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.