katherine s. miles-finch

rhetoric and professional communication

 

Much of my research is classroom-based and seeks to understand how students interact with new media in order to construct, apply and transfer knowledge.

Currently, I am researching the the use of weblogs in two, linked interdisciplinary courses. Quantitative and qualitative data suggest that the weblogs used in the writing class improve students' performance in the lecture class.

I also continue to research the effects of unfamilar contexts on students' constructions and applications of rhetorical heuristics. This research is situated in a virtual reality CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) in order to study how students react to new conceptual realizations of space/place.



A few of my research interests include:

Multimodal Literacy
Posthuman Rhetorics
Computer-mediated Communication

multimodal literacy

My interest in multimodal literacy stems from a failed attempt to represent, for students, a virtual reality environment using a case-based pedagogy. What I discovered in that particular technical communication course, and what I later researched for my dissertation, was that multimodal contexts (particularly those in which meaning-making is dependent on physical interactions with space/place) resist abstracted representations. Currently, I am investigating the way in which students differentiate between and represent information in three distinct communicative modes: textual, oral and visual.

posthuman rhetoric

My research on multimodal contexts lead me to focus on posthuman philosophy. My primary interest is in the interplay between individuals, groups, technologies, and spaces, and how that interplay contributes to the construction of knowledge. Recently, I have applied distributed cognition theory as a means to understand how students construct representations of rhetorical situations during the invention process.

computer-mediated communication

My research on Weblogs in the composition classroom suggests that social media facilitates collaborative learning and cognitive development in ways that face-to-face classrooms cannot. Currently, I am researching Weblogs (blogs) as a means to facilitate cognitive development and knowledge transfer in two interdisciplinary and linked courses.