move technical communication in a direction that encourages a more reciprocal relationship amongst all of the actors involved in the reality of globalized intellectual and material production.

NOTES

Johndan Johnson-Eilola – Datacloud

Chapter O – Introduction

• In the new information age, we don’t merely interact with information, we live it and inhabit it’s spaces – it is our primary environment and resource (3).
• Datacloud defined – a shifting and only slightly contingently structured information space (4).

Chapter 1 – Rearticulations: The changing Shapes of Computer Spaces

• J.E. notes that the U.S. economy has shifted from a model based on the material production of products via industry to an economy of ideas that promotes (well, not really promotes) the circulation of information.  In other words, we’ve moved from an industrial economy to an information and knowledge economy (11).
• In the section on breakdown and recombination J.E. seems to be coming up against the problems of multiplicity – or at least what happens when single subjects perform multiple subjectivities.  In this view our lives are structured by the continuous and dynamic processes of construction and reconstruction.  Echoing Latour J.E. notes that “There is no core, dispassionate self, but only a network of social and technical forces constructing the I as an ongoing, contingent process, a useful fiction” (18).
• To understand how humans make their way in data saturated environments, J.E. uses two frames – the theories of articulation (Stuart Hall) and symbolic-analytic work (Robert Reich).
• The goal of J.E.’s work is to explore a range of situations, technologies, and users in the process of articulation as symbolic-analytic workers (20).

Chapter 2 – Tendential Forces:  A Brief Primer on Articulation Theory and Symbolic-Analyltic Work

• J.E. wants to understand the process of communication as an exercise in breakdown – a breakdown that is productive, not destructive to the communicative process because it requires rearticulations through new ways of saying/doing/meaning (24).
• Articulation describes the ideological formation of symbolic-analytic workers whereas the symbolic-analytic describes the materiality of work.  So, to some degree the articulation is the ideological thrust behind globalized distributed capitalist economy whereas the symbolic-analytic explores the actual processes of carrying out that work in the world.
  • Articulation theory – people are constructed as subjects in particular ways by particular ideological imperatives; however, most individuals also push up against multiple constructions at all times.  The tension that arises from these brush-ups creates articulations of multiple subject positions – subjectivities – that allow human beings to occupy multiple and conflicting subjectivities (25).  Against strict postmodernity
    Things have no anchored meaning
    Meaning is made in things by contextual engagement.
    Key aspects of articulation:
    • Conceptual objects (articulations) are contingent and open to change
    • Change involves struggle among many different and competing forces
    • Conceptual objects are never separate from the forces that construct them – objects are always in the process of articulation
    • Different concrete contexts construct articulations in different ways
    • Fragmentation and destabilization doesn’t mean failure as new social networks and beings in those networks work to restabilize articulations into a possibly possible new articulation of subjectivity
  • Symbolic Analytic work – work that traffics in information.  Some typical actions of the symbolic-analytic worker
    • Experimentation – forming and testing hypothesis about information and communication.  So, in other words, work contexts are constantly changing.
    • Collaboration – this skill helps s.a. workers complete complex tasks across complex disciplinary domains.
    • Abstraction – this skill is a way for s.a. workers to discern patterns, relationships, and hierarchies from large amounts of information
    • System thinking – this skill emphasizes the s.a. workers ability not to break a problem into multiple parts to fix but to actually contextualize the problem in a larger set of relations to determine an answer (is this merely a tautology?  In other words, what of scale?)

Chapter Three – Toward Flatness:  Changing Articulations of Interface Design

• In this chapter J.E. looks at the microcontext of user work and learning – that is the location of information about learning to work with a computer.  He also considers the social and political implications of those different social constructions (35).
• As the computer progressed from an automating device that required apprenticeship for use (really use was a matter of recording, not manipulating) to the conception of computers as complex objects, computer interfaces became much more surface oriented (surface = GUI for example, everything happens on the screen, not in deep computing backends of programming, etc.). 
• This move toward flattening the work surface in computing encourages ease of use and discourages broad, complex forms of learning (45).  The tensions that have developed as a result of the asocial experience of work in a flattened environment vs. the need for workers felt need to break out of an interfaced experience creates the sort of luddite approach exemplified by many new s.a. workers (51).  That being said, social software is changing this dynamic.
• Social software such as MOOs (for J.E.) and Ning (para mi) demonstrate this move toward social work environments. 

Chapter Four – Interface Overflow

• The takeaway from this chapter is that J.E. sees complex, richly layered workspaces as symptomatic of s.a. work; however, there are times when work with interfaces and software aren’t as considered s.a. work because they require little complex, systems-oriented thinking.
• A great quote:  During the last five decades of the 20^th century, the computer began to absorb and contain not merely the objects being worked on but also the meta-information about those objects, including structures, and procedures for learning and working.  In other words the computer and space around it began to absorb and then reflect back context.  In many instances, the reflections have taken on significations divorced of any originary context – the ‘crop’ tool, for example, in PageMaker emulates a physical device used by graphic artists. . .” (68).
• In the discussion of his two buddies at college, the computer lab student worker, and his own work in the wired collaborative classroom J.E. is trying to demonstrate how we exist within information spaces rather than on the periphery looking – gazing – at them.
• To understand these new spaces, you can think of computing in two separate (but inseparable in practice) ways
  • Virtual reality – mirrors the real world and is supposed to be something of a replication of the meatworld.
  • Ubiquitous computing – the small, disruptive (read positively disruptive) articulations that allow for both productive and distractive communicative practices.  These are small and require far less attention than virtual realities.

Chapter Five – Articulating (in) the Datacloud

• Articulations are suggestions about acceptable meanings (89).
• J.E. discusses the effects of IM on his pedagogy practices on 92. (I wonder about asynchronous communication in this section as J.E. only discusses IMs and MOOs)
• The fragmentation that occurs through IM is a strength in many work contexts and can allow for fragmentation as a model for education and work emerging in our culture.
• J.E. is dreaming of the read-write web discussed by other theorists on 101 – in essence, he is wanting a place where s.a. workers are able to produce and consume information.  He calls this “transformative consumption.”
• The process of articulation involves both historical and spatial aspects – nothing is predetermined by history; however, history still matters (102).
• The takeaway from this discussion is that those who produce media work with it in more spatial ways than those who consume it.

Chapter Six – Other Stories, Other Texts:  Other Ideas About Work

• This chapter recognizes the remix as a creative form despite it’s lack of what we often think of as “originality” and linearity.
• The work of s.a. workers requires the skills of digging, mixing, and programming (114).  How is this different from writing (I know it is, but a question for discussion?)
• J.E. sees deconstructionist architecture as “information spaces that communicate doubly:  they both support and are composed of communication” (119).
• Traditionally information architecture could be viewed as “traditional work” because it takes the simplification and linearization of data as it’s primary goal.
• J.E. says that “deconstructive architecture succeeds on two key levels:  material and symbolic.  Although battles rage over the appropriateness and aesthetic appearance of much of the contemporary architecture, the fact remains that these architects have taken up core principles of deconstruction and postmodernism and made them work (125).
• Some core concerns and strategies for interfaces that support s.a. work:
  • The emphasis on breaking down artifacts is important work in the information age.
  • S.A. workers require support for maintaining and organizing large volumes of data
  • Texts are participatory and contingent on context.
  • Choices about information have moral consequences the S.A. should not strive to be neutral and invisible because that stance ignores that artifacts have politics (126-7).

Chapter Seven – Some Rearticulations:  Emergent Symbolic-Analytic Spaces

• Blogs are an example because they allow for interaction and read-write processes.
• Intense interfaces that are “dense” usually allow for development across media.  These are examples of what he sees as S.A. spaces.
• The hyperlinked document allows information to be taken in at multiple levels of abstraction – in other words, this is a non-preference of production and consumption because documents of this sort encourage working through and around information by rearranging it yourself – not simply consuming.
• Big ideas from the book:
  • We must learn to understand learning and work in new ways – creativity isn’t original, but a remix
  • As interfaces have shifted from an emphasis on depth to surface, users have begun to work with information in new ways.
  • Information is always associated with political and cultural meanings.  Our use of media to disrupt those tendential meanings is a political social act.
  • Surfaces must be translated into working spaces if we are to begin working along the lines suggested by symbolic-analytic work.  This means making spatial environments that are social.
  • The new spaces where social work will happen require contingency, information overload, and ongoing re and deconstruction.  As such, information architecture will need to change to meet the needs of the S.A. worker.

Feb 17th 10 Posted by justin in WRT624

WRT624 – Logie – The (Re)Birth of the Composer

Logie – “The (Re)Birth of the Composer” from Composition and Copyright

• Logie notes that composition is the antitheological activity par excellance because it dissolves the author into an accumulation of public ideas, interpretations and claims (176).  In this sense, composition challenges God “and his hypostases – reason, science, law.”
• “Classic [humanist] criticism has obscured the networked composer in order to celebrate the Author: for that criticism, there is no other person in literature than the one who authors”
• In short, Logie posits that following Barthes’ “The Death of the Author,” the composer must be (re)born.
• I like that Logie connects contemporary copyright law with the notion of the Romantic “author.”  It’s something that my composition students are doing pretty effectively so far this semester.
• Logie recognizes Woodmansee’s three key elements of the Romantic construction of authorship:
  • Author is solitary (think Inge’s piece here).  Because of this solitude, the author can be inspired by the muse.
  • Author is originary.  So there is a level of originality not granted to hack writers and journalists (most journalists).
  • Author is proprietary.  Traced to Fichte’s philosophy, this is the idea that the author takes control of their work at least long enough to be sold.

• I think there is a lot to chew on in Crowley’s claim that “One paradoxical task facing the teaching of writing or public speaking is to make students aware of the discursive agency that works through them, and of it’s possible effects on others, while at the same time helping them to grasp the art or craft that can lead to their assumption of authorship” (181-2).  This seems to contradict the sort of liberation that Marx had in mind for the worker – is our making them “aware” really just another imperialism?
• Great stuff here on print-focused copyright laws and their ability to hinder free culture or Borges’ “Library of Babel” (183).
• Logie draws attention to the capitalist imperative underlying print-based publication.
• Logie advocates Creative Commons as a way to move beyond traditional proprietary models of copyright. Woot!
• Logie sees blogging as a form of journalism – sometimes – that is social/capital/istic.  In other words, the social capital garnered from blogging is a reasonable impetus to continue composing in that digital environment.
• What does this look like for the classroom?  A composing space would “develop creative and strategic responses to the assignment without necessarily fully embracing the obligations of full ownership and full originality” or in other words, a low risk zone that embraces entropy and risk to create modified, multi genre pieces.
• For Logie “strategies of cutting, pasting, extracting, subverting, and decontextualizing extant works are (or will be) at least as important as the Author’s supposed sparkings of original genius” (188).