Writing researchers have long sought to make tacit writing knowledge explicit, rendering it available for learning and critique. We advance this endeavor by describing our use of the “tool-based interview” (TBI) as a variation of Odell, Goswami, and Herrington’s influential discourse-based interview (DBI). Rather than the product-focused textual disruptions of DBIs, TBIs, by altering authors’ writing tools, disrupt conventionalized writing processes, an approach useful when access to texts is limited for security, privacy, confidentiality, or proprietary reasons. We illustrate this method by describing its use in the development of Journaling , a digital tool for intelligence analysts. After describing our research context and procedures, we describe three sample disruptions from our interviews with intelligence practitioners and the knowledge elicited through these. We conclude with a comparison of the knowledge elicited by our TBIs with that from DBIs and discuss the limitations of each in light of recent work on tacit knowledge.

To investigate how college students understand and use cloud technology for collaborative writing, the authors studied two asynchronous online courses, on science communication and on technical communication. Students worked on a group assignment (3–4 per group) using Google Docs and individually reflected on their experience writing collaboratively. This article explores leadership and how it interacts with team knowledge making and the collaborative writing process. Guidelines are outlined for instructors interested in adopting collaborative, cloud-based assignments, and the tension between providing clear instructional guidance for student teams and allowing teams to embrace the ambiguity and messiness of virtual collaboration are discussed.