iPads in the Technical Communication Classroom: An ...

Article

iPads in the Technical Communication Classroom: An Empirical Study of Technology Integration and Use

Journal of Business and Technical Communication 27(4) 359-408 ª The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1050651913490942 jbtc.sagepub.com

Michael J. Faris1 and Stuart A. Selber2

Abstract Integrating and using technology in the technical communication classroom is an ongoing interest and challenge for the field. Previous work tends to focus on best practices and other types of generalized advice, all of which are invaluable to teachers. But this article encourages teachers to also pay attention to sociotechnical forces and dynamics in local settings. It explains how a cartography of affect can be useful in demonstrating how technologies become imbued with meaning and significance in particular pedagogical contexts. The authors illustrate the value of this mapping practice through a case study of iPad integration and use in a technical communication service course and its teacher-training course. They also provide examples of heuristic questions that can guide critical cartography projects in local settings.

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University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, WI, USA Department of English, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

Corresponding Author: Stuart A. Selber, Department of English, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802 USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Downloaded from jbt.sagepub.com at Kungl Tekniska Hogskolan / Royal Institute of Technology on March 6, 2015

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Journal of Business and Technical Communication 27(4)

Keywords technology integration, iPads, pedagogy, affect

Technology development is an ongoing social project in most cultures, and in Western culture, such development appears to be accelerating at an unprecedented rate. In some moments, however, this process is defamiliarized, or ‘‘made strange,’’ providing a snapshot in time of a particular technological artifact or phenomenon. These moments occur for a variety of reasons, including negative reasons such as large-scale mechanical breakdowns and failures. In more positive occurrences, a technology is so different from the status quo that it captures the collective interest of a culture, suggesting new possibilities for action and activity. In a sense, then, snapshots of technology development might be seen as an aspect of critical literacy, providing an avenue for reflection—positive or negative—on a process that for many has become naturalized and taken for granted in everyday life. On its launch date (April 3, 2010), the Apple iPad received an enormous amount of attention, both domestically and abroad. The usual suspects noticed it (i.e., technology journalists, bloggers, media commentators), but so too did students, teachers, administrators, and academic information technology (IT) specialists. Consumers immediately weighed in on the release, purchasing over 300,000 iPads in the first 24 hours (Apple, 2010). Why all the attention and interest? One explanation is that the iPad was ahead of the curve for newly revived tablet computers, which defy conventional distinctions in taxonomies of digital devices. Tablet computers combine elements of personal, portable, and cellular devices, and contemporary tablets like the iPad employ mobile operating systems (versus a PC architecture) and touch screens that remake the role of embodied practice in human–computer interactions. Although in certain respects users can operate an iPad like a PC, the affordances of the iPad reconceive the use landscape of more mainstream literacy technologies in visible and significant ways. At Penn State, the iPad reached the radar screens of teachers, librarians, instructional designers, deans, IT leaders, and others. In addition to its novel character, the broad appeal of the iPad could be attributed to its status as a ‘‘boundary object’’ (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 393). Boundary objects, according to Star and Griesemer (1989), are institutional artifacts that are capable of establishing common ground between people with varied perspectives and interests. These artifacts can be interpreted and configured for specific purposes, but their overall structures remain relatively coherent and


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comprehensible, enabling coordinating activities without the need for intellectual or functional consensus. So, on one hand, educators from across the curriculum could explore the applications and implications of the iPad for their particular subject domains. On the other hand, IT departments could sponsor user groups and develop policies, procedures, support documents, and other infrastructural systems that foster the cooperation needed for integrating iPads into these particular learning spaces. Thus, the iPad, as a boundary object, can help mediate inescapable tensions between centralized and decentralized sociotechnical practices in university settings. For the subject domain of technical communication, the iPad promises to make a mark on both production and consumption activities. Our initial interest was in consumption: How might the iPad function as an e-book reader? The launch of the iPad coincided with our study of the ways in which students appropriated—or failed to appropriate—the features of the Sony Reader for accessing, using, and marking academic texts (Faris & Selber, 2011). In that study, we found that students attempted to recreate systems for writing that were not included in e-book devices. Although e-book devices have features for bookmarking pages, taking and sharing notes, highlighting texts, and connecting to the Web, multipurpose devices such as the iPad integrate writing and reading activities more thoroughly— supporting readers as they write and writers as they read—for purposes typical to those of educational settings. With the iPad, students can create complete workflows for course projects and other activities. We could imagine uses of the iPad in technical communication classes. After all, it can run applications for word processing, editing, graphic design, research, collaboration, content management, and more. And with compatible e-book versions of established textbooks in the field available for downloading, the pedagogical building blocks were there for reflective course development. But the contexts for educational technologies are overdetermined by an array of sociotechnical forces operating at both micro and macro levels (Bowers, 1988; Petrides, 2000; Postman, 1995). That is, literacy devices, textbooks, and other global pieces of the technologyintegration puzzle are appropriated and reappropriated, accommodated and resisted, against the backdrop of the dynamics in local settings. In this ongoing routine, such local and global forces are imbricated in the process of knowing and the organization of knowledge. We cannot make judgments about the iPad, then, without considering its working contexts and antecedents: For example, in my courses, how might students write and read technical documents on an iPad? What are the infrastructural requirements and constraints for their particular approaches? What issues and obstacles


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might teachers in my program encounter while using iPads for instructional purposes? How might the distributed help systems that iPads deploy change the function and character of IT support at my university or the way that my program defines and understands technical communication? These sorts of grounded questions, which situate the iPad in fundamental rhetorical terms, are as crucial to understanding its potential role in higher education as are questions about more general matters such as app specifications or e-book conventions. In this article, we report our effort to integrate and use iPads in an established technical communication service course.1 We begin by reviewing the disciplinary literature on technology integration and use, identifying areas that teachers consider instrumental to effective instructional practice: classroom and lab design, literacy, pedagogy, teacher training, and assessment. Although such research is extremely useful, teachers also need to develop a concrete sense of how technology integration and use develops in specific situations, including the nature of the relationship between global and local forces in those situations. We therefore turn to perspectives on identity and agency that encourage teachers to pay attention to how things work around them and how assemblages of varying sociotechnical forces help to create problems and potentials for iPad use. Our aim here is to advance a critical cartography of technology integration and use for technical communication. Toward that end, the heart of this article models this critical practice by considering sociotechnical forces in four areas that affected our experiences with integrating and using iPads in the technical communication classroom: device features, literacy practices, pedagogical elements, and institutional structures. We demonstrate the value of undertaking critical cartography projects in technical communication programs and conclude by providing some heuristic questions that typify questions that teachers should develop to guide their own mapping projects.

Technology Integration and Use in the Classroom Technical communication teachers have been considering integrating technology into their instruction since at least the 1980s, the decade in which microcomputers first became available to people working and learning in university classrooms. Even then, the field understood that effective instructional uses of technology would not occur automatically or by default. Halpern (1985), for example, concluded from her workplace study of ‘‘new media’’ composition—word processing, electronic mail, videoconferencing, and teleconferencing—that technical communication teachers


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should conduct significant pedagogical research ‘‘about the consequences of technological change for our profession,’’ including ‘‘appropriate professional responses to technology’’ (p. 181). Tebeaux (1989) argued that ‘‘technical communication teachers need to understand how the emergence of the Information Age is affecting the work environment and how changes in work will alter what we should teach’’ (pp. 136–137). And Jobst (1987) admonished teachers to be alert to plagiarism and the ‘‘possible abuse of computers used for word processing,’’ stating that ‘‘while these machines offer the potential for students and teachers to develop stronger writing skills, they also increase the opportunity for major unethical behavior, both on campus and in the marketplace’’ (p. 1). This initial work was anything but uncritical or unthinking. Since then, the field has identified and investigated a variety of areas that can contribute positively toward integrating technology into the curriculum. Often framed as responses to barriers to change, discussions in these areas address an array of contemporary sociotechnical factors that constitute and regulate instruction, including classroom and lab design, literacy, pedagogy, teacher training, and assessment. Allen (1996), Howard (1997), and Williams (2002) recognized that designing computer classrooms and labs is no mere managerial endeavor. Rather, physical and network layouts, staffing and scheduling schemes, and funding streams and requirements all have a bearing on how students and teachers conceptualize and undertake technical communication projects. Johnson-Eilola (1996), Selber (2004), and Dicks (2010) developed approaches to technological literacy that expand its scope and appeal, resituating functional skills and abilities in social terms and articulating new literacies for a knowledge society. Special journal issues edited by Albers and Cargile Cook (2002) and by Hewett and Powers (2007) have shown that teaching approaches grounded in assumptions and practices from the world of print can be inadequate for teaching with digital technologies. Authors in these collections provided theoretical and practical justifications for new pedagogical directions, illustrating those directions with examples from their own experiences and those of others and calling for additional research that formalizes or models sustainable teaching practices. Teacher training is a major focus in integrating the use of technology into the curriculum. Selber, Johnson-Eilola, and Selfe (1995), Bernhardt and Vickrey (1997), and Dubinsky (2002) discussed teacher-training approaches that ‘‘rely on natural learning within full social and technological contexts’’ (Bernhardt & Vickrey, 1997, p. 332), aiming to produce people who are ‘‘engaged in reflective practice’’ (Dubinsky, 2002, p. 130). A key element of reflective practice, of course, is assessment, and


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teachers have originated an assortment of frameworks for evaluating the integration of technology in technical communication instruction (cf. Jablonski & Nagelhout, 2010; Katz, 2008; Morain & Swarts, 2012). In one assessment effort, Manion and Selfe (2012) discovered a mismatch between their current grading routines and the affordances of wikis. ‘‘If the benefit of wikis depends on the fact that they develop in ways we or our students do not expect,’’ they wondered, ‘‘how can we possibly assess them?’’ They suggested that ‘‘we need to radically rethink our assessment practices to better match the collaborative, adaptable nature of wikis’’ (p. 26). In all these areas—classroom and lab design, literacy, pedagogy, teacher training, assessment—and others, teachers have established that teaching about and with technology involves new challenges and opportunities. In response to these challenges, they offer their best practices and generalized advice for integrating technology into technical communication courses and programs. These formulations are crucial to such integration efforts, and the field has profited considerably from the continued development of research and theory on the various aspects of using technology for teaching and learning purposes. But teachers cannot learn from best practices and generalized advice everything that they need to know in order to be effective in local contexts. Teachers must also learn how the signifiers of integration and use become imbued with meaning in particular sites of technical communication activity. They can then shade their more universal understandings with their view of how things actually work on the ground, resulting in an informed outlook that synthesizes global and local considerations. For example, Reid (2008) traced a series of networked interactions through the ‘‘bureaucratic labyrinth’’ (p. 66) of his university, characterizing how students, teachers, technologies, and institutions coconstruct the spectrum of potential for teaching and learning with the mobile devices that run iTunes University. Selber (2009) made a similar point in his mapping of the organizational contexts at Penn State, illustrating through visuospatial methods how both micro- and macro-level forces bear on the task of creating multimedia documents. Those projects were sensitive to how signifiers can shift and multiply meaning and to how technologies can be appropriated and reappropriated on different scales. For this project on the curricular integration and use of technology in technical communication, we wanted to focus on how things work and to what effect rather than on what things mean, or signify. Slack, Miller, and Doak (1993) argued that, historically, technical communicators have been weakly situated as either transmitters or translators of knowledge, two positions that preclude meaning-making or interpretative capacities. Their


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solution was to ‘‘rearticulate’’ the technical communicator as an author, leveraging the power of the author function to raise the profile and value of technical communicators and technical communication itself. In a follow-up article a decade later, Slack (2003) invited us to think in additional ways about notions of identity and agency; she addressed the challenges of using identity categories to advance prospects for change: Given the vicissitudes of identity, its slippery nature, it makes sense to shift away from prioritizing it. After all, it doesn’t really matter if all you do is call someone an author or develop professional organizations and identifications. What matters is what those identities get you, what they allow you to do, what effects they have. (p. 200)

Although Slack noted that how you define and characterize actors and activities is not inconsequential or trivial, those definitions and characterizations cannot ensure new possibilities, or even the status quo, for identities are always in the process of being formed and reformed, always in a state of flux. They are nothing but useful fictions. Thus, in their efforts to integrate technology use into technical communication classrooms, we encourage teachers to map the ways in which tablet devices such as the iPad accrue meaning and significance to students and teachers in local settings, engaging in a cartographic process that can be used for planning, assessment, and more. Best practices and guidelines are really useful instruments, but they do not (and cannot) address the specific nature of teaching and learning in a technical communication program. In forming a cartography of affect, Slack (2003) emphasized, teachers should view actors not as autonomous agents with fixed identities but as components in assemblages of sociotechnical forces that flow and move in dynamic momentum. What are the forces associated with integrating iPads into the technical communication curriculum? How do these forces help determine meanings and uses? What do they enable and constrain? What is the relationship between global and local forces in an assemblage? Answers to such questions will always be contingent and incomplete (assemblages are living phenomena), but these answers are crucial for promoting realistic and sound approaches to teaching and learning with iPads in local settings.

Project Background As the iPad became available to the higher education market, the IT department at Penn State purchased forty 16 GB Wi-Fi units for use in technical


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communication courses aimed at both students and teachers. The purchase also included 40 iPad keyboard docks to support production activities, 40 neoprene carrying cases to protect the iPads, and 10 iPad VGA (video graphics array) connectors to project files for large-group settings. In addition, the start-up package provided funds for downloading and testing an array of apps for instructional purposes and then purchasing the apps we selected for word processing, blogging, managing files, and annotating documents. These latter funds were crucial to an ethical imperative for access: Because we were requiring students to borrow technologies owned by the institution, we did not want them to have to purchase apps they could not operate after the semester was over. We assumed that relatively few students would own iPads, up-to-date iPod Touches, or iPhones: At the time, the iPhone accounted for only about one quarter of the smartphone market (ComScore, 2010). We confirmed our assumption by initially surveying our participants’ technology ownership and use: Of the undergraduates in our study, 14% owned iPhones and 22% owned iPod Touches; for the teachers in our study, the percentages were 11% for each. Nobody owned an iPad. Although the Mac versus PC war has been more or less settled by crossplatform programs on and off the Web, the expanding universe of apps and operating systems for tablet computers has rekindled concerns over compatibility and interoperability issues in educational settings. These issues carried over to the process of selecting a textbook. Webbased textbooks, of course, have been available for some time now, and open-file standards for e-book devices are increasingly gaining a foothold, especially the ePUB format: ePUB files are available on iPads and on numerous other devices. For that matter, Kindle books, which use proprietary file formats (AZW and KF8), can be read on a variety of platforms, e-book or otherwise, including the iPad (via the Kindle app). But there are also app versions of textbooks with proprietary formats that use schemes for digital-rights management in order to restrict access and sharing. The positive aspect of such versions is that they can be tailored to a specific approach to tablet design and use. We partnered with Bedford/St. Martin’s to test their iBooks version of Technical Communication (Markel, 2010): All of us were curious to see how students and teachers would respond to a first-generation textbook designed expressly for the iPad. Although Bedford/St. Martin’s agreed to provide free copies for students and teachers, we did not anticipate a problem concerning how apps and e-books within online stores are distributed and downloaded. In short, the iBookstore had no mechanism with which publishers could provide examination copies. So for a brief period (about 48 hours), Bedford/St. Martin’s dropped the


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price of the textbook to zero so that teachers and students in our courses could download it for free. For those who missed the download period (for technical or other reasons), Bedford/St. Martin’s provided iTunes gift cards that would cover the cost, effectively buying back their own books. Thus, a negative aspect of such a setup is that publishers could be relinquishing a level of their control over distribution and pricing by housing their e-books or apps in popular app stores such as the iBookstore. The setting of our study included the technical communication service course for science and engineering majors. We studied one section with 24 students in fall 2010 and one section with 18 students in spring 2011. Both sections met in computer classrooms (of different sizes and layouts). Our study setting also included the course we use to prepare people— graduate students and fixed-term instructors—to become teachers of technical communication. For this group, we also studied two sections, one in the fall and one in the spring of the 2010–2011 academic year; each section included 10 teachers in training. These sections also met in computer classrooms. We were able to secure iPads from our IT department because it supports this type of high-impact enterprise. Our technical communication service course, which is a general education requirement at Penn State, enrolls around 2,000 students per calendar year and typically employs 20 to 25 teachers per semester. The teacher-training course includes 10 to 12 people each semester who are teaching technical communication for the first time. They receive a common syllabus and meet each week with a tenure-line faculty member to review assignments and lesson plans, practice grading, discuss pedagogical essays, and so on. Because the service course has become rather standardized both within and across technical communication programs, employing conventional genres and approaches that are recognizable to many in the field, our discussion should resonate with a wide swath of teachers. In a time of scarce resources, projects with the potential for broad appeal and influence are attractive to academic IT units, which have funded their fair share of esoteric or idiosyncratic projects in the humanities. That is, we were interested in understanding the sociotechnical forces shaping iPad use in an established technical communication program, a consequential location for the field that is sure to catalyze the interactions between old and new contexts that are ever present in technology integration efforts (such efforts do not exist in a historical vacuum). We reinvented a few aspects of our standard course but on the whole remained committed to its usual assignments—among them, job application packages, instruction sets, user guides, and e-portfolios. To make the iPad a topic as well


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as a tool for the course, we also assigned a usability report that asked students to reflect on their overall experiences with the device. Moreover, we asked students to respond to a series of reflective blog prompts in order to preserve their unfolding insights on the semester-long integration process that both accommodated and resisted the course’s practices. Their responses to these two additional assignments were a portion of our data set, which we will discuss later. Although the sections met in computer classrooms, ensuring access to institutional resources that teachers in our program have come to depend on, we encouraged the students and teachers in our study to use their iPads whenever possible for both course and personal activities. Although we could not provide iPads for the students of the 20 teachers (that would involve buying 480 iPads), we did ask teachers to use their iPads for key instructional tasks: reading the textbook, preparing and editing class materials, responding to student queries, exploring the challenges of electronic grading, marking up pedagogical articles, and the like. To intensify the experience of working on design problems, we asked teachers to use the iPad to start drafting an online teaching portfolio. For the teachers, then, the study also encompassed a professional development component.

Methodological Approach A cartography of affect for technical communication, Slack (2003) suggested, ‘‘[should begin] with stories and ethnographies of what happens on the job’’ (p. 202) and employ research methods that can help people ‘‘read’’ the ‘‘flows, blockages, and potentialities’’ (p. 205) of artifacts and activities in workplace and instructional settings. We therefore designed a qualitative research study that was sensitive to the sociotechnical forces that might have a bearing on the firsthand experiences of our participants. More to the point, we attempted to integrate the iPad into a mature technopedagogical environment and then elicit and document the challenges and opportunities presented by this process—a process that is routine, ongoing, and instructive in that new technologies are always and inevitably positioned within and against the landscape of existing commitments and priorities (technical, instructional, financial, etc.). To tell our story of technology integration and use, we relied on four approaches to data collection: structured interviews, written reflections, contextualized observations, and device analyses. We also conducted a brief survey toward the start of each term to help us gauge the technological experiences of participants. These approaches bounded the inquiry that produced our data set.


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The interviews, which we videotaped and transcribed, occurred at equal intervals throughout the 16-week semester. We used a structured, or standardized, approach, asking the same questions of all participants, which made comparing responses easier. The questions reflected our interests in consumption and production activities, sociotechnical dynamics and forces, and the participants’ perspectives. Several were open-ended questions and repeat questions that enabled participants to revisit old ground from the vantage point of their new experiences with the iPad. We asked students and teachers about their perceptions of the iPad and of the associated course activities. We also asked them about their reading, writing, and teaching practices and about challenges and opportunities for literacy, including how working with the iPad compared to working with computers and printed materials. In addition, we asked students and teachers about their experiences with the textbook app and with the university IT infrastructure. Finally, we also asked them about what they liked the least and the most about the iPad and how they employed it in their personal lives. Taken as a whole, our questions addressed a wide range of issues associated with integrating technology use into technical communication instruction. The written reflections, which included participants’ formative and summative thoughts about their iPad use, provided a more immediate and patient outlet for feedback than did the structured interviews, which occurred in groups of four to six participants. The written reflections, then, added more individualized data to our interview process. The undergraduates posted weekly blog responses to both directive and nondirective prompts. The directive prompts asked students to reflect on various aspects of their iPad integration and use in a current assignment while the nondirective prompts asked students to describe an issue that (for better or worse) they were attending to at the moment. At the end of the term, the undergraduates also wrote usability reports in which they provided their overall evaluation of their iPad experiences. This assignment asked them to reflect on successes and failures for administrators who would decide to continue or abandon the iPad program on campus. So written reflections offered both analytic and descriptive data for an audience of decision makers. For their written reflections, the instructors included a philosophy statement about teaching with technology in their online portfolios. These philosophy statements were directly informed by the instructors’ work with the iPads throughout the semester. Our contextualized observations of the iPad in action provided a perspective that is essential to understanding how it works on the ground. Although participants provided richly detailed descriptions and reflections,


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we wanted to see firsthand how students and teachers encountered the iPad and its sociotechnical dynamics and forces. According to DeWalt and DeWalt (2011), contextualized observations enable researchers to situate tasks and activities in authentic settings that provide access to participants and their problem-solving approaches and practices. To engineer such access, we dedicated six entire class periods and certain portions of other classes to working on project assignments. In these organized sessions, which modeled the mood and atmosphere of studio classrooms in the arts and architecture (see Walter & Hendler, 1996), students cooperated in solving problems and answering questions while using the iPads to achieve concrete tasks, turning to each other and the teacher as learning resources, particularly for tasks requiring procedural knowledge. As teachers, we were able to use these sessions to connect procedural knowledge with conceptual knowledge (theory and research-based propositions), supplying rationale and informed justifications for technical communication activities. But more pertinent to this discussion, we were able to gain a direct window into the factors and forces shaping the ways that participants integrated and used the iPad, their experiences with it, and how they represented those experiences to themselves and others. Such contextualized observations, therefore, enabled us, as researchers and teachers, to see and discuss certain aspects that would have otherwise remained invisible. Because we interacted with as many participants as possible during those observation sessions, which were both hectic and fascinating, we did not attempt to generate real-time notes as we moved from one student to the next. Instead, using inductive reasoning, we crystallized our observations, understanding multiple instances of the same sort of problem or practice as patterns worth considering. As these patterns emerged, we discussed them with the class and helped to resolve any problems with iPad use. Finally, we generated data through our device analyses. At the end of each term, we collected the iPads and examined the ways in which participants configured and maintained them (participants trusted us to not peer into private documents and to reinitialize the iPads before assigning them to other students). Researchers in the humanities are often (justifiably) criticized for ‘‘gazing at navels’’ rather than working on tangible problems, and in the context of technology, such navel gazing can cause material aspects of artifacts and human activities, aspects with real influence in shaping technical communication, to go unnoticed (Haas, 1999). Although technologies cannot preordain their use, their structures and default settings constitute cogent suggestions to users, particularly if the settings and structures suit


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the social context (e.g., the collaborative model for a course aligns with the collaborative model instantiated in a software program). For this reason, we accounted for material aspects of the iPad in a variety of areas. First, we examined the extent to which and how participants modified the default settings of the operating system. Second, we examined the extent to which and how participants configured and used the apps that Apple provided. Third, we examined the extent to which and how participants configured and used the apps that Penn State provided. And fourth, we examined the extent to which participants downloaded additional apps and how they organized them. Our analyses involved checking settings, describing and counting content elements, and recording the information in a spreadsheet. This collection technique enabled us to visualize patterns in a well-organized manner (e.g., by scanning a single column of the spreadsheet, we could see that no participant modified accessibility settings). Thus, by combining and triangulating multiple research methods— structured interviews, written reflections, contextualized observations, and device analyses—to depict a rich, detailed account of the sociotechnical forces that shape iPad integration and use in the technical communication classroom, our approach to data collection engendered a variety of perspectives. This cartography of affect does not aim to address the dualistic line of questioning that seems to consume commentators writing about new technologies: Does the iPad help or harm student learning? Will it increase or decrease academic achievement? Although the field should pursue a positive agenda for change, investigating the power and promise of new technologies for technical communication, answers to such evaluative (and Manichaean) questions can never be generalized to all classrooms and programs or to all students and teachers. As researchers have shown time and again (cf. Dicks, 2010; Grabill, 2001; Street, 1995), literacy practices, including those that incorporate pedagogy and technology, are not universal but based in time and space, configuring and reconfiguring in concrete expressions in specific situations. To a significant extent, then, the iPad’s effect in any particular setting is a function of the various arrangements and intensities of the sociotechnical forces operating in that setting. The affordances of the iPad are pertinent, but they do not solely determine its value to education and work. Accordingly, our objective was to situate the iPad in a consequential context and to characterize the dynamics and forces that can affect its use. The case study that we depict here models the constructed nature of this epistemic process for teachers in technical communication programs, encouraging them to enact critical cartography projects that can inform local practice.


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Table 1. Thematic Categories of the Sociotechnical Forces That Shape iPad Integration and Use in the Technical Communication Classroom. Question

Thematic Categories

What are the sociotechnical forces that shape iPad integration and use in the technical communication classroom?

Device features portability file storage default settings Literacy practices personal histories writing processes Pedagogical elements instructional approaches curricular relationships textbook designs and uses Institutional structures workflow procedures app update protocols

Interpretation and Discussion: Mapping Our Local Scene We have organized the following interpretation and discussion of our case study into four thematic categories of sociotechnical forces that shape iPad integration and use: device features, literacy practices, pedagogical elements, and institutional structures. Two of the categories, device features and pedagogical elements, were preset: After all, our initial objective was to investigate teaching and learning with a new technology. The other two categories, literacy practices and institutional structures, emerged from our reading and rereading of the data set. Within the four main categories, we created subcategories until no new themes emerged (see Table 1). Although the categories in Table 1 exhaust the data that we consider to be salient to the project, they are neither contrary to nor exclusive of each other. Literacy practices and device features are undoubtedly two sides of the same communication coin, not discrete or competing phenomena, and pedagogical elements and institutional structures bleed into one another in instructional environments. We therefore conceptualize our categories in heuristic terms, as divisions that enable analysis rather than construct a rigid taxonomy. In cases in which an item could have fallen into more than one location (which tends to happen in qualitative data analysis), we sided with the category that seemed to have the most explanatory power for


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Figure 1. The dynamic relationships between the thematic categories.

technical communication. For example, strictly speaking, the iPad touch screen is a device feature, but for students and teachers it took on particular meaning in the context of literacy practices, so we located it there. In this fashion, our interpretation and discussion reflect a rhetorical perspective. Figure 1 illustrates the dynamic relationship between our thematic categories. It also begins a cartography of affect for technical communication, using the categories as general elements in an assemblage of sociotechnical forces that shape iPad integration and use in classroom settings.

Device Features The hardware and software features of tablet computers reflect a new design sensibility, one that was adumbrated in the 1960s by the Dynabook but not fully articulated or realized until recent times (see Kay, 1972, for prototype images of the Dynabook, which foreshadows the look and feel of the iPad). In his roll-out speech for the iPad, Jobs (2010) famously proclaimed that the liberal arts constituted a key influence of this design sensibility, encouraging an approach to technology development and innovation that values interdisciplinary thinking and a sensitivity to aesthetics and user needs—less geek, in other words, and more humanly conscious invention practices. Although Jobs did not mention the product-development process for the iPad—Apple is more secretive of its methods than philosophies—device features in a framework inflected by the liberal arts could be understood as


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instantiations of beliefs about the character of literacy and work. Carroll and Rosson (1992) formalized this stance in a ‘‘claims analysis’’ approach that situates device features as ‘‘theories’’ to be interpreted and as representations ‘‘embodying myriad specific propositions about their users and the circumstances of their use’’ (p. 183). They offered an example from procedural documentation: [A] self-instruction manual can be seen as embodying a range of assertions about what the learners know, what they do, what they experience, about the nature of the learning tasks and the contexts within which these tasks are carried out, etc. (p. 183)

What do iPad device features assume about the character of literacy and work? How did our participants make sense of and respond to those assumptions? These questions, which address the shaping perspectives of tool designers in a technical communication assemblage, proved to be especially pertinent in three areas: portability, file storage, and default settings (the last two are elements of the operating system). Portability. An obvious fundamental attribute of tablet computers is portability: They are designed to support mobile users. The Wi-Fi model of the first version of the iPad weighs 1.5 pounds and is about 9.5 inches tall and 7.5 inches wide; the depth of the device is half an inch. For comparison purposes, the height and width match a standard-sized textbook in the field, which is considerably thicker and heavier. This reduction in the size of a self-contained device with real computing power and capabilities is not to be minimized: Material dimensions were mentioned by all the participants as a positive contributing factor to their experiences with the iPad. In fact, the iPad’s degree of portability surpassed participants’ expectations, established by their experiences with laptop computers. Although 90% of first-year students at Penn State owned laptops, only 32.6% of all students reported using laptops or other devices for course-related activities during class (Pennsylvania State University, 2012). The reasons for this disparity were twofold, at least: Teachers did not always permit or encourage laptops in the classroom, fearing that they would present an irresistible distraction to students, and students did not relish the prospect of adding the weight of a laptop computer to an already overloaded school bag (a midsize laptop weighs 6 to 8 pounds). The iPad, in contrast, was a constant fixture in the lives of many participants, becoming as ubiquitous to local literacy scenes as textbooks, notebooks, folders, and other conventional print materials. As


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one student put it, ‘‘The iPad was there whenever you needed it.’’ It was ‘‘there’’ in that it was both nearby or at hand and always on or ready to go. Like smartphones and digital cameras, the iPad uses flash memory storage, which does not have to be booted for a period of time to be accessed by users. One teacher commented on an effect of this device feature: The portability of the iPad is great. And it takes no time to start it up. I now find myself working when I would otherwise be idle. The convenience of being able to do 10 minutes worth of work is a good fit for my lifestyle.

The iPad’s portability and immediacy encouraged participants to redefine the boundaries of work, relaxing constraints on time and place, in personally rewarding ways. That is, the iPad afforded new possibilities for the when and where of work (we discuss the how of work in another section). File Storage. While our participants may have considered the iPad’s portability as a boon to the study and practice of technical communication, most of them were confused by its file storage. Although the desktop metaphor has been roundly critiqued for psychological and social reasons (cf. Kaptelinin & Czerwinski, 2007; Selfe & Selfe, 1994; Van Dam, 2001), it has nevertheless become ubiquitous in educational settings and a de facto standard for organizing human–computer interactions (98% of our participants reported using either a Windows or Macintosh operating system). In fact, prior to tablets and smartphones, the file and directory structures associated with this metaphor contributed to people’s ability to become mobile workers. Since 2002, the network setup at Penn State has enabled users to access the same desktop configuration from any public computer; they can also access their work files from any public or personal computer. So, as students and teachers travel from computer classrooms to libraries to dorms and offices and back again, their roaming profiles bridge physical campus sites, institutional computers, and literate activities to provide access to a recognizable filing scheme that supports both hierarchical (i.e., folder systems) and flat (i.e., files represented spatially at the root level, on the desktop) storage. Notwithstanding the development of popular cloud-based services such as Dropbox and iCloud, centralized storage systems are likely to remain popular on college campuses because they permit IT administrators to maintain visibility and control over network security. Such an ongoing investment in the desktop metaphor helps to explain why participants found the method for file storage to be so puzzling. On the iPad, files are stored in apps rather than in universal locations that can be


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manipulated by users. The system, for example, does not provide a My Documents folder (or comparable component) or a desktop-style layout (although a user could transform an iPad into a Windows PC with services such as OnLive Desktop). Users can reference an index of files created or saved in an app but cannot see or manage either a cross-section of files or a sum total. Connecting the iPad to iTunes allows users to more quickly see file–app associations, but this step is inhospitable to mobility and workflow procedures and does not provide an integrated view. This reworking of the graphical user interface (GUI) for tablet devices created problems for students and teachers. One participant said that she was ‘‘confused about where to find things. How do I save files? Is there a folder I can go through to see everything?’’ Another said that the iPad was a ‘‘mystery’’ to him and that he ‘‘did not trust it enough for notes’’ because he felt a lack of control over the file structures. A third participant characterized the file system as ‘‘odd.’’ And several participants could not come to terms with the fact that the iPad can store the same original file in multiple places (thus making it multiple files). Such problems have a basic psychological dimension: Students and teachers lacked the schema for operating the iPad. To be concrete, one triumph of the GUI was in eliminating layers of abstraction in human– computer interactions, providing users a more direct sense of agency and control over computer-based tasks and functions. But for those accustomed to the desktop metaphor, the iPad reintroduces complexity by decentralizing file storage and eliminating the aggregate views of work. This approach can be learned or hacked in different ways, but it was no small impediment to our participants. Default Settings. The iPad operating system also reimagines the expression of default settings. In the computer world, including the universe of app development, default settings are initial factory settings that help govern the behavior and interoperation of software programs. In Safari for the iPad, for example, Google is the embedded search engine; AutoFill is off, which means Safari will not automatically fill in Web forms, user names, and the like; and the Bookmarks Bar is visible instead of hidden, docking directly beneath the permanent address bar at the top of Safari. Users can change these sorts of individual settings; reset a subset of settings, such as those associated with accessing computer networks or laying out the home screen; or reset all the settings at once, erasing an iPad and returning it to its initial state. Default settings instantiate the plans and preferences of those in appdevelopment communities, but personalizing such settings can help users identify with, and take ownership over, their digital devices, leading to


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more productive and rewarding interactions. As Marathe and Sundar (2011) demonstrated, customizing software has ‘‘deep psychological value’’ (p. 787): It allows users to ‘‘enhance their experience with a product by adapting it to their own needs and desires’’ (p. 781; see also Zoetewey, 2010, for a study of mobile hardware customization). Despite the intellectual benefits of personalizing technology, our participants did not alter the default settings of their iPads in significant ways. For the most part, students and teachers tinkered around the edges, changing wallpaper, adding signature blocks to e-mail, or extending the time period for the auto-lock feature, for example. The only area in which we noticed a degree of appreciable customization was in the protocol for downloading apps. Although standard computers allow users to specify install locations, the default organization of the iPad is time ordered: The most recently installed app is automatically placed in the last position on the last screen. More than half (60%) of our participants reordered this arrangement, moving key apps to the dock and removing others, separating course apps from personal apps, clustering apps by themes or categories, or creating folders for themes or categories. Only a handful of iPads in this subset, however, were extensively reorganized: Most of them displayed both time-ordered and reordered app arrangements, with the former considerably outweighing the latter. Why did participants tend to maintain default settings? Our findings are congruent with research in software assessment and customization. In a usability study of Microsoft Word, a popular program with over 150 settings, Spool (2011) found that ‘‘less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had kept the settings in the exact configuration that the program installed in.’’ Although Spool did not offer any reasons why those users tended to maintain the default settings, in our context, there was a particular reason for such a tendency. Standard computers divide operating system preferences from application preferences, but the iPad both mixes and divides them, creating two locations for settings: in the app itself and in the Settings app. Participants struggled to discern a pattern for how and where default settings are treated on the iPad, and the arrangement, which appears to be unsystematic, confused and confounded them. For example, in iBooks, the app we used to access our textbook, settings for type size and typeface are separated from those for justification and hyphenation. In this case, the iPad divides comparable controls for text attributes. The same is true for the navigation system, which is governed both from within (making bookmarks) and from without (assigning navigational directions for screen taps) iBooks. The other course apps handled default


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settings in additional—and sometimes inconsistent—ways. As a result, participants never really learned to manage or manipulate them, mostly maintaining the original state of the iPad (in the sections on pedagogical elements and institutional structures, we discuss nontechnological factors that contributed to participants’ tendency to maintain default settings). Device features on the iPad, especially those related to portability, file storage, and default settings, reflect shifts in thinking about the character of literacy and work in technological contexts—shifts that our participants both resisted and praised. The computer-based environments that they have become accustomed to are predicated on the centralization of certain aspects of action and activity that support teaching and learning. Such environments have distinct advantages, including aggregate views of work and consolidated controls for features that support the tasks of writing and reading. The iPad, however, addresses file storage and default settings in unconventional ways, which created problems for the participants. On the upside, the participants appreciated the iPad’s portability and immediacy and how such affordances encouraged them to redefine work locations. Device features on the iPad, then, are sympathetic to a vision of literacy that is less hierarchical and more distributed, suggesting new organizing boundaries for physical and virtual structures that mediate human–computer interactions in technical communication.

Literacy Practices This study assumes that technology and literacy are dialectical pairings implying an open-ended negotiation between designers and users. Designers of hardware and software embody their perspectives in concrete features that provide shape to teaching and learning environments. Users, in turn, employ these environments in specific writing and communication activities and their larger sociotechnical spheres of influence—in our case, pedagogical elements and institutional structures. Users accept these designer features, including the modifying options for default settings; reject them; or hack them with various technical and social tactics. Pfaffenberger (1992) characterized this open-ended process as a ‘‘technological drama’’ in order to emphasize the unfolding circumstances, actor interdependences, and multiple, often diverging motivations that enact imperfectly (and sometimes unpredictably) in settings of consequence. In our study, technological dramas associated with iPad integration and use involved personal histories and writing processes.


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Personal Histories. Students and teachers do not approach novel devices like the iPad with a blank slate, in a tabula rasa manner. Instead, they have intellectual and financial commitments to established communication technologies, and their understandings of literacy are conditioned by a combination of outward and inward circumstances, such as socioeconomic factors, reading and writing practices at school and home, learning and working preferences, and more (cf. Selfe & Hawisher, 2004; Warschauer, 1999). Literacies have histories, in other words—or as Brandt (1995) illustrated in her work on writing, learning, and cultural change, literacies ‘‘accumulate,’’ or ‘‘pile up,’’ from various sociotechnical sources over time—and these histories mattered to the ways in which participants integrated and used the iPad. That is, how students and teachers approached the iPad depended, at least in part, on their attachment and access to other activities and devices and on how comfortable they were with exploring new technology. As one student noted, ‘‘Having made an investment with my laptop into learning how to do the tasks I am interested in, I have a hard time wanting to invest further energy in learning a new system to do the same tasks in a less efficient and less natural manner.’’ This comment reveals the extent to which users’ personal histories can help them to domesticate technological designs, engendering in them a sense that their protocols and perspectives for working and knowing are somehow normal or natural and not conventional, learned habits, practiced skills, and received insights. Another participant revealed a personal history that made him more inclined to adopt and use new technology: ‘‘Usually I am not a creature of habit. In fact, I really enjoy changing daily habits for a refreshing feeling when it seems like I am falling into a boring work routine. I am excited to see what the iPad can do.’’ Norman (2004) argued that people have emotional relationships with designed artifacts, including visceral responses to their look and feel, but for a variety of reasons, people may be predisposed toward seeing a new technology as an agent of either stasis or change. Such inclinations, in our study, were a function of participants’ attitudes and work psychology. A third example of the role of personal histories can be seen in the singular requirement of one student writer: ‘‘Can I listen to music on the iPad? That will determine if I can be productive or not.’’ The first version of the iPad operating system did not support multitasking, so users were not able to run a music app while working in another app. Both teachers and students complained about this limitation, a limitation that was addressed in the second major upgrade to the operating system (iOS 4.2), which we were able to use in our second semester of research. Although the student hacked this


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situation with a straightforward approach, listening to music on an iPod while writing on the iPad (we will return to the subject of coordinating multiple devices), participants exhibited a history of clinging to familiar and personally meaningful techniques as they explored the efficacy of a novel literacy device. In fact, for this particular student, the mobility afforded by the iPad intensified his need to employ music as a mechanism for rendering public spaces on campus more private and less social so that he could focus on accomplishing intellectually intensive tasks. Writing Processes. Personal histories can certainly have a bearing on how people write: No one process speaks to everyone, and people develop highly idiosyncratic methods that are effective and productive even if they are unable to reflect explicitly or systematically on what their methods entail. Nevertheless, the field has developed actionable models, working heuristics, really, that students and teachers can use to approach writing activities from a rhetorical perspective. These models do not provide rigid prescriptions for writers but instead help writers to conceptualize and interrelate aspects of writing that are typical to technical communication. For example, in the iBook app that we used, Markel (2010) discussed his conventional model of planning, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading as rough stages in a recursive process that can support the development of print and PDF documents. In creating documents on the iPad, participants experienced both positive and negative disruptions to their writing processes. Let us illustrate a few of these disruptions by focusing on the instruction set, a common assignment in the service course. Our approach asked students to select an iPad task to document, a task that would appeal to a professional audience, including prospective employers, and involve 10 to 12 (or so) procedural steps. Following Markel (2010), we provided in the assignment sheet guidelines for selecting tasks, examples of suitable tasks, rhetorical contexts for instruction sets, and a characterization of the instruction set’s content, organization, design, and evaluation. By and large, this assignment sheet evoked topics of general interest to new users: How to set up an Apple ID, how to configure an e-mail account, how to navigate the iPad App Store, how to transfer documents from Pages to Dropbox, and how to use Google Sync. But it also invited a few topics of local interest, such as how to use the PNC Mobile Banking app and how to play music over a personal wireless network using AirTunes. To aid the writing process, we supplied worksheets for planning and revising stages; these worksheets offered questions to prompt students’ thinking in productive directions. We also distributed positive and negative


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examples from previous sections of the class and scheduled usability tests during class time. All in all, these are standard operating protocols for teaching the instruction set. Although considering local contexts is crucial to making conclusions about the iPad’s capabilities, debates about this device often fail to account for the settings and procedures for writing. Commentators continue to question the capacity of tablet devices to support production activities for academic work, but this discourse is often less than clear about the nature and scope of those activities. In contrast, in our study, task activities, in part, constituted experience and practice, giving rise to rhetorical qualifications that are crucial to an honest assessment of the iPad for educational purposes. For example, Figure 2 positions literacy activities associated with developing an instruction set in an analytical matrix with two variables: task difficulties (low or high) and writing processes (research and design, which we use as example phases). In our classes, students were able to employ the iPad successfully for tasks with a relatively low level of difficulty, accepting iPad design interfaces as a toolbox for action that meets the needs of technical communicators. The iPad support for these aspects of the assignment—looking up definitions of terms or concepts, e-mailing subjectmatter experts for information, finding reference images licensed under Creative Commons, styling headings, making columns and vertical lists, taking screen shots, managing negative space, and inserting call-outs— helped students produce serviceable instruction sets that abided by the conventional wisdom of the field. After all, tasks with a low level of difficulty for writers can result in document features that are valuable to readers. Thus, the iPad, in our assemblage of sociotechnical forces, functioned seamlessly with many of the basic elements of technical communication research and design. The same was not the case, however, for certain higher order tasks requiring analysis, synthesis, comparison, and evaluation. For all of our students, the tasks listed in the bottom half of Figure 2 were more difficult to manage and accomplish, encouraging them to either reject designer interfaces by abandoning the iPad for a standard computer or hack the interfaces by coupling the iPad with another technology. The reasons for this difficulty related to the parameters of the touch screen and multitasking function, but to illustrate these dynamics in rhetorical terms, we organize three examples around the overlapping issues of proximity, spatiality, and materiality. In the first example, students discovered that editing for document coherence can be more challenging than editing for document cohesion. The latter includes editing lists, transitions, and summary words, which are


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Writing Processes

Task Difficulties

Making columns and vertical lists

E-mailing subjectmatter experts for information

Taking screen shots

Finding reference images licensed under Creative Commons

Inserting call-outs

Analyzing examples Synthesizing information High

Managing negative space

Comparing and contrasting prototypes Editing for coherence

Testing usability Creating and editing visuals

Accept interfaces

Low

Design Styling headings

Reject or hack interfaces

Research Looking up definitions of terms or concepts

Figure 2. An analytical matrix for the task difficulties of two writing processes in developing an instruction set.

self-contained lexical chunks that are viewable on a single screen. Conceptually, editing such modular texts on the iPad was manageable and effective, contributing to enjoyable and satisfying experiences for participants. But as the proximity between document elements began to widen, students, in editing for coherence, often struggled to see how all the parts of the instruction set fit together to form a unified solution to a technical communication problem. Complete instruction sets with a body of 10 to 12 procedural steps can scroll for dozens of screens, and editing for coherence across such a considerable range is an arduous undertaking on a tablet device. ‘‘The iPad,’’ concluded one student, ‘‘is not the best or most efficient device when it comes to communication documents that require major editing.’’ As a consequence, while attending to macro-level editorial concerns about audience, organization, and design, many participants moved to large monitors or Microsoft Word, which, unlike Pages (the word-processing app we purchased for our courses), allows users to segment a screen into two separate document windows with independent controls. This move enabled


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students to reference other areas of the instruction set while working on another area, effectively reducing proximity boundaries between document elements. The second example concerns working within and across multiple documents. The ways in which the iPad recasts discursive relationships in design and research endeavors caused major disruptions for participants. Although the iPad does support multitasking (after the iOS update to version 4.2) in that several apps can run simultaneously, users are limited to a serial view of the work in those apps. Although third-party apps such as Split Screen and Side by Side manage to fit multiple windows next to each other, users cannot create robust spatial adjacencies in support of a full writing process (Split Screen positions two Web-browser windows side by side; Side by Side can tile up to four windows from different apps, but working with one fourth of an iPad screen for tasks with a high level of difficulty is challenging, particularly for information-processing activities; cf. Albers & Kim, 2002; Buckner, 2008). This constraint had functional and epistemological implications. On a functional level, consider the fundamental procedure in usability tests of critically walking through a set of instructions. In that procedure, evaluators need concurrent access to a draft of the instructions; the environment supporting the tasks being documented; the usability script, which provides background information, outlines protocols for the test, and solicits information and feedback from evaluators; and perhaps an environment for taking notes. Oscillating between these sites is not conducive to assessing the effectiveness of the instructions. Shifting attention over space takes time and mental energy, breaking concentration and momentum, which is why a key aspect of documentation systems is their spatial relationship to systems that support primary work activities: Online help resides within end-user interfaces; manuals, print or online, function in parallel with primary work activities (Selber, Johnson-Eilola, & Mehlenbacher, 1997). In contrast, in the apps we used, documentation systems were external to the systems that supported primary work activities, calling separate HTML or PDF files in a sequential fashion or overlaying screens on the current window. To overcome a serial view for tasks in usability testing, participants coupled the iPad with a classroom computer, using one or the other as a second screen. On an epistemological level, a device oriented toward a serial view of work can discourage certain aspects of sense making and meaning making in technical communication design and research. Tasks with a high level of difficulty often require people to work across multiple sources of information (Mirel, 2004; Spinuzzi, 2003; Swarts, 2008), but on the iPad the visual


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field is restricted in considerable ways, complicating users’ ability to synthesize and analyze texts and their contexts. Consider our student who wrote his instruction set on how to play music over a personal wireless network using AirTunes. Before Patrick could begin to draft his instruction set, he himself needed to learn how to accomplish this task, which involved working with more than a few texts: invention heuristics from his teacher, instruction sets from Apple.com, technical definitions and descriptions from Wikipedia.org and other sites, technical specifications from networking router providers, and more. To accomplish his learning objective, Patrick accessed, and interacted with, numerous information sources, a situation that is typical in technical communication settings (indeed, the whole enterprise of single sourcing is predicated on the assumption that technical communicators need techniques and technologies for organizing and managing numerous related texts). But for Patrick and other participants, the restricted visual field of the iPad hindered their cognition—so much so that for the instruction set assignment, participants dramatically reduced their iPad use. In one class section, for example, 18 students wrote their instruction sets solely on computers (with some using the iPad as a second screen), two students wrote initial drafts on the iPad and then turned to computers to complete and revise the assignment, one student wrote an initial draft on a computer and revised on the iPad, and one student wrote an initial draft on a computer and revised on a computer and the iPad. Only two students (about 8%) used the iPad to support their entire writing process. In contrast, for a rhetorical analysis assignment involving just two documents and requiring the production of a text-only memo, 10 students drafted and finished the assignment on the iPad (about 42%), 8 students drafted on the iPad and finished on computers, 5 students wrote exclusively on computers, and 1 student drafted on a computer and finished on the iPad. The dramatic variation here helps to characterize the extent of the literacy challenges that participants faced when working on information-processing activities on the iPad. Cognitive psychologists might categorize these problems as cognitiveload challenges arising from a ‘‘split-attention effect’’ in complex problem solving, an effect that, according to Jang, Schunn, and Nokes (2011), is ‘‘directly related to the issue of spatial organization of learning materials’’ (p. 61). A cadre of researchers have advanced the proposition that learning materials for higher order intellectual activities ought to be integrated rather than separated so that people do not have to split and coordinate their attention across various spatial locations, overburdening their limited working-


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memory capacity (Kalyuga, Chandler, & Sweller, 1999; Mayer & Moreno, 1998). One of the students who employed both a laptop and the iPad echoed this proposition, noting that using both devices ‘‘was much more productive because I did not have to interrupt my thought process by constantly closing Pages [our word-processing app] to view other documents.’’ Another said that using multiple devices helped him to ‘‘not lose my train of thoughts as much’’ and ‘‘finish the assignments more quickly.’’ Through its serial view of work and restricted visual field, the iPad separated associated information sources in student projects, and this separation had both functional and epistemological implications. Further, Mirel (2004) has shown that elements of this phenomenon are not peculiar to the iPad or tablet devices. Although features of the iPad can contribute to cognition problems in technical communication tasks that are highly difficult, software engineering has not really supported users’ ability to develop interconnected insights, failing to help users coordinate their work activities, focusing instead on helping them to conceptualize discrete, well-defined tasks. Mirel reminded us that working to support complex problem solving has been an ongoing challenge for designers of literacy technologies. The third example of difficulties that students had in using the iPad for higher order writing tasks encompasses material aspects of working with the touch screen, a feature popularized by tablet computers and smartphones and thus relatively novel to the technical communication classroom. Inostroza, Rusu, Roncagliolo, Jime´nez, and Rusu (2012) claimed that this novelty may warrant new approaches to usability, for designing effective touch screens requires attention to mobile contexts of use and input constraints of the body. Our participants experienced work disruptions in three areas, one representational (the metaphor for the iPad interface) and two physical (precision and rate of speed). They were all consequential to design and research activities and born from attempting to operate a natural user interface for academic work, a phrase coined by interaction designers to refer to digital devices controlled by human bodily gestures (cf. Saffer, 2009). Although this phrase suggests that interacting with tablet devices is more authentic than interacting with standard computers, which involves using input mechanisms such as mice and track pads, using bodily gestures to control tablet devices is a practice that may not come naturally, requiring learning, adaptation, and cultural development (cf. Wysocki, 2010). In fact, in responding to design approaches to apps and tablets, Norman (2010) noted that ‘‘most gestures are neither natural nor easy to learn or remember. Few are innate or readily predisposed to rapid and easy learning’’ (p. 6). In our study, participants were animated about their uneven experiences with


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the iPad touch screen, which denaturalized material aspects of writing in direct and tangible ways. As we indicated in our discussion of iPad device features, the iPad’s decentralized approach to file storage and its incapacity to display more than fragmented views of work reintroduced a level of abstraction that had been eliminated by the GUIs running standard computers today. Its touch screen, on the other hand, had a concretizing effect on students and teachers, especially while navigating texts and viewing content at different levels of granularity, two tasks with a low level of difficulty. One student expressed this effect in adaptive terms: ‘‘Working with the touch screen was quite enjoyable because I like the feeling of using my fingers to move around. I feel more in control of the iPad when using my hands.’’ Another said that using the touch screen for textbook reading ‘‘felt more real’’ than using a computer. These participants were responding to metaphors of the iPad interface (it mixes several). Although e-texts would not have to use page-turning effects, and navigation bars would not have to use tabbed dividers, such elements function as digital skeuomorphs, which are ‘‘bits of design that are based on oldfashioned, physical objects’’ (Thompson, 2012), easing the transition between one conceptual apparatus and another. For students and teachers, the bodily gestures of swiping, flicking, and pinching the touch screen helped to make the iPad feel comfortably old and familiar in certain circumstances, even when those gestures did not have an exact match in the physical world. Gestures for text selection, however, were more problematic for our participants as were situations that required multiple gestures to complete a technical communication task. Their problems involved a lack of precision in executing commands and speed in accomplishing work. The iPad’s architecture does not support the use of a mouse, a standard component of personal computers since the 1980s and thus mundane to students and teachers in academic settings (one can ‘‘jailbreak’’ an iPad and configure a Bluetooth mouse, but apps are not designed with a mouse in mind—there is no global cursor on the iPad—to use in producing and editing texts). Although the mouse has evolved and changed over the years—the Apple Magic Mouse, for example, is touch sensitive, allowing users to scroll texts with fingerslide gestures—using a finger to tap or slide across the touch screen rearticulates human–computer interactions in discernible ways. As one teacher noted, ‘‘I do a lot of formatting with word processors, and I like to use Photoshop. I have become spoiled with a certain degree of precision in using mouse cursors, so it is frustrating when the iPad does not highlight what I want to highlight.’’ Others also asserted that writing on the iPad is difficult without a mouse, especially for ‘‘trying to fix mistakes and getting


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back to certain places.’’ These comments address difficulties participants experienced in learning to use the touch screen as an interface for editing and formatting texts. If pointing and clicking a mouse has become second nature to writers and writing processes, using bodily gestures to select text is not only new and different but relatively inexact and inaccurate, at least for novices: In physical terms, fingers as pointing devices for texts may span entire words, which is why many apps include a magnification mode that aids precision in text-selection activities. But applying this mode adds additional steps to a straightforward task, reducing the rate of speed for accomplishing work. Participants were sensitive to such shifts in writing pace. One participant reported that ‘‘changing the font size of text requires a combination of seven taps and drags (a tap is used to select an item; a drag is used to scroll through items). When formatting a large amount of text, all of these taps and drags add up quickly, slowing down the writing process.’’ Another participant referenced the onscreen keyboard, saying that ‘‘I always use the external keyboard because trying to compose a full, technically sound document with the on-screen keyboard is a lot like trying to do your homework on a cell phone.’’ A third participant stated that at times using the iPad felt like ‘‘I was doing my projects in slow motion.’’ Although people can become accustomed to new procedures, the iPad considerably multiplied the procedures associated with editing and formatting texts, and for certain tasks it was far less precise than a computer mouse or track pad. The accretive force of such multiplication and imprecision was burdensome for participants when they were producing large or highly designed documents. Literacy practices on the iPad are complex, dynamic, and multiply determined, entwining personal histories, writing processes and contexts, task complexities, device features, user responses to those features, and other sociotechnical forces. Our participants accommodated, resisted, and hacked the iPad, confronting disruptions to their literacy practices that were both productive and unproductive, depending on the circumstances. Literacy practices on the iPad, in other words, are inescapably contingent and rhetorical, but rhetorical situations can include suggestive patterns that provide insight into the sociotechnical forces shaping technology development and use in local settings. We learned, for example, that iPad-hacking tactics can be employed to personalize institutionally sanctioned approaches to writing and writing education. We also learned that complex tasks can be difficult to accomplish on the iPad, especially if those tasks involve working with several documents at once. In addition, we learned that stacked commands in the touch screen interface can frustrate and slow down editing and


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formatting processes with the iPad. These lessons illuminate the interconnectedness of past and present communication practices. Working to integrate the iPad into local literacy scenes is less revolutionary than it might at first appear. Historically, the development of literacy has rarely stood still, and practices with the iPad are no exception, mixing the conventional with new possibilities for discourse and discourse production. This hybridized reality was apparent to participants in concrete situations of use, such as the one voiced by this student: ‘‘On multiple occasions I found myself reaching for a mouse to the right of the iPad, and at the same time found myself straining to touch the screen of my 2008 Apple MacBook, hoping that the tip of my index finger would tell the computer what to do. It seems as though my two worlds are starting to collide.’’ Such collisions are not problems to be solved once and for all but visible instances of the ways in which literacy and technology continually shape each other in an ongoing relationship of reciprocal actions and influences. The iPad cannot escape this relationship or operate in a technical vacuum.

Pedagogical Elements Pedagogies are often understood to be overarching learning systems that encompass methods, activities, materials, agents, spaces, technologies, and more. In this section, we are thinking of pedagogical elements in a slightly narrower sense, as aspects of educational endeavors driven more by teachers than by students, institutions, or technology designers, though they all contributed to the technical communication assemblage helping to shape participants’ experiences with and responses to the iPad. This distinction is tenuous and a little misleading—the intensities of the interactions of sociotechnical forces are dynamic and always in flux—but it acknowledges the shaping influence that teachers and their practices can have in technology integration efforts. We discuss three pedagogical elements as examples of this influence in our study: instructional approaches, curricular relationships across departments, and textbook designs and uses. Although teachers contemplate and manage numerous pedagogical elements, these examples illustrate a range of issues and forces spanning individual classrooms, academic disciplines, and learning materials. Instructional Approaches. What is the nature of the relationship between instructional approaches in technical communication and educational technologies such as computers and their variants? Responses to this critical question have been debated and tested for decades. A central question in


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this debate addresses causation as a whole: Do instructional approaches and educational technologies constitute each other, or does one—or should one—determine or drive the other? We argue that although real and significant shaping happens in both directions, on occasion, it can be fruitful to highlight either approaches or technologies in order to achieve particular rhetorical purposes. Our decision to explore the integration of the iPad into an established technical communication program foregrounds instructional approaches, and this research choice functioned as a conserving force for participants, encouraging them to use their previous practices as a prism through which to understand the iPad and its potential (this choice recognizes the persistent hold of the status quo). Oftentimes, the influence of existing pedagogical practices was positive and valuable. For instance, our teaching philosophy asks teachers to think of themselves as learners as well as experts and to cultivate productive relationships of trust and cooperation that enable students at all levels to develop and succeed in a course. One teacher instantiated this idea by individuating his explanations and examples: Most technology classrooms are designed in a way that distances students from teachers. While not eliminating this problem, the iPad does help to minimize it by allowing greater mobility and the freedom to interact with individual students instead of only with a group.

As opposed to ‘‘being tied to a distant computer at the front of the classroom,’’ this teacher leveraged the ability to ‘‘walk around the class and flip the pages [of the iBook] and demonstrate things to individual students’’ in order to customize learning at key junctures. The iPad, in this case, functioned as a resource for approaching established methods from a new and different angle. The influence of existing pedagogical practices, however, was not always positive and valuable. Teachers, for example, tended to balk at learning new procedures for electronic grading because the affordances offered by those procedures did not seem to support this task as they had come to know and understand it before the iPad. In our teacher-training course, we ask participants to read Dragga’s (1991) heuristic for formulating directives, questions, and suggestions for student projects, which is informed by both university teachers and workplace editors and supervisors. In employing this heuristic for electronic grading, the vast majority of teachers open student projects in Microsoft Word and use the Track Changes and Comments features to insert their directives, questions, and


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suggestions, all of which amount to discursive responses attached to particular document segments. On the iPad, this procedure varied from the usual course of action because writing and commenting are separated by apps. Pages, the word processor we used in our courses, does not track changes or include other commenting features, so to respond to student projects, teachers used a second app, iAnnotate PDF, which has numerous options not only for making comments but for marking texts in a wide variety of ways. As opposed to considering the possibilities offered by iAnnotate PDF for reimagining commenting practices, teachers tended to focus on how the iPad complicated a simple routine by embedding it in a feature-rich app that has a bit of a learning curve. As one teacher put it, ‘‘If it [using commenting features on the iPad] could be as easy as it is on my PC, that would be excellent. But compared to electronic grading on the PC, it’s not, and so my students don’t get detailed comments from me. I find myself holding back.’’ This sentiment was commonplace and speaks to a reluctance on the part of some to disturb workable routines that have been sanctioned by existing instructional approaches. Thus, existing instructional approaches supported both positive and negative outcomes, but they always functioned on some level to constrain action and meaning. In a future pedagogical project, we hope to study tablet integration and use in a more flexible, open-ended course. Curricular Relationships. If the relationship between instructional approaches and educational technologies is significant to the iPad, so too is the relationship between curriculum and instruction across academic departments. The service course in technical communication is typically housed in humanities or liberal arts departments; it supports writing work occurring in science and engineering majors. Using rhetoric as a framework to bridge gaps in disciplinary knowledge, the service course contributes to a tool kit that students can use to solve science and engineering problems in academic and nonacademic settings. This tool kit includes domain expertise, problemsolving strategies for document development, technologies for the production and reception of texts, and more. Although tool kits constructed from across the curriculum are intellectually stimulating, enriching, and essential to the practice of technical communication, they are deployed within curricular frameworks that can regulate use. Moreover, the affiliations between the tools themselves can be variable and uneven. Sometimes these tools work in conjunction with pedagogical scaffolding for courses that share objectives and activities, such as course-management systems with forums


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to support electronic conversations for required readings. But sometimes the curriculum prioritizes or subordinates tools. In the end, the service course in technical communication is an adjunct component of degree programs in science and engineering, and this programmatic status affected the ways in which participants experienced the iPad. For example, it was challenging for some to embrace an educational enterprise that does not formally encompass the work of their major courses. ‘‘I had difficulty just using the iPad for this one class,’’ a student emphasized. She had difficulty finding room—intellectual and temporal—for a tool that fragmented rather than unified her curricular activities. In addition, in their own investigations in the literature review assignment, students discovered that for certain vital activities, the iPad often functioned as more of a complement to powerful laptops and desktops. Consider this case in point: The AutoCAD app available during the 2010–11 academic year opened existing files and allowed users to annotate and edit them, but students could not use the app to create new projects for their major courses. AutoCAD has since released a full-blown app, but its ability to handle high-end design work is questionable. Computer-aided design users are also accustomed to the screen real estate that workstations and large laptops provide. On top of these constraints, there are mature curricular infrastructures in science and engineering programs that support computer-aided design projects, and these infrastructures, which involve servers, software licenses, workstations, workbooks, textbooks, assignments, and the rest, can hinder the adoption of alternative choices in educational institutions. Participants did indeed locate many worthwhile apps for the iPad, as exemplified by the account of a chemistry student: I downloaded the Molecules app to help me learn molecular structures for organic chemistry. It has proven to be a great tool for my organic chemistry class as well as my biochemistry class, because it provides a way to visualize the molecule, which is something that a paper-and-pencil method cannot provide.

Curricular directions, however, helped to establish the extent to which such apps would prove relevant to assignments that are central to a degree or major. Textbook Designs and Uses. A third pedagogical element—our textbook— calls attention to the iPad as an e-book reader for learning materials. As far


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as we can tell, our study included the first textbook in technical communication designed as an iBook: Markel’s (2010) ninth edition of Technical Communication. Bedford/St. Martin’s partnered with us to encourage research in the burgeoning area of e-books, especially in relation to the iPad because it can operate texts written for a variety of platforms, including the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook. There is also an iPad app for CourseSmart, a textbook rental service supported by numerous publishers in higher education (CourseSmart includes Markel’s textbook and other popular textbooks in the field). The iPad, then, is a convergence machine for digital content, but it is not without issues inflected by pedagogical considerations and other sociotechnical forces. Many of these issues were front and center throughout our research project, and they suggested important questions about the integration and use of learning materials in university classrooms. Where does the iPad end and an iBook begin? The iPad divides comparable controls for text attributes; it also places controls for reading in two different places, the iBook app and the Settings app, clouding boundaries between the textbook and its delivery system (which, in this case, was not a problem). This issue, however, involves more than the location of commands for features supporting reading activities. In discussing our iBook, one student said, ‘‘It seems like a lot of the problems I had with the book on the iPad were publisher problems, not iPad problems.’’ But the problems referred to by this student were a function of both, and more. For example, a well-known dilemma with e-books is how to handle page numbers, especially for group settings where people want to be able to refer to particular passages of texts. This straightforward task in the print world is complicated in e-books by a tension between the desires for fixed layouts and reflowable texts and by the ways in which tablet designers, e-book publishers, and users collaborate to construct reading experiences. In default mode, participants in our study could rely on Markel’s (2010) page numbers for navigation and discussion purposes. The default mode, as a shared structure for representation, provides a platform that can enable authors and publishers to build out and organize resources across multiple texts and contexts. But the stability that this platform provides is undermined by two additional capabilities: the ability (with the release of iBooks 2) to use iPad multitouch gestures for reading and navigation and the ability within an iBook to select type size, font, and a full-screen mode (this mode hides aspects of the book metaphor that make use of screen real estate). These additional capabilities reflow the content of an iBook in ways that can be useful to individuals but confounding in activities that rely on references to page numbers.


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So where does the iPad end and an iBook begin? Our study suggests that answers to this question will vary from situation to situation but must consider the ratio of activities between tablet designers, iBook authors, publishers, and users. For e-books, the boundaries separating stakeholders have become increasingly porous and permeable, calling for a new level of coordination to help ensure that the textbook needs of academic readers are understood and addressed. Will the iPad advance the state of interactive textbook content? In technical communication contexts, including instructional ones, texts are not only read but used (Redish, 1993), and this pragmatic reality has encouraged the field to consider interactive possibilities for media that can support both action and comprehension (cf. McDaniel, 2009; Weise, 1995). Broadcast advertisements for the iPad, especially Apple commercials with ‘‘The iPad is magical’’ tagline,2 offer a vision of an age in which interactive features are signature characteristics of texts. This vision is not entirely science fiction: Many of the activities in the ads—controlling simulations, watching videos, playing games, editing documents, navigating texts—rely on existing technical capabilities that have been adapted for gestural interfaces. But there are challenges on the back end of these activities that could hinder the development of interactive possibilities for technical communication instruction. Consider the question posed in the dynamic banner area of the Web site for Inkling (www.inkling.com), a prominent publisher of e-books: ‘‘Can your textbook play Mozart, spin 3D molecules, and quiz you?’’ At this point, the general answer in technical communication is no—and will continue to be no without the development of sociotechnical infrastructures for information sharing. Being quizzed by a textbook requires an iBook to access a database on a server; providing manipulable models assumes a new level of investment in content development. Even simple technical features can involve complex social issues: Bibliographies in e-books do not often link to copyrighted materials, a fact that frustrates academic readers. Although the extent and nature of sociotechnical infrastructures will vary by textbook project, participants in our study expressed expectations reminiscent of the lively Apple commercials: If I think of an e-textbook, I want it to be more interactive. I want videos or things my students could move around and manipulate, or examples of how to format text, where they can actually play with text formatting. I don’t think it makes much of a difference if it’s just electronic. That’s not how I think of e-textbooks.


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For this teacher, a robust image of an iBook functioned as a metonym for the rich and varied landscape of e-texts, but there are different types of e-texts and also variations within genres. Itzkovitch (2012) distinguished between e-books, enhanced e-books, and interactive e-books. In his formulation, e-books are not very interactive: ‘‘You are mainly able to flip the pages, search for content, or highlight words to see a dictionary definition.’’ Today, the majority of e-textbooks fit within this category. Enhanced e-books use the ePUB3 standard, which provides support for integrating audio, video, and various interactive elements. An e-textbook that allows students to share annotations is an example of an enhanced e-book. Finally, interactive e-books are ‘‘designed specifically to utilize the powers of tablets to enable users to interact with the storyline in sight, touch, and sound.’’ According to its catalog,3 Inkling offers a biology e-book with more than 40 3D molecules, 200 videos, and 350 interactive images. Although our textbook was an iBook, it was a first-generation product, and such products often look backward more than forward as people work to gain a handle on new possibilities and practices. But as Itzkovitch noted, this process of designing for the future should be mindful of the distinction between file formats for encoding content, which inspire the prospects for e-books and enhanced e-books, and software apps for relating and sharing content, which can be used to build interactive features for e-books that leverage social media and the affordances of gestural interfaces and tablets. Textbooks as pieces of software (versus modules of text) can advance the state of interactive content for students, but publishers and authors have a lot to learn before making this considerable shift, such as determining how to scale interactive e-books for the service course and what sociotechnical forces influence the integration and use of interactive e-books in technical communication. What types of iBook features appeal to and support academic readers? Our iBook included the basic features of an e-book. Students could navigate using the table of contents, hypertext links, and a search box; highlight passages and create bookmarks; make reading notes; look up words in a dictionary or words and phrases using Wikipedia or Google; adjust the typeface and type size of the text; and more. On a functional level, these features represent certain fundamental options for engaging textbook content. But our participants wanted various other features, with one in particular standing out: Students and teachers wanted the practices of reading and writing to be seamless and easier to manage. Students used different apps for reading, composing, annotating, and blogging, and the apps were not always interoperational. For example, there were several options for publishing blog entries via BlogPress (one of our course apps), but users cannot


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import BlogPress texts into Pages and vice versa. Likewise, although users can e-mail themselves reading notes from the Markel iBook, those notes are removed from support for composing. In an age in which platforms for academic reading have multiplied and continue to expand and change, features for accessing and integrating texts have become all the more crucial to students and teachers in technical communication. In an in-class survey in one of our sections, 66% of students said that they would prefer to use the printed version of Markel’s (2010) textbook. They were not condemning the iPad per se but were instead responding to its treatment in our study, to its relationship to other courses and learning materials, to its new and nascent form, to images in commercials, and to other sociotechnical forces operating in our technical communication assemblage. In fact, students and teachers appreciated the features of the iBook, and many expressed an interest in continuing to use the iPad for academic work. Everything considered, their tentativeness reflects the various functions and influences of the pedagogical elements involved in integrating technology into curriculum.

Institutional Structures Today in academia, no literacy event is an island unto itself: Students and teachers are enmeshed with institutional structures that help determine the ways in which technologies function and behave in technical communication. By institutional structures, we mean the centralized environments, approaches, and resources created by academic IT departments to support an entire population of university computer users—structures such as Internet backbones, e-mail servers, library databases, use policies, and online help systems. At Penn State, institutional structures are the immediate and tangible architectures for teaching and learning that bring order and coherence to a university system with over 100,000 computer users. Such architectures (for any size school) are crucial for providing technology access and support on a campus, but their assumptions and designs, which necessarily function to serve the greater good, must always be considered and negotiated within the situated contexts of particular literacy activities, producing global–local tensions. For example, configurations for general-purpose computer classrooms and the campus Wi-Fi network played no small role in our study. In the case of the former, students who were in classrooms with space to spread out or sit away from desktop computers devoted more focus to working on the iPad whereas students in classrooms with tight rows restricting


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movement tended to turn to the desktop machines for even simple activities like online quizzes. In the case of the latter, our campus Wi-Fi is not one large monolithic network (as it appears to be to users) but rather a network of networks with different levels of stability and signal strength based on how various academic administrators across campus allocated the resources. As a result, the physical locations of classroom buildings regulate the character of Wi-Fi experiences for students and teachers. As these examples suggest, institutional structures are part and parcel to educational endeavors involving tablet devices, and they function as contributing elements in the sociotechnical assemblage shaping learning activities. The issues we discuss here, workflow procedures and app update protocols, are particularly relevant to both the practice and teaching of technical communication. Workflow Procedures. In the context of this project, workflow procedures are patterns of activity that can guide the development of learning materials and experiences in organized and managed ways. Although the discourse in technical communication is often textcentric, focusing on relatively mature protocols and systems for generating texts in a workplace (e.g., information mapping, minimalism), Hart-Davidson, Bernhardt, McLeod, Rife, and Grabill (2008) demonstrated that workflow procedures, as an aspect of content management, can also illuminate fundamental rhetorical questions about objectives, including outcome statements for teaching and learning. Teachers in technical communication have been trained to be sensitive to these sorts of questions, but a universal or singular approach cannot begin to account for the panoply of instructional perspectives, methods, and technologies in an academic institution. As a result, teachers and students must necessarily devise their own workflow procedures, procedures that unite local and global considerations. For teachers, one of the more illuminating avenues in this project was the way in which the iPad defamiliarized our familiar processes, unsettling our assumptions and encouraging us to relook at workflow procedures, which, in our well-established service course, have become stable (a good thing) and safe (a not-so-good thing, at least in intellectual terms). The workflow procedures for this course involve a variety of texts, including textbooks, assignment sheets, invention worksheets, and progress reports; recursive phases, including planning, drafting, and testing phases; and technologies, including word-processing programs, graphic design programs, and course-management systems. We bundle texts, writing-process phases, and technologies in a coordinated fashion and present this approach to students


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as a workflow for the course, one that exploits institutional structures while accommodating individual student projects and pedagogical perspectives informed by the discipline. Here is a rough description of how this approach works for students in the instruction-set assignment: 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

Students download the assignment sheet from ANGEL, the coursemanagement system. Students open the assignment sheet in Microsoft Word, and we discuss it as a class. Students use the Comments feature to add notes or type notes directly into the file. Students download sample instruction sets (written by previous students in the class) and an analysis worksheet from the coursemanagement system. In small groups, students analyze the samples, using prompts from the worksheet to guide their collaborative efforts, and upload their analysis worksheets to a dropbox in the course-management system. Students download and complete a planning worksheet from the course-management system. This worksheet asks them to develop a rhetorical discussion of the tasks that they would like to document. Students present their projects to the class and upload the planning worksheets to a dropbox in the course-management system. Students download a peer-review worksheet from the coursemanagement system. This worksheet provides questions to guide their development of drafts. Students upload and download drafts from the course-management system, using the Comments and Track Changes features in Microsoft Word to provide feedback to peers.

Although this procedural description is acontextual and incomplete—missing numerous texts, technologies, and phases, including phases involving the teacher—it provides a functional sense of one way in which work is produced and circulated in the course (there are others as well). In retrospect, we did not—and could not, really—anticipate the extent of the mismatch between the iPad and our workflow procedures for the service course. The issues were immediate, significant, and manifold. Here are some examples:

The residence halls on campus provide Ethernet connections, not Wi-Fi connections, so in their rooms, students could only use the iPad in an offline mode.


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iTunes was available in our computer classrooms, but the software necessary for iTunes to sync with iOS devices was not available for Windows machines, so students in one course could not manage their iPads in class. Key features in our course-management system did not work on the iPad, including features for responding to and uploading texts. Key features in our university e-mail system and blogging platform did not work on Safari, the default iPad browser, including features for sending mail and posting blog entries. Pages, our word-processing app, did not include features for commenting on texts or tracking changes.

Such problems compelled us to abandon our course-management system altogether and design a new infrastructure for the class. This infrastructure included a cloud-based service for file management (first SugarSync and then Dropbox), which, as an added benefit, reintroduced the aggregate views of work that the iPad operating system eliminated; an app (BlogPress) that functioned better than the Web-based environment for making posts in our institutional blogging platform; and multiple apps to support the various stages of document development (Pages, iAnnotate PDF, and Keynote). On one hand, this shift was challenging because it destabilized approaches to domesticating institutional infrastructures that can be seen as overly involved and complex. As one student put it, ‘‘Overall, the system that Penn State runs is confusing enough on a regular computer. It just got more confusing on the iPad.’’ On the other hand, the shift presented unique opportunities for reseeing workflow procedures. As a result, we are investigating options for more thoroughly integrating writing, reading, and managing activities, which at present are physically disparate activities despite their interconnected nature. We are also planning to add a phase to assignments that asks students to take an activist stance toward developing and using institutional infrastructures in technical communication projects. App Update Protocols. The second area, app update protocols, could be considered a component of institutional-level workflows for managing computer classrooms. The computer classrooms in our study are general-purpose classrooms that were designed and supported by a centralized IT unit. They included one desktop computer per student, an instructor station, projector, printer, and a help phone line that instructors could use for technical problems. The software included site-licensed programs to support technical


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communication assignments. As a rule, software updates for these classrooms take place between academic terms and at other lower demand times of the year. This maintenance cycle encourages stability and focuses on users. Although universities are beginning to develop support systems for tablet devices, on the iPad, app update protocols are repositioned in central ways. Apps for the iPad are relatively cheap: Our most expensive app was $9.99. Students were at liberty to purchase apps and download free apps; we did not oversee the content of their devices, nor did Penn State. The wide availability of cheap and free apps causes the options for writing and communication in a course to constantly evolve, but support for those apps is distributed rather than centralized at the institutional level. One student lamented this situation: ‘‘iAnnotate PDF needs to stop adding features and buttons. All I really want when I’m editing is a pencil and a highlighter. Two buttons would suffice for this program, and they just keep changing the screen.’’ As anyone who has a smartphone knows, app update notifications appear constantly. If users experience problems with updates, they need to consult help documents in the apps themselves or on Web sites, including Web sites collecting user-generated content; for major problems, they need to contact the app developer. In our case, an app update introduced a bug that crippled the BlogPress app, which was working fine when we downloaded it. (The bug added ‘‘http://’’ to new blog dashboard URLs, but our secure server required the ‘‘https://’’ protocol.) The developer fixed the bug in an updated release, but it took him about 6 weeks to do so: Apparently, he was not motivated to take swift action by pleas for homework help from students using his $2.99 app. This response was not callous or indifferent but emblematic of the changing nature of the relationship between technical communicators and users. Academic institutions will continue to support help systems in a centralized fashion, but for tablet devices, such systems will also involve a network of distributed tools, resources, and workers with varying commitments to users. Such a fragmented support scene will become the new normal for students and teachers employing iPads and other devices organized around apps. Although the iPad affords new prospects for the where and when of work, it did not untether participants from institutional structures or perpetuate transparency in human–computer interactions. Instead, teachers and students were compelled to confront workflow procedures and app update protocols, reinvent aspects of these areas that were under their control, and accommodate new structures for integrating and using iPads with the centralized IT services at Penn State and the decentralized support systems in


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the app world. Students and teachers often hack the global structures of academic institutions, reinterpreting (or working around) them for particular needs and purposes. In our case, however, such micropolitical interventions could not overcome interoperational problems. These technical mismatches, which were distracting and disquieting at first, became opportunities for revisiting taken-for-granted assumptions and practices and for illuminating institutional structures as potent elements that shape the integration and use of technology in our courses.

Conclusions and Example Mapping Questions In this study, participants’ experiences with the iPad were shaped by device features, literacy practices, pedagogical elements, and institutional structures, but not in a simple or uniform manner. Instead, the students and teachers who participated in our study interpreted and negotiated these assemblage elements in a wide variety of ways, and the elements themselves routinely animated one another. This entangled process resulted in a set of rich encounters with the iPad that were inescapably contingent and complicated. Such an outcome is likely to be viewed in negative terms by iPad evangelists, but the encounters necessarily reflected dynamics that were particular to the sociotechnical forces in our setting. What did we learn from the study? How might this cartography of affect be valuable to ongoing curricular integration efforts? Let us share a few findings from the thematic categories (we have already mentioned some of them) and then turn to examples of heuristic questions that can help teachers develop their own critical cartography projects. In terms of device features, we learned that our instructional approaches need to address the affordances and values of new computing metaphors, which can be confounding for both global and local reasons. Our instructional approaches should also help people learn to customize new technologies in ways that encourage commitment to exploration and use. In terms of literacy practices, we learned that our instructional approaches need to include a narrative assignment, which is not typical to the service course, helping students and teachers anticipate and understand the shaping power of personal histories for writers and communicators integrating and using a new technology. In addition, we learned that responses to complex literacy practices can constitute efforts to create serviceable interfaces that support technical communication activities. These interfaces can be physical and virtual, technical and social, personal and institutional. Our instructional


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approaches should help students learn to think in rhetorical ways about using and managing multiple devices and spaces. In terms of pedagogical elements, we learned that teaching and learning a new technology can be advanced by integrating and using that technology across several courses and programs, not just in a single course. And we learned that we need to develop criteria for adopting e-textbooks in our program, criteria that account for the reconstruction of textbooks as software programs. Finally, in terms of institutional structures, we learned that issues involving stability and security, which we have come to expect and appreciate, can create challenges for students and teachers working with a new technology; those challenges, however, can lead to fruitful pedagogical opportunities with new prospects for technical communication. To maximize and extend the value of these lessons, we generated a series of heuristic questions that teachers in our program can use to guide their efforts to integrate technology into the curriculum. Although these questions are far from exhaustive, they address key considerations. We provide them here as examples of the types of questions that teachers in the field might generate for their own programs. Questions About Device Features

What do our courses assume about access to technologies and about where these technologies will be used? What do the technologies in our courses assume about the character of literacy and work? What specific claims do technologies in our courses embody and instantiate? Are these claims evident to students and teachers? How do the technologies in our courses organize work, including representing and storing the artifacts of work itself? How might we encourage students and teachers to commit to and customize the technologies in our courses, including institutionally owned technologies? Questions About Literacy Practices

Do the claims of device features in our course technologies match the literacy practices of students and teachers? Are there significant mismatches? What are the literacy practices of students and teachers in our courses?


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What sorts of technologies and practices are students and teachers in our courses invested in? Why? How might the personal histories of students and teachers in our courses shape technology integration and use? How might task specificities and complexities shape technology integration and use? Questions About Pedagogical Elements

How do our instructional approaches understand the relationship between technologies and pedagogies? Do they shape each other? Is one more influential than the other? What are the settings and procedures for writing in our courses? What is the relationship between our program and academic departments in science and engineering? Do we share practices and values? Are the learning materials in our courses tied to particular technological platforms? Are our learning materials and writing spaces integrated or separated? Why? What are our expectations for e-books? What are students’ expectations? How might we encourage teachers to abandon efficient, serviceable practices for new practices with uncertain outcomes? Questions About Institutional Structures

How does our institution organize support for the curricular integration and use of technology? What are the advantages and drawbacks of working within our institutional structures compared to working around them? What are the workflow procedures for our courses? Do our institutional structures accommodate or resist workflow procedures for our courses? How should we approach, use, and contribute to distributed support systems in the world of Web 2.0? What is the relationship between those systems and our institutional structures?

Acknowledgments We want to thank our IT colleagues at Penn State, especially Cole Camplese, Allan Gyorke, Erin Long, Brian Young, and Jason Heffner. They provided the iPads and


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apps for this study and supported us in ways too numerous to mention. We also want to thank Patricia Gael, who helped to design our study and taught a course section for the study; Rachel Mennies Goodmanson, who assisted with interviews; and Sarah Stoolman, who transcribed interviews. Leasa Burton and Bedford/St. Martin’s provided free access to the iBooks version of Markel’s (2010) textbook. We also appreciate the helpful feedback we received from David Russell, editor of JBTC, his anonymous reviewers, and Lori Peterson, managing editor of JBTC.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes 1. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Pennsylvania State University, protocol #34506. 2. See http://www.youtube.com/watch? v¼8osEYSbA_Ps to view the iPad commercial we refer to here. 3. See https://www.inkling.com/store/book/biology-robert-brooker-2nd/ to read the catalog description for this interactive e-book.

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Author Biographies Michael J. Faris is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin– Eau Claire. His research interests include digital literacies, privacy online, and social media ecologies. Stuart A. Selber is an associate professor of English and director of Digital Education for English at Pennsylvania State University. He is a past president and Fellow of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing.
