Understanding users undergoing change: Exploring responses to an innovative, hybrid first-year writing program

Technical communication, rhetorical theory, user-centered theory, and diffusion theory---four disparate areas brought together in this dissertation to examine the adoption of an allegedly user-centered innovation. This project may be of particular interest to technical communication scholars and practitioners, writing program administrators, software developers, usability engineers, and writing instructors who teach technical communication and/or first-year composition. The project is structured in three steps in order to explore the tension that arises each time technical communicators apply the term user-centered to the development of an artifact.;Step one is a critical analysis of the term user-centered. The premise of the review is that the term user-centered has become a slogan in the literature and has little consistency in its meaning and purpose. The discussion examines how the term fluctuates by looking at the various ways scholars define users, explain their needs, and prescribe roles for technical communicators to create more user-centered artifacts.;Step two explains the rationale behind the methods used in this project. Through an introduction to diffusion theory, alternative ways to examine the theory and practice of user-centered design are presented.;Step three provides the context for bringing together the term user-centered and diffusion theory. The context is the First-Year Composition Program at Texas Tech University, which is undertaking a massive restructuring of the way writing instruction is delivered. Specifically, the new Interactive Composition Online (ICON) project separates the process of delivering classroom instruction from the process of delivering instructional feedback and assessment to student writing. The success of ICON relies on the simultaneous adoption by all participants in the composition program's system. For a program that handles close to six thousand students per academic year, this wholesale adoption represents a dramatic shift in the use of computer technology in higher education.;Thus, the purpose of this project is to gain a better understanding of some of the ways in which writing instructors respond to the simultaneous adoption of both a pedagogical and technological innovation. Its goal is to develop more effective means for accommodating the needs of writing program administrators, software developers, writing instructors, and their students.