bowl happy

Rutgers won its third straight bowl in four appearances. I was happy yesterday. Last night Maryland ganked Nevada. I'm happy today. This afternoon Air Force takes on Houston. It will be the third different team hat I wear this week. I think I'm going to be happy tomorrow.

So many affiliations. So much fun this time of year.

We pass into a new year in a few short hours. To all who hear or read these mundane ramblings, a safe and blessed New Year!

the writer in me

Scott has an old post available for the holiday respite. The argument is so subjective, yet it's always nice to revisit it at different points in your career.

In my second job as a paid "technical" writer, I worked for a guy about ten years younger than me and fresh out of college. He was smart, technically savvy, and something of a documentation whiz. I learned a lot from him about systems-oriented documentation and testing practices. I don't think (at least I don't remember) that he was a very good writer of things other than manuals and testing docs. After our small software company was bought/sold for a second time, he accepted a tech writing gig out of state. At his going away lunch, he told me, "Look man, I don't want to be a technical writer when I'm 45."

That life statement has stuck with me for 15 or so years now. Every once in a while, when I read articles about the lack of artistic "writerly" talent that is involved in really really really good technical writing, I get a little introspective and think about being a writer -- technical or otherwise -- at 45.

I'm a couple years shy of 45 and I find it harder each passing day to accurately call myself a technical writer. But I do wonder about the young guy I worked for -- why he thought that being a technical writer at 45 was something he couldn't feel good about. I wonder about thinking of myself as a writer of any kind, which is also something I'm finding harder to do each day.

Next year is a few sunrises away. There may be a resolution awaiting me on the other side.

teeny tiny hurdles

I received some great feedback from a first-time online instructor who ran a course for us this past summer.

What worked well for him:

Content creation in Blackboard.
Taped mini-lectures using Audacity. "Students loved them!"
Online office hours.
Question-driven threaded discussions.
Online exams and grading.

What didn't work so well for him:

Difficult to monitor what students are learning from the textbook. "It's not possible to assess what they're reading and/or understanding from the book."

Inconvenience of accepting assignments via email. "I'm not sure how to make the submission of narrative work more streamlined: and I didn't get a chance to explore any features of Blackboard that would allow me to edit or comment upon writings right on the online documents themselves."

Of most importance (I think) are his comments about assessing the students during the semester – how does an online instructor know that they are “learning” anything from the readings and activities. One strategy I’ve seen described is using small evaluative exercises specific to a topic or learning activity. In Blackboard these might be simple quiz objects that students complete a few times each week. These exercises might also be questions posed by the instructor to individual students. The questions are intended to drive the student back into the material to find a specific answer.

Whatever the strategy, the onus is on the instructor to continually place in front of the learner an opportunity to verify an understanding of the subject matter. This type of ongoing assessment, of course (or perhaps, arguably), is easier to do in a resident environment because of the potential spontaneity of classroom instruction.

We need to explore this issue in more detail. I'm certain there is something that can be done “outside” the Blackboard box to accommodate ongoing learning assessment. The keys for us are cost and institutional commitment to quality online courses and instruction.

i spy with my little eye

One of the joys of reading is finding connection between the text and your own experiences (there's that whole inter-textuality thing that continues to fascinate me).

In finishing grading the final projects for my ENG 218 course at JCC, I was reminded of how I tend to teach technical description to undergraduates. I like to think that I meet students half way -- creating a learning opportunity in a space that is comfortable and familiar to them. Most 218 students have taken the/a freshman comp course, so I try to build the technical description sequence around what the students already know about observation (subjectivity vs. objectivity, the writer's lens, etc.). While the resulting technical descriptions are somewhat predictable in structure and style, there are always one or two descriptions that give me pause to reflect on the role good writing plays in effective technical writing.

I re-read The Snow Leopard a few weeks ago. I enjoy reading it in the fall, trying to finish sections on the same dates that Matthiessen made the entries in his journal (corny, yes). So, coming back to my point: in reading some of the technical descriptions embedded in a few of the ENG 218 final projects, I saw in the descriptions the same strategies and techniques Matthiessen employed as a naturalist observing the habits (mating and otherwise) of blue sheep. Thinking further now, I'm wondering if the technical descriptions I found most compelling were system or process descriptions, rather than traditional "characteristic" descriptions. Regardless, I'm reassured by the ability of young technical writers to approach a project as writers first.

There is more to say here than I'm getting at. Maybe it has something to do with my bias toward the scientific method and objectivity in observation.

art, artistry, and boredom

This post reminded me of some of the distance I felt during a methodologies course a few years ago. Among other texts, we read Bazerman's The Language of Edison's Light. I highly recommend this text to anyone interested in the rhetorical nature of technical communication.

So why did the post remind me of the course? My classmates were all cultural rhetoricians in training. I was the only comp track student. Compounding my alienation was my reading of the Bazerman text as a technical communicator, not a compositionist. Unlike my classmates (who saw the text as a social commentary about male chauvinism and rampant capitalism during the early parts of the 20th century), I saw the text as a case-study about the art, artistry, and skills required to create purposeful and effective technical communication.

With a complete appreciation for my classmates' perspectives, I came out of the class disappointed that such bright people could not see in the text the many analogies to modern rhetorical theories. By casting Edison's and his engineers' technical writing as forms of discourse and written expression, Bazerman illustrated profiles of technical rhetoricians within definable design and development activity systems. And if, has James Berlin has told us, the term rhetoric refers to a diverse discipline that historically has included a variety of incompatible systems, then the activity systems documented by Bazerman represent one large system--technical communication--because it involves a particular variety of rhetoric--a way of speaking and writing within the confines of specific social sanctions. That is the work of the rhetorician and artisan.

It's not that far of a stretch. I'm reminded that I should pick the text up again. I'm feeling a little less than artistic these days.

yeah, i'm a technical writer

Tom and Anne have some great threads about the "character" of a technical writer. This, however, always cracks me up:

the sesame street model

The note about the DVDs is fascinating when you consider the implications for distance learning.

long-tail of irrelevance

Maybe this is more obvious than I'm making it, but how do technical communicators reconcile the concept of "enough relevant information" with the basic value propositions of the long-tail?

Alan makes a great point here about productivity, necessity, and relevance. But doesn't Chris' basic premise (it seems like it was decades ago) argue that somewhere, someone will find that nugget of knowledge and be better off for it? The user who turns to the section of documentation that hasn't been accessed in five years is a user who needs information. The information is found, the task is completed, and the user is happy. Alan's argument assumes that there is some scale of value that technical communicators should consider when constructing and publishing an information product. If one user accesses a section of the documentation once every five years, Alan seems to argue that the section is not (necessarily) needed. One could save time and cost by simply not updating or including the infrequently used section.

And yet there is the obvious suggestion that one happy user is worth the time and cost to update the section. The information is only relevant when it's needed. Surely modern documentation techniques and technologies have made it possible for us to expand the amount of information we can include in our information products without dramatically increasing the time and cost to do so. Somewhere way back on the documentation tail is a tidbit of information that will one day make a user a happy (return) customer. A tough sell to the budget director, I know, but documentation always has been -- and will continue to be.

ADDENDUM: A case in point, although the comment about Macs having shipped with a thick book is pathetic because it assumes that the Mac is well-designed and user-friendly.

free scale

I'm sure there is a way to make this work in higher education. The biggest challenge, I imagine, is convincing the leather-patch Q-tip heads that there really is a means to expand on the traditional recruitment and retention models so faithfully followed lo these many years.

I'd hate to see someone like Capella or the University of Phonyix get there first.

how minimal is minimal?

I'm still waiting for Twitter to morph. Into what, I'm not sure, but there is something about the 140 character limit that is... limiting. Tom and one of his commentors make a good point about the scope and nature of tweets. The type of "product info" that the WebWorks folks are publishing seems to be something less than a traditional technical communication product (not there is any specific definition of a "traditional" tech com product). I'm imagining these small WebWorks info bits fit in somewhere between psuedo-tech com and quasi-marketing. It's a gray area that technical communicators need to be conscious of; aware of how the minimal space shapes the type and usefulness of the information product placed therein.

My personal bias being obvious, I always twinge (not tweet) a little when technical communicators start to bandy around the phrase "brand awareness."

plain usability

The Plain English movement is alive and well. Before it was formalized into a proper noun, we called it good technical writing. Scott's example is funny, and I appreciate his comments about appropriate documentation for a busy work environment. But that, I think, is exactly the space we (technical communicators) should be focused on. Too often we see decisions about environmental analysis left to industrial and instructional designers. As content developers, those decisions saddle us to craft an information product in a predetermined environmental context. It's part of the argument for a holistic treatment of technical communication as an inter-disciplinary practice.

perspective is everything

There is a theory that ".edu" email extensions carry more ethos than other extensions. I find the theory funny (and maybe a little pathetic). It's entirely likely that the people espousing the theory are faculty. Yes, that's entirely likely. I'll have to mention this to our MX managers the next time I ask them why AOL is kicking back all mail out of our domain.

answerable to the customer

This, I believe, is one reason why Pablo decided he wasn't right for the job. It seems to me there were fundamental differences of opinion about this topic within the upper echelon. But that's just me looking upward.

The biggest problem with these sort of claims is that the terms are always murky. Ask students if they want a robust and stable wireless network. They say yes and leave their laptops at home, opting instead to position for limited machines in the clusters.

"Technology" continues to mean something very different to our students. Each year (each week?) the term encompasses more than instructors, researchers, and technologists can effectively process. What you're left with is a gap between expectation and reality. I don't know that the gap can ever be closed.

my my myths

If IT was at the curriculum design table, SU would be a much "richer" university -- in all the ways the term applies. Great article, but I'm not sure I see IT being the driver. Maybe the facilitator -- the conduit -- but not the driver.

Myth One: Is this guy a closet Compositionist?

Myth Two: This keeps instructional designers and instructional technologists up at night.

Myth Three: Oh yeah, ask any parent trying to pry the game controller from their 11 year old kid's pale white hand.

more randomness

To those who know me, don’t ever – ever – allow me to bad mouth Jim Boeheim again. This team is not that good, but they knocked off Florida and Kansas in two days. They are, however, better coached than 25 teams ranked ahead of them in the pre-season, and every team with the exception of UConn in the Big East pre-season rankings. I’ve seen them play more man-up in the last two nights than I’ve seen over the last 20 years. Uncle Jim is coaching to the talent on the floor, like great coaches do.

Have you seen the first couple of ESPN games with The General doing analyst work? He has forgotten more about the game of basketball than the average person will ever want to know. I’ve concluded that the people who don’t like Knight are the same people who talk like they know college hoops. Not to sound too ridiculous, but there is a beauty, rhythm, structure and – most importantly – history to the game that gets harder and harder to connect with. Knight is connected.

My sister and brother-in-law get major props for being Ball State Cardinals. This is not the same team that Rutgers shellacked last year in Toronto. Don’t count Buffalo out of the conference championship game in Detroit. Regardless of what The Idiotman says, Turner Gil is on the short list to replace G-Rob. Buffalo is a good defensive team, but holy crap, can Ball State spread the field.

Dilbert’s lock of the week: The Oregon St. Beavers over the Oregon Ducks for a Rose Bowl berth. The Beav’s haven’t been there since 1965. I like the nostalgia and the fact they have the best team name in college sports.

Dilbert’s lock prediction for March 2009: The Big East will absolutely dominate the early rounds of the tournament and have two teams in the Final Four.

Dilbert’s lock prediction for 2010: I will always hate the NBA for what it has done to the game of basketball. However, one cannot help but to be amazed at what Lebron James does – coast-to-coast, half-court, posting up, one-on-one. The Knickerbockers will get their smack together and put James on The Garden floor in 2010.

mittwoch randomness

The Good Doctor stepped aside. Not surprised, but a little put off by the lack of communication after the fact. I should come to expect the vaccum. Excited by the possibilities that top-level turn over brings. There is a core of young, smart, and deliberate technologists in place up there. We're still moving forward and that's always good.

Not surprised that SU squeeked by Richmond. The Spiders aren't that good. SU is that mediocre. Devenduh under judicial investigation. It's going to be a long NIT season Uncle Jim.

UNC is not that good -- even with The Savior suited up.

Great time of year, so you get to fly through the possibilities: I love all things about Texas Tech -- on the gridiron and the hardwoods. Don't ask me why. I spent one long miserable year in the armpit of the country and vowed to react with disgust to all things Texas. That was a long time ago. Before ESPN ruled the known world, before anyone could dream of the The General donning a sweater of deeper red, and long before I realized how hard college athlethes work to perform at the level that they do.

stupid statements - tell me i'm a moron

The argument Bob makes here is ridiculous and on a certain level quite insulting. His framework assumes that once an IT decision, strategy, policy, etc. is made (in his case, aligned with the business), it doesn't or cannot change. Maybe Bob has been blathering too long for pay.

The other thing that irks me about Bob's article is that I actually read it. I can't help but think he intentionally made a round of stupid comments to increase traffic to his blog. I've had similar suspicions about Nicolas Carr. I feel many of those suspicions have been validated by his recent apologist qualifications of his claim-to-fame deflating of the CIO and all strategic value relating to IT.

I know it's the nature of this navel gazing game. It reminds me of this most excellent comment on the state of online social space and the need to be heard.

It's a big void Bob. I recommend screaming loader, longer, and with a bit more ignorance.

remembering foucault

This article is hilarious in so many ways. It reminded me why I'm so intrigued by words, usability, and heuristics. It also reminded me that I actually did get something out of Michel Foucault and those painfully drawn-out course work discussions about structuralism, post-structuralism, and post-post-pokemeintheeyewithaforkism.

tell me about it

Kids aren't as stupid as we think they are.

This is why next year I'm going to have a single section of WRT 407 with fifty computer and electrical engineers. That's 50. My tizzy about how we're going to pull that off aside, I'm excited and inspired by the college's ability to be out in front this time.

virtually relative

This is why desktop virtualization is the darling of the moment. IT budget mongers are drunk on the possibility of the 10-year old desktop. Make my mine a double, no ice and a splash of water.

how bleak is bleak

Will Kelly may have it right - maybe. I think Scott has a better perspective. We will always have the group of technical writers who put a premium on the writing. From experience and anecdotal observation, these are the hacks who find themselves slogging through marcom dreck and dreaming about the next great American novel they'll never write. The tech writers who emphasize the tech are the writers who get the jobs. It may not be a sea change, but there are tech com programs that get it -- the move to develop more than a student's writing and editing skills in such a way that it's not a simple academic folly. Really bright people like Johndan get it and are moving the field in the right direction.

the carousel

I like Tom Johnson. I like this post. I don’t know if I agree completely with this comment:

Nowadays, tech writers are a dime a dozen. Companies hire them as needed and discard them when the immediate need is past. Companies will hire programmers and DBAs and QA personnel as regular employees because they have a direct effect on the process of turning out marketable product. But tech writers do not. So when a company reaches a point where it needs to field a help system or some other kind of documentation for customer use, they’ll hire a TW on a 6-month contract and when it’s over, he’s out the door.

Tom’s comment implies that at some point before “nowadays” there was a halcyon time of plentiful tech com jobs and 25 year stretches of employment with the same company. I don’t think this has ever been the case in the IT industries Tom invokes (programmers, DBAs, and QA personnel). Tech comm has always been and always will be expendable. It’s the nature of the practice and one of the consequences of business viability.

gotta make the donuts

Apparently, CIOs are increasingly being asked to do more than just IT. The shifting focus is on business projects. I'm sure there has been plenty already written about why the shift is taking place. I'm going to venture a few perspective-based guesses.

First guess: Most organizations suffer from a glut of leaders who read all the right books and talk all the right talk, but don't really know how to do much of anything. Most IT people cut their teeth on doing. The knowing got them hired. It's not likely that the organization seeks out the doer. Rather, the doer starts getting crazy over the inertia and just starts doing.

Second guess: No longer being considered a strategic asset, IT people have to find other ways to increase their value to their organizations. Business process improvement is a logical space and one that all organizations struggle with.

Third guess: IT people hate boredom and love to systematize everything.

It may not keep you off the chopping block, but the shifting focus does serve to keep you busy, satisfy short-term needs, and provide resume fodder for the next chapter.

who's driving the bus

"Since he was so familiar with the power of Web 2.0 tools and was surrounded by people who felt the same, he hadn't realized how many college students didn't actually have experience using these types of 21st century tools." (context)

Tough spot to be in. That's what you get for making broad assumptions about your students. Don't treat them like they're all plugged in 24x7, reading The Onion (or Wired), and waiting on the next tweet, twitter, ditter, or doodle. Good instruction starts with knowing who your students are and what they individually bring to the table. Don't think that they'll find it (or you) cool or hip just because it has to do with web-based technology.

interdisciplinarity

Anne has it correct. I note that with slight resignation. What is the best way to get technical communicators to see, value, understand, and exploit the interdisciplianary nature of their practice? I once blamed it on IDDErs. Shame on me.

wordless

Classic. I love these sort of validating perspectives. It reminds me that a good technologist's caution is warranted, if not necessary.

The Hype Cycle, used by Gartner to track the adoption of new technologies, has five distinct phases:

1. Technology Trigger
2. Peak of Inflated Expectations
3. Trough of Disillusionment
4. Slope of Enlightenment
5. Plateau of Productivity

radical dude!

"Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. Blogging is writing out loud." -- Andrew Sullivan

I like that. It's as close to extreme sports as I'll ever get. Back in the USAF, there were a couple of extreme sport A-holes who would occasionally find their way to the basketball court. I couldn't stand these guys -- and not because they sucked on the hardwood. Maybe it was the forced lingo, the scuba diving symbol tattoos, and the always empty kayaking racks on their intentionally muddy Jeeps purchased with loans they couldn't afford. Whatever the reason, I've never been able to appreciate extreme sports. Sorry Tony Hawk.

See, I'm already feeling more alive

virtually limited

The buzz about virtualization isn't quite deafening yet. We do have much to be excited about. I'm particularly geeked up about the possibility of bleeding our PCs white with a virtual desktop environment. My initial concerns have had to do with performance.

In an informative briefing given by one of the ITS gurus (he's actually a brilliant technologist), I got a hint of a pending performance breakthrough. It was my understanding that performance in virtualized environments is bottlenecked because a single VM can only use four vCPUs. My understanding was that adding virtual guests when the VM has access to a single vCPU dimishes the guest's performance. However, it was mentioned in the informative briefing that this limitation is about to change. Apparently, even with the current four vCPU limitation, the lastest versions of the four most popular virtualization technologies (they'll remain nameless because I'm just not in the mood) are all meeting or exceeding performance requirements with six VMs running with one vCPU allocated per VM.

I'm feeling better already about a 47% hardware/software line item reduction.

ah, 15% of that

The exercise was easier than I expected. That does not mean it didn't hurt. Not quite the corncob pain I remember from past austerity dances. No, this was a little less invasive.

With my general operating line item still intact, I was able to surgically remove approximately 47% of my hardware/software line item. With 2/3 of desktop machines upgraded in the past year and the remaining third still only 3-5 years old, I'm feeling confident we can weather the rest of this fiscal with what we already have. With our file, print, and mail servers now centralized with main campus, our only big metal assets are a large web server, one large web dev server, one small app server, a dedicated LMS box, and one test box. All relatively new with the server OS already paid for.

See, I already feel better looking at my justification in print. So what doesn't get done? Well, our training and travel budget was going to come out of the hardware/software line item because we were charged on July 2 for last fiscal's travel. Thank you budget office. That means no conferences, training, re-certs, junkets, seminars, etc. It also means looking for more creative ways to provide professional development opportunities to a staff that thrives on and requires continuous learning.

It's going to be a rewarding next couple of months.

the passions run deep

Technology is an extremely personal thing. We all have our particular likes, dislikes, suffrages, and delights. I know this. It's why we review, analyze, vet, test, and reverse engineer technologies and processes before we ask our end-users to adopt them as their own -- in sickness and in health.

So while I'm not overly surprised by responses to this, I'm wondering about motivation and argument. Claim and warrant are both shaped by the rhetor's passion for the subject, at least that's the way it used to be. It's this passion that I'm curious to understand better, particularly when we're talking about something as innocuous as a network operating system.

In spite of my efforts to qualify my comments, there remains this need to have the last word. It's like arguing with my kid about why he needs to have his license on him when he's driving the car that I still insure. It's a reaction that I understand, but nonetheless wish I experienced less. Julie makes two absolute guarantees in her claims about Netware/Groupwise vs. AD/Exchange. Richard is similarly compelled to reiterate the notion of fiscal irresponsibility in selecting a Microsoft solution. In both cases, I'm struck by and admire the strength of their conviction and the urgency in their tone.

What I can't swallow is the implication that our decision to adopt an AD/Exchange campus computing environment was wrong. The implication isn't palatable because it assumes there is a "right" decision. I guess it's like anything: you have opinions and convictions that drive you to accept certain beliefs. In some cases you hold onto those convictions so long that you simply can't consider any alternative, compromise, or compelling context. In other cases, you're driven to continue to hold onto something because you just can't tolerate, accept, or otherwise co-exist with the alternatives.

This is why I think we've been modestly successful in our IT work at UC. We know that technology is personal and that technologists get really geeked up when you start bandying around options, directions, and future-think. Maybe I'm just getting tired of the outliers who continue to screech the same old tunes I've been listening to since the days of the Lisa and X-Windows. Yeah, maybe I'm just getting tired.

get me my bourbon smee!

This always cracks me up. I see this argument rear it's little pea-brained head about as often as the "tech writers need certification" debate. I too have seen SMEs attempt to develop technical information products. It's likely what drives me to teach young engineers how to do technical communication better than they assume they can. It's also why I know good technical communicators will never starve or have something interesting to talk about at the company picnic.

15% of what!?

It’s not quite the writing on the wall, but there are faint glimmers of text underneath the white-wash job they slopped on in 2001. That would be the last time the university underwent a knee-jerk reaction to a downturn in the economy.

So much of higher education seems to run counter to common sense and the general directions you would expect things to go when the economy gets really crappy. Traditionally, more students decide to stay in school (particularly grad school) when the job outlook is bleak. Similarly, schools such as University College see slight enrollment increases as out-of-work adults look for retraining and retread opportunities. All of that means nothing when the mother ship's general endowment (the investments from all those wealthy alumi donors) takes a 40-60% hit. Yeah, that's a lot of operational dough.

The surprised look around the table after the Dean announced a 5% budget hacking this fiscal and additional 10-15% next fiscal made me smile a little. Deep down inside I was thinking that now is the time these people have to stop playing like they know how to run a business and actually do something business-like. When I think about why and how certain departments in the organization have dedicated operational budgets, I get a small pain in my lower back. It's the pain you get from sitting on your wallet all day, only to ask yourself, "Why do I carry a wallet anyway? My wife has all the money. Maybe it just makes me feel like I'm really in control of something."

It’s been a long and windy complaint of mine that for the most part, people working in higher education fail to understand that what they are doing is selling a product. Arguments about what that product actually is occasionally get way off track, especially when undertaken by people with Ph.D.s in education or textual studies. Suffice it to say that regardless of what the product is, enough people on most campuses wouldn’t know the product if it was marked by a rotting moose carcass on the quad.

In a really creepy (almost scary) way, I’m really geeked-up about the possibility of showing my colleagues how to carve out 15% of a budget without canceling the coffee service. I honestly think that those of us with enough scars from the private sector can bring a fair amount of calm and diligence to an otherwise weepy-eyed job.

Results and better suggestions to follow.

hey mitch, go tend to the hogs

We’re coming up on two years into our migration off eDirectoy to Active Directory. It was my decision to push UC’s early adoption. We were spending too much money on Novell licenses for the OS and a dedicated GroupWise mailbox, not to mention the hardware.

Now the problem is governance. The campus has a tight small group of dedicated experts working as the technical gods. They’re extremely good forest admins. UC is luck y that we have a guy who is just as good, if not better. Now the campus group knows it. Our guy has been pushing enough on the tech side, and I’ve been gripping enough about protocol and policy that they’ve asked our guy to join their little team. It’s a good move for our guy and great gain for them.

In the coming weeks I plan to put governance back on the AD team’s radar. It’s too important to decentralize in a university as dysfunctional as ours. The way I see it we have to focus on 1) systematizing compliance, 2) centralizing policy vetting and object packaging, 3) developing a reproducible core skill sets for sit admins, and 4) defining a clear path for ongoing management, maintenance and development.

That’s what I’m going to propose. Lofty? Not really. When you consider the consequences of doing nothing (and the path we’re headed down now), they seem like fairly pragmatic and necessary goals.

who has time for the blah, blah, blah?

Not me apparently. It’s been so long that I’ve forgotten I had an outlet for navel gazing and whining. Coming back is like finding that old bottle of Wild Turkey I forgot I had on the back shelf of the pantry. That and the old Fuente I found in the travel humidor that I keep in my fishing tackle bag. Nice find. Better when I can find the time to enjoy them.

more irony

Interesting article. Here's what's funny: The guy belabors the fact that years of online reading (surfing, scanning, scratching, etc.) has changed the way he reads. And yet, here he is, writing a long, drawn-out argument which he hopes we'll wade through -- as if we wont scan, scratch, and sniff through the page to get the gist, find his principle point, and move on. Better to modify your writing habits based on how you and a million other droids now read.

Just because you write it, does not mean that they'll read it.

multi-learning

This discussion has some obvious implications for online learning. Of particular interest are the claims made about the use of multiple media during or to facilitate a learning or information transfer activity. Here we are as course designers and information technologists, struggling to find effective uses of technologies to gather, push, pull, mash, and otherwise make accessible a range of content and information resources. Now we are to consider the possible (relative) negative effects of these solutions.

Is it possible that the asses-in-seats folks have had it right all along?

before the sillyness

I took a vacation day, mostly to spend some time with S. But he had a buddy spend the night, which meant that he'd be sleeping in this morning. So before catching up on some reading, I drove up to the Oneida River at about 0630. I set up just below the Caughdenoy dam. It was open and the water was running too hard. Some folks don't mind water moving that fast. I find that I'm fighting the water and not paying attention to the feel of the line.


I moved east above the dam. Slower water, but nothing but a few random nibbles. Back down on the canal (the Anthony cut that runs west out of the lake below the river) the water was glassy, the morning air was cool, and the fishing sucked. Choice morning though. There's a slim chance I can get back up there tonight. Those fish, they ain't going anywhere.

square peg - round hole

This is why people with graduate degrees in textual studies should not teach writing. The guy is failing nine out of 15 students per semester. The project manager in me says, "Whoa chief, let's evaluate what you're doing and how you're doing it." The skills-oriented writing instructor in me says, "If you're asking students in a community college writing class to read "Araby" and Hamlet, then you better be prepared for a lot of push back, yawning, tuning out, and frustration." The guy is wondering why his students are not improving as writers. Hmmm. I may be way off, but I'm going to guess that he's not actually teaching them how to write.

you got that right

All of the consultants I've been asked to meet with the last few years have made mention of Chris Anderson's Long Tail Theory. Sean Branagan was especially excited about how we (University College) might be able to apply the theory to marketing/selling higher education "products."

This article, while focusing on commercial product selling, seems to refute the core proposal of Anderson's theory: that the Internet is changing everything we know about marketing and selling. A short quote from the article:

"The Web is clearly changing cultural consumption patterns, but those changes don't seem to involve the sort of drastic flattening of demand curves predicted by the Long Tail. While whole new cultural categories -- YouTube videos, for example -- are indeed emerging, they seem to quickly settle into the same winner-take-all dynamic experienced in the pre-Google age. Don't toss out those old paradigms just yet."

This short blog post from Robert Scoble reminded me that while Anderson's theory is intriguing, at UC we continue to do the core technologies and strategies extremely well, especially when you consider the budgetary and staffing constraints in which we perform.

glued organization

This is a really interesting discussion about what tech writers traditionally call glue text and advanced organizers in tech docs. Many moons ago I had a dog-eared text with an entire chapter dedicated to the effective use of transitional and organizational textual elements in technical documents. Admittedly, I've been a long-time advocate of their use.

Hackos' position and descriptions are relevant at this moment because we're currently working through the procedural and declarative information module in WRT 307. I've always presented declarative information as the contextual bubble in which procedural information is considered. But I like how JoAnn describes the common misuse of contextual information and how it can bog down or compromise the text.

With the discussion of structured documentation aside, I think I'll be using this article in WRT 407 this fall. I'm still hoping to restructure the writing activities within a DITA framework. We'll see how it goes.

... and because I like to brag: Opening day I landed a few pan fish and one wee Large Mouth. On the second glorious morning I pulled this beauty on a night crawler. Papa was returned in good health with a clean release.

randomness

I caught a few minutes of Pulp Fiction last night on the idiot box. It loses a lot when edited for TV. It's been a while since I saw the entire reel. I remembering needing to watch it twice to appreciate it. This time I caught the scene where Uma tells JT that there are two types of people in the world: Elvis people and Beatles people.

I think I could have been an Elvis person if it wasn't for a neighbor I had for a few years growing up. She was a cruel, large, hateful women with two bratty kids and a rail-thin worm of a husband. They moved to Jersey from Texas and liked to explain at ever turn how they had just moved to Jersey from Texas. When Elvis died I was 11 years old. I remember that it was all over the three channels we got at the time. Every radio station was playing montages for days. That reaction was expected. What I didn't expect and remember most displeasurably from August 1977 is my neighbor walking around her back yard sobbing uncontrollably about the Large Man's passing. This went on for hours. If you didn't know any better, you'd think she was having liposuction done with a vacuum and a straw. At one point, I remember my old man just looking toward her yard and shaking his head. He was speechless, and that's a pretty hard thing to do to my old man.

So I think that's why I never developed a better appreciation for Elvis. I love the Blues. I listen to Jazz. I like Rockabilly more than I probably should. But thanks to my hideous neighbor, I just can't get my arms around Elvis (and there honestly is not a pun intended there).

nothing for its own sake

This is exactly why I think I do a pretty decent job of keeping UC from jumping all over every next killer app that raises its sexy yet untested head.

thank you facebook

Hillarious! This is exactly why I have such a hard time seeing social network spaces for anything more than what they are.

oh loathsome blogger

Fantastic gaps in my writing. Same old excuses. Some catch up: WRT 307 is clicking along. It's a lively bunch in that the discussions are rich with the students' personal examples and lively in that the discussions deviate a bit from the routine, "I also too agree" blather. It's still early in the semester, but I'm hopeful they can sustain the activity. I've not found it necessary to get involved in the discussion yet (although I do fight the the urge). The podcasts seem to be well-received. I haven't heard from any students that they'd prefer the ol' textual responses and feedback.

Attending the NYS Tech Summit yesterday and today. My overall assessment: plenty lame. The vendor displays are all hardware/network wiring related, which should be expected since CableExpress is the sponsor. The presentations are mostly sales-pitchy. I actually found myself nodding off in one this morning. I need to be more selective with these types of conferences. I used to go for the workshop/instructional conferences, but that was when I was doing hardcore tech com. It's harder to justify those now. Maybe something next year.

Must catch up on my reading, which almost always leaves me with something to write about.

the Q word

I'm reading this cool little book titled 201 Principles of Software Development. It's a fun read - I get through five or six principles each morning waiting for the bus.

I've long seen parallel principles among software development, technical communication, and instructional design. I'm still convinced that there are a set of universal principles that apply to all design/development disciplines. The few principles in the book that address quality remind me that there are core considerations all designers/developers need to work from.

In technical communications (and software development), the word "quality" does not have a singular meaning. The subjective nature of seeing quality in an information product makes measuring quality a moving target. And this is something that technical communicators need to understand. On some projects, quality might be an elegant document design or logical information structure. On a lot of projects, quality might be delivering a solid, functional product in a timely and cost-effective manner. The issue for technical communicators is that not all definitions of quality are compatible. That's where the fun in the project meetings begins.

professional shorthand

Before we ended our one-week classroom session in WRT 307, we talked a little bit about the use of informal writing in technical and professional contexts.

I just read a brief note about a Pew study which shows 64 percent of teenagers admit they use informal writing styles in their school work. There is the now folklore story about the British student who submitted an assignment written entirely in text message shorthand. That's not what the Pew study revealed. More specifically (and perhaps more challenging for writing instructors), the study indicated that young students find it acceptable and easy to integrate emoticons, informal punctuation and grammar, and text message shorthand while authoring in formal contexts.

So rather than take a hard-ass instructional stance, it seems that our challenge as teachers of writing is to understand how these stylistic changes affect what we're trying to achieve in the classroom. And perhaps the challenge is greater for professional and technical genres: integrating informal styles in such a way as to not compromise the organization, logic, structure, and concision of a document.

poopy podcast

I've given it a run. My first ever podcast. I decided to use Gcast. No surprise there. The fact that I'm using Blogger should be evidence enough that I'm not very much into overhead when it comes to the technology I use on a relatively regular basis.

My hope is that I can use the podcasts to supplement the textual announcements I post (in Blackboard) during the semester. I've mentioned we've got a WRT 307 underway this summer. Most of the textual posts tend to be reactionary comments on what I'm seeing in the submitted work, or a general comment about that week's topics. My hope is that the podcast will fill in some of the blanks -- or at the very least, some of the compositional "stuff" that is difficult at best to relate textually, without going dissertationesque.

We'll see how it works out.

dancin' with myself

Roaming Collin's space... a funny point about blogging for an audience of one. Why is that funny? Well, it's not quite HA HA funny, just more of a "pause and think about it" kind of funny.

I used to journal a lot. Maybe too much. It started to tapper off after the boys were born. It came to a screeching halt when I started grad school. It turned into a forgotten outlet when I started bringing work home with me.

For all of the obvious reasons (covered ad naseum in millions of spaces), blogging scratches that itch for me. And while I do write with a general sense of audience, the target reader in my head is me. I've always written this way. I know serious writers would disagree (and there's plenty of composition theory to argue otherwise), but I write best when I write to myself.

"Mirror mirror..."

seedlings of change

The other night in WRT 307, we had a short discussion about the pace at which communication norms change in business. The bottom line: While certain genres retain specific structures and elements (the memorandum, for example, has not changed in 100 years), the style [loaded term] of the writing can, has, and will continue to change.

The conversation shifted to the range of writing styles that college students are asked to navigate. There are the informal modes (IM, blogging, Twitter, FaceBook, texting, etc.), the standardized academic modes, and the business/technical modes which they are entering.

There are a lot of considerations wrapped up here, such as changing learning styles and globalization. I did find this article more than tangentially related. I particularly liked the notes about how work tools need to mirror web tools.

It's why I love teaching professional and technical communication. Really.

marvelous sounds

Krista had a wonderful post about memorable sounds. How eclectic.

Late yesterday afternoon, when the backyard was buried in the shadow of the house, I heard the unmistakable "slap/smack" of a baseball hitting a glove. It was a regular pattern, occasionally interrupted by an errant throw no doubt. The interesting thing: The sound was one-sided. There wasn't a reciprocal slap/smack, as you'd hear during a game of catch. When I snuck a peek out the kitchen window, I saw D and S tossing a hardball. D was using one of the lacrosse sticks. S was using his glove. With the curiousness of the sound figured out, I settled in on the sight,which was plenty rewarding.

Maybe I'm getting mushy. Maybe they're growing up too fast. Maybe it's a lot of both.

blank spaces

We finished the first week of the limited residency WRT 307 on Friday night. I've mentioned before how much I like this format. The classroom sessions allow you to put a name to a face. More importantly for me, it allows us to clarify our expectations for the course.

The issue of expectations (what instructors expect of their students) comes up at every online faculty training session. It's like a bunch of old Italian mothers sitting around complaining about their son-in-laws. And when I mention to the gaggle that should also consider telling their students what they, in turn, should expect from their instructors, a short "Oh yeah" silence settles in the room.

I need to pick up some of the great work Coach Dan started here in regard to faculty training. It's an obvious opportunity to work in some the Quality Matters tools and design evaluation. At the very least, we could begin to formalize the Instructor Worksheet, may even making it required for anyone teaching a full online section for UC.

So much fun and good work to do.

It looks like a good 307 group this summer. I'm looking forward to seeing what we can come up with.

gotta make the donuts

5:30 - pop up like toast
5:45 - remind H what time it is
6:00 - downstairs, email, OJ, vitamin, H's harsh tarry-like coffee (which she loves)
6:05 - make sure D is up and in the shower. He's taking a Summer I bio - that's five days a week on campus
6:06 - toggle between Sports Center and Robin Meade (depending on what she's wearing)
6:30 - get S out of the sack for his 30 minutes "I'm a teenager" ritual
6:35 - empty the dishwasher
6:55 - finish making S's breakfast, watch D pace the room to make sure he has everything for class
7:00 - remind D to put gas in his car and drive safe
7:05 - serve S his breakfast, kiss H goodbye, and discuss diner plans as she flurries out the door
7:15 - clean up breakfast stuff, get S upstairs to brush his teeth and play with his hair
7:29.01 - remind S that the bus comes at 7:30
7:30 - ask S to make sure he has lunch money as he struts out the door

By the time I get to work most days, I feel like I've run five miles. The sad part: I would love to be able to run five miles. I know it gets easier. At least, that's what I was promised.

hope yet

S is thirteen. While driving him and a buddy to laser tag, I half-listened their animated discussion about the music they've recently placed on their ever-shrinking players.

I was pleasantly surprised to hear them mention a Scorpions standard. I was shocked when they started swapping Ramones titles. I almost stopped dead on the highway when I heard S say something about "it's just a shot away."

"How's the song go?"
"I don't know, it starts really slow, but gets wicked good when the girl starts singing."

Yeah, it gets wicked, wicked, wicked-assed good. I wanted to mention the steel guitar, but thought better of it. Why ruin their discovery.

When we got home, I fired up the laptop and took a look at S's play list. Sure enough, there was Gimme Shelter, wedged between a Panic at the Disco title and something by Linkin Park.

"Rock is dead they say..."

maybe a little clearer

A brief addendum to the earlier post (it's been something of a productive thinking/writing morning)...

Here are framing thoughts that I'll take into my review with my ever-energetic, but completely overworked dean:

• I need to better calculate our ROI in regard to technology. I need to look for measures of the investments will pay off. This will be difficult: In higher-ed, we want to make sure that every investment supports enrollment and retention. With part-time commuting students, this becomes difficult. Technology is not on their radar as something that influences their decision to attend UC.

• I need to work harder to align the goals of University College with those of the university. I need to explain to the University CIO the college’s issues and aspirations, and translate them in terms of what UC can do and what’s a realistic outcome for technology.
  

• I need to formalize a certification training path for at least one principle member of my team, and possible all who are interested.

• I need to increase the amount of time I talk to end-users. I need to meet with student representatives at least once per semester; I need to visit departments; break-down silos; and to set-up power users (champions) in the building. I need to regularly meet with department heads to learn if IT is doing a good job supporting their goals.

• I need to know what issues are worrying my boss.

• I need to better understand the academic and business aspects of higher-ed and align that with where the college (and the university) wants to be a decade from now.

little friends

It's a phone camera shot, so you can barely make out the huge heron perched on a fallen limb across the canal. I like to think it's the same heron I see there year after year. I know why he likes that side of the canal: there are always fish jumping, well out of reach of even my best and longest cast (which is never very far). The logs, limbs, and over-hanging vegetation make for a nice place to be a fish. One dry day this summer, I'll cross at the lock just east of this spot and make my way down through the brush. Heron are never wrong when it comes to fish.

blurred vision

I finished my leadership development workshop last Friday. Overall, it was a positive experience. I can't really say that I learned anything specific – anything that I feel like I didn’t already have some sense of. What it did do well was to articulate most of the things we might call “business acumen” in a context that exposed levels of importance.

So I got to thinking about leadership, my job, and how I can give myself a gut check on occasion, just to see if I’m doing what I’m supposed to do. From something of a removed perspective, I feel that my most import job is to make sure that the technology used on campus and in our college align with the goals (and vision) of the college. And this is where things have been tricky lately (which I think explains some of my frustration over the past few months): It’s no longer clear to me what the goals and vision of the college are. I can evaluate technologies and perform needs assessments until I’m blue in the face. But if the technologies and solutions I’m proposing don’t align with or support the college’s goals, I’m wasting my time.

I recently read a brief article on what it takes to be a great CIO in higher-ed. The bottom line: you have to understand your college’s academic and business requirements, and you have to know where your college (and in our case, the university) wants to be a decade from now. My challenge is to better understand these requirements, goals, and visions while still providing our staff, students, and faculty with a supportive and innovative computing environment.

I have a performance review coming up. This will be a topic of discussion.

you're lame now

Too much going on? I can find so many excuses. I remember reading some one's comments about blogging in which they were struggling to understand how they could think about all kinds of things to write about, but never find the time (or develop the discipline) to sit down and write.

Hell, a lame blog is better than no blog. I could go back to filling store-bought journals with bad poetry and lame short stories. OK, maybe they're not that lame.

I'm a little geeked up for the WRT 307 I'm teaching this summer. I absolutely love this course -- especially in the hybrid format (one week residence, the rest online). It's the first course that the SU WP offered me way back in 2001. And while it's similar to the ENG 218 I teach for JCC, the curriculum allows for more application of big R Rhetoric and little r rhetoric. I'm going try using the Blackboard virtual classroom for online office hours. I've instructed faculty for years in how to effectively use the tool, but I've never done it myself (those who teach....).

dependability

I had about 60 yards more to mow (that's going back and forth) before the wheel fell off. I finished the back yard on three wheels and some fancy one-wheel turning.

Five years ago, the little beauty cost me $99.00 at Home Depot. She's been dependable and true -- one pull and a start -- every year since. It's a surprising track record, considering that I found her completely submerged in the flooded shed (which sits too close to the back easement) a summer after I bought her. She sat upside down in pieces on the garage floor for about a week. Half a can of quick start spray and a prayer had her humming like her old self just in time for the first dry day of spring that year.

Because I'm so cheap, it's only fitting that the wire guide on the 13 year old electric weed whacker would also break on this very same day. Karma? Maybe. Or maybe a cosmic challenge to see if I can get my two old wounded warriors taped and bandaged for one more year -- or at least through next weekend.

whose literacies

Check out this recent statement adopted by the NCTE regarding 21st century literacies. Sound vaguely familiar? If you're a tech writer or have done anything remotely close to technical communication in the last 100 years, you'll note the eerie similarities among the literacies for readers and writers of the 21st century and those that have served tech writers from the birth of our identity-phobic discipline.

In 2002, Kelli Cargile Cook published an essay (Technical Communication Quarterly, v11 n1 p5-29 Win 2002) in which she imagined a framework for technical communication instruction based on six literacies: 1) Basic, 2) Rhetorical, 3) Social, 4) Technological, 5) Ethical, and 6) Critical. While Cook's focus was on a pedagogical framework, the outcomes of the objectives, lessons, and activities she imagined could and would quite cleanly align with the range of literacies adopted by the NCTE.

My point: Well, I don't necessarily think I'm trying to make one. It's the kind of inter-disciplinarity that I kept finding when I was preparing for my exams -- yes, the exams that I have yet to take. Regardless of my procrastination, the relationships across, through, and among disciplines is always intriguing and a bit reassuring... like maybe if someone else believes it, we surely can't be wrong.

waiting on writing

Here's one: Have you ever been so busy writing that you don't have time to stop and write? How about this: Have you ever written so much nothing during the day that you don't feel like writing much of anything at night? Yeah, well that's been me for about two weeks.

My prompt to get to thinking about what I'm writing? Gorton's Ladder of Learning. I saw this model some years ago when I first started looking at technical communication through an instructional design lens. Much of what we do as technical communicators is applied learning theory. This time around, I got to thinking about the ladder in the context of what we're trying to do in online learning environments.

Simply put, Gorton's ladder runs like this from bottom rung to top: Unconscious incompetence, Conscious incompetence, Conscious competence, Unconscious competence. Overlaying these rungs are the situational teaching styles that best suite the capabilities and proficiencies of the learners located at various points on the ladder. For example, a "director" type instructor is appropriate for learners that stand on the Unconscious incompetence and Conscious incompetence rungs. A "coaching" type of instructor is similarly more appropriate for learners that stand on the Conscious incompetence rung and further up on the Conscious competence rung (you get the picture).

In regard to online learning: It seems that learners suited for online instruction stand somewhere on the Conscious incompetence and Conscious competence rungs, taught best by a coaching/supporting type instructor. In regard to mastery of the subject matter, the goal is to move the learner to Unconscious competence with an instructor who can simply facilitate movement through the content.

I know I'm oversimplifying this, but it's kind of a neat way to think about what it is we try to achieve with online learning. If unconscious competence is not an outcome for the course, it's almost always a goal for the instructor.

virtual skills

I've been thinking again about the "s" word in higher education. An associate dean who also manages our workforce development initiatives forwarded and interesting article about 21 century skills requirements in the UK. I'm still not sure why I should particularly care about what the UK is doing in regard to preparing their future workforce, but I'm sure it's not that dramatically different from what we need to do here.

What I keep finding across all this reading is the (almost) tired old gripe about college graduates lacking written communication skills. The added twist is that employers are now associating "written" communication skills with an employee's ability to exploit computer-based communication. By exploit I mean the ability to navigate and create content in a range of computer-based spaces, not necessarily computer-based tools.

While there clearly needs to be a lot of work here at SU on how well we address the communication skills requirement, I'm wondering (in the wake of a recent mini-seminar discussion), how prepared are students before they get to college? Anecdotal observations indicate that college students today are generally more proficient in the Web 2.0 spaces, if only that they are coming into the classroom with some awareness of these spaces. In more than a few cases, they're awareness is greater than their instructors'.

Our challenge -- the challenge of writing instructors -- is to find ways to embed Web 2.0 and the 3.0(?) virtual spaces into our instructional activities. These instructional spaces differ from our traditional writing spaces is that they allow students think about content differently. How differently is something I'm curious about.

Random association: Web 1.0 and recently 2.0 spaces require skills for identifying and aggregating content. Web 3.0 spaces require skills for creating content. And yet, how do those skills differ?

reworking the core

I’m coming back to this idea of a core heuristic – of a basic set of assumptions we come to interfaces with. I seem to remember bumping into this a few years ago working through some text on visual rhetoric. I also think there's something to be co-opted from work that Louise Phelps and Janice Lauer have done in regard to heuristics.

I’ve been working on a small project with SUNY Upstate Medical University. They were looking for someone familiar with Blackboard (they also run the SUNY Learning Network, but the faculty seem to prefer Blackboard). After an initial meeting, they realized they needed someone to do design and development and Blackboard configuration. They have about 200 PPT slides with progress checks in the notes, which are used to supplement an ass-in-seats course on evidence-based medicine. The project: convert the PPTs (the only “content” available for the course, of course) into Blackboard-compatible files.

Phase one was a predictable mess -- but a clean mess, if you know what I mean -- a straight conversion of slides to Dreamweaver-templated HTML. Coursebuilder pop-ups present the progress checks. Lots of white-space. The “modules” are accessed from the Blackboard nav bar. Inter-course nav is a simple Next/Back sequence. Nothing crazy and the only script used is in the progress checks.

We invited six second-year medical interns into a computer lab and had them work through the content, making it clear that the product is far from a complete online course. Without exception, each of the reviewers commented on the inability to “see” where they were within the space of the course. This one point was present in almost all of their feedback, which gets me back to my point.

These reviewers – all well-educated and articulate – were unable to clearly explain what it is they wanted out of the interface. They used words like “file view” and “bookmarking” to explain the inability to located themselves spatially within the course content. It’s a phenomenon that I think is part of this universal heuristic that most users bring to an interface. Maybe it’s our familiarity with book-bound texts and the way we come to use TOCs, indexes, and x-refs within a text. Maybe it’s based on our exposure to directory structures and file relationships in our personal computing. Or maybe it’s just a human requirement to be able to locate oneself within a space – be it a textual, visual, physical, or emotional space. There’s something here that converges with a range of disciplines. Now if I could just (re)focus my efforts on my exams, I might have time to work through this a bit more.

social network cutlure

Sticking with this theme over the last few days... sort of like when you get that stupid pina colada song stuck in your head.

One of our assignments for the social networks mini-seminar is to "consider the culture of social network spaces." I thought I'd start with trying to get a better sense of who is actually using these spaces, aside from the scholars, academics, and crazy people on reality TV shows talking about their MySpace pages.

There are 34 senior engineering students taking WRT 407 this year. On Thursday I asked, by a raising of hands, the following questions (responses included):

Who has a Facebook profile? 9 students
How many check Facebook daily? 2 students
How many check Facebook at least once a month? 4 students (including the two who check daily)
Who has a MySpace page? 3 students
How many check MySpace daily? 1 student
How many check MySpace at least once a month? 2 students (including the one who checks daily)
Who uses other social network spaces? 2 students
Who uses social networking spaces, such as Linkedin? 3 students

I'm not sure what the survey results imply. When I shared with the class that the totals seemed low compared to what I excepted, one of the most promising students in the class said, "We're engineers, what did you expect?"

Now on the surface, that reply was (and is) kind of funny. It's a lot like lawyer jokes: you always laugh at them, but then pause to consider the reality of it. Engineers (and I'm speaking about the computer and electrical engineers I'm most familiar with) are not so much different from other students as they are more serious. I am, of course, making broad generalizations here. But for the most part, the engineers I've worked with over the past five years are focused, serious, and God-awful busy. Maybe it's the same with other pre-professional disciplines.

So my point: Based on my far-from empirical survey of senior engineering students, I can conclude that not all college students are on the grid plugged into social network spaces. And really, that's all I conclude without getting myself into some one-dimensional break-down of personality traits. Maybe there's a dissertation topic in here somewhere?

the "ing" difference

I'm big on clarity when it comes to the terms we use, particularly in professional and technical documentation. It's no wonder that I was exuberant over Madeline's description of the difference between social network spaces and social networking spaces. With appropriate reference to the scary-smart Danah Boyd, here's what Madeline gave us (paraphrased from notes):

A social network space has the following three characteristics: 1) Constructed boundaries understood and recognized by all users; 2) Within the bounded system, the user controls the groups and individuals with which to interact; 3) The user is active within the space, it doesn't count if you're not doing something.

A social networking space is used explicitly to make online (virtual?) connections that will be translated into off-line (non-virtual?) connections.

Mad's description is useful for me because it provides a starting point from which I can consider how these different spaces can be used in online learning situations. My question about virtual/non-virtual is in reaction to something Mad said about how we treat online spaces as "virtual" -- as if the interaction in the spaces is not real. I'm going to delve into that a little later because it bumps up against many of the discussions we have with faculty about the nature of online teaching and learning.

And with that, I'm now officially on Facebook. Yes, woefully late in the game compared to my peers, but there nonetheless... and already wondering about the relative creepiness of it.

human factors II

I’m preparing for another WP mini-seminar; this one regarding social networking and how it can be incorporated into the writing classroom. In re-reading the seminar description, I was feeling a little inadequate. I’ve never used Flickr, tried LinkedIn and thought it was a little goofy, don’t have a MySpace, and never have the time to see what Friendster is all about.

But then I got to thinking about what it is I am doing in regard to these technologies. I’ve spent a fair amount of time considering how to leverage these spaces for distance or online learning. In fact, the AcademHack does a great job of exploring the relationships of these ever-morphing spaces to learning and teaching in general. And in most cases, reading about what others are doing successfully is enough for me to make a decision about a particular type of technology or virtual space in an online course or program we are designing. Can I justify the move by saying it’s the nature of the business and there’s only so much time I can commit?

Here’s the other thing that sort of gets in the way for me: I read all of these experts proclaiming that 12-25 year-olds are the plugged-in generation. People in this age group need these virtual social spaces just like people my age needed the pizzeria or the mall. And while virtual worlds, such as SecondLife and There, are attempting to create some sense of physicality online, the human element is glaringly absent. Maybe I’m limiting myself and my definition of human element. How is online social networking any different from the intertextuality of a novel? For all of my soap-boxing about the importance of textual elements in online spaces, why do I have such a hang-up with social network? And why am I exploring this on a blog - arguably the most prolific, if not the most ubiquitous, of current social networking space?

Regardless of my hang up, I’m certain I’ll learn something useful in the mini-seminar. I always do.

blue jays and jayhawks

We went through the entire winter without seeing a single blue jay. This morning we saw a huge male flitting through the bare stems of the maple in the front yard. Today was not the first day of spring, but certainly the first spring-like day we've enjoyed in weeks. S and I took out the gloves for some catch in the street (the side yard is still too muddy). I find myself marking time by how much harder he throws. I remember when D hit the same age and arm strength.

I liked Texas so much I had them picked to win it all on one of my brackets. Not to be. Now I'm watching Davidson carry the hopes of every future 10 seed into the last minutes of a great game against Kansas. And while I absolutely love to see small schools rattle the brackets, I have Kansas picked on the sheet that I have the best shot with. Cold hard CAASSSHHH or the love and beauty of college hoops? What the hell, how great would it be to see Davidson play in the championship? Pretty damn great. That's why we love the college game.

human factors

The Scobleizer is always quick with the industry low-down, that's why I enjoy reading about his meanderings and elbow rubbings. But a recent post has me wondering about how technological fascination often clouds rational thinking.

Consider the following from his post: "When a new social network comes along (say your company turns one on this morning) I’d love it if it noticed that 15 of my friends who join up there are also on Twitter, etc. Why is that important? Because if there were some way to bind these social networks together they could do a lot more for you. For instance, I know that Scott Beale is on almost all of my social networks listed above. Why don’t the systems know that? If they did, we wouldn’t have a need for FriendFeed, or Profilactic, or SocialThing (those systems are attempting to glue all those social networks together)."

Well, sure. And if the many systems noted did "know" about all that activity, we would never have a need for making personal choices based on human factors such as motivation, determination, jealousy, envy...

This silver bullet back-end for the entire range of applications that fall under the social network umbrella is not likely to happen. I'm confident saying this having spent too many years watching altruistic software development efforts get compromised by revenue digging. I'm no economist (or futurist), but I can't imagine the financial model that motivates a range of popular and not-so-popular social networking apps to expose interfaces to some back-end data sharing process. And please don't anyone say anything about the online advertising model.

I guess I'm just bothered by the ease in which human presence in online environments is re-positioned by system functionality and feature sets. I am, perhaps, sounding a little like the anti-online learning faculty that ignorantly compare assess-in-seats learning to online learning. And yet, there is something to the argument that something gets lost when we forget that the "experience" is ours, not the system's. What that something is, I'm not quite sure, but at times it feels like a little slice of humanity.

"civic" engineering

On Monday I finished the last session of a Writing Program min-seminar (noted earlier) on civic engagement. The seminar was great. Our assignment was to discuss or develop civic engagement projects that we can or do use in our writing classes. I learned that some of the instructors teaching WRT 105 are extremely creative and committed to developing in their students a knowledge and sense of written communication that extends beyond rote academic prose.

My challenge for the seminar assignment was to develop a way in which I can introduce civic engagement assignments into WRT 407. I poked around and found some engineering programs doing interesting things with robotics and disabilities studies. Then I recalled that the Burton Blatt Institute right here at SU has a center dedicated to research and development in assisstive technology.

The fit seems obvious enough: have the senior engineers work with the Burton Blatt Institute on projects that involve assistive technologies -- from robotics to accessibility software and systems. But the more I thought about it, the more restrictive the connection felt. I realized I was making "the move" -- defining my students against broad generalizations that I bring into the classroom. Why should engineering students be drawn to a disabilities project? Am I assuming that they don't already have a sense of the civic -- that there are no other avenues into civic engagement for electrical and computer engineers?

So maybe the challenge for me is to find opportunities for my students, rather than specific projects. Let them explore those opportunities that they find engaging and productive. I shouldn't privilege the scientific or the technological simply because of the students' programs of study or my particular interests. Which leads me to another thread about unwritten program agendas and organizational ideologies. It's a post for another time, but one that's worth writing. In the meantime, I'm going to start working on next year's WRT 407 course structure to look for appropriate spaces for civic engagement.

joys of spring

Easter weekend and spring has sprung, albeit in Central New York style. I see some buds a' budding across the yards in the neighborhood, but it's still only 27 degrees. H excitedly called me to the front window this morning just in time to see our first robin of the year. It's something we've been doing for our 21 years together (it's actually 21 next month). It's always a big deal, because we've never lived anywhere particularly warm. So when we see our first robin, we try to imagine what she's thinking. Maybe something like, "Why the hell didn't I wait a few more weeks to fly north for spring?"

You know how certain things remind you of people? A few years ago I had the privilege to work with an exceptional instructional designer and artist. She had given me a photocopy of the cartoon to the left. It's taped to one of the organizers on my desk, and it cracks me up every time I look at it. So of course, it's now not possible for me to ever get ready for the Easter holiday without inevitably looking at chocolate bunnies, thinking about my friend, and laughing to myself.

Happy Easter and joyous spring to all. Laugh to yourself, think about old friends and good people. And remember why spring is such a great time to be alive.

egos and blindspots

Let me start off by saying that not all academics are complete social misfits or major A-holes. Now let me say that of the eight associate deans I quietly mocked this afternoon, maybe 2 were worth a top-shelf bourbon (and one of those two spoke only during the introductions).

It was an awfully awkward and uncomfortable meeting. I've mentioned, perhaps in passing, that the college is going through a reorganization. We've been mandated to shift our mission from an academic unit to a service unit. There are all sorts of issues surrounding and embedded in that loaded mandate. That's not what I want to write about today.

The eight or so associate deans and guests, representing the other colleges, schools, and departments within the university, were invited in to do a bit of brainstorming. Basically, they were asked to tell us (University College) what they could imagine us doing to support them in the future. Upon the question being asked, I immediately realized why one of our own associate deans opted not to attend.

The responses from our learned and talkative guests ranged from "Nothing, thank you. We don't deal with part-time students. And oh, by the way, have you heard that there's a journalism school on campus?" to "Well, if you could do a little web development and media placement for us, that would be great."

For my money (and my sense of business, which I think is relatively attuned), the meeting was a complete waste of everyone's time. These people, many of whom can't stand each other, did not want to be in that meeting any more than our associate dean who found a reason to beg off. It was a meeting equivalent to Apple inviting Microsoft in to ask how the next Mac desktop could be improved. These people (all smart in their own rights), haven't a clue about continuing education or distance education or adult learning. Sure, they've read the papers and talked the talk, but they don't get it - not one bit. And yet, in all fairness, why should they get it? Most of them are sitting on fat endowments and turning away more students than they can accept. They all rely heavily on subsidized services from the University, where even under RCM they are making out OK. So when you pose a ridiculous question like, "What do you see UC doing for you?" to a group of people who love to hear themselves talk about nothing in particular, your going to get some pretty ridiculous answers.

The one answer that made the most sense - almost - came from an associate dean from our grand school of management. As someone who has spent a lot of time in a professional school, he had enough sense to challenge us to make him want to "do business" with his school. "Show me why I should come to you to do something we're already doing fairly well?" He had me thinking he was pretty sharp until he suggested that UC might be best suited to help out with event planning and marketing. He completely blew it when he starting blathering about economies of scale and competitive markets. "Yeah thanks. Did you mention that you were with the school of management? Where is that on campus exactly?" (Inside joke: If you know where UC is located on the SU campus, you'll get it).

Here's the rub: This is a great time to be part of UC because it's a challenging time -- a time to reinvent the "business" to be sustainable and viable in a budgetary system that takes accountability to task. People are worried about their jobs, and maybe they should be. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't.

But I'm also worried about the student populations we serve. The part-time students - working moms, out of work retreds, struggling young parents, people wanting to get a piece of the dream - are going to be the losers here. If the university decides it doesn't want to be in that business, then that's a decision it must live with. But for God's sake, will someone take the initiative or at least have the common sense to not ask the morons I had to listen to this afternoon make that decision?

do opposites really attract

I had an interesting conversation with another SU employee at my Friday leadership development workshop. He was commenting on the problems that his department has been having trying to reconcile the university's RCM budget process.

I recalled my Friday conversation as I was preparing for a Writing Program professional development mini-seminar: Writing and Civic Engagement. The readings range from a 1999 call to action by Barber to a contextualization of a part-time instructor's activities. In reviewing my marginal notes, I realized that I'm coming to this topic (and perhaps my other scholarly interests) from a position of fiscal accountability. It's a tension that we were trying to articulate in our leadership workshop. And it's a tension that I'm realizing underlies a lot of my work-related frustration these last few months.

While I know I do the methodology a disservice, RCM (Responsibility Center Management) is basically a budget process that decentralizes control of resources and demands fiscal accountability for all activities. RCM is becoming increasingly popular with large universities, but I'm not sure why. The accountability thing would, on the surface, seem to create a lot of issues for universities that privilege teaching over research. But that's not where I'm seeing the tension.

Here at SU, we're being challenged to find new and sustainable ways to engage the community through scholarly activities (the chancellor's Scholarship in Action initiative). At the same time, we're being asked to evaluate all of our activities against revenue and expenses. The tension: Trying to turn a scholarly community engagement into a revenue generator. If revenue cannot be generated: How to justify the cost of the engagement (non-tangibles) against all of the other non-revenue generating engagements within the university. What we're left with is a "My community engagement is more valuable than yours." This line of argument inevitably leads to claims of disciplinary superiority, and would seem to run counter to interdisciplinary collaboration -- another aspect of Scholarship in Action.

It's a complex question, which Louise and others have more eloquently and adequately addressed in a widely distributed white paper. I'm responding to the tension at a more guttural level because I (like my fellow workshop attendee and many many others on campus) am left to implement the grand schemes of our visionary leaders.

break me off a piece

A little relief from the upper echelon in regard to our re-org. We now have more time to figure out what exactly it is we're supposed to do and how we're supposed to do it. Looking forward to all the challenging, engaging, and thought-provoking process planning. Umm, umm good.

Realized this week that while I'm not a web designer, I instinctively know when an interface is crappy. In WRT 407, we talk a lot about the subjectivity and objectivity of document structures. I've also used the line, "You don't have to know why it's wrong, you just have to know that it's wrong" with my students during document reviews. I guess it's the same thing. I don't teach my students that mixed construction in a sentence is a switch between grammatical patterns. I teach them how to recognize confusion at the sentence level. It goes back to some of my thinking about Collin's review. Is there a universal heuristic that we refer to when responding to crappy site designs and interfaces.

What's troublesome for me is that the most craptastic interface I've seen this past week is the front-end of a back-end project I've been working on. It can be incredibly deflating to build out a scalable and manageable information architecture only to see the interface mangle the logic.

Random note to all faculty that want to build their courses in Flash: Don't. And if you do, please do not ask me to change the comma in your introduction to an em dash. Don't ever.