Reading :: Composing Research

Composing Research: A Contextualist Paradigm for Rhetoric and Composition
By Cindy Johanek

When I was working on my PhD, in 1994-1999, one of the big points of contention in writing studies (rhetoric and composition, professional communication, business communication) was the issue of research methods. Well, maybe "big" isn't the right word, since rhet-comp folks were not (and still are not) generally trained very deeply in empirical research methods, and the studies in question were often not well designed and/or came from outside the field. In any case, we had just left the 1980s, when Carnegie-Mellon's alliance with cognitive psychologists yielded several studies using think-aloud protocols and experiments, and entered the 1990s, when compositionists discovered qualitative research methods such as ethnography. The methodological discussions, sometimes characterized as "wars" (although I think wars tend to be larger and bloodier), were partially about the warrants, epistemologies, and theoretical frameworks that the field would accept. In any case, we had reached a sort of detente by the time I began my dissertation, and in 1998 I was able to characterize my work-in-progress as a "mixed-methods" approach, one that "transcended" the "quantitative-qualitative divide."

In 1998, coincidentally, Cindy Johanek went on the market with an award-winning dissertation in hand, one that examined the state of research in composition. Johanek, who studied psychology as an undergraduate, had been surprised in graduate school by the way quantitative research was negatively characterized in her English graduate courses and how qualitative research was valorized with thin justification. In response, her dissertation -- which eventually became the book Composing Research -- examined the state of research, took arguments against empirical composition research to task, and argued for a "contextualist paradigm" for rhet-comp research.

Like me, Johanek characterized her work as transcending the quantitative-qualitative divide. Unlike me, she didn't just roll her eyes when people made disparaging and ignorant remarks about research. Rather, she really took these arguments to heart, even comparing them to bigotry in one analogy (pp.108-109). Aghast at the number of "studies" based on anecdotal evidence, she determined to lay out the case for principled research that begins, not with methods or methodologies, but with context (p.108). "We have fallen into an odd, unbalanced rhetorical stance that comes from the stories we tell," she charges, "stories that appeal heavily to audience emotions but stories that are also uniquely personal to the writer" (p.110).

The heart of the book, more or less, is a table on p.112: "A contextualist research paradigm for rhetoric and composition." This heuristic contains several questions that researchers should ask themselves, with the x-axis representing rhetorical issues and the y-axis representing research issues. This heuristic (I'm not sure I would call it a paradigm) should prove useful to new composition researchers who are trying to work through the beginning stages of a research project, conceived as an argument to a particular audience.

I very much wanted to like this book, but I couldn't find anything terribly solid to hold onto; the argument did not seem to be strongly stated or signposted, or perhaps the text wandered. In addition, other things bothered me.

First, qualitative research gets short shrift here, I think. Judging from the marginal notes that someone penciled in the library's copy of this book, I'm not the only one: next to an evaluation of a study on p.186, they wrote "qualitative [does not equal] anecdotal!" Yes: even though Johanek mentions qualitative research once or twice, in places such as this one, she seems to be equating qualitative research with anecdotal research, and doesn't mention -- leave alone examine -- qualitative methods such as case studies, grounded theory, or discourse analysis (she mentions ethnography in passing). On the other hand, she demonstrates how to set up a quasi-experiment and calculate standard deviation.

Johanek also writes a diatribe against MLA citation style in Ch.7, which I found even less convincing that Charles Bazerman's argument against APA style. It's a little outdated too, from my perspective, since tech comm journals are moving toward APA and Written Communication also uses it.

Finally, she complains about the inadequate textbooks designed to train composition researchers. I can certainly understand this, but look at the amazing surplus of good research texts in related fields, such as education. These are mostly quite applicable to the research we do in comp-rhet. Johanek curses the darkness, while I have preferred to light a candle (see my recent reviews of qualitative research texts).

So here's the question: Do you use Johanek's book in your graduate qualitative research course? I considered it, but in the end decided not to. Not only does it have a short shelf life, it also portrays the field's research too narrowly and dichotomously. I might, however, photocopy that matrix and pass it out.

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Reading :: Designing Qualitative Research

Designing Qualitative Research
By Catherine Marshall, Gretchen B. Rossman

I just finished reviewing Maxwell's Qualitative Research Design, and here I am reviewing Designing Qualitative Research. I suppose there's a finite number of titles you can give to this sort of text. At any rate, Designing Qualitative Research is a fine book, but suffers from comparison to Maxwell's more economical and clearly organized text.

Not that Designing Qualitative Research is a monster text, by any means. The body is only 152 pages (Maxwell's is 115). But whereas Maxwell's book was an overview of principles, Marshall and Rossman's book gets into more details about discrete qualitative research approaches as well as details about data collection and analysis. At present I'm on the fence about whether this is a better approach: I think that a student could design a reasonable study solely based on what s/he learns from this book, a claim that I couldn't make for Maxwell's book, but the discussions are necessarily quite constrained.

Like Maxwell, Marshall and Rossman settle on developing a research proposal as the objective readers should accomplish. But unlike Maxwell, Marshall and Rossman use the generic sections of the research proposal as an organizing scheme for the book: the chapters roughly correspond to these major sections. The advantage of this organizational scheme is that it puts the nascent argument front and center, really demonstrating that research design is an argument. But that's not as big an advantage as it sounds; a research argument has to underlie the design, and breaking the text into proposal sections results in segmenting that argument. I'd have to work around this if I were to use this text in my grad class.

Pragmatically, Marshall and Rossman include a welcome chapter on managing time and resources -- something that many QR texts don't address -- and a chapter on defending qualitative research. In addition, they use many, many vignettes throughout the chapters to illustrate the concepts they are trying to teach. These features make the book easy to follow and, I imagine, easy to apply for graduate students and advanced undergrads.

Overall, this book is a solid entry. I don't think I will use it in one of my classes (I still like Creswell), but if I were asked to do so, I would be happy to use it.

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Reading :: Qualitative Research Design

Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach
By Joseph A. Maxwell

I've been meaning to read Qualitative Research Design for some time. Not only have I seen it cited, students of mine have recommended it to me as a good introductory book for grad courses in qualitative research (I usually use one of Creswell's books). So I finally got to it over the break. And I'm glad I did. The book isn't comprehensive by any means, but it's a good, solid, compact, clearly written discussion of how to design a qualitative research study.

The book was written in 1996 [Note: The above Amazon link is to the second edition, published in 2004], back when qualitative methods were less accepted in the social sciences, so Maxwell spends portions of each chapter discussing how to argue for qualitative research designs to skeptical audiences. This gets a little wearying. But he also lays out the basic components -- purposes, conceptual context, research questions, methods, and validity (p.5) -- and methodically goes through these components and their relationships. He also includes solid, cumulative exercises in each chapter, something that should benefit students at undergrad and grad levels. (The exercises should also help scholars who are reading up on qualitative research for the first time, and cumulatively they lead to a developed QR project.)

The chapter on methods is a bit thin, but I think that's by design. It's not feasible to go into much depth on the basic methods, so we get a high-level overview with cursory descriptions of data collection and analysis methods; readers will have to look elsewhere for descriptions detailed enough to actually implement a study. Fortunately, Maxwell recommends texts for us to read on these issues, particularly Miles and Huberman's excellent text on qualitative analysis.

The final chapter is on research proposals, and Maxwell reminds us here of what I always like to tell my students: your research design is an argument, and you need to be able to identify your claims and demonstrate how your research decisions will support those claims. While being sensitive to the differences of proposals in different fields and written to different agencies, Maxwell gives us good advice and includes a sample proposal.

Finally, Maxwell provides an appendix of recommended resources for those who want to read further.

Overall, a really impressive text. I borrowed this one from the library, but now I'll have to buy my own copy.

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How to make money

You've seen the new Macintosh Air commercial, in which the astonishingly thin laptop is pulled out of a manila envelope? Manufacture a padded laptop case for the Air that looks like that manila envelope. Post pictures to BoingBoing. Create some Machead buzz. Cease manufacture after six months. Give me a small percentage of the profits.

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Reminder: JBTC special issue on social software

Just a reminder that I'll be editing a JBTC special issue on social software. See the cfp. No proposal necessary, inquiries welcome, full manuscripts due May 1. An article in this special issue could make your career and bring you universal acclaim. No pressure.

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Microsoft's supposed patent on physiological monitoring

According to one report, Microsoft has submitted a patent application for a system to monitor the physiological state of users in order to help them.

Microsoft submitted a patent application in the US for a “unique monitoring system” that could link workers to their computers. Wireless sensors could read “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure”, the application states.

The system could also “automatically detect frustration or stress in the user” and “offer and provide assistance accordingly”. Physical changes to an employee would be matched to an individual psychological profile based on a worker’s weight, age and health. If the system picked up an increase in heart rate or facial expressions suggestive of stress or frustration, it would tell management that he needed help.

I have no idea how true this report is (it sounds fishy and, even if true, unworkable in practice). But the reason we pick up on it, and the reason Drudge gave it a red link last night, is that it just sounds like Microsoft: centrally administrated, intrusive, oriented toward "helping" people before they ask or even if they don't plan to ask. It's Clippy the helpful paperclip, but this time he doesn't just monitor your software activities, he monitors your physiological state. And this time he doesn't just interrupt your work, he asks your boss to intercede. Or if you want a more recent analogy, it's like Vista's security feature, constantly asking if you want to allow or deny an action.

Microsoft seeks patent for office 'spy' software - Times Online

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State of the mobile phone industry

It's remarkably positive, with enormous growth in all sectors. In South Korea, users replace phones every six months, coinciding with fall and spring fashions. In Britain, young urban professionals are increasingly obtaining two phones each. In Japan, mobile internet access is close to overtaking PC-based internet access. And in Australia, SMS is reported to be as addictive as smoking -- and globally, it is taking its place in the set of media available to users, with its own usage expectations:

And why is SMS text messaging so addictive? it is the most discrete (secret) form of communication and it is also the fastest way to communicate. It is preferred by kids in school attempting to cheat in class to busy business executives who need something more powerful than wireless email on a Blackberry. A May 2007 survey by 160 Characters found that 84% of active users of SMS text messaging expect a reply within 5 minutes !!! On email we're happy to get a reply within 24 hours. On voicemail who knows if we ever get a reply. Like we've reported, even the Finnish Prime Minister says on his voicemail recording, don't leave me voicemail, send me SMS. Or how about the Finnish libraries who send alerts via SMS and the Finnish dentists who replace cancelled appointments via SMS. One in five London car drivers pays the congestion charge by mobile phone using SMS text messaging. One in two Helsinki public transportation user pay for the single tram tickets using SMS text messaging. Or the heavy users, 10% of British students thumb out 100 SMS text messages per day - in South Korea 30% of students average 100 SMS text messages sent per day. What is the global average? 2.6 SMS messages sent per day. The leading countries, Singapore users average 12 per day and phone owners in the Philippines are the world leaders averaging 15 SMS sent per day. Even laggard USA is following in lock-step with this growth curve and now USA cellphone owners average over 1 SMS sent per day. (My emphasis)

Besides Huatong Sun, no one in writing studies appears to be studying SMS use in earnest. That has to change.
Communities Dominate Brands: When there is a mobile phone for half the planet: Understanding the biggest technology

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Reading :: Group Cognition

Group Cognition: Computer Support for Building Collaborative Knowledge
By Gerry Stahl

Group Cognition is a perplexing book. The fourth book in MIT Press' Acting with Technology series, it focuses on the topic of computer support for building collaborative knowledge, drawing largely from the literature of computer-supported cooperative learning (CSCL). As Stahl explains in the introduction, the book represents his journey over a decade of CSCL research as he came to see individual cognition as a secondary effect of group cognition, and CSCL as a way to help support, improve, collaborate, and transform individual cognition. So far so good -- I'm interested in this issue as well, and so are many others in CSCW and related fields.

What makes the book perplexing is that the chapters are based on Stahl's published research and talks over the past decade, and they appear to be only partialy revised. So we get a chronological evolution of Stahl's thinking, research, and methodologies, but they are not well framed, so it's difficult to tell what Stahl's current arguments are and how the previous arguments fit into them. Since the evolution is quite visible -- Stahl starts with rule-based modeling and ends up with a distributionist understanding of CSCL demonstrated through conversation analysis -- the book really needs more framing than it has for us to avoid becoming lost.

At one point in Ch.6, Stahl explains that this approach is not accidental: "In this draft of the chapter (still not considered a final static document but a recapitulation from one particular moment in an ongoing process), I am trying to narrate a story about how theory and practice have been comingled in our research" (p.132). Whatever the merits of this approach, it makes it difficult for us to sort out which claims are still operative, what claims aren't, and when they've decayed. It's, in a word, slippery.

Let me see if I can make it less slippery. From what I can piece together, Stahl discovered two things -- the sociocultural perspective and Conversation Analysis -- partway through the decade of research under discussion. He now wants to tell everyone in CSCL about these two things, and he spends a lot of time in the later chapters unravelling conversations syllable by syllable in the manner of conversation analysts. The portion of the book before this epiphany is primarily about modeling CSCL without a sociocultural theoretical framework. The portion after the epiphany involves applying an activity theory-based framework and CA to several studies, but it's a straight application without much theoretical or methodological development. In addition, the later chapters tend to go over the same short piece of dialogue multiple times.

If you have a CSCL background, you might find Stahl's journey to be useful. If you're familiar with CA and sociocultural theory, though, I don't think you'll turn up many new insights.

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LiveDocuments review

A very positive review for LiveDocuments, a MS Office clone built in Adobe Flex 2.

» LiveDocuments using Flex and AIR for a real office suite | The Universal Desktop | ZDNet.com

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Olympics rule against cyborg

Amputee Barred From Olympics - New York Times

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Reading :: The Devil's Highway

The Devil's Highway: A True Story
By Luis Alberto Urrea

The Devil's Highway is this year's First Year Forum book at the University of Texas, meaning that every introductory Rhetoric and Writing course uses it. The book, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, tells the true story of a disastrous border crossing in Arizona in which 26 men attempted to walk across the desert to a US town. Only 12 made it.

The story is compelling, well researched, and meant to help readers think through the issue of border policy. Unfortunately, the book's prose is less compelling. The author, not content with a gripping story, continually looks for ways to infuse supernatural and religious symbolism into the book whether it fits or not. Here, for instance, he makes a big deal of the fact that one procurer is named Moses and the desert guide is named Jesus:

He has another alias, too. His boyhood nickname among friends was sometimes Chuy, the diminuitive of "Jesus."

This is his true name: Jesus.

Jesus led the walkers gathered by Moses into the desert called Desolation.

Jesus had the inevitable birthday of December 25. (p.68)

It's like the book was ghostwritten by John Stossel. Not only do these dramatic paragraph breaks make the book longer, they impair the storytelling, distracting from the very real tragedy. Like a cook who can't resist one more grind of pepper, Urrea relentlessly looks for symbolism and tries to tell a quasireligious overstory when just one story would do. And unfortunately this immoderation made me wonder how much I could trust his descriptions. Were things in Veracruz or Sorona as bleak as his prose suggests, or was he just laying it on as in the passage above?

Similarly, the conclusions he draws are troubling. Urrea condemns border policy as insane and unworkable, but in the Reading Group Notes at the end of the book, he admits that he has no answer to the problem. Intractable problems shared by multiple interests, of course, tend to lead to fragmented public policy. The closest Urrea comes to an answer is when he argues that illegal immigration helps the US economically, implying that the borders should not be vigilantly maintained. The argument, however, is entirely economic -- no discussion of how maintaining a permanent, permanently vulnerable underclass of noncitizens affects a working democracy built on principles of equality, or on how an open border policy disproportionately affects certain states, counties, industries, landowners, or workers in particular market segments.

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As the writers strike goes on, other writers seek to make TV irrelevant (exhibit B)

Striking Writers to Launch Online Video Co., Seeking $30M+ « NewTeeVee

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As the writers strike goes on, other writers seek to make TV irrelevant (exhibit A)

Shadow Unit: award-winning sf writers create "fan site for a show that never existed" - Boing Boing

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New MyQuire release

MyQuire just released an update. MyQuire, which is a Basecamp-ish project management system, describes itself this way:

MyQuire is really a combination of project coordination and social networks – bringing them together for the first time.

MyQuire.com - The place for projects

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Popcorn

I was talking with a grad student earlier this week, and he confessed that his leisure time during the break was spent reading over a dozen science fiction and fantasy novels. "They're like popcorn," he said. I agreed, saying that I used to read similarly large numbers of these "popcorn" books.

No longer. Almost all of my reading has to do with my research and/or my field. Of course, that doesn't mean that it's not pleasure reading.

After slogging through a few HCI books recently, I picked up several texts on qualitative research methodology and was surprised at how quickly I went through them -- and how happy I was, simply getting into sweats and reading about research design. I finished two of them in a few hours each and am halfway through a third right now. Readers will see reviews of these soon, I'm sure, but right now I'm having too much fun reading to write about them.

And yes, I know that that's way more geeky than reading a dozen science fiction novels.

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The mechanics of a space war

MIT research associate Geoffrey Forden wargames a space war between the US and China. Bottom line: The US is more dependent on satellites than anyone else, but also has massive redundancy that works to its advantage in a space war.

How China Loses the Coming Space War (Pt. 1) | Danger Room from Wired.com

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Building a third party

Hard work. Micah Sifry talks about how Unity08 was organized and why it hasn't managed to grow.

techPresident – Unity08, Bloomberg and the Specter of an Independent for President

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Writers' strike a boon for online video; TechCrunch says: I told you so

The writer's strike has sent desperate TV watchers to other venues to watch video. That doesn't just mean DVD rentals and purchases, it also means dramatically increased visits to video sites -- perhaps because video sites, like the TV, can be viewed on a whim, whereas DVD purchases and rentals must be planned.

What TechCrunch doesn't tell us is how this affects Hulu, the video streaming service set up by some of the major networks. TechCrunch unmercifully ridiculed Hulu during its planning and launch. Fortunately for Hulu, the writer's strike started soon after its launch, ensuring a stream of TV addicts. It's all in the timing.

Thanks Striking Writers, Online Video Going Up, Up, Up, Up

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Mobile phone use among college students

I'm not surprised that more college students have a cell phone than any other tech. But I'm a little surprised at how many: 97%, more than own a laptop (79%), a media player (73%), or a game console (53%).

Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Cell phones rule among college students

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Reading :: Beyond the Desktop Metaphor

Beyond the Desktop Metaphor: Designing Integrated Digital Work Environments
by Victor Kaptelinin (Editor), Mary Czerwinski (Editor)

The desktop metaphor has been around for quite a while, ever since Xerox PARC came up with it for the Star workstation in 1981. Apple borrowed the concept and made it famous and successful with the Macintosh in 1984; since then, it has become a standard interface feature in most graphical user interfaces.

Of course, it's a matter of some debate whether the collection of interface features we call the "desktop metaphor" actually works as a metaphor anymore. I've argued in print that these elements are no longer perceived as metaphorical by many or most users, and Johndan Johnson-Eilola has similarly examined interface elements as knowledge spaces rather than metaphors. But let's bracket that discussion, since the authors in this collection are less concerned about whether the desktop metaphor is still operant, and more concerned about how this collection of interface elements limits the sorts of things we do with computers. As the editors argue in their introduction, the collection is "a collective exploration of the design space of new-generation digital work environments" (p.11).

The editors summarize the authors' contributions as identifying and addressing the following limitations of the desktop metaphor:

• Information access vs. information display
• Multitasking
• Multiple information hierarchies
• Communication and collaboration
• Coordinated use of multiple technologies (pp.9-10).
  

These are certainly limitations of the desktop metaphor, which was configured largely for standalone machines that addressed neophytes working in office environments and using machines with very limited processing and graphics capabilities compared with today's machines. To address these limitations, the authors come up with very different answers, and some of them argue with each other quite directly.

The first contributed chapter is Freeman and Gelertner's "Beyond Lifestreams: The Inevitable Demise of the Desktop Metaphor," in which the authors revisit their 1994 Lifestreams project. Lifestreams threw out unique file names and the spatial placement of interface elements, instead supplying "a time-ordered stream of documents combined with a few powerful operators for locating, organizing, summarizing, and monitoring information" (p.19). One of the most important, and hardest-to-implement, features was summarizing: the automatic abbreviation of documents or document collections (p.23). Freeman and Gelertner argue that in addition to these features, a Lifestreams unified model should address these issues:

• Storage should be transparent
• Folders and directories are inadequate organizing techniques
• Archiving should be automatic
• Computers should make "reminding" an integral part of the desktop experience
• Personal data should be available from anywhere, to any device, and compatibility should be automatic
• The system should provide a means of summarizing a set of documents into a concise overview (pp.24-26)

My first thought was that Google's products, particularly GMail and GDocs, seem to be reading from this playbook. But we also see some of these characteristics in the Nintendo Wii (which summarizes gameplay) and Facebook.

In fact, as I read the other contributions, what really struck me was that none of these contributors seemed to be addressing Facebook, MySpace, GDocs, Gmail, Bascamp, and other relatively recent web-based innovations that have chucked the desktop metaphor for dashboards and tagging. When David Karger talks about Haystack, which provides an "inbox" for email and contacts, he seems oblivious to the Web 2.0 revolution that has been in full swing for quite a while now:

Should users then abandon applications and move all their data to the web? Hypothetically, a user could create a separate web page for each email message, each directory, each music file, each calendar appointment, each individual in their address book, and so on. Editing these pages, the user could indicate arbitrary relationships between their information objects. Feeding these web pages to a tool like Google would give users powerful search capabilities ...

Of course, such an approach could never work: it requires far too much effort on the part of the user. (p.62)

Just a reminder: this collection was published in 2007. User-generated web content was well established by 2001, and even web tyros were already exploiting its potential for organizing diverse data types by then.

Indeed, many of the contributions seem a bit quaint here in January 2008, since they fail to anticipate the enormous changes that came in the last couple of years due to distributed interacting services and the boost that comes from making one's resources social. (It's unclear how much time passed between the time the chapters were written and the time they were published.) For instance, Plaisant et al. argue in "Personal Role Management" for a single, omnibus system that stores email, calendar, documents, and other information, integrated with the university system; this tightly controlled set of information can be separated into roles (e.g., school, work, general). But this centralized, "walled garden" approach has generally fared poorly against more distributed open systems that allow users to choose their own web apps and organize connections between them as they see fit.

But things get interesting again as we move to the second half of the book, in which sociocultural approaches such as activity theory are brought to bear. In "Solyent and ContactMap," Fisher and Nardi talk about these two projects as ways to support knowledge work. "Little of what knowledge workers do is done alone," they argue (p.171), so they concentrate on mapping connections in individuals' social networks by mining emails. This approach is admittedly less rich than a context-aware approach might be, they say, but it is still powerful -- and they are able to automate it (p.188).

Voida, Mynatt, and MacIntyre go in the same theoretical direction with "Supporting activity in desktop and ubiquitous computing," in which they argue that activities are multifaceted, dynamic, collaborative, multileveled, and distributed across spaces (pp.196-197). They describe Kimura, an activity-centered work environment that supports knowledge workers by separating their digital workspace into a focal region (a monitor) and two peripheral displays (projected on the office walls). Work activities are modeled as document clusters named "working contexts" (pp.199-200), displayed as "a montage of images garnered from system activity logs" (p.200). Toward the end of the article, the authors argue that such an environment can allow users and researchers to conceptualize levels of activity systems (e.g., activity system of the industry, the organization, and specific groups within that organization) (p.216).

Jakob Bardram takes a somewhat different tack, describing "activity-based computing" or ABC, in which "the basic computational unit is not the file ... or the application ... but the activity of the user" (p.224). He contrasts this approach with the traditional design ideal of supporting "tools and materials," a design ideal that meshes well with the assumptions of traditional activity theory; that traditional approach includes a deep skepticism toward workflow, which has been seen as implying human activity as a mental construct rather than arising from material conditions in dialectic with human objectives (p.226). Bardram carefully delineates that approach from ABC, which does not support workflow but a system in which "the human activity defines the computational activity" (p.227). ABC supports the cooperative nature of human activity via computer-based collaborative artifacts (p.228). Bardram supports this point with an empirical case study of ABC in a hospital environment.

We get back in the weeds again with Ravasio and Tscherter's "Users' theories of the desktop metaphor, or why we should seek metaphor-free interfaces." Here, the authors argue that problems stem from "an overly concrete metaphor that no longer applies" (p.265).

Kaptelinin and Boardman are up next in "Toward integrated work environments," which revisits the most successful CSCW application (email), explores why it is so successful, and chronicles Katelinin's work with the UMEA system. The authors point out that email is not a tool but a habitat (p.298) and that users use email for dedicated task management rather than turning to task management software (p.300). They argue that cross-application coordination is needed (but they don't mention Google) (p.304) and describe how UMEA creates project contexts as by-products of work on projects (p.314).

Finally, Moran and Zhai argue in "Beyond the desktop metaphor in seven dimensions" what I have been thinking all along: That a strict concept of the desktop metaphor is a straw man (p.335). We are on our way to a new metaphor, they say (wrongly, I think) (p.335). This is in some ways the only chapter that sounds as if it has been written after 2002 -- Moran and Zhai recognize the existence and repercussions of cloud computing, predict the movement from applications to services, discuss the interaction between collaboration and tagging, emphasize that personal information is becoming public, and talk about how activities are now providing records of experience (p.349). There's not much in this chapter that you won't get from reading TechCrunch, but it's stated in academic terms and interconnected appropriately with research. That is, it's a strong finish to a book that too often seems stuck in 2002.