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CGHE Seminar
October 13th 2016
The Dynamics of Knowledge
Creation: Academics'
changing writing practices -
international implications
#acadswriting
Project team: Karin Tusting (PI), David
Barton, Ibrar Bhatt, Mary Hamilton, Sharon
McCulloch
Literacy Research Centre, Lancaster University
Depts of Linguistics and of Educational Research
Funded by the ESRC
Introduction
Project Description and
Significance
Why Study Writing in HE?
 Writing work is at the heart of knowledge production
in many cultures, and traditionally, the university has
been a pivotal and highly valued site for this.
 Transformations in the HE workplace lead to changes
in the work, responsibilities and identities of academics
which can be tracked through their writing practices.
How Universities are changing and the
implications for academics’ work
 Universities are changing within the context of an
international, competitive knowledge-based economy (Sum
and Jessop 2013) from which emerge new, competing
versions of “knowledge” – new producers and audiences
 Changing Student Bodies
 Massification/widening participation - from an elite to a
mass system
 Internationalisation of student body
 Dispersed International campuses
 Consumerisation and marketisation – fees
 Transformations in managerial practices in universities
 Accountability and audit (Strathern 2000)
 Intensification of work and job flexibility/insecurity
 Changing resources – working within changed
time/space – new digital tools (Goodfellow and Lea 2013)
 Facilitating distance and blended learning and collaboration
(Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), video
conferencing,
 changing nature of scholarship – the ‘digital scholar’ -
online library resources,(Weller 2011);
 mobilities - smartphones and portable devices
• to publish in strategic ways which can conflict with
disciplinary norms and established practices
• to be accountable to standards which change the nature
of academic work
• to respond to new demands around impact, public
engagement, open access
• to engage in social media and maintain public online
persona
• to use new technological platforms eg VLEs which take
time to learn
These changes in the demands and resources
of the academic workplace lead to tensions
and pressures:
Theoretical perspectives
 A literacy practices approach: researching what people
are doing, not what they ‘should’ be doing or what skills
they should have (Barton 2007; Hamilton 2012; Tusting
2012).
 A sociomaterial perspective: researching how people’s
writing practices are shaped by social and material tools
and contexts, resources including the digital (Fenwick
et al 2011; Orlikowski 2007; Callon 2002)
Some examples of concepts that guide our research
and illuminate the dynamics of knowledge creation
 Textual trajectories : tracing the life of texts in
institutional ordering (Smith, 2005)
 Inscription “all the types of transformations through
which an entity becomes materialized into a sign, an
archive, a document, a piece of paper, a trace” (Latour
1999, 306). Inscription enables social action, helping to
move forward intellectual and practical projects
 Symmetry
 requires us to attend equally to the material, affective
and social aspects of writing practices
 all writing work is real and contributes to the
production of epistemic cultures
 Mundane materiality asserts the value of first-hand
accounts and observations of the material conditions
and strategies of everyday writing work
Research design
Maths Marketing History TOTAL
interviews
University A:
research-intensive
1960s campus
9 7 8 24
University B: urban
post-1992
6 6 3 15
University C: red-
brick research-
intensive urban
10 3 10 23
TOTAL no. of
interviews
25 16 21 (62)
We are here
Phase 1:
working with
individuals
• Interviews with
individuals about
their work
practices,
technobiographies,
and typical days’
practices
Phase 2: detailed
study of writing
processes
• Recording the
detail of writing
processes using
screen capture,
digital pens,
keyboard tracking,
informed by
interviews
Phase 3:
understanding
the community
• Interviews with
managers,
administrative
staff, colleagues
and collaborators
Screen shot from Phase 2 recordings of writing
Distribution of writing activities
Teaching
ResearchAdmin
Service
Example 1
Mobilising Research
Networks in the accelerated
academy
Tracing a text trajectory
First contact: entirely at a distance
?
“I still don’t understand
where I fit”
Next: face to face meeting
“Skype and email conversations
are misunderstood, plus you’ve
got an interdisciplinary thing
going on”
“We got too tired …
These are academics
that are used to
crafting … If you try to
wordsmith too early,
you can’t capture and
it slows you down.”
Third phase: writing from task list
“I came away
going, ‘OK,
now we need
to …. ‘ “
Fourth phase: co-ordinating writing
in a small team
Leveraging the
multimodal
affordances of Word
and Skype to allow
people to write
together across
continents – “IT
becomes crucial”.
Fifth phase: co-ordinating with the
larger bid team
How long did this take?
How long did this take?
 Diane contacted on 1st day of month.
 Meeting on 20th day of that month.
 Bid submitted on 11th day of the following
month.
 >>> All the written communications
involved in producing the bid after the
meeting needed to happen in a space of
about 20 days (including weekends).
 Internationalisation and global
interdisciplinary collaboration depend on
a range of writing practices
 In a context of strategic pressure to be
involved in large international research
bids
 Interdisciplinarity changing both the
kinds of work which can be done, and
the kinds of work which need to be done
 Digital technologies changing what is
possible
 Support division of writing labour
 Co-ordinate writing tasks
 Enable a back and forth process between face
to face and distance
 Make a highly intensified accelerated process
possible – and, increasingly, expected?
 Shows the importance of becoming
enrolled into international networks
 Developing a range of ways of doing writing
within these network
 Different writing practices at different points in
the process
Example 2
New forms of work
New genres
 In Higher Education, new strands of
activity have been brought together
 Therefore, new textual work that
academics must contend with
 These can carry different value systems
and increase/change workload
Don’s report
“Something which I have been working on this morning is this
draft of the Head of Department’s response to the Examiner’s
Reports. It has gone through several different drafts. This year
for the first time the Examiners’ Reports is going to have to be
made available to students via Moodle... So that has kind of
changed the way in which it is written … because students are
going to see it.”
(Don, Historian)
Example
 This is the first time that this report is
being written for students
 Recontextualising an established genre for
a new audience
 A new kind of student relationship =
new and different writing work on the part
of academics
 Accountability and transparency
New demands
 Digitisation facilitates the rapid
dissemination of texts = the
acceleration of work
 Both in terms of speed and quantity of
texts being produced
New demands
 Does this sound familiar?
 What are the implications for academic
professional work?
International Dimensions
Implications and Networks
International dimensions
 International interest, personally and
professionally
 Superdiversity
 Global networks and academic mobility
What can the project offer
internationally:
 A ‘telling case’ which can be used as a
point of comparison
 Methodologies: data collection instruments
and approaches to analysis
Social issues
 Different contexts of massification,
internationalization and managerial
practices;
 North-South disparities, including access
to technologies;
 Global networks and academic mobility.
Language issues 1: Who speaks what to
whom and in what language?
 The language of school education?
 The language of HE teaching?
 The language of the discipline?
 The language of publishing?
 The language of everyday life?
 The language of social media?
 The Superdiverse academic
Language issues 2
 Publishing in English
 Why the rejections?
 A question of equity?
 The multilingual scholar
Discussion
We are currently
collecting data for
Phase 3.
To follow the
project’s progress:
Blog at
http://wp.lancs.
ac.uk/acadswriting/
THE END
http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/acadswriting/
References
Barnett, R. (2000). University knowledge in an age of supercomplexity. Higher education, 40(4), 409-
422.
Barton, D. (2007) Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. Oxford: Blackwell,
Second edition.
Callon, M. (2002) ‘Writing and (re) writing devices as tools for managing complexity’, in J. Law, A. Mol
(Eds.). Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices, Durham, NC: Duke University Press,191-
218.
Evans, James, and Phil Jones (2011). "The walking interview: Methodology, mobility and place."
Applied Geography 31.2): 849-858.
Fenwick, T., & Landri, P. (2012). Materialities, textures and pedagogies: Socio-material assemblages
in education. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 20(1), 1-7.
Goodfellow, R., & Lea, M. R. (2013). Literacy in the digital university: Critical perspectives on learning,
scholarship and technology. Routledge.
Jerejian, A. C. M., Reid, C., & Rees, C. S. (2013). The contribution of email volume, email
management strategies and propensity to worry in predicting email stress among academics.
Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 991–996. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2012.12.037
Latour, B. 1999: Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge: HUP.
http://humanitieslab.stanford.edu/23/235
Lea, M. R. & Stierer, B. (2011). Changing academic identities in changing academic workplaces:
learning from academics’ everyday professional writing practices. Teaching in Higher Education,
16(6), 605-616.
Lupton, D. (2014). ‘Feeling better connected’: Academics’ use of social media. Canberra: News &
Media Research Centre, University of Canberra.
Orlikowski, W. J. (2007) ‘Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work.’ Organization
studies, 28(9), 1435-1448.
Smith, Dorothy E. (2005) Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. Rowman Altamira.
Strathern, M. (2000). Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the
Academy. (J. P. Mitchell, Ed.)European Association of Social Anthropologists. London and New
York: Routledge.
Sum, Ngai-Ling, and Bob Jessop (2013) "Competitiveness, the knowledge-based economy and
higher education." Journal of the Knowledge Economy 4, no. 1 (2013): 24-44.
Tusting, K. (2012) ‘Learning accountability literacies in educational workplaces: situated learning
and processes of commodification.’ Language and Education, 26 (2), 121-138
Vonderau, A. (2015). Audit culture and the infrastructures of excellence: On the effects of campus
management technologies. Learning and Teaching, 8(2), 29–47.
doi:10.3167/latiss.2015.080203Hamilton 2012
Weller, M. (2011). The digital scholar: How technology is transforming scholarly practice.
Basingstike: Bloomsbury Academic.

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The dynamics of knowledge creation: academics' changing writing practices – international implications

  • 1. CGHE Seminar October 13th 2016 The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation: Academics' changing writing practices - international implications #acadswriting
  • 2. Project team: Karin Tusting (PI), David Barton, Ibrar Bhatt, Mary Hamilton, Sharon McCulloch Literacy Research Centre, Lancaster University Depts of Linguistics and of Educational Research Funded by the ESRC
  • 4. Why Study Writing in HE?  Writing work is at the heart of knowledge production in many cultures, and traditionally, the university has been a pivotal and highly valued site for this.  Transformations in the HE workplace lead to changes in the work, responsibilities and identities of academics which can be tracked through their writing practices.
  • 5. How Universities are changing and the implications for academics’ work  Universities are changing within the context of an international, competitive knowledge-based economy (Sum and Jessop 2013) from which emerge new, competing versions of “knowledge” – new producers and audiences  Changing Student Bodies  Massification/widening participation - from an elite to a mass system  Internationalisation of student body  Dispersed International campuses  Consumerisation and marketisation – fees
  • 6.  Transformations in managerial practices in universities  Accountability and audit (Strathern 2000)  Intensification of work and job flexibility/insecurity  Changing resources – working within changed time/space – new digital tools (Goodfellow and Lea 2013)  Facilitating distance and blended learning and collaboration (Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), video conferencing,  changing nature of scholarship – the ‘digital scholar’ - online library resources,(Weller 2011);  mobilities - smartphones and portable devices
  • 7. • to publish in strategic ways which can conflict with disciplinary norms and established practices • to be accountable to standards which change the nature of academic work • to respond to new demands around impact, public engagement, open access • to engage in social media and maintain public online persona • to use new technological platforms eg VLEs which take time to learn These changes in the demands and resources of the academic workplace lead to tensions and pressures:
  • 8. Theoretical perspectives  A literacy practices approach: researching what people are doing, not what they ‘should’ be doing or what skills they should have (Barton 2007; Hamilton 2012; Tusting 2012).  A sociomaterial perspective: researching how people’s writing practices are shaped by social and material tools and contexts, resources including the digital (Fenwick et al 2011; Orlikowski 2007; Callon 2002)
  • 9. Some examples of concepts that guide our research and illuminate the dynamics of knowledge creation  Textual trajectories : tracing the life of texts in institutional ordering (Smith, 2005)  Inscription “all the types of transformations through which an entity becomes materialized into a sign, an archive, a document, a piece of paper, a trace” (Latour 1999, 306). Inscription enables social action, helping to move forward intellectual and practical projects
  • 10.  Symmetry  requires us to attend equally to the material, affective and social aspects of writing practices  all writing work is real and contributes to the production of epistemic cultures  Mundane materiality asserts the value of first-hand accounts and observations of the material conditions and strategies of everyday writing work
  • 11. Research design Maths Marketing History TOTAL interviews University A: research-intensive 1960s campus 9 7 8 24 University B: urban post-1992 6 6 3 15 University C: red- brick research- intensive urban 10 3 10 23 TOTAL no. of interviews 25 16 21 (62)
  • 12. We are here Phase 1: working with individuals • Interviews with individuals about their work practices, technobiographies, and typical days’ practices Phase 2: detailed study of writing processes • Recording the detail of writing processes using screen capture, digital pens, keyboard tracking, informed by interviews Phase 3: understanding the community • Interviews with managers, administrative staff, colleagues and collaborators
  • 13. Screen shot from Phase 2 recordings of writing
  • 14. Distribution of writing activities Teaching ResearchAdmin Service
  • 15. Example 1 Mobilising Research Networks in the accelerated academy
  • 16. Tracing a text trajectory
  • 17. First contact: entirely at a distance ? “I still don’t understand where I fit”
  • 18. Next: face to face meeting “Skype and email conversations are misunderstood, plus you’ve got an interdisciplinary thing going on” “We got too tired … These are academics that are used to crafting … If you try to wordsmith too early, you can’t capture and it slows you down.”
  • 19. Third phase: writing from task list “I came away going, ‘OK, now we need to …. ‘ “
  • 20. Fourth phase: co-ordinating writing in a small team Leveraging the multimodal affordances of Word and Skype to allow people to write together across continents – “IT becomes crucial”.
  • 21. Fifth phase: co-ordinating with the larger bid team
  • 22. How long did this take?
  • 23. How long did this take?  Diane contacted on 1st day of month.  Meeting on 20th day of that month.  Bid submitted on 11th day of the following month.  >>> All the written communications involved in producing the bid after the meeting needed to happen in a space of about 20 days (including weekends).
  • 24.  Internationalisation and global interdisciplinary collaboration depend on a range of writing practices  In a context of strategic pressure to be involved in large international research bids  Interdisciplinarity changing both the kinds of work which can be done, and the kinds of work which need to be done
  • 25.  Digital technologies changing what is possible  Support division of writing labour  Co-ordinate writing tasks  Enable a back and forth process between face to face and distance  Make a highly intensified accelerated process possible – and, increasingly, expected?
  • 26.  Shows the importance of becoming enrolled into international networks  Developing a range of ways of doing writing within these network  Different writing practices at different points in the process
  • 27. Example 2 New forms of work New genres
  • 28.  In Higher Education, new strands of activity have been brought together  Therefore, new textual work that academics must contend with  These can carry different value systems and increase/change workload
  • 29. Don’s report “Something which I have been working on this morning is this draft of the Head of Department’s response to the Examiner’s Reports. It has gone through several different drafts. This year for the first time the Examiners’ Reports is going to have to be made available to students via Moodle... So that has kind of changed the way in which it is written … because students are going to see it.” (Don, Historian) Example
  • 30.  This is the first time that this report is being written for students  Recontextualising an established genre for a new audience  A new kind of student relationship = new and different writing work on the part of academics  Accountability and transparency New demands
  • 31.  Digitisation facilitates the rapid dissemination of texts = the acceleration of work  Both in terms of speed and quantity of texts being produced New demands
  • 32.  Does this sound familiar?  What are the implications for academic professional work?
  • 34. International dimensions  International interest, personally and professionally  Superdiversity  Global networks and academic mobility
  • 35. What can the project offer internationally:  A ‘telling case’ which can be used as a point of comparison  Methodologies: data collection instruments and approaches to analysis
  • 36. Social issues  Different contexts of massification, internationalization and managerial practices;  North-South disparities, including access to technologies;  Global networks and academic mobility.
  • 37. Language issues 1: Who speaks what to whom and in what language?  The language of school education?  The language of HE teaching?  The language of the discipline?  The language of publishing?  The language of everyday life?  The language of social media?  The Superdiverse academic
  • 38. Language issues 2  Publishing in English  Why the rejections?  A question of equity?  The multilingual scholar
  • 40. We are currently collecting data for Phase 3. To follow the project’s progress: Blog at http://wp.lancs. ac.uk/acadswriting/
  • 42. References Barnett, R. (2000). University knowledge in an age of supercomplexity. Higher education, 40(4), 409- 422. Barton, D. (2007) Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. Oxford: Blackwell, Second edition. Callon, M. (2002) ‘Writing and (re) writing devices as tools for managing complexity’, in J. Law, A. Mol (Eds.). Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices, Durham, NC: Duke University Press,191- 218. Evans, James, and Phil Jones (2011). "The walking interview: Methodology, mobility and place." Applied Geography 31.2): 849-858. Fenwick, T., & Landri, P. (2012). Materialities, textures and pedagogies: Socio-material assemblages in education. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 20(1), 1-7. Goodfellow, R., & Lea, M. R. (2013). Literacy in the digital university: Critical perspectives on learning, scholarship and technology. Routledge. Jerejian, A. C. M., Reid, C., & Rees, C. S. (2013). The contribution of email volume, email management strategies and propensity to worry in predicting email stress among academics. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 991–996. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2012.12.037 Latour, B. 1999: Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge: HUP. http://humanitieslab.stanford.edu/23/235
  • 43. Lea, M. R. & Stierer, B. (2011). Changing academic identities in changing academic workplaces: learning from academics’ everyday professional writing practices. Teaching in Higher Education, 16(6), 605-616. Lupton, D. (2014). ‘Feeling better connected’: Academics’ use of social media. Canberra: News & Media Research Centre, University of Canberra. Orlikowski, W. J. (2007) ‘Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work.’ Organization studies, 28(9), 1435-1448. Smith, Dorothy E. (2005) Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. Rowman Altamira. Strathern, M. (2000). Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. (J. P. Mitchell, Ed.)European Association of Social Anthropologists. London and New York: Routledge. Sum, Ngai-Ling, and Bob Jessop (2013) "Competitiveness, the knowledge-based economy and higher education." Journal of the Knowledge Economy 4, no. 1 (2013): 24-44. Tusting, K. (2012) ‘Learning accountability literacies in educational workplaces: situated learning and processes of commodification.’ Language and Education, 26 (2), 121-138 Vonderau, A. (2015). Audit culture and the infrastructures of excellence: On the effects of campus management technologies. Learning and Teaching, 8(2), 29–47. doi:10.3167/latiss.2015.080203Hamilton 2012 Weller, M. (2011). The digital scholar: How technology is transforming scholarly practice. Basingstike: Bloomsbury Academic.

Editor's Notes

  1. Abstract   We report on our ESRC-funded project entitled ‘Dynamics of Knowledge Creation: Academics’ writing practices in the contemporary university workplace’. We are mapping how knowledge is produced and distributed through writing practices across disciplines and types of universities in England, and how these are shaped by recent changes, such as the new relationships with students and pressure to marketise teaching, associated with the introduction of higher fees; managerialist approaches to research writing associated with research evaluation; and the shift to diverse forms of digital communication and self-presentation.   We explore the diversity of academics’ workplace writing practices associated with teaching, service, and administration, as well as research. Our mixed methods project first examined the professional lives of academics using various types of focused interviews. This has been complemented with close up in situ recordings of writing processes. We are now engaging with managerial and administrative staff, to locate individual experiences in the broader university context.   In completing our ‘telling case’ of English universities, we are in contact with academics internationally and are beginning to explore international differences, including: different managerial contexts and cultures of writing; North-South disparities, including access to technologies; language issues especially around English as a global language for academia; and global networks and academic mobility. Presenters: David Barton (Department of Linguistics and English Language) Ibrar Bhatt (Department of Educational Research) Mary Hamilton (Department of Educational Research) Karin Tusting (PI) (Department of Linguistics and English Language)
  2. The project is called the “Dynamics of Knowledge Creation: Academics writing in the contemporary university workplace”.  The field that has come to be known as “academic writing” has largely focussed on student learning and support. We are taking a different (workplace) approach, exploring the writing that staff in a range of HE institutions do as part of their work, interviewing and observing people from different disciplinary and career backgrounds. We signal this in the “s” at the end of “academics” – it’s the activities in which people  engage on a day-to-day basis, including the teaching, admin and service-related writing tasks they choose to do or which are (increasingly) demanded of them. While the research-based book or journal article is the “gold standard” for success as an academic in HE once you begin talking to people about the way they spend their time, it quickly becomes obvious that they need to be skilled and knowledgeable about a large variety of other kinds of writing, equally essential to carrying out their role successfully Our research questions are: How are academics’ writing practices shaped by socio-material aspects of the situation? How are digital communications technologies shaping these processes? How are managerial practices shaping and co-ordinating writing work? How are academic scholarly and professional identities produced and shaped by these socio-material aspects of writing practices? .
  3. The inscriptions generated through writing work are at the heart of knowledge production in many cultures, and traditionally, the university has been a pivotal and highly valued site for generating and archiving these inscriptions. Universities are changing rapidly as they compete within an international knowledge-based economy. In turn, the work of academic professionals in higher education is being transformed due to increasing numbers of students, demands for greater accountability, resourcing decisions, new communication technologies and changes in the understanding of academics' roles.   The resulting tensions and pressures have to be managed both by academics and the institutions that employ them (also by students, but this is not dealt with in our study)   The thesis on which our research is based is that transformations in the HE workplace lead to changes in academics’ roles and responsibilities which can be tracked through their writing practices. These practices are in part professional (assembled within wider disciplinary networks) and part institutional (assembled through immediate university affiliations and employment). Our data on academics’ use and experience of the changing campus through their writing work offers insights about how key workers in the university sector can best be supported and developed in challenging times
  4. The project draws on a number of theoretical resources all of which lead back to the idea of embodied practice.
  5. STS offers many theoretical and methodological tools – which ones are relevant to understanding academics writing? Inscription   Academics are knowledge workers and a central part of the work they do with the HE network is to create texts. Writing is a powerful form of what STS theorists refer to as inscription. For Bruno Latour, inscription “refers to all the types of transformations through which an entity becomes materialized into a sign, an archive, a document, a piece of paper, a trace” (Latour 1999, 306). Inscription solidifies meanings and circulates them, co-ordinating the work of diverse actors, both internally to the university and externally. As literacy theorists also understand, social relations and purposes (ideas about the user and the usage) are encoded into texts and in this way, a textual artefact is “inscribed” with a certain pattern of action which later on will more or less influence and determine the actual use of the artefact. It thereby enables social action, helping to move forward intellectual and practical projects. Academics are entangled in this work of inscription both through the vocational interests and commitments they purposefully pursue in their professional communities, and by the institutional demands they are bound to satisfy as part of their employment. These motivations discipline their writing skills and shape their identities.  
  6. We’ve been working with academics from 3 different disciplines and 3 universities in England, We’ve done a total of 62 interviews, with 17 different academics. We’ve interviewed most people 3 times. This is a working total as there are still some phase 3 interviews in the process of being anonymised and checked which aren’t in the HU. When we finish we will have involved almost 100 people. We currently have 91 interview transcripts in the HU, these consist of:   Team pilot / autoethnography interviews – 18 EdRes pilot interviews – 7 Ling pilot interviews – 9   UniAHist interviews – 8 UniA - Maths: 9 UniAMrkt - 7 UniB Hist – 3 UniBMath – 6 UniBMrkt – 6 UniCHist - 10 UniCMath – 10 UniCMrk – 3    Total research documents per site in the HU (including videologs, photos, as well as transcripts): UniAHist – 19 UniAMath – 56 UniAMrkt – 40 UniBHist – 19 UniBMath – 50 UniBMrk – 14 UniCHist – 67 UniCMath – 28 UniCMrkt – 29
  7. Explain why use the term “community” under Phase 3 - it is not just peoples’ immediate institutions but also the wider networks important to them and through which they define their professional identities.
  8. [Should we mention examples of each of these?] People mention a wide range of writing activities in their interviews with us – so far we have counted over 60 kinds of writing tasks involving different texts, procedures and collaborations with others, including academic and administrative colleagues, funding bodies, parents and editors/publishers Much of this writing is done to satisfy institutional demands related to teaching, administration, external impact, generating publicity and resources and – of course – collecting and recording data for accountability purposes. Most of our participants have told us that their role falls into 3 main areas, which in some cases are written into contracts and allocated a nominal % of their time. These are usually teaching, research and admin but there is a fourth area of more “optional” work that we have called service – much of it outward-facing. The variety of writing tasks are sometimes still done using pen and paper but many are done using digital tools and platforms of various sorts Many of these are learned informally, and people are more or less familiar and muddling through with them…and again there are institutional pressures to use some of them, especially for teaching. Social media such as twitter and blogging are increasingly important, both for personal and professional writing
  9. As part of the project interviews, people have talked with us about the processes involved in producing particular texts. I’m going to talk through the trajectory one of these examples, the writing of a collaborative EU grant proposal, which one of our Marketing participants was involved with. This graphic represents different stages in the process, focusing on the people involved in the process and the tools used to co-ordinate the writing. This is just one story from our data, but the dynamics of this illustrate many of the broader points emerging from the project about contemporary patterns of collaboration and co-ordination in academic writing, the importance of digital tools and platforms for enrolling people into networks, and the acceleration of the academy, as well as the importance of regional networks and transport links in facilitating global academic research writing.
  10. The first thing that happened was that Diane was contacted by a group of scientists who were writing a bid for research to develop a tool they were working on. This tool addressed a particular ecological problem in one specific industrial setting, potentially enabling a change in working practices in this industry to shift to more sustainable patterns. They had been working on the bid for a while, and had realised that they needed to bring into the process a marketing specialist in her particular area of marketing, for one of the work packages of the bid. They initially emailed her the proposal so far, and had a couple of discussions via Skype. She agreed to be involved in principle, and so additional forms were emailed to her as attachments for her to complete. However, she still felt that at this point she didn’t have a really good understanding of the project, and was still thinking, “I don’t understand where I fit in this.” >> Interesting example of how people can get enrolled into new networks. These were not people she had worked with before, but who could locate her because of her public online presence and contact her directly and easily.
  11. The next step was for her to get on a plane and go to a European city for a three day meeting. The bid involved thirteen universities across six countries, and they were bidding for £10 million. At the meeting, there were representatives from all of the universities, and the plan was to write the bid at that meeting. This didn’t quite work out. They found that having thirteen people from different disciplines and different institutions talking with each other in the same room was not the conditions they needed to be able to do the actual writing of the bid. Diane said, “We tried to write things while we were together … We got too tired, because these are academics that are used to crafting. You do your wordsmithing right at the end. Sometimes if you try to wordsmith too early, you can’t capture and it slows you down. When you’re tired, you can’t think in that way. You have to be able to really stand back and look at your own words as if a stranger has written them. So that didn’t work.” The affordances of face to face discussion were not conducive to the focused crafting that the bid required. What face to face did allow, though, was a back-and-forth discussion which helped Diane to understand her own place in the bid, and her relationship to the other people in the room. It allowed, particularly, discussion around terminology which was shared between the participants, but which meant something different from their own disciplinary perspective. – an interdisciplinary thing going on where you discover that “you think you’re talking about the same thing and then you realise you’re not.” Because of these issues, a face to face meeting at some point in the process was seen by Diane as crucial.
  12. What they were able to do, during the three days they were together, was to put together a skeleton structure for the bid, in bullet point form. Using the ‘comments’ function of Microsoft Word, they assigned tasks to all the different people in the room. Once this division of writing labour had been established and a recording of this produced in a digital form which people could share, the different members of the project could go back to their home universities and write their individual pieces. After the meeting, Diane was much clearer about both her own role in the project, and her responsibilities in the bid writing process, coming away from it with a very clear idea about what to do next. Diane’s role was to lead the marketing ‘work package’, which had two other marketing academics involved in it. Her first piece of writing was a one page account of how her particular model of marketing would help the project to better understand the marketing issues relevant to this particular ecological problem. She wrote this on her own, and circulated it to the other members of the marketing team by email.
  13. The next step was for the marketing sub-team to write the marketing ‘work package’ section, which outlined what the academics in this area would contribute. Because three people were working together on this, they had to negotiate their respective contributions. - Diane was providing an overview of the industrial system that this new tool was going to be located in, and explaining how the network of this system would need to change if the tool was to be used. - Another academic was writing about consumption practices and consumer decisions around this industry. - A third was working on barriers to introducing sustainability in the industry, for instance, tensions between sustainable practices and employment in local communities. They worked on this using Word, circulating versions by email, and using Skype to discuss their changes, using the ‘screensharing’ function to be able to focus in on specific paragraphs.. They had some difficulties around keeping track of which version they were on. They also had to develop a new system for showing which changes had been made by whom. ‘Track changes’, the solution provided by the software package, did not work for them, because they were discussing changes via Skype and found that Word was assigning different colours to the changes on different machines. Instead, they used the ‘highlight’ function to highlight their changes, each in a different colour. (mundane materiality?) Here, we see how the multimodal affordances of Word and Skype allow people to write together across continents – “IT becomes crucial”.
  14. Once their work package had been drafted, it had to be related to the other work packages. There were at least five of these, each worked on by a different team of academics: one related to fieldwork exploring the use of the tool itself, one on biology, one on chemistry. The scientists co-ordinating the bid as a whole had to produce a ‘communications’ package, to show “how the different work packages support and speak to each other, and how the data will be brought together to produce a cohesive whole”. Meanwhile, the scientists leading the bid were also producing all the other documents – budgets, ethical statements, impact plans, etc – necessary for a major bid of this kind. Supported by administrative and technical people on their side – ethics offices, research support officers etc.
  15. No longer necessary to be face to face when meeting to do writing
  16. We have presented papers in 9 countries. Conferences attended in Hong Kong, Germany, England, Austria, Ireland, Spain, USA, Sweden. Upcoming: Netherlands. Only funded by ESRC for one each.   When giving papers, in the questioning or afterwards, People are keen to tell us of cross country similarities and differences. Last night came up with Scandinavian visitors.   It also occurs in the UK, as audiences always international It engages academics, professionally and personally – stress and email example. We have tapped into something bigger. It challenges myths such as the lonely scholar and writing being all about research.   Demonstrates the internationalness of universities, so an American professor of linguistics just moved from HK to the UK cannot believe the level of administration the amount of checks, and the lack of admin support. Not sure who has more to learn from this example.   The internationalness of universities and academic life. Most departments in many disciplines have high proportion of non-British academics, though hard to be precise about this. High proportion of British academics spend time abroad. And academics move around jobs internationally. Part of global networks and high academic mobility. This pattern of complexity of movement and language use is referred to as superdiversity.
  17.   What have we achieved by this project? We are completing our ‘telling case’ of universities in England. This is how we see it – a good detailed example.
  18. As well as chatting to academics at conferences we are in contact with academics internationally and are beginning to explore international differences. International dimensions including: Social issues we are interested in pursuing First the overall context Transformations in relationships with students Massification - greater proportion of people going to university Consumerisation – students paying for courses [can be £9000pa in UK] Internationalisation - students encouraged to go abroad. Differences in managerial practices For instance: Funding mechanisms – government control of universities, other institutions offering degrees League tables – national and international Research assessment framework – effects on research done, publications, interdisciplinary research Impact – new audiences, shapes research.  2. North-South disparities, including access to technologies; connection speeds, having Virtual learning environments (VLEs) Online library resources Access to Social media, and everyday software File sharing and other tools for collaborative work Smartphones and portable devices   3. Participation in Global networks and academic mobility - partly cultural differences
  19. As linguists interested in Language issues especially around English as a global language for academia pan out differently in each country or region – need a sociolinguistic profile – who speaks what to whom and in what language: English based universities: The language of school education; The language of HE teaching – at different levels MA. PhD may include visits The language of the discipline; The language of publishing The language of everyday life; The language of social media - twitter, blogging, linked-in
  20. Publishing in English. The big issue. Whether in HK, Norway, Spain academics are under pressure to publish in English, but a lower level of acceptance in journals. It is knowledge of English, but a lot more, including networks…. English as the global language - English as a lingua Franca May at the same time be pressure to publish in other languages Multilingual scholars in HK, and in UK         Our interests: 1. Hong Kong and China. 2. South Africa. 3. Finland and Scandinavia
  21. [This slide may not be needed– these are conclusions from an earlier presentation] In conclusion, our research challenges longstanding myths about academics writing (e.g. that it is solitary, all about research). It makes visible the sheer volume of workplace writing that has to be managed and the new forms of inscriptions that have to be informally learned and prioritised by academics. It shows the role of these in producing new forms of knowledge.   It shows how setting boundaries around times and spaces for writing are important ways of managing tensions for many people but are increasingly hard to maintain. New strategies are being developed for managing different kinds of digital boundaries which offer new possibilities for mobility, collaboration and flexibility but can also be felt as chaotic and overwhelming. Not everyone is doing this boundary work; some are simply extending writing work in time and space as far as possible.   Our interviews and observations reveal a damaging mismatch between the assumptions about academics writing that currently drive managerial practice, the design of physical spaces and institutional demands versus the day-to-day routines that define academics’ writing lives. These findings make visible the dynamics of the interconnected processes of academics writing work, enabling a better understanding which can inform future reform, innovation and productivity within the academy.
  22. Extras Hassard, J., Kelemen, M., & Cox, J. W. (2012). Disorganization theory: explorations in alternative organizational analysis. Routledge. Fenwick, T., Edwards, R. & Sawchuk, P. (2011) Emerging approaches to educational research: Tracing the sociomaterial. London: Routledge. Callon, Michel, P. Lascoumes, and Y. Barthe. Acting in an uncertain world. An essay on technological democracy. (2009). Cambridge: MIT Press.