The Basic Assignment

Web Work

Web work involves searching for relevant websites, reporting on what you find, and connecting to your audience both at the HWR and in your chosen field.

Searching

Using the web is mostly about find one’s professional communities and looking ahead. While textbooks offer the fundaments, smart web use helps us to identify emerging problems by finding the professionals talking about them.

Build on what you know. As you read the assigned text, list keywords, cited texts and authors, and any links or footnotes that you think might lead to writers who are paying attention and sharing what they know.

Keep it personal. To go beyond the important fundamentals of technologies, business models, etc., that have been developed thus far and look for writers who are discussing change and the different ways people are dealing with it: look for the leading edge writers, the connectors, who make it their business to know how people are talking about things.

I discuss this work in more more detail in my Finding Your Target Language/Conversation post.

Expand your web work tool kit!

Not incidentally, once you start looking for things, you will find yourself with piles of stuff to select from, sort, arrange, and hopefully, store in a memorable, accessible way. My Collecting, Storing, and Retrieving post will get you started on the path of personal data collection, storage, and retrieval — something you will need to start thinking soon!

Reporting

Once you’ve found some interesting stuff you’ll need a way to talk about it. With report structures, you will be able to examine your sources critically and invite your readers to learn from and trust both your sources and your evaluation of them — as I review in my Reporting post.

Enter the conversation!

The purpose of reviews is to describe what relevant other writers are discussing in as neutral and clear a fashion as possible AND offer a critical commentary that, while it may include your opinions, is designed to illuminate the relevant issues and so contribute to the professional conversation: you write not simply to express yourself, though this is very important, but in a professional context we write to move the conversation forward and find solutions.

So that instead of looking for “the facts,” we look for discussion of issues organized by networks of commentators. Instead of looking for opinions, we look for professional debate and discussion of issues over which reasonable people disagree — as I review in my They Say / I Say post.

Become a Connector!

Not incidentally, you might think of writing as a form of negotiation and your role as one of connector, where:.

• You build trust with your author and readers when you sincerely acknowledge insights and information you have gained
• You learn far more from listening and asking questions than when you do all the talking (and trying to show off what you know)
• You demonstrate your openness and flexibility when you consider multiple and evening competing interpretations and leave the problem open for the opinions of others.

Ideas are important, and your having them is a wonderful thing, but the connector probably does much more, because he or she brings others together with a minimum of means to a maximum of effect — something we do when we find, evaluate, select, and present information, ideas, and arguments which our readers may evaluate quickly and efficiently and click on to discover even more valuable things — and return to thank us for the help!

To understand more about your relationship to your reader, you might visit the Harvard University Program on Negotiation website, 5 Negotiating Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Present your work carefully and with style!

Blog posts and websites are highly-structured and sophisticated. My most recent post on post and sit design is Multidimensional WordPress, and next to that you do well to read Tips from the Blogging Experts. You may also profit by reading my earlier Blog Design post.

Connecting

As John Seely Brown explains in his Learning in a Digital Age and as you will read in Richard Light’s Making the Most of College, perhaps the single most decisive factor in student academic success is the ability to form and participate in groups.

For this reason, I am inviting you look for, report on, and connect to the professional conversations in your field — something the web nowadays is uniquely able to offer. In addition to finding relevant conversations on the web, your task is to comment freely on the blog posts of your classmates (as well as welcome such comments on your own posts).

In addition, your task is to form a working group of 4-6 members and where you and your group members will create and contribute to a WordPress blog, and in this way, learn how to see your work as part of a collective activity, share your work and comments with others, and enjoy knowledge transfer and support in a community of peers.

While we are at it, we will talk a lot about being forward-looking, engaging with the “state-of-the-art” discussions, and learning how to keep track of emerging trends. We will explore how to fashion ourselves as problem-solvers and how to find others on the web and link to them.

The best general resource for understanding how this works might well be the short, highly-accessible Blogging In Plain English video by Commoncraft. I’ve also written up a discussion of how we sometimes use twitter in my classes, How We Twitter.

Web Work is a Weekly Thing

Of course, you are expected to arrive in class on time, participate actively, and completely your homework assignments when they are due. Abuse of these requirements may result in a reduction of your final grade. And while students in pass/fail courses are allowed to miss up to two classes without direct penalty, and it remains your responsibility to find out what went on in class from your classmates and proceed accordingly. But the most important reason you should plan on attending class and posting to the web EVERY week is because you will likely need 12 weeks of continuous work if you are to fullfill the course requirements. Consider the following scenario:

• Search. It will take you about three weeks to define your topic, for the simple reason that you are likely new to the field, or at least this class, and so your record for this time will likely include false starts and difficulties (and eventual success!).
• Survey Topic. We will assume that your next 3-4 posts will appear as a survey of the relevant issues as you probe 2-3 different aspects of your topic.
• Understanding in Depth. We will assume that during the final 3-4 weeks you will begin to write as an “insider” familiar with your topic and develop sufficient depth of understanding.