No abstract

Growing out of research in Technical Communication, Composition Studies, and Writing Program Administration, the articles in this dissertation explicitly seek to address changes in the practices and products of writing and writing studies wrought by the so-called "digital revolution" in communication technology, which has been ongoing in these fields since at least 1982 and the publication of the first Computers and Composition newsletter. After more than three decades of concentrated study, the problems posed by the communication revolution have been brought into clear relief by a succession of scholars, and the complex and semi-coordinated project of remediating ourselves, our discourses, and our disciplines is in many respects well underway. Nevertheless, significant challenges face multimodal pedagogy in the context of Writing Program Administration, challenges that take the form of entrenched conflict regarding the ownership and distribution of personal information and intellectual property. These articles examine problems at the level of the student, the teacher, and the program and argue for a new kind of Writing Program Administrator who uses multiliteracies to rethink how writing programs should produce and practice writing and the teaching of writing in the 21st-century.

This report outlines the authors' experiences developing and piloting ISUComm Sites, an electronic portfolio platform currently in development for ISUComm foundation courses at Iowa State University. Since 2007, ISUComm has sought to better teach students the electronic mode of communication through such a platform, but for some time the project had stalled. This changed in the spring of 2014, when the authors of this article negotiated the resources necessary to build a WordPress installation created both for and by teachers of ISUComm courses. This platform affords students the capability to build online portfolios that showcase their developing identities as scholars and professionals. But to be successful, our project needed "boundary brokers," or graduate students who use their experience as system developers and teachers to negotiate between stakeholders and users at all levels of implementation and development.

Despite their central importance to a variety of endeavors and despite widespread use in both industry and academia, version control systems (software for tracking versions of files) have not been extensively studied in fields related to technical communication, rhetoric, and communication design. Git, by far the most dominant version control system today, is largely absent. This study theorizes Git as boundary infrastructure---infrastructure used to facilitate collaboration across disciplines and domains. The unique characteristics of boundary infrastructure explain how something as prominent as Git can be so invisible and help identify dangers posed by boundary infrastructure. Drawing on modes of resistance developed in feminist rhetorics, this article concludes with suggestions to ameliorate the negatives effects such infrastructure might have on collaborative knowledge work.

This article reports results of a comparative analysis of expert and novice designers' collaborative practice, focusing on differences in their workspaces and work materials. We conceptualize workspaces and materials as boundary objects and use the dimensions of infrastructure taxonomized by Star and Ruhleder (1996) as a framework for our analysis. As a result of the differences we observed, we suggest pedagogical implementations that may help novice designers learn to collaborate as experts do, and we identify further avenues for research and study.