Stuart Selber, Associate Professor of English and Sciences, Technology, and Society

For my faculty fellowship, I propose to investigate the changing nature of instruction sets in online environments, including Web 2.0 environments. My deliverables will include a research-based heuristic that provides a rhetoric for electronic instruction sets, which can be applied by teachers of technical writing and by instructional designers responsible for procedural documentation.

Instruction sets have become a fixture and a focus of online participatory culture, illuminating the significance of technical writing to an ever widening audience of authors and users. By "online participatory culture" I mean the activities and practices in social spaces on the Web that encourage the production and distribution of user-generated content (e.g., uploading videos to YouTube and photos to Flickr; writing and rating product reviews at Amazon; adding and editing encyclopedia entries at Wikipedia; sharing and tagging collections of bookmarks at Delicious; offering advice in user forums at Apple or Microsoft).

At present, it seems that nearly everyone on the Internet is a technical writer--or at least has the potential to be one. The sociotechnical interfaces that organize literate activity today are inclusive and remarkably flexible. They no longer position data and information--or people, for that matter--in one context or another. Nor do they care very much about the boundaries the field has used to define technical writing. Although the range of user-generated content is extensive and includes a wide variety of materials (new media or not), instructional discourse occupies a conspicuous position in the landscape of online participatory culture. At the previously mentioned websites, which incorporate so-called Web 2.0 features, there is no shortage of how-to texts, images, and videos of both an official and vernacular nature; these items have been produced by amateurs and experts who confound distinctions between subject positions (or audience categories) and between elements in a mixture of additional binary oppositions that have come to organize Western culture (e.g., private/public, work/play, literacy/technology).

In addition, Web 2.0 websites such as Expertvillage.com, Instructables.com, and Docstoc.com have been specifically designed to support the activities and practices of participatory culture in the context of instructions. Sites like these--there are many of them--host hundreds of thousands of instruction sets framed with metadata and mechanisms for various forms of feedback.

My argument is that Web 2.0 environments have begun to recast the instruction set in concrete and meaningful ways. The relevance of the instruction set has been amplified and widened by an online participatory culture that encourages involvement, collaboration, and information exchange. More than simply a good example, the instruction set has become something of a metonym for the complex world of Web 2.0. Although such a part-for-whole substitution is certainly reductive, it has heuristic value in that it helps people to understand a role and function for user-generated content--a phrase with no shortage of interpretive flexibility. In other words, the sharing of expertise, which is an easily understood and frequently practiced form of human discourse, has become an archetypal task of online engagement and interaction.

You can learn more about this project by visiting the ETS Wiki.

In recent weeks there has been a lot of discussion about how to create cross pollination among the faculty fellows. This week's big accomplishment for our groups has been to arrange a joint summit with Chris Long's group. The Fellows are also scheduled to be on a panel for the Summer Camp, but I hope there are more opportunities.

When we compared notes on projects, it definitely seemed like there was a lot of overlap. Allan asked what we thought the common theme was, and on further reflection, I think it's that we all are working towards a common vision of the Internet being a place where anyone, anywhere can contribute to the knowledge of the community (and I count brisk discussion as an important part of that).

Ellysa Cahoy has been focusing on new information literacy - which not only allow students to filter the enourmous amount of content out there but hopefully will allow them to make intelligent contributions. Carla Zembal-Saul has been focusing on student portfolios, which is an important skill to allow us to organize and share what we are learning with the world. Chris Long has been focusing on how the Internet can enable discussions of the type practiced by Socrates...but with a potentially much larger stage. And Stuart Selber has been focusing on how technical writers need to prepare for a world where users may be providing "official instruction" on a product.

I think there's been lots of interesting discussion going on and it's giving a lot of us a rare opportunity to think about how our jobs really can impact Penn State and the larger world. As I said, I hope there are more opportunities for cross pollination out there for us and the Learning Design community. These instructors have a lot to teach us.

If you want to sample what we are thinking, I would recommend Mary Janzen's last blog entry on technical writing. As always, I find it very interesting reading.

We're only a few weeks into the Stuart Selbur project, but already it seems time to review where we are.

Truthfully, we're still brainstorming, but we've had some fascinating conversations about different aspects of Web 2.0 and higher education. Stuart is formulating his taxonomy of online documentation modes, but this week we began to touch on what the implications would be for future practitioners in technical writing/editing. This will have many practical implications for those of us trying to both provide training and leverage resources/knowledge we know is out there in the community.

Another track we want to explore is how the Fellows can interact with each other. The Faculty Fellow team leaders are seeing lots of overlap in the topics, and Stuart himself said that one of his goals was to meet the other instructors. I'm realizing that a major benefit we can provide for our cutting edge faculty is a place where they can meet others with similar interests.

Penn State has been moving at a stately pace towards innovation, but, for the truly cutting-edge instructor, the experience out front may be a little isolating.

We just had our kick-off meeting yesterday, and it was very interesting. Stuart is interested in analyzing how instruction is constructed with new Web 2.0 tools. Stuart's proposal notes that, depending on your tool set, "instruction" can range from static documents to documents with comments or voting or fully participatory wikis.

For me, the interesting question is determining the social factors behind creating joint documentation. Anyone involved with recent efforts at community building know that it's easier to provide the tools than for people to accept them.

I'll be curious to see where this heads, so stay tuned.

Each Faculty Fellow is assigned a group of interested staff from ETS. The team will meet weekly with the Fellow and work through ideas and activities. The team members assigned to Stuart are:

• Elizabeth Pyatt
• Erin Long
• Mary Janzen