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Session Title: Investigating and Advocating for the Liminal … “Middle” … Interface of Writing Technologies.
Podcasts and presentations by Bill Williamson, Scott Kowalewski, and Steve Benninghoff.
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A note on the transcript: Otter transcription services does not claim to be 100% accurate in their speech recognition, and they are not. We have left this record almost completely unedited. This transcript has its flawed moments, but if you listen to the podcast as well, or if you read for context, you will get what we were saying pretty easily.
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A note about resources referenced: We make reference to a handful of scholarly resources and moments in this discussion. If you would like to follow up with a query about any of those sources, please follow up via email.
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Scott Kowalewski 00:00
I want to welcome you to our session EV 13. Conversation discussion presentation here. Our title is investigating and advocating for the liminal or middle interface of reading Technologies. I'm Scott Kovaleski. from Saginaw Valley State University, I'm joined by my colleague at SVSU, Bill Williamson, hey there, as well as, as well as our colleague, Steve Benninghoff, from Eastern Michigan University. Howdy. We wanted to record a podcast as part of our presentation here today, to be a little bit less presentation. And a lot more conversational. We saw that as being an opportunity for us to kind of share some of the things that we've been thinking about and talking about and working on over the last couple of years, as well as some of the things that we've just kind of, you know, tend to just discuss in very informal conversations among the three of us on the phone and through zoom calls over the last couple of years. We did propose this presentation, well, two years ago for the 2020 Computers and Writing conference. And so a lot has really evolved and changed in our thinking, and even with the way that the field has moved with some of the things that we're talking about here over the last couple of years. And so, you know, we're looking to have conversations about how to incorporate that. And I will encourage any listeners to, to sign our guestbook, our presentation slides, you can leave your name and contact information there and you know, even the call to action, if you'd like to reach out and chat with us or have a conversation with us, we'd love to hear from you. So you can feel free to send us an email as well. But I want to kick our conversation off today with something that we have been talking about here over the last couple of days, as we've been framing out our, our conversation, and it's it's kind of, I think, a way to introduce how we're talking about liminal spaces, and how we're thinking about. Well, some of the stuff we'll talk about today in terms of design thinking and maker spaces. And this came through with a conversation we were kind of talking about before we were recording, where Steve, you had mentioned that you think about computers and writing as always being a makerspace. And so I wonder if you could kind of get us started here and talk a little bit about that. And then we'll continue to move into some liminal spaces and thinking about maker spaces as as, you know, as some liminal as a liminal space, as well as places where we can think through adventure and literacy. We'll talk about some pedagogical and curricular elements. And Steve will share some work that he's done in his class through assignments this past winter semester, as well. So thinking about computers and writing as a makerspace. Steve, you'll talk with us a little bit about about that some of the things that you've been kicking around there.
Steve Benninghoff 03:08
One of the things that's been true about Computers and Writing for a long time is it has been a place where academics and grad students and people involved in both writing instruction and technology and supported writing instruction, have been able to play for lack of as I think the appropriate word with experiments and try things out. And it's been one of the places where that has been most supported through all sorts of different things with whether it's a grad research work, or just a supportive community. Computers and Writing has long been the place where if people want to try something out, they've been able to find people who are equally interested in ways of experimenting with technology and supporting, writing instruction. And in many ways, that sort of inventiveness and that sort of spirit. It's very much that one of the things that makerspaces are shooting for. And so that's long been the case. And when we were discussing ways of thinking about this as like, as we were going through, it's like hey, wait a minute. This is exactly what Computers and Writing has has long been
Bill Williamson 04:32
well and believes in you. I'm gonna jump in and say in add to the carry carry on that thread. One of the things that I value about Computers and Writing is someone who's relatively late comer to the to the community. I've always known a lot of the people who were active in computers and writing because they cross over into technical communication and technical communication, which has always been my home discipline is has always had to make peerspace spirit to it. We've we've always been home for geekery we've always been home for gadgetry, there's always been elements of our pedagogy that are playing with, with stuff that now we would associate with makerspaces tinker toys of Legos and, and you know, doing you'll prototypes of things and then try to figure out, okay, how would we describe that? And how would we explain to someone how we would use that kind of thing. So that kind of mentality has always been a big part of technical communication. So that that Makerspace element, I think, is something that computers and writing and technical communication have in common. And so this is a really exciting moment for us to be coming together as communities around a venture idea like that, because I think it has a lot of potential for helping us, one, reclaim some of those spaces or reinvent some of those spaces where we've been before. But also to recognize some of that common ground that we've always had.
Scott Kowalewski 06:03
Yeah, I would say, for me, I became involved with the computers and writing community, about a dozen or so years ago, when I was a graduate student at Virginia Tech. And there was something that I felt very welcomed into the community much more than I did at some of the other larger conferences in the field. And I think a big part of that, and over the years I've sort of been reinforced is, I feel like I can kind of bring some of the things that I've been experimenting with. And, you know, not to say that I don't want to bring good ideas or struggle, but but it doesn't have to be, you know, it can be, it can be something that I'm not afraid, necessarily that might bomb or fail. And to me, that's, again, the spirit of of invention, and makerspaces, trying some things out, seeing what sticks, seeing what doesn't work, and then going back and fixing and starting over sometimes.
Bill Williamson 06:55
So with all that kind of stuff in mind, Scott, do you want to, you want to take us a step down the pathway on to the connection between makerspaces and liminal spaces or liminality. You were you were the the person who nudged us on to this pathway, we went willingly. But but let's slit you start that conversation. And Steve and I can try to jump in and, and kind of shape that a little bit more.
Scott Kowalewski 07:24
Yeah, so. So my entry point into makerspaces came in 2019. When Bill and I were working on a, an internal grant proposal, for a, what was called the departmental enter in a departmental innovation grant. And it's a $5,000 grant, to help your department think and develop innovative strategies that connect with students are helped to help us student development and, you know, their their academic success. And one of the things that I had read recently, or Oh, actually, it came from my, my, my kids school, they had just created a, a Makerspace in their school. And so I wanted to read a little bit more about what those are. And I became really fascinated with how they helped to support invention. And the fact that they can incorporate a variety of low tech and high tech kinds of equipment. So for example, my, my kids Makerspace had this really state of the art 3d printer. And, and, you know, I thought that that was a, you know, a really cool piece of technology or equipment to expose young students to very early on to see how that helped them see their ideas, right, become a 3d object. But as as college students, while 3d printers might be kind of interesting as well, I also saw the value in working through low tech and low fidelity kinds of invention strategies. So one of the things that we use that I use the most of them are in my own Makerspace in the makerspace that Bill and I ended up getting supported through this grant are just paper and, and markers and some of the really low tech kinds of like graphing paper and things that that help students create wireframes and prototypes. Certainly you don't need a makerspace to do those kinds of things. But those low tech gadgets and opportunities can be really powerful. A Makerspace to kind of back up as I started to do it and research is a this is for makerspaces.com A collaborative workspace inside a school library, or public or private facility for making learning exploring and sharing the uses of high tech, low tech tools. So for me that these spaces then provided those resources for cultivating that learning and creation, and it was a central hub for where students could kind of gather and see that work happening. So then the challenge was, well, how do we think about working to incorporate that kind of stuff into, into curriculum into into coursework? So we think about these makerspaces, then as being these hubs for collaboration, and one of the things that reading scholar Doug was was argues, is that quote, we need to understand that meaning is not inherent in our tools, parentheses writing media ideas, language, and parentheses. Nor does writing as you notice, meaning resides in ourselves. Rather, it exists in the space between our tools, ourselves and each other, in the space of design and quote. And so I thought about these, these maker spaces as being these, these places for invention, or being these thresholds that helped to usher one kind of learning into another. And so this is where the idea of liminal spaces helped me kind of connect these ideas. And for a little bit broader context. At SVSU, I was working as a writing program administrator at the time, we had just brought Elizabeth Wartell in to do some presentations. In relation to the writing about writing, Texas, he writes, and so her presentation was largely built around liminal spaces as well. So these things were really kind of swirling in my head. So this connection between maker spaces as collaborative, high, the low tech, invention spaces really seem to connect to this idea of threshold, or liminality. As students grow and learn, and develop, through that idea of, of, of invention, and making and tinkering.
Bill Williamson 11:47
So we pick up that thread of liminality. A little bit in. So classically speaking, liminal spaces are spaces that are transitions in places that are that are in between, where let's where the concept of threshold comes from, where you cross over a threshold into this in between space. In metallurgy, we talk about interstitial spaces, the places that are in between, and in the context of creating a new material, living metal, for example, the impurities that you put into those liminal spaces, those interstitial spaces actually define the quality of the material that you that you end up with. So it's the impurities in the matrix that become the the flavor, so to speak, or that create the values and the properties of that particular kind of material. And makerspaces have some of that, because those maker spaces are places where you can come in, and you've got these things available to you some high tech, some low tech, but the real advantage is just having a space, a collaborative space, where you can begin to transform an idea into a reality, you can build a prototype, you can imagine a prototype to begin with, you can talk it through, you can write it up on a whiteboard, we've got magnetic whiteboard, so you can do things like interface design, and rearrange things on the on the whiteboard screen, that you can then translate into, into a wireframe using something like say, figma, the software package for doing wireframing or XD from Adobe. So there's all these ways that makerspaces become these transitional spaces where ideas go to grow, where ideas go to potentially thrive, but we also have to hold on to the idea that ideas may go there to die. And that's an okay thing because sometimes that idea, the prototype isn't proof of concept. It's proof that you're wrong. And and that's okay. You know, that's, that's got to be part of that learning process, part of that exploratory experience of creating and testing ideas.
Scott and Steve 13:59
And it's interesting since Bill brought up metallurgy, there's different ways for us to think about liminal and in mythology, and a lot of places where we're just in other societies where there's a clear stage between when someone is a child and someone becomes an adult. So there's in different societies, they go through liminal ceremonies and thresholds where they move into becoming an adult and taking up the sort of rights and responsibilities of an adult in the society. And oddly enough in like, in different sort of societies where there are shamans and other sorts of people who are sort of those are people who live in the liminal space, and in their transitions. They might go in a dream or in different things into a different space and have part of their body replaced. So it's a ancient version of sort of the sick Million Dollar Man, where did they go through and get some sort of power. And when they come back out of that dream, right, they too have transitioned into a different role or a different and they have a different capability. And so I think it's pretty interesting thinking about how these different kinds of tools, tools for imagining, and tools for testing and spaces where it's okay to play at testing, these are what we think of as makerspaces.
Bill Williamson 15:33
Well, and it represents that makerspace is more than a physical entity or a physical facility, because as we'll explore, as we continue with our conversation here, makerspace is something that we've incorporated in technical communication classrooms for a long time, and Steve's gonna highlight some of the stuff that's been going on in his classes recently. But it's a it's a mentality, it's a, it's a way of approaching a problem, you know, we have made the transition over the past decade and a half, especially in technical communication, into thinking of ourselves as problem solvers. More than as, as a writer or a or a communicator, in what we mean by that is, instead of defining ourselves, or instead of defining our students at our potential, or future graduates, I suppose, by what they're going to do on the job, we emphasize the fact that like other professions, we solve problems, and our tools may vary in our tools may be different from some of those other professions. But ultimately, that's what it is, which is why it has become an we've evolved in recent years, to embrace makerspaces, to embrace design thinking to embrace user experience, design, and then usability studies. And these are all things that help us make tangible and make real in the context of classrooms, and of laboratories and of other kinds of workspaces, where we connect people with things people with ideas, people with people, and where we can reinforce the best of what we do in a way that gets valued as one problem solving, to design thinking, and three is something that is going to be valued both within the academy. And once our students leave the academy.
Scott Kowalewski 17:26
Right, and one of the biggest challenges to get to that point, is getting students to feel comfortable with the messiness that happens during problem solving. And, you know, so we can think about the design thinking process that starts with empathy, and works through a process typically associated with, you know, defining and ideation and prototyping and testing. And that that structure can be really helpful for kind of giving students a framework for thinking through some of that messiness. But it doesn't always guarantee that if they followed all the way through, they're going to end up with a lovely polished deliverable, right, there's a lot of a lot of gnarliness that can kind of happen in, in the, in those liminal spaces as they're moving, even as they move between, you know, amongst the between some of the steps of the design process. And that can be a really uncomfortable place, I think, for a lot of students, because, well, in part because of the way that academic models typically work. You know, I teach you do you get grade. And, and that's often how they're accustomed. And, you know, this idea of, of design thinking and, and working through a makerspace mentality, really kind of throws a lot of that on on their head, and it puts them in a position where they have to define they have to figure it out, and they have to work to solve. Yes, we are there to provide ideas and thoughts and feedback. But even sometimes, I'm not sure. I mean, why maybe all the time, I'm not sure where things are gonna go
Scott and Steve 19:11
on. One of the key aspects to having this kind of pedagogical approach is that we're asking students to take chances. And so you have to be upfront and clear with them. I'm asking you to think hard, I'm asking you to work at these problems that we don't necessarily know the answer to. So it's very much different than the teacher knows where this is going kind of mode. So you have to be very clear with the students that if I'm going to ask you to take chances that I'm not going to slap you on the wrist and like hammer you grade wise for what's going on, because academia and everything still rewards the individual grade. So you have to make sure that you put bumpers out there for them so that they're not going to run off the road.
Bill Williamson 19:54
Well, and this is really key because historically speaking, when when at least when Steve and I came into the world of technical communication, which you got to go back to the 80s. To get to that point, you know, there's a misconception that technical communication is really about making the world neat and tidy. And and that's not the way the world works. And so we have embraced over the last 20 years, in particular, this notion of wicked problems. And as we've made that transition into thinking of ourselves as problem solvers, if that's where we're going, and if that's the world that we want to acknowledge it absolutely, that's where I'm at. And that's the kind of thing that I want to celebrate here. We can't create spaces that are neat and tidy. We can't create grade schemes that are neat and tidy, we have to let that infinitely messy and incalculable reality of human interaction, define the flavor, the quality, the the whatever phrase you want to put in there, of what happens in our classrooms, because that's going to be the thing that helps our students break out of that mentality that actions equal points, equal grades, you know, that's, yes, there's a connection there. We live in an environment that values assessment, can't get away from it. At the same time, if we want them to take something away, we don't want them to take away Hey, I scored an 89 on that. No, we want them to take away. That was an interesting problem. And why did we come up with some fantastic ideas, and boy, do we have a few that tanked as well? That's what I want to see.
Scott Kowalewski 21:31
So we've talked a little bit already about thinking, making connections between makerspaces and liminal spaces, talking about how that's integrated into strategies for problem solving, and the messiness of that problem solving for student activity and assignments, and then our serve responsibilities as, as teachers as faculty to support students in that messiness. Let's maybe pivot here is a good good point to pivot here. And, Steve, if you want to share a little bit about your pencil activity, that that brings in some of the structure that we've been talking about.
Scott and Steve 22:10
Sure. So in my tech comm classes, lately, I've been served as courses, and I've have a lot of education majors, and I have some majors. But one of the key things that activities I've tried to do to help them think about this sort of approach, like a design thinking approach, or a makerspace approach is actually extremely low tech. And I would have students make a set of instructions for using a pencil. And it seems so incredibly simplistic at then, we do it in sort of three stages. And at one level, they would just do instructions for basic operation, a second level, they would do it for using a pencil for a particular task, so a more targeted thing. And the third level would be how do you teach? Delight? How do you how do you make people enjoy using a pencil, and of course, the framework for this and from a tech comm perspective, is the most old school version of tech comm is very explicit operation and use of something. The second level is much more targeted on particular tasks and goals, and more of a sort of a little bit of an audience base there. But the third task is obviously shifting more towards an understanding of user experience design, and trying to make it not just something that is basic operation, but how do you actually make it enjoyable and valuable to people? How do you help people develop their own meaning their own meaningfulness is as Walz was saying, in the use of the tool. And so these are very simplistic, so you try to, to as a sort of play activity, you know, one page, use a pencil to do it. And it's amazing the layers and levels that appear right away. So in the very first iteration of this, I would go round and note the way the students were holding the pencils and the ways that you have to learn if you're left handed or an other, they all operate the things differently. So the even though it's not high tech, and this is one of the valuable things about a lot of low tech versions of thinking about this terms of makerspaces is they realize how much of their knowledge and understanding is tacit, and then you can help them really start to develop and bridge much more awareness of what's possible and how deep their own knowledge and awareness can can become.
Bill Williamson 24:50
And assignments like that. I like before I jump in with a historical moment. I want to celebrate here that I think this is really cool because it is you It is so utterly simple at some level. And yet you can draw so much value and have conversation threads that move in so many different directions from this, I think that that's one of the things that where I was gonna go with that is that's that Makerspace mentality that's always been part of tech comm. I remember being an undergrad back in the 80s. And designing some set of goggles in a class, I think, with Craig Waddell, where, you know, it was using tinker toys. And then I had to write up like a description of it and, and instructions for how to use them. And like there's roots of your pencil assignment in their paper airplanes that were one of those classic things, you'll the instructions for paper airplanes, which I then transformed into origami. And then found all kinds of ways of extending into UX, in recent years, through these incredibly simplistic, very hands on manipulable kinds of, of pedagogical moments and methods. So that kind of stuff is like we can do that anywhere. We can do that any time. And when it's appropriate to bring into the class. It's a way of getting our students focused on a particular activity that we can then draw out all of this. Well, a whole bunch of different kinds of value. So that's the beauty of it. Now one
Scott and Steve 26:21
of the key aspects of this. So yes, it's complicated, it's wicked, it's messy, it has all of these components to it. And so but one of the core core aspects of doing assignments like this, and that's one of the I think a challenge for Makerspace mentality is that you absolutely have to do reflection, that helps the students formalize what they've discovered, and what they've realized, so that they realize it's not just their idiosyncratic knowledge, it becomes our community and group knowledge. And so they incorporate the what they've developed in what they've figured out into the concepts of that you're teaching in the course. And the ways that that all works. And it builds in this is what, you know, people who advocate makerspaces are all about is that it builds agency for the students and understanding what they're doing, and their own learning.
Bill Williamson 27:19
Well, and it SVSU, we built off of these kinds of impulses that we were, you know, exploring in our classrooms. And bit by bit, I mean, we secured some funding to build our usability lab. And we secured additional funding to add audio capabilities, we had our first podcasting studio, and then we added video production to that. And then we added the MakerSpace. to that. And then after all of that stuff, and this was this is incremental work over several years that we were we were very lucky and very successful to be able to accomplish that stuff and, and to find ways of permeating our curriculum with these Makerspace mentalities. And then we come to the realization. It's all makerspace. We haven't we didn't think of it that way at the beginning. But here we get to the point, this is part of the evolution that we were hinting at earlier. I listened to John Deere Jetson, Isla being interviewed by his local campus radio station, and he made reference to their audio studio, or I think it was audio studio, but in general, the lab that he's that he works in over there, as their digital makerspace. And it was like, boom, oh, my gosh, John Deere is ahead of me, in thinking about these kinds of things, why did I think of that? Scott, what did you think of that? But but that revelation, I think, is absolutely incredible, that all of these things are about that liminality, about that exploration about that, you know, taking out of wicked problems and having these places where we can test out ideas, regardless of whether it's high tech, low tech in between tech. It's all about design thinking. It's all about problem solving.
Scott Kowalewski 29:00
Yeah, we didn't have we maybe didn't necessarily have some of the terminology.
Scott and Steve 29:05
And John, and Johndan's always ahead of all of us, but yeah, well.
Scott Kowalewski 29:11
We didn't have the necessarily the terminology, but I think that's a core of what we are trying to create it well, at the core of what we're trying to do was provide spaces for creation, yeah. And invention, whether that was audio, video or other kinds of multimodal multimedia production, or thinking through some user experience process in the, in the usability lab, the maker space, not only gave us some of that additional terminology and way to kind of frame the entire thing or tie the whole thing up into a neat package. I think it helps to tie in solidify the sort of the design thinking process as an extension to what we were already doing, which was the user experience. It's and usability stuff. You know, that started over a decade ago. And as you said, I mean, it's been built incrementally over time 345 $1,000 at a time. So you know, which I think in some ways sounds like a lot. But when you think about some of these other labs, it, it's not a whole lot. And especially when you can kind of chunk it up like that. But the other thing that we had to do is to think about curricularly, how to support, right how to how to have the facilities support, what we're doing curricularly, we had already been pulling in, you know, assignments, and really focused on usability and user experience. And you and I had written about that for programmatic perspectives a couple of years ago, and shared some of the things that we had done. But then we found ourselves, you know, at the precipice of of creating a new curriculum, and, and thinking through how to build some of that stuff in. And we recognize right away that we wanted to go vertical, right, really kind of build curricula that that that increased, right, as students matriculate through the program, how do they build on the knowledge they, they had learned in previous courses. But then we also wanted to provide that sort of breadth across each level layer of level two. So we could think about curricula, or verticality, in some of the courses we created, like our problem solving course, and then at the 200 level, and that the foreigner level, we have an advanced problem solving course. And in the interim, students are taking a methods course in usability studies, or they're doing internships. And so right, this knowledge is building as they go. And across, they're taking courses in emerging media and information architecture, and web writing. So again, they're kind of getting this breadth, and depth. And the facilities that are integrated into all these layers, every facility may not be used at every for every course or at every level. But throughout the course of the curriculum. There, they're learning how to create in the spaces. And so the idea, I guess, I hope, anyway, is that that while these spaces serve as sort of these threshold, or these liminal spaces, that by the time they get to a course, like the advanced problem solving, they feel comfortable with a loose framework. And they can kind of start thinking like, really thinking like problem solvers and incorporating these methodologies. And I know that, you know, we all sort of teach that course, in a similar way, not necessarily all the same, but But it all sort of follows an iterative process.
Scott and Steve 32:43
And it's interesting when we think about curriculum, and we think about the ways that students in whatever programs or whoever we're serving, but doing the problem solving itself, like design thinking, is a kind of liminal activity compared to other disciplines that have very structured, very settled, like, what their disciplines do is create a defined space. And what our discipline, whether it's computers, and writing, or technical communication or rhetoric, is very much about, well, what space do I need to be in now? And how do we shift back and forth between those different spaces? So I think it is an interesting question, when we say, we know that the students need to be uncomfortable to learn, learning requires that discomfort. But you know, they become more comfortable, we hope, in that understanding themselves this way as liminal workers, right, or people who work through different liminal stages as required. But it's interesting, do they ever really get that comfortable?
Scott Kowalewski 33:56
I don't know that they always really feel like they. Well, they might not be until they they get that first job.
Scott and Steve 34:04
When even then when you think about them, they get the job. But they still I think it's interesting that majors in our fields, they know they can transition they know like the, you know, solving problems in tech comm book, what's the one thing we know change. And one of their core abilities is adaptability. So hopefully they get comfortable with the idea that they can adapt.
Bill Williamson 34:32
Well, and one of the things that you said a few minutes ago, Steve, talking about exploration, being a quality or a characteristic that we wanted to celebrate in a variety of different ways, in our in our discipline, in our profession, in our curricula in our programs. And, and I think one of the things that I want to make sure that we think about as a discipline, and that we think about it as as part of our pedagogical practice. Is that the idea of a liminal space, the idea of a makerspace is something that we need for every component of our curriculum. So, we right now are focusing on maker spaces as these places for engagement with the physical or the digital, and with problem solving, but we need to have that same mentality when we're talking about rhetoric, when we're talking about technology, when we're talking about communication theory, sociology, any of the disciplines that we might draw in, that we might use to inform ourselves, we need to bring that stuff with that same kind of mentality of exploration. And with that same sense of wonder that comes along with it that says, Okay, do I have this right? Is there a right, you know, is there a way? Is there one way of interpreting this? Or is this something that's going to evolve as well, you know, the the permission to learn and fail, learn and succeed, learn and stumble, be somewhere in between all of those things have to be components of our curriculum, regardless of the subject matter that we're exploring. And again, whether it's the thinking part, the doing part, or some transition between those two.
Scott Kowalewski 36:09
Well, I know we could talk about this stuff all day. In the interest of time, I think we should look at wrapping it up. And one of the things that I really want to do, as we bring our session to a close here is invite listeners to reach out, I said at the top of the podcast, we'd appreciate you leaving your name and contact information in the guest book. But if you'd like to reach out and talk a little bit more, we want to have a conversation want to be part of a podcast with us in the future. Go ahead and send us a message and we'd love to hear from you. Otherwise, I think we're gonna wrap this up and we look forward to hearing from you.
Bill Williamson 36:41
Thank you for listening, everybody.
Scott and Steve 36:44
Man, that was fun.
Bill Williamson 36:47
I agree.