WRA 453 Grant

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WRA 453Grant Proposal Writing

• Fall 2005
• Bill Hart-Davidson
• hartdav2_at_msu.edu

Session 14 Proposing as a social act PIP, or
proposal microstructure
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Communication Event Models
Proposing activity can be seen as transactional,
intersubjective exchange of information,
thoughts, and speech among participants. Chains
of communicative events.
One approach Visualize the chains
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How Why do we build them?

• How Units used to construct visualizations are
  communication events, taken from diaries
• Why Distributed processes of work can be
  presented in intelligible ways to foster both
  formal inquiry (e.g. research) and informal
  reasoning about practice
• for example

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CEMs for Two Student Teams
These teams were writing a proposal for a new
technical product. Their task was to show that
their design was state-of-the-art.
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New horizontal line for each event that did not
include all team members
Sort Coordination
The distance team was working with people out of
the loop early onwhat if they had known here?
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Paradigmatic Dimension
P
f2f
f2f
P
Paradigmatic How do proposals get started at
SpaceCo?
f2f
f2f
f2f
Syntagmatic Dimension
f2f
P
CAUTION The diagrams here and on the next slide
are mocked up, not models of real data
Syntagmatic How does a project that begins with a
strategy meeting proceed?
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Going deeper
Each is a site of mediated activity too
P
f2f
f2f
P
P
f2f
P
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Studying Proposing Activity, sources
Prior, P., Shipka,J. (2002).Chronotopic
laminations Tracing the contours of literate
activity. In Bazerman, C. Russel, D. Writing
selves/writing societies Research from activity
perspectives. http//wac.colostate.edu/books/selve
s_societies/index.cfm Faigley, L. (1986).
Nonacademic writing The social perspective. In
L. Odell D. Goswami (Eds.) Writing in
nonacademic settings. Gunnarson, B.L. (1997)
The Writing process from a sociolinguistic
viewpoint. Written Communication 14.2. Dourish,
P. (2001). Process descriptions as
organizational accounting devices The dual-use
of workflow technologies. SIGGROUP 01.
ACM. Suchman, Lucy. (1984). Plans situated
actions The problem of human-machine
communication. Cambridge UP.
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PIP A fractal organization scheme for proposing
Persuade Inform Persuade
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Try it proposing an activity
To ensure that our visualizations are usable, we
will invite two expert reviewers from the field
of information visualization to comment and give
feedback on the design. Paul Dourish Barbara
Mirel are two leading researchers in the areas of
information visualizationa and computer-supported
cooperative work. Both have agreed to support
this project by serving as reviewers. We believe
that with the help of Mirel Dourish, our
visualization tool can be integrated into the
work practice of proposal writers who have not
previously used self-analytic tools to improve
their performance.
Persuade Inform Persuade
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Scaled up PIP for methods slot
Line of Argument Here is a methodological
approach that has been shown to be sound in these
previous studies/projects. Line of Argument We
are using the methodological approach, adapting
for our specific project in these ways. Line of
Argument Based on our pilot study and previous
published work, here are the positive outcomes we
expect that match with the goals stated in the
RFP. (e.g. replicability, validity, etc.)
Persuade Inform Persuade
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Scaled down PIP elevator speech
Some colleagues of mine and I are working on a
way to improve proposal writing success by
visualizing the proposing process. We depict
proposing process as chains of communication
events rather than tasks. Task-based
visualizations are not detailed enough, we find,
because knowledge work tasks are themselves made
up of communication events - sometimes many of
them!
Persuade Inform Persuade
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Your PIP practice
Using the PIP structure can be a helpful,
ready-to-hand strategy for all parts of the
proposing process. Try it for yourself!
Persuade Inform Persuade
Draft an elevator speech for your P2 project
using the PIP structure. Post it to your project
page
Not only will this earn you credit for an in
class exercise when you post it to your project
page, you might also find yourself using it for
real when talking to someone about project 2!
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Next Time Guest Speaker!
Martine Rife, RA for the WIDE research center,
will discuss her recent proposing work. Her
presentation will serve as an excellent example
of the reflective approach I am encouraging you
to take with Project 2.