*Title borrowed from a former colleague in my MA institution...
So, right off the bat, I have to say that I'm responding only to the introductory essay in this week's reading:
George Pullman and Baotong Gu. "Guest Editors’ Introduction: Rationalizing and Rhetoricizing Content Management." Technical Communication Quarterly. 17.1 (2008) 1-9.
The authors advocate that we think rhetorically about the CMS, and each essay they've selected to be part of the special issue does that in some way. (They also advocate the need for TCers to be a part of the design process for CMSs, since they're one of the primary groups of end-users...). But I'm going to spend the space of this brief blog interrogating, for myself, the definition of a CMS they offer, compared to several def's of wikis, held up against my own CMS-wiki-google site thing. (With a little workflow analysis thrown in, maybe...).
Soooo Pullman and Gu define CMSs as:
But the next definition thinks about wikis from a critical and epistemological standpoint, which P & G advocate for the CMS. So if we think about a space that:
I'm not sure if you can see the features carefully, but let me write a bit about the space and what it allows me to do. First of all, I do not use my gSite on its own- I use Delicious to tag and later locate pages within it, and I'm going to be using Zotero-i think-to keep track of the citations within the site. True to the CMS, there are some standard features-the "notebox" on the left side of the site gives my standard note-taking model-taken from Collin Brooke's advice. Below there I have some important tags that I add to my notes-namely one for my dissertation and one for each of my three exam areas. This standardization allows me to easily maneuver within my own generated content. (The search feature of the site also looks through the text of attached pdfs, which is awesome!)
The site is free. I've built it myself, and changed it's structure and organization many times (though I'm reeeeally happy with my current layout-it might just carry me through). I think it facilitates my literacy development...it's where i draft everything, and post revisions for later reference. I can also post everything in multiple places, and linking is super easy. Collaboration is possible and I use similar sites for that kind of work, though this one is all for me. And, I store information that can be easily repackages, reassessed, rewritten, remade for distribution in different spaces- like the way I'm boutsta repurpose my C & W proposal for this class by reinterpreting it from a techcomm framework. Same general info-different purposes.
I think it's obvious that I have an ecology set up here, and that I'm doing symbolic-analytic work. But I wonder how we are to think about the CMS differently from a wiki... I want to make a big R rhetoric move and say that my computer is an information/knowledge/content management system that has structures I work within and against in order to structure my own knowledge-work and practice. What do you think? Am I over simplifying? In what ways does the CMS work as an apt metaphor for our individual workflows (to build off of Johnson-Eilola)?
So, right off the bat, I have to say that I'm responding only to the introductory essay in this week's reading:
George Pullman and Baotong Gu. "Guest Editors’ Introduction: Rationalizing and Rhetoricizing Content Management." Technical Communication Quarterly. 17.1 (2008) 1-9.
The authors advocate that we think rhetorically about the CMS, and each essay they've selected to be part of the special issue does that in some way. (They also advocate the need for TCers to be a part of the design process for CMSs, since they're one of the primary groups of end-users...). But I'm going to spend the space of this brief blog interrogating, for myself, the definition of a CMS they offer, compared to several def's of wikis, held up against my own CMS-wiki-google site thing. (With a little workflow analysis thrown in, maybe...).
Soooo Pullman and Gu define CMSs as:
And in a recent (Fall 09) Kairos article on teaching with wikis, "Working with Wikis in Writing-Intensive Classes" the authors collected the following definitions of wikis:
A content management system, then, is any systematic method designed to organize and distribute information, while content management system software automates the system, typically providing “a platform for managing the creation, review, filing, updating, distribution, and storage of structured and unstructured content” (White, 2002, p. 20). (1)
The purpose of CMS software is to centralize all communications practices, to standardize layout and design, and to increase efficiency when it come to distributing information, ensuring that the company stays on message and does not issue redundant or conflicting statements. In order to achieve this level of control, every piece of information an organization issues has to originate from within the CMS database, and thus everyone writing for the organization has to get used to creating, storing, sharing, and publishing within the system, which means that nearly everyone has to change his or her writing practices to fit inside the CMS’s framework. (2)
I'm not sure that any of these wiki definitions are "agreed upon," or credible-the official word on wikis, but they offer what I feel is a nice sort of rounding out of the definition of CMS that Pullman and Gu provide- a way to think of CMS's in a more experiential way. In the first wiki def above, the authors, importantly, distinguish wikis as "ideally designed," a characteristic that according to P & G's critique distinguish wiki's from CMSs. They are also free and open source- another bit of salt in the wound for the problems P & G reveal. In this way, wikis have one up on the bulky and expensive content management systems.“. . . wikis are an ideally designed, open-source space that takes advantage of the messy, dynamic nature of writing” (Garza, Loudermilk, Hern, 2007, emphasis added).
". . . wiki software presents an ideal platform for generating reading and writing assignments that encourage language awareness in the literary domain" (Farabaugh 41, 2007, emphasis added).
But the next definition thinks about wikis from a critical and epistemological standpoint, which P & G advocate for the CMS. So if we think about a space that:
- is cheap/free
- is user-centered
- promotes user work that facilitates literacy-development
- centralizes communication
- facilitates collaboration
- allows for the generation and distribution (before and for production) of information, documents, etc.
I'm not sure if you can see the features carefully, but let me write a bit about the space and what it allows me to do. First of all, I do not use my gSite on its own- I use Delicious to tag and later locate pages within it, and I'm going to be using Zotero-i think-to keep track of the citations within the site. True to the CMS, there are some standard features-the "notebox" on the left side of the site gives my standard note-taking model-taken from Collin Brooke's advice. Below there I have some important tags that I add to my notes-namely one for my dissertation and one for each of my three exam areas. This standardization allows me to easily maneuver within my own generated content. (The search feature of the site also looks through the text of attached pdfs, which is awesome!)
The site is free. I've built it myself, and changed it's structure and organization many times (though I'm reeeeally happy with my current layout-it might just carry me through). I think it facilitates my literacy development...it's where i draft everything, and post revisions for later reference. I can also post everything in multiple places, and linking is super easy. Collaboration is possible and I use similar sites for that kind of work, though this one is all for me. And, I store information that can be easily repackages, reassessed, rewritten, remade for distribution in different spaces- like the way I'm boutsta repurpose my C & W proposal for this class by reinterpreting it from a techcomm framework. Same general info-different purposes.
I think it's obvious that I have an ecology set up here, and that I'm doing symbolic-analytic work. But I wonder how we are to think about the CMS differently from a wiki... I want to make a big R rhetoric move and say that my computer is an information/knowledge/content management system that has structures I work within and against in order to structure my own knowledge-work and practice. What do you think? Am I over simplifying? In what ways does the CMS work as an apt metaphor for our individual workflows (to build off of Johnson-Eilola)?
