THE BOGGLISH HUDERON

overcoming perceived barriers by enfranchising faculty

2012-01-31T08:49:00.000-05:00

Oh random thoughts of progress...

What is our growth of part-time faculty, adjuncts, lecturers, etc.? This is part of the trend and equation. What are the resistors to online teaching for full-time faculty?

Can we look at a model of faculty (full-time or otherwise) at a distance?

What percentage of our faculty/instructors teaching in the iMBA and iSchool programs are on-campus? Do we have remote faculty in those programs?

General question for preparing faculty: Should we require faculty to teach the course at least once in a F2F format before allowing them (or preparing them) to teach the course online (in full or hybrid format)?

Barriers to allowing distance faculty:

1) Tradition
2) Perceived faculty role change.

Similar concerns/arguments surrounding remote workers.

"How do they attend faculty meetings?"
"They can't take full advantage of support resources on campus."

What can we do:

Develop alternate support options
Change attitudes about the "weight" or value of teaching online
Identify a champion
Assess the institutional culture (already done this at the macro level)
Environmental scan (this is the core of my proposal -- it's a micro-level environment scan).
Spec or create an infrastructure that would allow faculty to participate as a member of the faculty community (we do this for students)

putting the pieces together

2012-01-30T12:13:00.000-05:00

We continue to work toward an institutional vision for online undergraduate instruction. It continues to be good and challenging work. In regard to the challenges, we have many. The biggest (at this point -- today) may be effectively communicating or providing a clearing house for information regarding online teaching and learning. Should it be web-based, a dedicated site, a series of road shows, or frequent workshops? Should it be all of the above? There is no way currently to share best practices here; no forum in which to vet and consider options, policies, procedures, etc. On the tail of that challenge: Getting faculty to understand that the LMS -- the platform -- is not the process of teaching online. We need to broaden their understanding of online teaching and learning, then help them find the appropriate technology to support the teaching processes.

So here are my random thoughts regarding faculty preparation/development options:

New Instructor Orientation/Workshop
Continuous Development Series (monthly online sessions)
Instructor Webinar Meetings (includes veteran online instructors
Comprehensive Faculty Resource Site (OLS)
-- We can/should base this within Blackboard (?)
-- Wiki for best practices
-- Instructor news blog -- should be external facing (?)
Online Teaching and Learning Newsletter - monthly. What feature? Sustainable? How much work?
Online Faculty Certification Program (you are certified to teach an online course at SU)

Get 'em while they're starry eyed: During new faculty orientation, can we survey or discover new faculty preferred mode of professional development. Also inquire about experience teaching online; interest in teaching online. This is what I need to do. What is her frequency of the new faculty sessions? Is there a first-year community/forum to engage with this population? What about adjuncts? This is the bulk of SOM and IST instructor cohort.

We have the technology/LMS training opportunities, but they are not required. How do we require them? How do we get a sign-off or performance of some level of competency before we let them "use" Blackboard for F2F courses?

Lots of pieces to come together -- one piece at a time.

time and location

2012-01-12T16:38:00.001-05:00

The industry trade journals all predicted that smart phones and tablets would overtake PC shipments by the end of last year. I don’t know if that’s the case, but I’ve been curious to see how this trend plays out with our traditional age undergrads. If we work from the assumption that mobility eliminates time and space boundaries, then we can assume a predilection for content that can be “consumed” any time/any place.

This isn’t a new concept, but it does serve our ongoing conversations about the use of technology to maximize classroom time. If, as some argue, SU will never see a critical mass of hybrid or full online courses, we should focus our energies (resources, money, time, etc.) on helping faculty use technology outside the classroom. Our undergrads today – the much hyped “digital natives” – may not be demanding instructional content outside of the classroom, but they would most certainly be comfortable consuming it on their time.

If we continue to demand an ass in a seat for 1 hour and 20 minutes two days each week, let’s make sure that we’re exploiting that face time. Move the contextualizing back-drop blather to ether and get to DOING in the classroom. That would truly be technology-enhanced instruction.

progress at any pace

2012-01-11T16:22:00.002-05:00

I had the opportunity yesterday to attend an online teaching and learning prep session hosted by the SU Writing Program (WP). The WP has shown extraordinary vision in this regard, as they’ve been hosting these events at least once a year for the past six or so years. The sessions are now required for any Professional Writing Instructor (adjunct) or doctoral student interested in teaching an online writing course.

This year, a scholar who I’ve long admired as a teacher’s teacher gave a terrific overview of her strategy for engaging students in an online course. It was interesting to see how someone who is keenly aware of pedagogical moves in the writing classroom was challenged to make her online course less about technology and more about learning. By that I mean selecting specific tools and technologies based on pedagogical requirements, rather than the other way around. If I can convince her to deliver a version of her presentation to faculty outside the WP, it would go a long way toward moving antagonistic faculty beyond the problem of conflating the concepts of online teaching/learning and instructional technology.

I also found during this year’s session that the small group in attendance expressed the same valid concerns we’ve been wrestling with for a long time. For example, there remains a concern about the lack of more rigorous or formalized options for preparing faculty (and others) to teach online. This may be changing here on the iceberg – stay tuned.

tech no faculty

2011-11-16T16:38:00.002-05:00

I just read two more articles bemoaning the challenges of getting faculty to use instructional technology in ways that benefit students. Both articles offer the same staid suggestions for technology adoption, as well as the standard 5-step approach for implementing technology -- any technology -- to address a specific problem.

These regurgitated suggestions always fail to recognize the audience -- the faculty we are asking to rethink and retool. Beyond the anecdotal generational differences among faculty, there are a few other "conditions" that cause faculty to not fully accept our best efforts and good intentions in regard to instructional technology. For starters, faculty will not read anything that is not specific to their discipline, area or research, or something they've written themselves. Countless hours have we scribed workbooks, templates, tools, and guides to assist faculty in preparing to use instructional technology, only to find the wealth of knowledge therein committed only to the ether. Instead, faculty prefer to learn about instructional technologies by simply calling the help desk and asking, "How do I use [mention technology here] for my class that starts tomorrow?

To compensate for the lack of engagement with our written materials, we've fallen back on face-to-face training sessions scheduled around proven and well-designed project plans. Yet when provided a chance to sit and work hands-on with a new technology, faculty disregard the schedules, project plans, and other activities associated with having a course structured and complete prior to the start of the semester. They prefer, instead, to not interact with others -- particularly when with their peers -- nor to engage with support staff when in group training settings. Maybe it's an ego thing. Most likely, it's an ego thing.

So what are we left with? Beyond the old 5-step solutions, here's what seems to be working in places that have the balls to do it: First, link faculty training directly to an incentive -- pay them or reward them in some other way to learn and adopt instructional technologies for their courses. As with any effort involving faculty, get to know the culture in which you're working. Find out what motivates faculty and leverage those motivations in the cultural contexts of your school, college or university. Money and release time seem to be the most popular motivators. Second, teach faculty as they go -- don't jam them up with the traditional show-and-tell type training. Let them move through the technology in ways that scaffolds their use and competency -- make the technology seamless to their instructional objectives. This is the ego rub -- it's where you can make them think it's their idea. It works really well when done tactfully.

Two things to consider. Lots of issues associated with both. Of course, nothing is as easy it should be. All we can do is to keep chopping. Chop, chop, chop.

governance and chaos

2011-11-14T16:19:00.000-05:00

It doesn't look like it should work, but it does...

I left the Sloan-C conference last week with a renewed vigor, ready to embrace the chaotic cultural context in which undergraduate online teaching and learning occurs at Syracuse University. The chaos is a byproduct or the operational and academic autonomy that each of our schools and colleges maintain. In regard to governance of online initiatives, this autonomy necessitates a multi-level structure. Faculty and Deans provide governance at the local level. The Provost's office provides oversight and considers initiatives against the University's broader goals. In regard to support and implementation, the Provost, CIO, and Dean of University College work collaboratively (at least in spirit) with Deans and faculty to determine courses of action. In regard to quality, the faculty ultimately certify that their courses satisfy the instructional requirements for the course. As a University, we've not yet decided how to address faculty preparation and design/development support (centralized or de-centralized, in-source or out-source, etc.), but it is coming. Policies relating to online teaching and learning are made at the local level, with only scant consideration toward executive level oversight/approval. Again, the autonomy of the schools and colleges means resolution of policy issues is a local process which involves central University administration only when necessary.

So here's what I got out of my work with Sloan-C this year: I went into the IELOL program thinking the differences in organizational cultures across the schools and colleges complicate efforts to standardize support and governance for online initiatives. What I've discovered is that the differences don't necessarily complicate the efforts if we approach governance and support as a shared effort. It's in that space of sharing that I see University College working well. Our entire mission is about sharing and brokering -- about working collaboratively across the campus. That's the organized chaos in which we operate.

... and we never get bored.

pew and the new online learner

2011-11-10T08:24:00.006-05:00

The keynote at this year's Sloan-C was delivered by a really smart guy from the Pew Foundation. They've completed yet another great research project that would imply we have to think about online teaching and learning in different ways -- or do we.

Pew claims we're in the midst of a digital revolution with three components: 1) broadband access, 2) social networking, and 3) mobile computing. The mobile aspect of the digital revolution is really interesting in only one regard: There are now 328 million wireless lines in the US. The total population of the country is 315.5 million. Do the math. Broadband is simple -- the number of homes, schools, and public places that have broadband has doubled in five years and continues to increase. With broadband comes better access, better access means engagement in things like... social networking.

I've never been a fan of generational labels, simply because I'm at the extreme top end of the GenX club (35-46). I've often thought I have more in common with the Baby Boomer generation than GenX, but Pew doesn't think so. In regard to the social networking component of the digital revolution, my generation has, on average, 196.7 Facebook friends. I don't think this statistic means anything by itself, but it is part of the overall claim that our friends, followers, likers, etc. in social media spaces facilitate peer-to-peer learning by doing. This learning by doing aspect of online social spaces is changing the role of social networks. In one interesting way, our social networks are now serving as early warning systems; we use them to gauge what's going on and to evaluate information -- to connect with (perceived) smarter people and determine what is true and what we should care about. Most interesting about these changing social spaces is the way in which we are using them to cobble together learning experiences -- DIY learning. People don't need credentials to teach us and we don't have to be accepted into a closed or elite community to learn.

So what does all this say about online learning? I still don't believe digital literacy is necessarily a prerequisite for being a successful online learner. What it does say is that as attention zones change, we may find that more of our students (traditional age through adult learners) will begin to demand more learning opportunities beyond the physical and virtual classroom structures we use today.

A final point from the keynote. The Pew guy asked, "Has the digital revolution -- technology -- made us stupider?" We all laughed and he answered: "We're not any stupider now than we were 20 years ago. The difference is that today we can find the answers to questions and problems instantly using smartphones and connected devices."

sloan-c and the state of online learning at su

2011-11-09T11:46:00.001-05:00

First session of the Sloan-C conference starts shortly. I'm going to make a concerted effort to post thoughts, comments and concerns. Before I get too far along, I'm going to set up the framework or online teaching and learning at Syracuse University for my proposal to my IELOL colleagues, which I'll present tomorrow.

When I first met with a senior University official to discuss aspects of online teaching and learning, my initial feeling was that we (the University) were being naive and little short-sighted in regard to online initiatives. Having now (nearly) completing the Sloan-C IELOL program, I have an entirely new perspective on the University's position.

At the graduate level, Syracuse University has a highly interdisciplinary set of programs with clear differentiation points. It's clear that the University will be more aggressive in pushing these opportunities, but we will not accommodate a free-for all among the schools and colleges. The University Provost has indicated he will be strategic and deliberate in assisting the schools and colleges with vetting and planning their graduate programs (and this is a space in which I believe University College can provide considerable support and assistance). Yet SU remain's committed to our graduate residency requirement because we place a high value on our campus experience and access to faculty, staff, and facilities -- this is one critical point of differentiation -- it creates a connection to the University. At the undergraduate level, the University administration continues to support the schools and colleges as they develop online course offerings that provide increased flexibility for our students -- students who are increasingly asked to engage in scholarship beyond the classroom. These visions align with our overall vision and mission in that they support the principles of Scholarship in Action.

More to follow in what I hope to be a useful and productive couple of days.

happy halloween

2011-10-31T09:06:00.001-04:00

We are, for the most part, a PC house here at UC. We have three Mac users in the entire college -- two of them in our marketing group of course.

Because my small IT team is creative, moderately techno-geeky, and fun, they suggested our submission (see accompanying photo) to the the college's annual pumpkin carving contest needed to reflect our collective eccentricity.

We didn't win the contest, but we certainly continue to impress. It's one of the reasons that makes coming here everyday easy. And in case you're wondering, yes those are Macintosh apples.

oh loathsome blogger - revisited

2011-10-23T21:09:00.002-04:00

It’s a discipline. I keep telling myself that. The chaotic pace of things this time of year only goes so far to excuse drop-off-the-earth absences. What bothers me the most is that I haven’t taken the time to use this space to sort out my thinking, which is really the most practical thing this space is good for. Well that and navel gazing.

And sorting out my thinking I shall be doing over the coming weeks and months. Lots of really exciting (cool?) efforts underway that I’m going to need to vet and mull. Vet and mull? Hmmmm. There’s a lot of cheese layered on that pomposity, eh?

operational to strategic: ielol primer

2011-08-04T16:15:00.000-04:00

Looking at my daily activities over the past few days, I’m definitely doing a lot of zooming. Part of that is due to the fact that we’re slightly understaffed. Another part of my zooming has to do with where my roles are located within my organization. All efforts relating to online teaching and learning (as well as instructional design, course building, etc.) were historically located within the college’s IT department. Today, that location means that in addition to “provide[ing] campus-wide leadership in support of Syracuse University online teaching and learning initiatives,” I’m also charged with “providing leadership in selecting and exploiting business, instructional, and information technologies throughout University College's operations, faculty/student support, information management practices, and communication efforts.” That’s a lot of blah, blah, blah, but it’s the catalyst for my daily zooming.

When I look at my goals for the year, I feel like I’m working toward them. It’s the time commitment that’s already a little frustrating. For example, one of my goals to accomplish before next June is to “standardize the University College Online Course Quality Model for adoption by the University for undergraduate online courses.” This is a goal that requires a lot of face-to-face brokering with various stakeholders among the schools, colleges, and administration. Without dedicating a set amount of time each week to this specific goal, I’m now wondering how realistic it is.

vision for online at su

2011-07-28T15:53:00.001-04:00

In 2004, our current Chancellor articulated a vision for the University (Scholarship in Action) based on three areas of focus: 1) faculty excellence and scholarly distinction, 2) access for enterprising students, and 3) engagement with the world.

Imagining the University 10 years from now (within a context of online learning teaching and learning), I would hope to see a more accommodating environment for "non-resident" experiences across the three areas of focus. Faculty excellence and scholarly distinction would require interfacing across academic/thematic clusters in technology-enhanced ways that expand the intellectual richness and potential for future impact -- expanding access to faculty and doctoral/profession students.

Access and support for enterprising students; today we are seeing the early benefits of online undergraduate course offerings that attract excellent students with bold and diverse interests. Ten years from now, formalized and high quality online undergraduate courses will provide the best of these students more options to seize and build upon SU's interdisciplinary and engagement opportunities. Online undergraduate courses also provide greater access for students from all socio-economic and cultural spheres to "come to Syracuse" and experience the creative campus in ways not tied to a physical presence.

Engagement with the world 10 years from now will be, by default, technology-enhanced engagement. Students, faculty and staff will expect immediate engagement with the world and the pressing concerns of the day. In a context of online teaching and learning, even the resident classroom will include different voices and practitioners in fields and industries.

online learning and leadership

2011-07-28T15:48:00.001-04:00

I started the Institute for Emerging Leadership in Online Learning (IELOL) program last week. It's a blended-learning leadership development program sponsored by Penn State and the Sloan Consortium. Very promising from a strategic perspective.

One assignment during the first week I found interesting had to do with our view of the essential elements of leadership. I found myself falling back on comfortable territory, but I don't think I was too far afield. Here are my thoughts:

I believe the most essential element of effective leadership is open and honest communication. Regardless of the leadership development model (I’m certain we’ve all seen many), communication is either a hub competency or critical component of other leadership competencies (navigator, facilitator, strategist, etc.). In some ways it seems rather obvious; how can I be an effective leader if I cannot communicate organizational and operational concepts (the good, bad and neutral) in such a way that they are understood to be truthful and in the best interest of the institution and the populations we serve?

Listening is also an essential element of effective leadership. Good communicators listen. Listening is a great way to learn – to actually hear the concerns, perspectives, expectations and needs of the people we work with and for. We demonstrate a commitment to the group and the institution by showing a real interest in our colleagues’ voices, skills, and talents, and using what we learn from them to help shape the direction and future of the institution.

That's nothing revolutionary, but I'm pretty well committed an emphasis on open and honest communication in all aspects of life. Seems pretty tough to get by without it.

communicating engineers

2011-04-20T07:56:00.001-04:00

Last weekend was the L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science open house. My WRT 407 students presented and demonstrated their year-long projects to visitors, guests, and an IEEE review team. Once again I came away from the event amazed by the creativity, talent, and genius of these pre-professional engineers. It is both a humbling and energizing event.

I spend much of the afternoon reviewing the project teams' documentation suites. While the format is not required, they typically take the shape of tabbed three-ringed binders. The suite consists of the following documents, which the teams have developed and revised over the course of the two semesters:

Formal Project Proposal
Individual Technical Descriptions
Technical or Demo Presentation
System Requirement Specification
Test Plan/Test Scripts
User or Implementation Guide
Status Report
Draft Research Paper/Article

When I look at the range and quality (yes, quality) of the documents, I inevitably wind up questioning the outcomes of the course. I focus my instruction on genre and the communicative and rhetorical requirements of different types of documents in different contexts. Filtered down, that really mean that I'm teaching production. I don't really see that as a bad thing, but I do wonder how the production of technical engineering texts s in alignment with the course outcomes.

I have some improvements to make, particularly in regard to managing 40+ students in a class that meeting only once per week. Aligning activities and products to goals and outcomes will drive those improvements.

physical design

2011-03-29T21:01:00.001-04:00

continuing with my previous post...

A number of years ago, Saul Carliner developed a three-part design model for technical communication that identifies physical, cognitive, affective activities performed while creating an information product. I've found the model useful when working with pre-professional engineers because it allows us (in the context of the technical writing class) to locate engineering design and development activities within a range of practices and activities defined as technical communication or information design. Most useful in these efforts is exposing the students to the physical design activities of the model.

Physical design occurs in the space between design and development; the preparation and creation of physical elements of an information product. In the context of an engineering project, physical design includes the core writing and editing activities performed by the engineer. The information that shapes physical design activities derives from the design documents created as a result of cognitive design activities. This type of product development (development based on pre-defined design criteria) allows the engineer to develop a product that meets specific needs and purposes.

The value of this model is that it allows the engineers to locate "meaning" within the design documents they create. To interpret the meaning between and among the structures of these documents, the engineers must understand these relationships in such a way as to present them for specific purposes (for example, the technical requirements of a product). In this regard, the engineers perform physical design activities to create the external forms through which users of their documents extract and construct meaning.

deconstructing ia

2011-03-28T20:27:00.001-04:00

continuing with my earlier post...

Similar to Information Architecture (IA), Information Design (ID) carries multiple definitions and applications. In web contexts, ID ranges from developing maps and signage to simple web pages. As a practice, ID has been described as an interdisciplinary approach that combines skills in graphic design, writing and editing, illustration, and human factors. On a more ephemeral level, ID has been described as a position or stance one takes. Beth Mazur has likened this stance to a political or moral stance that we take the design or an information product to improve the quality of the communication. More specific to what I want pre-professional engineers to understand about IA; ID has been described as the act of designing and deploying content in such as a way to achieve the performance objectives for specific end users – objectives captured during IA analysis.

For the purpose of instruction in WRT 407, it has been useful to define ID as one aspect of design that occurs within the performance of IA analysis. Design activities performed within analysis are the point at which the engineer can focus on the context and purpose of the information products they are created during their engineering activities. If the product of IA is the blueprint or specification that guides development and deployment, ID is the act of shaping the specification. ID uses the results of IA analysis to inform the engineer's overall product design.

Within this framework of analysis and design activities, IA can be seen as any number of processes the engineer follows to understand available forms and structures; to design the physical aspects of the information product, and to develop the product to meet end-user requirements. The forms and structures available to the engineer are shaped and served by any number and type of discourses, styles, genres, and dialects. These are the standard designs – the genres and conventions that engineers are aware of and work with. Designing the physical aspects of the information product occurs when the engineer transforms one (or more) of the available standard designs into a new product that meets specific pre-defined requirements.

defining ia --- again

2011-03-26T10:13:00.001-04:00

continuing with my previous post...

When I use the term information architecture with writing students, it sounds impressive and maybe a little overwhelming. But then I get to the place where I have to define IA. That's when things get problematic.

I'm finding it best to situate IA as a verb. I ask the engineers to think about IA as the act they would perform to express the explicit details and concepts of the systems they are designing. One important aspect of that performance is creating an organization and structure for the information relating to and used by their system -- in particular, it is the act of architecting relationships among system components and elements.

After we have the activity of IA on the table, I move to the product of IA -- to the outcome of the performance. When defined as a noun, IA is the blueprint that contains the description of how information is organized and structured within the system. That blueprint is the physical specification (technical and functional) that identifies a set of possible structures, patterns, and techniques to make information easier to access, understand, and used within the system.

Defining IA as both activity and product allows me to do two things in regard to situating IA within TC practices. First, the definition allows the engineers to see themselves as information architects who perform the activities required to create products that meet the needs of specific users. Second, the definition situates aspects of IA as a series of sub-activities performed at iterative points in and around the analysis and development phases of the engineers' design methodologies. Situating IA this way allows me expose for the engineers the relationship between analysis and design. The product of the design illustrates the engineer's ability to effectively address requirements identified during analysis.

How's that for a closed loop?

ia is about structure

2011-03-25T10:05:00.001-04:00

continuing with my previous post...

We've come to understand Information Architecture (IA) as the practice of structuring information (often according to context) for a particular purpose. Tom Johnson and Donna Marsh circled around this definition last week. From their discussion, it seems that defining IA is problematic because it is most commonly applied to web development. However, from Donna and Tom's experiences (and those of others) it's quite obvious that IA also applies to disciplines such as TC, software programming, and user experience design (Peter Morville has said as much about a decade ago).

To complicate things a bit more, an alternate popular definition of IA exists within the field of information system design, where IA refers to the analysis and design of blocks or chunks of information (and their inter-dependencies) within a system. Beth Mazur has used this definition in her efforts to draw distinctions between IA and information design.

The practitioner perspectives that Tom and Donna provide and the academic definitions that Morrville and Mazur provide are built on features of information interaction, content analysis, classification, information hierarchies, information navigation, and information structuring for particular purposes. It seems to me that if I can invoke TC practices that include these features, I can illustrate to my students a range of practices that will help them understand the complexity of their design activities. For this purpose, I need to begin by locating design activities, as an aspect of IA, within TC practices and embedded engineering writing instruction.

tech comm, design, and information architecture

2011-03-24T20:42:00.000-04:00

In the next series of posts, I want to try to revisit the relationship of design to technical communication practices. I explored the topic in a graduate seminar last year, but I'm bumping up against it again as WRT 407 comes to a close and the engineers begin to see the product of their design, development, and writing activities.

I want to begin with the question that I was asked during that seminar: "Why is it important for technical communicators (or anyone performing the role of technical commicator, such as an engineer) to understand that they are doing design?” The question is an important one because it demands that we reconsider traditional treatments of the disciplines and fields that serve (and are served by) Technical Communication (TC).

For a long time, I have viewed TC as a co-opted discipline; taking pieces and parts from any number of closely and remotely related fields, practices, and disciplines. My perspective placed TC in the middle of the design/development universe. Yet when asked to qualify the importance of viewing the technical communicator’s activity as something other than “technical communication,” my heliocentric perspective broke down.

Such a break down is possible because all perspectives of TC across the scholarship and literature are based on uneasy and inconsistent definitions of the discipline and the practice. These definitions always include (arguably, must include) descriptions of design, development, and production activities that are performed by technical communicators. This move to include any and all activities associated with creating an information product is what complicates an answer to a simple question about disciplinary perspective. Blame it on the reflexive nature of Composition as the mother discipline. Blame it on technology-mediated practices. Whatever the cause, technical communicators are unable to foreground their discipline within a clearly demarcated practice of design/development activities. TC is not at the center of the design/development universe; it has gradually become the generic glue that connects hundreds of fields, practices, and disciplines.

This is the position from which I will further consider the relationship of Information Architecture to TC over the next few posts.

questions of quality

2011-02-04T15:52:00.000-05:00

We're currently working with one of the colleges to navigate a proposal they received from an online course/program vendor. These hack shops are popping up like mushrooms and making a lot of noise about tremendous enrollment targets and extraordinary returns (read: tuition revenues).

There are a lot of problems with these organizations and the promises they serve up. I may, in fact, spend some time dissecting the issues in terms of problem resolution. What's bothering me right now, however, is the lack of coherent dialog on campus around the issues of online education.

I spent some time today with the principals who will ultimately make the decision to outsourcing their graduate programs to a third-party vendor. I tried to explain the roll that quality plays at all levels of an online program. I don't think they heard it. Like a typical buyer, they're more concerned with costs and returns -- and enamored by the idea that they could pull out of their agreement two-years in if things aren't working out (read: they're not enrolling huge numbers and making millions of dollars). I wanted them to understand how even that act -- of bailing on a program that has already graduated and currently supports students -- could compromise quality.

Again, I don't think they heard it.

It's an ongoing dialog, and I should be happy that the conversation is even happening. I just worry about the outcomes should our message and services get blurred by unrealistic revenue targets.

the uneasy art of persuasion

2011-02-03T16:43:00.000-05:00

We spent some today in 407 talking about the role of the "the proposal" in engineering environments. I always try to impress on students the importance of thinking about project proposals as persuasive documents -- documents that must move a reader to a particular action, position, or opinion.

That's what we do in the classroom.

In practice, I know with a high degree of certainty that many of theses engineers will never write a single proposal. At best, they may serve as a subject-matter-expert or contributor. Yes, I know it's invaluable for them to understand the genre, the contexts, and how it all works together. But I still struggle with their time -- wanting to exploit the limited time we have them here.

The proposals they work on in 407 are specific to their Senior Design projects. That means they have some skin in the game, which is useful. Overall, it's a good exercise in that it helps them refine their thinking about the complexities and possibilities of their projects. In that regard, I should appreciate the activity. I just need to find some way to extend it -- to make it more meaningful beyond performance of an academic activity that they will likely never repeat.

tech makes us dumb

2011-02-02T08:32:00.001-05:00

The other day my mother-in-law was talking about how kids are smarter today -- that they seem so plugged in and aware. I commented that I don't think kids are necessarily smarter than earlier generations, but I do think they are clearly more comfortable with communication, instructional, and entertainment technologies.

A couple of days later I read a short article on the definition of modern literacy by Susan Metros. She claims that the skills necessary to successfully using technology (analyzing, visualizing, communicating, and innovating) will require everyone to be technologically literate (on a continuum that moves from stimulated to novice, novice to literate, and literate to fluent). This does not, however, equate to literate in the traditional sense. As Metros notes, "They know how to upload a movie to YouTube...they know how to text, and they are constantly connected to something digital. But my argument is they are not literate; they are just basically stimulated."

I find in these distinctions of literacy the same tension that exists in the technical writing classroom. How technically literate does a technical writer have to be? It's really more than the decades old debate about do we teach tools or do we teach writing. It has more to do with the technical writer's ability to comprehend complex topics and concepts, and to produce usable and original information products with an array of tools, technologies, and skills. In co-opting Metros' argument, the modern technical writer's "literacy" must be less about the tools and technologies and more about "ways of thinking and seeing, and of crafting narrative."

dual design

2010-12-08T16:07:00.001-05:00

Giving a presentation last week - faculty asks, "Mike, when you say design, what do you mean?" Good question.

When discussing online course design, I'm tend to confuse instructional design with information design (and to complicate it even more -- information architecture). Lately, I've been trying to talk about design in two ways.

First, I address the basic concepts of instructional design. This is important because we want faculty thinking about their instructional strategies early on in the course design process. How are we going to instruct? What are the engagement opportunities? How are we going to assess?

Second, I address issues of organization and emphasize the concept of heuristic for the course space. How are we going to sequence the instructional blocks? What metaphor are we going to use to organize the content? What structures are imposed by the LMS?

I have to make an effort to keep these two aspects of course design separate and clear. I think faculty will be better able to work through our design/development model if we clearly differentiate between the types of design activities.

working class

2010-12-03T13:49:00.000-05:00

Faculty can be funny. When working with them on online course projects, they like to dance around the workload issue. More precisely, they want to know how much time they'll have to put into teaching online without directly asking the question.

Yesterday one of our program directors called to ask about contact hours in an online class. Apparently a faculty member she's working with needed to know "how many contact hours will be required" before he would commit to designing, developing, and teaching an online course. I hadn't seen that fancy step before, but it shows how lithe faculty can be on their feet.

Rather provide a description of how contact hours work in an online courses, I sent up a general description of faculty workload for an online course, which I found in a new and incredibly useful book titled The Online Teaching Survival Guide by Judith Boettcher and Rita-Marie Conrad. The authors claim that because a 3 credit F2F course typically represents 20-25% a full- time faculty workload (assuming a 4-5 course load), faculty are working 8-10 hrs. per week on that course (representing 32-50 hours per week just on course-related activities). For an online course, after an initial investment of time (tools training, resource collection, course building, etc.) faculty should therefore be spending no more than 8-10 hrs. per week on course-related activities.

While I like the generalization about time commitments, I see some problems with using this model as a standard reply to the question about workload. My principle hesitancy is that the model assumes faculty put in 8-10 hrs. per week on each class they're teaching. This is more likely and average time commitment over the course of a semester, rather than an actual time-on-task commitment each week per each course taught. I see faculty recoiling from the idea that for their online course, they'll be actively working 8-10 per week for the duration of the course. My opinion here has little to do with faculty work ethics. I'm more worried about complicating the dance with the misconception by many faculty that online teaching is easier than F2F instruction. This isn't about the politics of dancing with faculty, it's about first getting them out on the floor. The invitation has to be appealing, nonthreatening, and genuine.

That's why we have our work cut out for us.

learner-centered

2010-12-02T09:19:00.002-05:00

I was having a discussion the other day with some folks about best practices for teaching online. Someone in the group piped up and said, "Oh, that's just a learner-centered teaching strategy." I thought about that for a nanosecond and said, "Well, if our primary objective in the online course space is to allow students to shape the learning outcomes, then yes, I guess I'm describing a learner-centered pedagogy."

I could tell my response didn't sit well with the person who made the observation, and I think I know why. The "learner-centered" phenomenon has been around for a long time. In the late 1990s we were applying it to corporate initiatives where we moved from knowledge-centered training to a focus on learning/training outcomes. The idea was to expand the training (F2F, computer-based, web-based, etc.) to include "shop floor" activities that lead the learner to their own desirable learning outcome, such as being able to perform a new task or to perform an old task better. The key to this approach is to provide the learner with opportunities to demonstrate their success in achieving their learning outcomes and aligning those outcomes with the overall training requirements.

In an online undergrad college course, we are not so much applying a learner-centered strategy as we are a sort of knowledge/learner hybrid pedagogy. Encouraging students (through design and prompts) to interact with the course content and with each other is one thing (and one aspect of learner-centered instruction). However, I don't know of any faculty who would openly adopt their students' goals for their course. A more realistic outcome is to have faculty identify and address the disconnect that almost always exists between their goals and those of their students. It's similar to the challenge of aligning corporate training outcomes and requirements, just more tedious.

There's a lot of value in learner-centered pedagogy. We just have to be cautious and deliberate in applying that pedagogy to online learning environments.

ringraziamento felice

2010-11-24T15:17:00.000-05:00

thicker threads

2010-11-23T15:46:00.005-05:00

I've long proposed that the relationship between technical communication and instructional design needs to be explored more deeply than it has been. In fact, it's an area of my yet-to-be-taken qualifying exams. As an extension of that relationship, I've recently started pulling on the thread that runs through online course design (as a generic practice) and technical communication.

We covered some of this ground in Krista's class last year -- specifically the relationships among information architecture, information design, and technical communication. In a current online course design project, I'm finding that understanding these relationships helps me better describe and illustrate to faculty what they have to do when creating an online course.

For example, technical communication is all about content. Online courses are all about the content. Structuring that content in a logical, meaningful, and usable way is sometimes difficult for faculty new to online course design. Technical communicators, on the other hand, intuitively understand how to do this. By introducing basic concepts of information architecture to faculty -- even rudimentary folder/item metaphors -- I've been able to show them the connection between instructional content and instructional sequence.

Similarly, technical communicators have long struggled with presenting content in usable, useful, and effective designs. On the successes and failures of these struggles, it's easy to introduce faculty to basic concepts of information design -- working with the options (and limitations) of the interfaces through which their course content will be served. After faculty understand the role of heuristics in the online course space, they are always less intimidated by multi-layered content and web-based instructional technologies.

About twelve years ago my little technical writing department was making a case to be positioned as the information hub within a software development company. It seemed a bit of a stretch at the time, but now I think we may have been on to something. The (rapidly changing) nature of technical communication places the TCer in a unique position to weave together threads of a wide range of disciplines, practices, and theories. Maybe this is what makes it so hard to define technical communication. Maybe it's what makes practicing technical communication so much fun.

you can't make me

2010-11-22T15:27:00.000-05:00

I'm just finishing up a recent study about various approaches to managing instructional, operational, and technical aspects of online education programs. Granted, the study focuses on full online programs, but there's a lot SU can take away -- particularly in regard to faculty preparation and quality assurance.

In this and similar studies, it becomes clear that the schools/colleges with the most successful online initiatives are those that mandate training for their faculty. It only makes sense, but can you imagine the blow-back from faculty who see themselves as working "with" the university rather than "for" the university?

The same resistance would/is felt when you attempt to position quality assurance in front of faculty. Quality is of critical importance to the success of any online education initiative. Yet how do you get faculty to understand that if they want to teach online, they will be required (mandated?) to actively engage in coordinated and systematic examinations of their course designs and pedagogical strategies?

There are advantages to working for a private university. One advantage is that you can make up your own rules. It only gets dicey when you have to navigate the politics of dancing; mandating faculty to do things in the best interest of the institution.

water water everywhere

2010-11-19T15:54:00.001-05:00

The Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department is engaged in a multi-institution smart-grid computing project. The member sites are looking at the best way to collaborate. In a short five minute teleconference today, I was reminded about the difficulty most engineers have with needs analysis. Rather than spending the time necessary to determine their requirements (the type and degree of required collaboration), there was a sudden jump to the most accessible or user-friendly collaboration tool.

The list and types of cloud-based (and otherwise) collaboration tools grows every day. It's not realistic nor necessary to know every possible platform or tool option. It is, however, necessary to know that the tool you select is going to meet all or most of your requirements. But we first have to identify those requirements. Most of the technical writers I've worked with understand this necessity. Maybe it's because you only need to get burned once by scope-creep and ill-defined project requirements. Maybe it's because most technical writers need well-developed contexts, frameworks, and purpose statements to begin developing effective information products.

The smart-grid computing project sounds extremely interesting. I'm a little geeked up on the opportunities to work with some of these other regional colleges and universities. It fits in nicely with the chancellor's call to action.

new money

2010-11-18T13:10:00.000-05:00

I'm hearing this -- new money -- a lot lately in all sorts of meetings and contexts around here. It bothers me.

The simple definition of new money is revenue to the university that has not already been allocated/extracted from a full- or part-time student.

The definition itself doesn't bother me as much as the way in which the phrase is bandied around in relation to online course and program initiatives. For example, "We may not need to determine how to allocate resources to that project based on the amount of new money it will generate."

There's two problems here. First, how do you estimate the amount of new money -- the potential for revenue -- when you have no idea about the market opportunities? Who on this campus, other than University College, understands the potential to attract new matrics and non-matrics to this university? The second problem is that the university is starting to cover ground that University College has already been over. We've created and participated in dozens of studies and research the last 10 years that show it takes an average of 3 years to begin to see a return on investments in online courses and programs. New money or not, if the university is not prepared to eat some costs out of the gate on any of the initiatives already in the pipeline, then they're going to lose out peer institutions (which we're doing anyway).

The rub is that much of the bulk of the costs that everyone keeps talking about -- the infrastructure, technology and support resources -- are already committed, they're just not being exploited. Redirecting and focusing existing investments (overhead) is readily and easily done. Building quality online courses and programs is readily and easily done. Do that, and the new money will come. It's not complicated.

The hardest part for these people is to get off the stick and act. The audience, market, and need is there. It's time we start to do something in a formalized, organized, and qualified manner.

getting traction

2010-11-17T14:33:00.002-05:00

I had an interesting conversation with a research associate from the Education Advisory Board. They're preparing a report about online program initiatives for a regional university. The focus of the study is on cultural issues in regard to online teaching and learning.

It struck me that during our conversation I found myself defending SU's commitment to resident-based instruction. Working through the range of arguments for or against online, I came to a position that I'm actually comfortable with. In order to move SU forward in the online space, we have to accept the fact that the resident undergraduate experience is (and will likely be for a very a long time) the principle reason why students choose to come to SU. And while we may be able to accommodate those students with flexible format courses, including full-online, we should not expect that they would rather be completing their undergraduate degrees from off campus and at a distance.

Interest here at SU is growing around online graduate programs and certificates. We're getting the most traction with the schools and colleges that don't already have grad programs online, which is everyone with the exception of the Whitman School of Management and the School of Information Studies. That leaves a lot of programs and departments who need help.

Online grad is a much easier (and logical) sell to faculty and executives because it's a target population that isn't necessarily interested in the resident experience. They've had that. Now it's about efficiency and flexibility. So in regard to cultural resistance, maybe we're actually coming at this in the right way. It still feels awfully organic, but I'm confident that we'll see rapid growth after we get a toe hold with a few high-profile/high-dollar graduate programs.

thank a veteran today

2010-11-11T15:52:00.000-05:00

precautions

2010-11-11T15:45:00.000-05:00

In thinking more about the ECAR study noted below, I'm wondering if we (anyone who vets, selects, or implements instructional technologies) should be weary of the ways in which the study could likely be taken up. In particular, the study could imply that because students are increasingly tech-savvy, we should rush to incorporate a bevy of new communication and networking technologies into our instructional spaces.

I think it's important that we not get caught up in the "technology is ubiquitous" line of thinking. I understand how the prevalence of "personal" technologies can remove certain constraints to adopting new instructional technologies. However, I worry about blurring the lines among different types of technologies in the interest of making broad claims about student preparedness to use instructional technologies -- or to co-opt communication and social networking technologies for instructional purposes.

Students are growing increasingly comfortable with technology-mediated interaction. I get that. But it doesn't mean that they're prepared to use those technologies in instructional spaces. Manipulating technology to learn is a different activity (and requires different skill sets) than manipulating technology to socialize and communicate.

I realize I'm making broad generalizations here, but I've seen how these studies have led to knee-jerk reactions in the past.

meeting demand early

2010-11-09T10:40:00.004-05:00

The latest Educause ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology is making the rounds -- lots of data, statistics, and assumptions about the spaces in which students and faculty are using technology.

These studies always excite me because I find little nuggets of validation (what does a validation nugget look like?) that indicate we’re still moving in the best direction; best for the students, the faculty, and the university. The most telling trend is that faculty and decision-makers appear to finally be getting it. There is a measurable degree of momentum building behind expanding instructional technology across the curriculum.

If I can use this latest study in any way to help shape our online strategies moving forward, I’m going to presume that student demand for alternate format instruction (hybrid to full-online) will increase at a rate similar to technology adoption in the resident classroom. That doesn’t mean Syracuse University is prepared to meet or respond to the demand, but it’s important that we recognize it.

common threads

2010-11-08T12:06:00.000-05:00

I had my classroom observation conducted a few days ago. We’re required to have an observation prior to our contract renewals. I’ve always seen it as an opportunity to get a fresh perspective from real composition instructors.

This year’s observation was extremely enlightening in that it helped me better understand the threads that run through the lower- and upper-division writing curriculum. I’ve never taught WRT 105 or 205, so I’m always basing my instruction in WRT 407 on assumptions about what the students should already know or should be capable of doing.

In discussing this with my observer (a seasoned and extremely talented writing instructor), we determined that because WRT 407 is content-rich and highly contextualized, I have ample opportunity to address rhetorical aspects of technical communication. By coming back to rhetoric (as a discipline and practice), I can draw on what the students have already experienced in their lower-division writing courses.

Of course, I’m feeling a little sheepish for not identifying this opportunity myself. For all of my emphasis on the distinctiveness of technical communication, I lost the forest among the trees.

geeked up

2010-10-08T13:10:00.004-04:00

No, this engineering student didn't eat all of those Snickers by himself, but he probably should have. Why? Well, if I had to sit through my lecture yesterday, I'd have been looking for just about anything legal that would keep me awake.

Is there an elegant way to move from a "dude, are you on crack" lecture about functional and technical specifications to a face-numbing "what the f**k are you talking about" discussion of prepositional phrases and helping verbs? If there is, I need to know about it.

Here's the problem: I'm teaching an advanced technical communication course in a room that is not conducive to writing instruction. So I'm struggling to find ways to get the students engaged with tech comm activities that don't require software, keyboards, cyborg interfaces, etc.

I had planned an individual writing/editing activity that I was all geeked-up about, but the photocopies sat cooling in my office while I was busily purchasing a few bags of sugary goodness before class. Knucklehead.

This year is going to be challenging, I knew it when they told me the section had 43 students. I need to keep them engaged, interested, and excited early so they don't fade out before project development begins in January.

on questions of relevance

2010-09-24T09:50:00.001-04:00

As is typical for his blog, Tom Johnson has a great post that is asking us to consider a number of tech comm issues within a single question. It's one of the things that makes Tom's stuff interesting.

I want to respond to what I perceive as an anti-academic tone in Don Bush’s statements. In many of his early articles (raise your hand if you loved reading the “Friendly Editor” articles in Technical Communication), and particularly in his co-authored text, Bush takes an extremely pragmatic approach to the practice of technical communication. That’s what makes his writing so accessible. So why have I been so bothered since I (re)read Bush’s quotes on Tom’s site?

I’m not an academic. I tell myself that every time I step in front of pre-professional engineers and intend to impart some bit of practical knowledge about technical communication – some iota of skill that they can carry forward into their practice; making them exceptional designers, developers and communicators. I have, however, developed a deep appreciation for the way quality academic work serves and shapes the practice of technical communication. Tom’s simple question (Is rhetoric relevant?) exposes how so much of this work gets lost somewhere between the scholarly journals and field-level implementation.

I realize my perspective is skewed. I’ve had the advantage of continuing to practice tech comm while studying with some truly amazing scholars in Composition, Rhetoric and Technical Communication (Lipson, Phelps, Brooke, and Kennedy to name a select few). My intellectual development within these three incestuously related academic disciplines has nurtured my growth as a practicing technical communicator and editor. Through the hundreds (thousands?) of readings and my (notably weak) research projects, I couldn't help but recognize how much of my previous practice lacked the theoretical rationale that frames the problems technical communicators face and the methods we use to solve those problems. I've since realized the importance of including scholarly attention to a variety of theoretical and practical issues in my professional work, as well as using a broad range of methods and concepts. This understanding helps me bridge the gap between theory and practice; to simultaneously grow as a scholar and as a practitioner. And what’s wrong with that?

Scholarship is not a four-letter word, and the ivory tower is not as impenetrable as many practitioners would have us believe.

i wanna easter egg

2010-09-23T21:23:00.001-04:00

Problem statements are not easy to develop. I know this, which is why I try to instill in engineering students the importance of writing an effective and meaningful problem statement. And yet, there I was yesterday, in an initial project meeting, buying into a “client’s” list of wants, not needs. I walked out of the meeting convincing myself that we had to retrofit an existing workflow and series of business processes – and migrate 11 web sites to a new platform – to accommodate the client.

As TCers know, it’s needs on which we build our functional requirements; it’s needs that we vet, organize and rank to determine how we’re going to solve a client’s problem with an information product. It’s needs from which we create alignment (stasis) throughout the product.

By this morning I’d diffused the wants (and other extraneous commentary) down to a single, actual need. It’s a need that does not warrant anything close to what the client imagined, proposed, or expects. In fact, it’s a need – a real life business requirement – that is being met with existing workflows and information products. It’s just that the client is too clueless to understand this.

I’ll likely spend more time than I should documenting the actual problem and detailing the existing solution to politely convince the client he's missing the point. But that’s part of what we do, right?

the greatness of anology

2010-09-21T16:49:00.000-04:00

This has to be the funniest thing I've read in a long time.

"... mobile manufacturers who go the Android route are doing no better than Finnish boys who pee in their pants for warmth in the winter."

For context, see engadget.

Stuff like this makes me miss freelance work. Oh the fun you could have with a quote like that.

do what now?

2010-09-20T11:30:00.002-04:00

I think I'll start collecting these to use in WRT 407 and WRT 307. I'll call the collection, Guess What They Really Mean To Say. Kind of catchy, right?

Egregious statement: "... support cross-campus generation of knowledge, enhancing the value of local research by exploring its trans-local ramifications."

Holy academic blather Batman! It's not really important to note who made the statement. It is, however, important to note that the statement is part of a call to action document. I'm still trying to decipher what that call is, but I'm getting closer.

Long live Bill Lutz.

ee humor (barely)

2010-09-15T08:56:00.001-04:00

I just ran across this at xkcd. I thought the EEs in WRT 407 would get a kick out of it. I barely get the joke, which is only a little pathetic on a few levels.

spoon full of sugar

2010-09-13T14:48:00.001-04:00

I do this every year. I tell students that I’m not going to spend an inordinate amount of time on grammar because, goddammit, it’s an upper-division writing course and they should know this stuff by now. I then find myself including blather like this in my comments to a student’s submission:

... My only comment is in regard to the use of "and/or" in the last sentence. "And/or" means that either both circumstances are possible or only one of two circumstances is possible; however, it tends to be clumsy and awkward because it makes the reader stop and puzzle over your distinction. The more of these “stop signs” we have in our documents, the less effective the documents become as the reader’s frustration with the content increases. Another problem is that too many writers use "and/or" inexactly, so you may have a reader looking at your usage and thinking, “Well, that’s incorrect because I use and/or differently.” Again, this is a pause that pulls the reader out of the text to reconsider not what you’ve written, but how you’ve written it. The best thing to do is recast the sentence to be more precise and avoid confusing your reader with the awkward “and/or” construction.

I couldn’t leave it alone. It’s like a pin in my neck. The funny thing is, it’s completely naïve of me to tell students they should know this stuff by now. The fact is, the majority of people hacking out technical and business documents don’t know this stuff by now, so why should college seniors? Hell, I barely know this stuff and I'm pretending to teach it.

What I should be helping these students do is recognize when something is amiss in their writing and then rely on the handbook or style guide to confirm the hunch. I don’t want to teach grammar and I don’t want pre-professional engineers to hate writing because they hate grammar. The trick is sliding it in without them knowing it – like when you have to mash up your dog’s pill and sprinkle it into his bowl of Chick-O-Beef parts.

The nasty little grammar pill. Bad medicine that, once taken, tastes oh so good.

coming back: what's new

2010-09-09T15:54:00.006-04:00

There's always plenty to say, just never enough time to say it. That's not entirely true, but it's an easy colloquial excuse.

WRT 407 started last week. I love teaching this course. This year, the College of Engineering is up for ABET re-accreditation. The last time we went through the process, the ABET reviewers were thoroughly impressed with the embedded nature of the writing instruction in WRT 407. Yet as I review the list of materials I need to provide to the reviewers this time, I'm struck by the request for an assessment summary. I don't recall how I handled this the last go around -- or if it was even requested.

Writing assessment, and the range of emotional responses it generates, continues to be an interesting topic. To meet the ABET requirement, I'm considering focusing specifically on the prevalence of genre in WRT 407 instruction. When I peel away the onion skin, assessment in WRT 407 is conducted exclusively through a review of each student’s work with a range of engineering and technical genres. Students work with different genres in highly contextualized instructional spaces to expose the differences among document types, while reinforcing the many types of associated writing requirements and activities they will encounter as practicing professionals.

I've blathered about this before, but I'm coming back to it now as another means of validating the design and pedagogical strategy we've adopted for WRT 407.

There will certainly be more on this later. It's preoccupying too much of my time for it not to be a series of boring blog posts. But not that there's anything wrong with that.

ccr 760: on kennedy

2010-04-11T09:03:00.003-04:00

OK, so now I want to read the whole thing. The historical aspects of Kennedy’s work (I’m assuming the rest of the dis follows the same methodology) makes for interesting reading.

As with all of our readings these past weeks, I’ve made a conscious effort to keep what I understand to be technical communication practices on the fringe while I’m working through a text. I note this readerly move to explain why I found the descriptions of textual curation familiar and creative.

Like the textual curators Kennedy describes (Chambers and the Wikipedians), the technical communicator also wrestles with two rhetorical elements: “[1] the exigence of information overload and [2] the unique agency demonstrated by the [tech writer] who labors to evaluate and re-compose huge amounts of information into a coherent and easily-accessible format for a broad audience" (113). This is, arguably, a more appropriate and concise description (than those offered by Slattery and Jones) of the modern technical communicator’s activities.

Specific to the activities of textual curation, Kennedy comfortably introduces the concept of craft ,and for me creates a clear progression from the readings we did in Spilka a few weeks ago. Like the craft of textual curation, the craft of technical communication (of the symbolic-analytic work) regularly involves "filtering prior texts and re-composing that information into a new text that fits the goals of the project at hand" (120, and “knowing where to collect information; developing ways to manage it; filtering … for relevance and quality; composing concise, clear articles; and attending to or outsourcing the myriad small tasks of publishing” (123).

Like the Cyclopædia and Wikipedia, modern tech comm information products are aggregated “synthetic compositions”. The individual who builds (authors?) these products is, quite literally, a “textual harvester” performing a continuous technology-mediated act of re-composition. And I’m thinking Textual Harvester would look pretty cool on a business card.

As a complete aside, everyone who has engaged in “perverse performances of agency in the form of vandalism” (160) please raise your hand.

ccr 760: on jones

2010-04-10T14:26:00.002-04:00

The way Jones uses the term “information coordinator” seems more appropriate than Slattery’s “textual coordinator” (see below). Maybe it’s because Jones addresses the importance of “writing” in his broader description of how shifts in technology “create new types of writing and writer” (455). “I found that the writing process had changed and that the writers focused less on producing text and more on developing, coordinating, and structuring the newly adopted corporate intranet” (456). I realize this is essentially the same claim Slattery made, but within Jones ethnographic study, the claim seems more valid because Jones comes back to the writing: “Rather than transferring past information, the writers I studied created items as needed, often in response to a change. When something changed, a writer would be tasked with writing an announcement of the change that would appear on the corporate intranet welcoming screen with a link to a document—usually created by the division making the change but sometimes by the writers—detailing the change” (459).

Ahhhhhh… technical writing as I know it.

The following comment from the corporate communications supervisor synthesizes our earlier readings regarding information design: “She noted that this process “’requires a lot more up-front analysis. You have to know your audiences … and the differences between them’” (458). Similarly, Jones states “because the corporate intranet was still new, the writers needed to create an overall intranet structure that worked for all users" (462). The importance of information design and similar activities illustrate the more telling ways writers’ activities are shaped by certain technologies.

Incidentially, I found in the essay the primary reason why there are so many essays extolling the value of and need for technical writers who do more than write… “The writers at times needed to create content for other divisions of the company. But that was seen as a transitory situation: The goal was for each division to create its own reference content” (460). Going back to Slattery for a moment, the “problem” with technology is that it empowers anyone with access to be a writer. This means there is more crappily written content, which professional technical communicators are left to collect, aggregate, edit, mend, and mash-up. Which is the point Slattery and Jones are both attempting to make.

Oh so cyclical is my thinking.

ccr 760: on slattery

2010-04-10T07:55:00.005-04:00

Yes, it’s about the technology. Even way back in the dark ages of 2005, that wasn’t a risky statement to make about technical communication. Slattery states that “information technologies appear to be the primary medium through which [the technical communicator’s] competencies are enacted” (355), but I’m thinking the statement applies to all knowledge workers. When we consider the list of technology-mediated activities – most importantly “the ability to coordinate, to structure workable ecologies of texts and then layer them into the target document" (355), I'm reminded that anyone with a hammer, some wood, and a box of nails can attempt to build a house.

I guess I’m responding to Slattery’s description of “writing” as an act concerned more with “deciding what to put where as it was deciding what to say and how to say it” (357). Rather than making a case for higher-level literacies, we’re reducing textual coordination to an act of content aggregation. That’s something we hire high school kids to do for us in the summer. And, interestingly enough, those high school kids typically have a larger “"technological repertoire" than the knowledge workers they’re assisting.

Slattery’s most important point, I think, is that a technical writer’s skills are experienced through and enacted with technologies. What gets lost are the skills necessary to do good writing in the first place. Slattery states that skill in writing is the “uber IT” (358), but diminishes that uberness by quickly tacking on the process of textual coordination as a necessary or equally important skill “necessary for building the genre ecologies that enable [higher order] thinking” (359).

For me, the activities identified as IT-mediated textual coordination are part of the job – and yes, a very important part of the job. But technical communication is and must continue to be about the writing; the place at which we must start when we teach aspiring TCers.

ccr 760: on tapscott & williams

2010-04-04T15:28:00.004-04:00

Is there a way we can make the university executive leadership read this chapter? I'm actually less interested in the author's arguments about the merits of wikis than I am in the way they position a particular social software-based solution within a broader call for bottom-up innovation.

The Best Buy case study is a fine example of how to meet people (students, employees, end-users) in the spaces in which they work and play. The key element to these meetings is communicating in a peer-to-peer fashion -- communicating to collaborate, to "drill holes through the hierarchy to produce great results" (251). The generational differences are too obvious to ignore or to apologize for. The NetGen is defining the dichotomy that Spinuzzi exposes in his introduction (see below): The changing nature of the networked work place and the intrusion of social network technologies on non-work time -- the demand for non-NetGen workers to be more adept in socially networked environments as tech (not technical) communicators and users of technologies. Within this dichotomy, you have someone like Best Buy's Stephens making money from the fact that non-NetGeners are typically unprepared to deal with even the most basic of technologies today -- the personal computer.

In reading about successful implementations of a wiki and the development of wiki cultures, I kept coming back to all of the failed wiki efforts I've been privy to over the years. The chapter suggests that a principle cause for failure is the point at which the initiative begins. In every failed wiki project I've been part of, the project began as a top-down mandate. There was nothing organic or natural about it. Tapscott and Williams claim that "wikis are supposed to conform naturally to the way people think" (256). I'm supposing that wikis fail when they don't provide that space for natural conformity.

I was only half-kidding above. I do think that an organization as large as Syracuse University could learn a lot from the underlying successes and benefits associated with social-software. Where better than a university to find people who believe they can contribute to innovation and progress? Reminder to self: Mention the SU IT Answers wiki project.

ccr 760: on spinuzzi

2010-04-04T09:56:00.004-04:00

In an introduction to a special issue of TCQ, Spinuzzi lays out a framework in which to consider the challenges facing technical communicators in an age of distributed work.

Much of the introduction brought me back to our earlier reading of Spinuzzi; as author of a text which made him an obvious choice to edit this special issue. In that text, as in his introduction here, Spinuzzi balances these broader discussions about the changing nature of work on a squishy definition of networks -- the networked worker, the socio-economics of networked activities, internetworked communications. This phenomenon of networks changes everything in the workplace -- from work activities to the organizational structures in which that work is performed.

While I think I understand the point being made, I'm still having trouble reconciling why this changes anything for technical communicators. It seems that there are broader implications for workers who are not prepared or "skilled-up" to be effective symbolic analytic workers.

I do see a complication in Spinuzzi's framework for the special issue -- worker activity is not the same as worker connectivity. When I read about the modern worker being segregated by education and segmented by technology (271), I wonder, has that ever not been the case in industrial societies? It just seems like we're stretching things when we introduce all of these socio-economic arguments in discussions about the changing nature of technical communication. I understand it's necessary to understand what's happening on a broader scale, but the challenges, problems, issues facing the technical communicator of 2010 are (I believe) the same as those faced in 1970.

When I strip away what feels like the necessary baggage of a scholarly essay (or introduction in this case), I find what I think is the essential issue facing teachers of writing, writing curriculum designers, technical communication programs, writing programs, Composition, and practicing technical communicators. In the age of distributed work, Spinuzzi says, "Rhetoric becomes an essential area of expertise ... when we are all potentially in contact with each other, across organizational and disciplinary lines, we must persuade more people coming from different domains—not just our superiors and coworkers..." (272).

ccr 760: on o’reilly

2010-03-28T12:06:00.004-04:00

I intentionally read O’Reilly last this week. It was required reading a few years ago when we were attempting to commercialize instructional design and development with the goal of spinning off into a for-profit venture. Before we could deconstruct, embrace, and apply the principles of Web 2.0, our over-capitalized experiment imploded.

I like this article because it provides a survey of where and what the web was, is, and can be. By intentionally not describing the web as a collection of HTML-based resources, the article allows us to see the web as a space in which things happen. Terms like platform, service, and architecture make more sense when used amid discussions of specific efforts over the years. If one thing is clear, it’s that the web (arguably the Internet as a whole) continues to be about choice and openness – about participation. From a business perspective, Web 2.0 tools, technologies, and initiatives have simply elevated that participation in ways that allow for commercialization outside of traditional product/revenue models. From a more holistic perspective, participation is now expected if not demanded by users. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

O’Reilly mentions in the article that as early as 2005 the term Web 2.0 had been high-jacked and improperly applied. Indeed, I’d noted my own personal disgust with rampant and disingenuous references to Web 2.0, which is why I continue to thoroughly enjoy this:

ccr 760: on diehl, et al

2010-03-28T11:10:00.001-04:00

I'm struck by the continuity through our readings the last week -- in particular the emergence (for me) of the importance of the visual in technical communication. I think I've always understood this, but in a narrow sort of way; the visual layout of a document or web space, the structure of tabular data, the use of graphics, etc. I'm seeing now that this particular view limits the visual to a declarative role secondary to the more procedural or narrative textual elements of an information product. The "malleable functionality" (428) of the Grassroots app illustrates the fundamental benefit of the mashup: an ability to compile and combine visual and aural information in a way that makes the most sense to the user. The relative importance of that information is completely up to the user, thereby negating an author's conception of the information as primarily procedural or declarative. Perhaps this is why it was necessary for Diehl, et al. to describe maps as arguments. If we are to accept that description, it is absolutely necessary to address how public participation in the design of an information product will shape the community ethos and eventual uptake of the product (419).

I'm also seeing a connection here with claims in earlier readings for broader and more tools-based competencies for technical communicators. In this case, the authors are first trying to expose and place value on the writing activities of people involved in civic participation. This was a similar move made by Carliner, Mazur, Spinuzzi, etc. in their efforts to identify the fundamentally rhetorical and "writerly" activities of technical communicators. They (like Diehl, et all) then claim that to be effective at these activities, the communicator/author needs to be able to construct compelling arguments using a range of tools, techniques, devices, and technologies beyond those traditionally understood to be necessary for successful communication.

The call to action is ultimately the same: to expand the teaching of writing (not just technical writing) to allow for a more inclusive or expanded definition of what it means to write in technology-mediated and technology-enhanced professional, personal, and public contexts. I guess this means I need to reconsider my statement about Stolley's claim that technical writers need to know how to sling code. I likely missed the point he was trying to make.

ccr 760: on stolley

2010-03-27T09:58:00.005-04:00

I don't propose to be well-versed in activity theory, but I'm not seeing how the use of a social media application (SMA), such as Delicious, is anything other than an individual activity occurring during the course of a collaborative project. Stolley notes (356) that the object (output – my term) of the team's activity is the document, project, system, etc. To therefore describe SMAs as “tool-mediated activities” because they do not appear in output is to describe just about every tool used by the technical communicator. Stolley's use of activity theory to frame his discussion just seems a little retrofit or unnecessary in the context of his case studies and discussion.

Beyond my inability to see through the essay’s framework, I think I understand the point Stolley is making by describing the use of Delicious (as an example of an SMA) in personal, academic, and professional contexts. Delicious, like many other second-generation web tools, was designed to be manageable, accessible, interoperable, and scalable. These are the principle aspects of tools and technologies that technical communicators (nay, all types of information workers) look to exploit in their daily activities. In some ways this move (both conscious and unconscious) on the part of the user further complicates the already complex work environment and the SMA. On the other hand, the move could have a mitigating affect. As Stolley notes (363-4), the SMA will shape the user's work (environment, processes, activities, etc.) as well as the output of that work. The ideal result then is a reshaping that improves inputs and outputs.

On a slightly divergent note, I don't agree with Stolley's imagining of the modern technical communicator. The ability to write code does not move the technical communicator “beyond a user-only attitude toward technology” (365). The ability to write code (or do anything) simply makes the technical communicator more valuable to the organization and self-sufficient on projects that require code slinging. One's attitude toward technology is based on more than skills and competencies. An appreciation for and understanding of the broader social and rhetorical aspects of technology arguably has more to do with "a new kind of digital literacy" than knowing how to use a particular tool.

ccr 760: a philosophy of usability

2010-03-23T20:10:00.007-04:00

Another useful and informative seminar session today. Jason and Missy led us through a great exercise to illustrate and apply certain aspects of usability (the product) with a particular focus on Quesenbery's 5 dimensions.

In the closing activity, we were posed a couple of questions to consider. One question had us imagine what a philosophy of usability might look like. Based on the week's readings, I imagined a philosophy akin to heuristics. I've always found heuristics interesting in a context of Composition and Technical Communication, and usability seems a logical space in which talk about heuristics. In regard to our imagined philosophy, where heuristics allows for users to learn things themselves, a philosophy of usability would extend that individual aspect to allow users to design and build in addition to learn.

One aspect of this philosophy might be a belief that users to are capable of and require the ability to obtain and explore information AND set their own rules (as opposed to simply following pre-determined set of rules -- heuristics). Another aspect of this philosophy might be an understanding that users are problem solvers, and as such they require a range of non-standardized tools and varying competencies.

As applied to the broader issues we've been considering in 760, a philosophy of usability could be a point at which Composition and Technical Writing can intersect -- perhaps in an expanded space of writer analysis. Unlike Composition’s emphasis on the personal, the technical writer’s understanding of audience analysis is typically organizational. And because technical writers generally do not have direct contact with the audiences for which they write, it is difficult, at best, for them to negotiate their texts with their primary audiences. This is where a philosophy of usability could inform technical writing instruction. Traditional Composition pedagogies can be applied to move technical writing students out of the basic writer-audience paradigm to a richer understanding of the function of language within organizational communications. Such an emphasis on usability could expose for the workplace writer the ways in which language is used to maintain corporate power relations and to form a writer’s identity.

Quick thought during a really great discussion amid some very very smart young scholars.

ccr 760: on wolf, et al

2010-03-22T14:52:00.002-04:00

This essay starts with an interesting statement: "... designing a Web page was a rhetorical act fraught with real-world implications." I like that statement because it applies to just about any design activity that involves communicating information.

I read the essay on the heels of a meeting with a project team designing and developing a course to prepare faculty to teach online. Usability implications oozed from every statement that was made about sequencing instruction, focusing on specific tools, varying the presentation techniques, etc. In terms of a continuity of design (not to mention nomenclature), the course as it is currently imagined will be a hodgepodge of chunks of information and activities. If there is a consideration toward usability, it stops at the point at which users/students will access the course content.

I mention this project because the principal designers would benefit greatly from an "Access First" design approach. Interestingly enough, the topic of universal design will be introduced in the third week of the course to familiarize students with accessibility issues -- focusing on the user's needs and ranges of (dis)abilities.

In many ways, the Access First design approach sounds a lot like descriptions of Information Design, which we reviewed a few weeks ago. I therefore wasn't surprised to see that quote from Redish, arguing for a more holistic consideration of usability studies. This broader view of users and possible uses of the system (information product) is what she claims is essential for effective and practical information design.

I agree with the authors' conclusions that current approaches to usability (analysis and studies) can be limiting in that they do not make space for the freedom, flexibility, and high-degree of personalization realized by Web 2.0 technologies. However, you have to start somewhere -- and think existing approaches to usability can provide at least a baseline for analysis. From there, we can start to look for more creative and interactive ways to assess usability in ways that mirror the technologies and spaces we're analyzing.

760: on salvo and rosinski

2010-03-07T08:29:00.004-05:00

Random Family Member: “Mitch, tell me again what it is you do.”

Mitch the Technical Communicator: “I’m a rhetorically trained, human-centered communication specialist.”

Family Member: “Oh, you work with Greek robots. That’s cool man!”

Mitch: “What? No, I contribute to the development of usable, human-scaled virtual information spaces and advocate for user needs in emerging digital spaces.”

Family Member: “So you’re like the dude in Avatar? I thought that was fake.”

Mitch: “Avatar is fake. Um, let’s see… OK, what I do most of the time is pay attention to context by transcending sentence- and paragraph-level content and the design of written communication intended to be placed on paper. But recently I’m being asked to understand how search engines and databases work within specific contexts to organize access to information, and how I can also consider context as I assign keywords, create summaries, and otherwise prepare documents for a searchable future.”

Family Member: “Dude, why didn’t you just tell me you’re an information designer? You ashamed or something?”

Mitch: “An information designer? What the hell is that? I’m a technical writer. Maybe I’m a very confused technical writer, but that’s what I am -- at least that's what I think I am. Is it still an open bar?”

Aside from the unnecessarily complicated descriptions of information design (ID) and technical communication (as disciplines and practices), the essay provides an excellent survey of the development of ID and its relationship to tech comm and the technical communicator. Most useful, I think, is the lexicon that Salvo & Rosinski (S&R) present because it gives us a way to discuss the outcomes or products of ID. Carliner earlier referred to blueprints; Albers and Mazur made reference to guidelines. S&R’s lexicon allows us to label and identify specific aspects of ID so we can place certain ID activities within the work (current or future) of the technical communicator.

Most interesting of the lexicon is ambience. “Effective ambient design helps users understand the purpose and content … with a quick glance” (120). This is a brutally difficult challenge; at least it is for me, which is why I rely so heavily on exceptionally talented graphic designers. Here's the funny thing about ambient design and the example of the quick guide for the office chair: Getting the user to use the guide isn’t necessarily the problem. It’s often more about getting the user to remember that the quick guide is right there in the arm of the chair.

As part of our body of knowledge, S&R make two principle claims that allow us to continue on with the historical and professionalization narratives we’ve been working through: 1) That technical communicators have a role (actually a stake) in shaping the field/practice of information design in the present and immediate future, and 2) Technical communicators are in an ideal position to continue doing what they’ve been doing for a long time – implementing good designs in their information products, but now the emphasis is on digital media.

Here are two asides from the essay:

I found it interesting that in defining what they mean by critical literacy, S&R are also describing some of the competencies required to be an effective information designer. Full participation in a community, which they call critical literacy, “requires that one comprehend not merely the words, but also the purposes or uses for the selection of those words in a given context” (103). Then again, that's probably why the essay is included in Spilka's text.
At what point did we start referring to the “early years of the World Wide Web” (106) as if they were halcyon days?

760: on mazur

2010-03-06T18:59:00.005-05:00

If I'd read Mazur first this week, I probably wouldn't be left with this feeling that she's casting around in a shallow pool of definitions, trying desperately to latch information design (ID) onto anything that floats by.

As a bibliographical history, the essay is insightful, primarily because it strings together the historical narratives that appear in Carliner and Albers (below).

One exceptionally useful nugget in the essay is the STC ID SIG's definition of information design: "ID applies traditional and evolving design principles to the process of translating complex, unorganized, or unstructured data into valuable, meaningful information"(23). Then, when you think you can't read any more "what is information design blah blah blah," there's this from Jef Raskin: "Information design is a misnomer. Information cannot be designed; what can be designed are the modes of transfer and the presentations of information" (23-4). Mazur goes on to quote Raskin's emphasis on drawing a distinction between information and meaning.

I'm going to try and keep that distinction in the foreground as we work through the final essay and move into our class discussion next week. I think it's going to be necessary to create that demarcation (between information and meaning) if we're to find ways to apply ID to our practices as teachers of composition and rhetoric.

760: on carliner

2010-03-06T10:18:00.007-05:00

Not to belabor the inability to define information design (ID), but Carliner refers to ID first as a notion -- IDers "look at the bigger picture: What problem is the client trying to solve, what can I bring to address the problem, and how does this solution support the larger business situation" (43). A page later he defines ID as a discipline: "Design as problem solving ... designers focus on the solution ... design is a problem-solving discipline" (44).

Knowing that I need to move on and not make this definition-deficiency an issue, I really like Carliner's three-part goal-oriented framework for ID (the notion, practice, field, discipline, whatever).

Physical - the ability to find information
Cognitive - the ability to understand information
Affective - the ability to feel comfortable with the presentation of the information

In many ways, the framework represents my understanding of heuristics and something I'm pretty sure that most composition scholars are/should be familiar with.

I also like what Carliner is attempting to do with the framework (as he qualifies it in his conclusion) because I can locate my own practices within it. I seem most comfortable with the physical and cognitive levels of the framework. The affective level seems like "point of failure" motivation to me, although I know that's incomplete and inconsistent with what Carliner is describing here. It’s just that things like behavioral change, change management, and performance improvement are always the moving targets of the project. It is, quite honestly, often easier and sometimes necessary to avoid the affective level just to get the project done.

As a complete aside: I could probably have gone without Carliner's clarification of what he meant by "pre-digested information" on page 51. Dude, really? A description of how LactAid works?

760: on albers

2010-03-06T08:05:00.003-05:00

I will openly admit that I’m a little confused now. Albers claims that information design (ID) is not the same as information architecture (IA). But I’m struggling with how ID is nothing more than a sequence of activities that technical communicators have always performed prior to developing an information product.

Albers says that ID is not "the practice of web navigation, creating graphics, picking fonts, laying out the page, or using particular tools. Rather, it must be considered the practice of enabling a reader to obtain knowledge" (7). And yet back on page one he states that “Information design is about the proper position of content within an appropriate/meaningful context -- content that is effectively assembled and presented” (1). Am I the only one who gets the sense that Albers can’t clearly define ID either?

OK, so let’s assume that the “practice” of ID occurs first. Do we then move to IA (page layout, fonts, headings, etc.), and then to the central task of authoring, collecting, and synthesizing content? If that’s the case, therein is my confusion because I’ve never seen or understood these practices to be mutually exclusive or necessarily sequential.

When Albers talks about the "essence of being a good information designer" it sounds a lot like good audience analysis and project planning. "They start with understanding the information needs of the audience and what data is available, and then decide if paper, web-based, or a loudspeaker is the best method of communicating the information. The medium used to communicate the message should not be chosen until the information needs of the audience are defined" (8).That, to me, is the necessary up-front work of building usable and effective information products.

The need to specialize the technical communicator’s activities into granular chunks isn’t surprising – in fact it fits nicely with the themes of value-seeking, self-preservation, and disciplinary struggles we’ve strung together since week 1. When Carliner lists the activities of the IDer on page 3, he’s describing many of the symbolic-analytic activities that all knowledge workers perform. Similarly, when Odell and Goswanmi state that, “In creating the optimal user experience, the information designer must also consider the social context of the user” (6), are they not simply talking about the work of the rhetorician?

If I come to this discussion through those narratives (above), then I can buy the claim that ID has emerged from technical communication. Similarly, I can accept the better of the definitions of ID presented in the introduction -- "Information Design Journal: Information design is the art and the science of presenting information so that it is understandable and easy to use: effective, efficient and attractive" (3).

I like the IDJ definition because it lists three key metrics that we use in tech comm to evaluate our information products. Those metrics are embedded in our training (or at least they were). So maybe we were taught information design without it being called information design. It's an aspect of good technical communication. Nothing more.

760: on clark

2010-03-01T21:00:00.004-05:00

I really don’t have much to say about this essay other than it does a tremendously good job of surveying the issues relating to content / structure separation.

I found two extremely meaningful comments. The first: “As a result, after implementing this type of separation, a significant part of the writing process becomes the negotiation of content across genres rather than simply within them, and writing is structured by the design and use of information models, rule sets, style sheets, and the technical infrastructure that maintains and enforces those models and rules and presents the content whenever it is requested” (50). As the other essays in the week’s readings argue (directly and indirectly), these are the principle activities of the modern technical communicator AS WELL AS anyone else building information products from content objects. I think Clark is correct in assuming that “trained” technical communicators have the advantage of adapting these activities to their workflows because they have a long history of performing the same activities in less controlled traditional workflows.

Clark’s second meaningful comment is an assurance that there will continue to be a space for the technical communicator in the CMS-based authoring environment: “Authors write and structure complete texts to which visual style is added as needed, allowing them to continue working flexibly within organizational genres and facilitating changes and the creation of new genres. But the implementation of a system that granularizes content and makes genre formation part of a multigenre, automatically generated presentation system means learning to write differently” (54). In many ways, this is what technical communicators have done as long as new tools and technologies have been introduced into their practices.

Both of these comments illustrate that Clark wants to keep the “writing” in “technical writing” and does not privilege the technology over the craft. This, I think, is something that needs to be foregrounded as we work through the issues and implications of content management and content/authoring systems.

ccr 760: on hart-davidson, et al

2010-02-28T16:11:00.006-05:00

I like this paper because it’s based on practicality – on specific activities required in specific situations. Maybe it’s the case-study approach and the lens of phronesis that makes the conclusions usable and practical.

Content management as an activity (or “a type of conduct”) is understood, I think, by most practicing technical communicators. What the authors do well in this paper is present two situations in which the activity is shared by a range of workers who create knowledge, arrange information and make texts. It is this common decentralized activity that makes it extremely difficult to get a “culture of content management” to stick. It’s the problem of herding cats – cats that have their own thoughts (and competencies) regarding the ways information is created, published, and distributed.

In some ways, I think the authors’ conclusions have already been taken up by CMS developers – particularly by web content management system developers. Allowing users to “become more than just consumers, but also actual creators, editors, and manipulators of content" (26) is exactly what allows an organization to create and shape a culture of content (see Justin’s comments below for a great example). This is the empowering activity (phronesis) that allows CMS users to respond to highly contextualized real world situations that require specific work (world?) experiences.

In terms of actionable items based on lesson learned in both case studies, the authors give us a space in which to ask content-specific questions that do not necessarily shift the authority of meaning making solely to the technical communicator. Similarly, the authors ground their conclusions on an honest assessment of their own consulting activities: "But for many other organizations, writing practices are not so obvious and nowhere near the list of mission-critical activities. This means that our expertise, too, is off the radar screen. This is why it is true, we would argue, that while the moment of coming to content management may well give us an opportunity to prove ourselves valuable, we also need to be careful to develop sustainable ways of coming to content management that can make writing work visible and accountable as part of an organization’s thinking" (32). If you’ve had a chance to meet and listen to Bill Hart-Davidson, you’d recognize his voice and pragmatism in the preceding passage.

760: on pullman and gu

2010-02-28T10:14:00.002-05:00

Of course I should have read the introduction to the special issue before diving into any of this week’s essays. I would at least have understood that the guest editors were creating an intentionally text-centric theme in which to consider CMSs and the common practices of technical communicators.

As with Whtimore, I find in the introduction a common hang up with CMSs: “Content management has a direct bearing on our field because a central issue in content management is the role (or a lack thereof) of technical communicators in the process of CMS design and implementation" (2). Maybe I’m just struck by the agency, relevance, and authority the authors are assigning to the technical communicator in the workplace. I realize my experiences are my own and limited to niche software development industries, but they aren't unique or exceptional experiences. I can honestly say that I’ve never worked with a technical writer, editor, or developer who saw themselves as THE SOLE content creators within their organizations.

The foundation of technical communication is cemented by collaboration, cooperation, and communication – synthesizing and shaping. As I understand tech comm, it has never been about the end product. I’ve always seen my efforts “as part of an endless flow of information” (2) – long before CMSs and similar systems began appearing. Have CMSs affected the way in which technical communicators think and practice? Absolutely. But involving technical communicators in the design and development of such systems will not make working in CMS-based environments any less problematic. The CMSs I’ve worked with and implemented were never intended to serve a single group of users –technical communicators. Rather, they were intended specifically to remove the reliance on "documentation specialists" and information gatekeepers – to allow other “symbolic-analytic” workers to perform the work traditionally assigned to technical communicators. If technical communicators are ill-served by CMSs, it is only because they are being de-valued by the machine.

The anger toward the CMS – the machine – is mis-directed and a little disingenuous. Is it necessary in the introduction to note that "CMS implementations have rarely been successful" and to provide financial statistics to support the claim? Trying to justify or argue certain positions using traditional ROI models has never worked for technical communicators. As our “value-add” historical narratives continually show, we have long wrestled with the difficulty of proving a return on investments in what we do and the information products we produce. Trying to make a similar move in a discussion about CMSs is just sloppy. What we need to do is move away from the tired old ROI arguments and explore more current fiduciary theories to IMPROVE our returns on investments in our practice and products. If we are going to treat what we do as business assets (as Pullman and Gu claim), we should find more creative and appropriate ways to consider how to reconcile our practices with all forms of asset capitalization, including the CMS.

wondering about whitmore's frustration

2010-02-27T13:39:00.007-05:00

I just came across this sage advice from Hedley Finger. The reference to "pain" during a single-sourcing implementation brought Whitmore's essay into a little better focus. Finger's claim that a good single-sourcing implementation necessitates a "strict hierarchical structure for your documentation" makes Whitmore's visually-spatial CMS authoring environment sound down right tasty. Similarly, Finger's comments about a "strict folder tree structure and naming conventions for files and formats to facilitate batch processing via scripts" makes me want to run out and sign up for the next "Writing Like an Automaton" workshop offered by SkillPath.

But then there's this interesting tidbit from Finger: "This allows us to ramp up a new project quickly and gives the writers and artists a uniform environment in which to work." Ugh. There it is again -- pragmatism in the workplace. Just when you're feeling all scholarly and theoryish, you get slapped with the cold Mackrel that is the life of the practicing technical writer. It's been a while since I've been slapped as such, but I have scars dude. Yeah, I have the scars.

760: on whitmore's metadata and memory

2010-02-27T10:35:00.006-05:00

I like Whitmore’s approach to this topic because his argument considers the relationship of classical, big “R” Rhetoric to technical communication. There are plenty of these arguments to be found, but Whitmore’s focus on the canon of memory is interesting in that it exposes another aspect of the non-fixed writing processes of technical communicators.

On the other hand, I find throughout the essay a sort of romantic narrative of the technical communicator – of the technical communicator has sole inventor, creator, manipulator, and producer of texts. While this may have been and continue to be the case in some organizations, by and large technical communicators have been reusing acontextual content and composing in “hypothetically egoless style so that their content could be seamlessly combined with other content” (91) for a long long time. This doesn’t diminish Whitmore’s argument, which I find compelling from a system design perspective.

Whitmore wants to make the CMS a tool that follows or adheres to "the ways in which memory can be enhanced to aid the tactical retrieval of stored knowledge during acts of composing" (95). As he admits in his footnote, some CMS vendors are using methodologies that encourage or allow users to generate custom or unique methods to retrieve and manipulate stored content (memories?) – “to better meet the cognitive needs of writers during composing so that the requirement for specialization [is] avoided” (92).

The “requirement for specialization” is something that stuck with me throughout the essay. Whitmore is coming at this issue from the perspective of the technical communicator – as if only technical communicators are users of these systems. In fact, CMSs are used regularly by a range of workers who actively locate and convert stored information into useful and actionable knowledge. To focus solely on the technical communicator – and to tie the argument into the changing role (economic, social and otherwise) of the technical communicator – fails to recognize the increasingly dynamic and important role CMSs play. They are not simple object brokers from which user guides and training manuals are created. Yes, CMSs do (admittedly) destabilize “traditional notions of authorship and ownership because writers operate at a further remove from their audiences and the information products..." (89-90). But on the shop floor, a machine operator calling a help screen of brokered objects from a CMS is likely not too concerned with “a sense of powerlessness and purposelessness” (90) as the creator of a knowledge product needed to complete a complex task.

Again, to back out to Whitmore’s broader argument, I like his concept of incorporating visual-spatial memory into content management and object brokering systems. We saw a tremendous advantage in data-driven software development with the introduction of 3-dimensional visual-spatial tools, such as OLAP. As Whitmore notes, “In fact, such visualizations would more closely match the three-dimensional metaphors such as that of the cube that other (often higher-status) knowledge workers like data miners and database engineers have employed for quite some time when attempting to visualize the structure of data in relational databases" (103).

There are lot of questions and threads we can follow with this essay: heuristics and metaphor in interface design; non-scientific taxonomies; the traditional tension between information scientists and technical communicators -- all interesting directions to go with this.

760: on wong

2010-02-12T12:18:00.004-05:00

This was interesting and a little scary. The FB employee stated that there is this need to delete data because of space and performance issues, but goes on to note they’re snapping data multiple times a day and basically moving it out of the production environment. That still means the data is retained and accessible (and hackable).

And this is just to my point earlier -- people don't get it. They don't know what they're doing out there."...it’s all stored in a database on the backend. Literally everything. Your messages are stored in a database, whether deleted or not. So we can just query the database, and easily look at it without every logging into your account. That’s what most people don’t understand... We track everything. Every photo you view, every person you’re tagged with, every wall-post you make, and so forth."

And again to the point about technology shaping the issue, not end-users: "With Web 2.0, 3.0, where the model is basically get as much information out there as you can. Obviously, someone needs to step back and make sure there is some information privacy here, or at least as much as we can put in place."

So I'm thinking this isn't as complicated an algorithm as it sounds."It’s also messages, file posts, photos you’re tagged in with them, as well as your viewing of their profile and all of that. Essentially, we judge how good of a friend they are to you." Or maybe it is complicated. I hate these computer-geek stereotypes, but this is just funny: "You just can’t talk to these people on a normal level. If you wanted to talk about basketball, talk about graph theory. Then he’d get it. And there are a lot of people like that. But by golly, they can do their jobs."

The ease at which the employee could make altruistic claims of responding to the Iranian crisis in the same breath as talking about global market share and revenue was telling. Iran is a market for Facebook, not a community of people struggling to find global communication channels through which they express free and unfettered political views.

And finally, and most fantastically: "Hence I was able to ditch work, come have two pitchers with you, and I will literally be able to go back and get my work done." Does anyone else see a problem here? Booze Bag Jane goes back to work half-lit with access to 350 million profiles and every iota of data ever captured by FB.

760: on zimmer

2010-02-12T10:53:00.003-05:00

I found Zimmer’s 11/08/08 post about Zuckerberg's philosophy of information more compelling than his post on Zuckerberg’s comments regarding FB’s new privacy policies.

I'm struck by this point: FB takes the position that privacy controls (features of the platform) are there for people to use. If people don't understand the controls or know how to use them, that's not FB's fault.
This position, while a bit indignant to some, really identifies a fundamental problem with the use of technology, particularly by Americans. Just yesterday, my CIO related to a small group that the rate of commercial technology adoption in Japan far exceeds that of the United States. One reason cited for Japan's adoption rate is that Japanese end-users are more likely to better understanding of the technology they're using than their American counterparts (apparently the Japanese actually read the manual). This understanding leads to a more rapid exploitation of the technology, in turn creating demand for a better, faster, stronger machine.

For me it's an interesting consideration as we work through this idea of privacy (or lack thereof) in cyberspace. Are the reactions we're working through representative of global concerns, or are they entirely Anglo-centric and an issue only for end-users who don't fully understand what it is they're doing when their tweeting, friending, blinking, and bonking?

As Zimmer notes, "Privacy means something different when we’re in the doctor’s office compared to in the classroom compared to on a social networking website." The problem, as I see it, is getting people to understand the implications of those differences in the contexts of the technologies they use every day.

760: on kirkpatrick

2010-02-12T10:07:00.005-05:00

"The age of privacy is over..."

As many of the comments to the article reflect, I think we have to start by identifying the "age" we're talking about and the definition of "privacy" we're working with.

I completely agree with Kirkpatrick's assessment that "Facebook itself is a major agent of social change..." FB's position that, "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people" is anecdotal and sloppy at best.

On the other hand, Kirkpatrick's claim that, "Accessible social networking technology changes communication between people in a way similar to if not as intensely as the introduction of the telephone and the printing press" is a shoddy apples-to-oranges comparison. Privacy in cyberspace is not as simplistic as un-listing your phone number from Yellow Pages.

I think we would all agree that social norms have changed since the advent of the printing press and the telephone. Similarly, technology has changed in ways that draw vast communities of people "closer" together -- in intended and unintended ways. The basic concept of privacy -- of what people want other people to know about them -- has similarly been changed. I don't think, as FB claims, that systems are modified to "reflect what the current social norms are." Quite to the contrary, I think the systems shape and drive many of those norms -- they facilitate the openness and make possible the sharing of information in ways that people are not prepared to deal with.

On a wider scale, I'm a troubled that 8 sentences uttered by a 26 year-old can have such a dramatic impact on the daily activities of 350 million people. Maybe that sounds like crotchety-old-man-speak, but I have similar concerns with the likes of Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs.

760: on dias, et al. worlds apart, part ii

2010-02-07T15:38:00.002-05:00

Chapter six begins with the claim: "... we have come to see that rhetorical purpose in workplace settings is in large part institutional rather than individual... and ideological rather than merely communicative" (114). This claim stuck with me as I worked through the case study of social workers’ writing activities at a large hospital. Particularly, how does that claim and the following statement jive with the net worked organization described by Spinuzzi: "The hierarchical structure of organizations creates economic and political semblances that work against shared goals and the continual growth of specialization" (114). In Spinuzzi we observer, I think, just the opposite—net workers constructing documents to fit organizational needs. While these documents (such as the spreadsheet that Fred maintained at Telecorp) could be classified under broad generic categories, they were constructed by individuals to meet specific organizational requirements. If Fred's spreadsheet was developed as a response "to what [was] perceived socially or collectively as sameness in situations," it was unique to his perception but designed to perform a specific organizational function.

Further into the chapter, I was more confused about what possible suggestions the authors could have in regard to teaching writing to undergraduates. In fact, they seem to complicate the problem of teaching writing by not directly addressing how or why we should engage students in genres that promotes particular ways of knowing and acting in complex socio-rhetorical environments. It seems the best we can do is generalize, which brings us back to extremely static and traditional treatments of workplace genres. While genres may be somewhat stable (120-122), I don't know that they're stable enough to teach even as simple documents through which to consider a standard set of requirements, environments, networks, etc. And yet, as I write this I'm thinking about the way I used generic documents to orient engineering students to design and development methodologies.

Dias et al. conclude, "So, although it might well be possible and even desirable to show students copies of workplace texts, and to have practitioners talk to students about the participation in those texts, the lived experience of texts is impossible out of their enactment" (134). Maybe this is why we feel we've done something particularly useful with WRT 407--embedding the writing instruction in such a way as to enact the design and development experience in the academic laboratory. Yes, the writing is shaped by the situatedness of the activity, but it is an activity that the engineers will perform time and again upon leaving the academy.

760: on dias, et al. worlds apart, part i

2010-02-07T11:53:00.006-05:00

I like the way the authors present a range of different theories through which to consider two central questions: 1) what are the functions writing performs in the workplace, and 2) how do socio-cultural settings shape writing practices in the workplace?

Throughout the survey of theories and the descriptions/definitions of academic writing, I was asking myself, “If we don’t’ regard university education as preparation for the workplace, then what is university education for? Maybe it’s a definition of the “workplace” that complicates this for me. Yes, “…writing practices in the university do not translate into effective writing within the work setting” (5). Is it the practices or the genres in which these practices are exercised?

With those smaller nagging questions aside, I finished part one with a bigger question: When we teach writing in the university, what are we teaching? Can we address what the writer is doing in the workplace (26) without understanding (or perhaps predicting) the “subject’s orientation and motivation” in different contexts? When we teach writing, are we necessarily “tying the contextual to the social, by seeing texts as ways of doing things with words…” (43)?

“Because writing is acting, it is highly contextualized…” (3). Yes it is, and I think this is the most difficult aspect of teaching workplace writing in the academy – of establishing or creating appropriate contexts in which students write and communicate. “…a full understanding of writers’ processes and products cannot occur without close reference to their place and role in their particular contexts” (9). If what people need to learn is to engage in the activity (28), how do we replicate or create the environments in which those activities occur? Simulated work environments only go so far in the classroom. I’ve yet to see a classroom simulation that replicates the “density and complexity of the intertextual connections within which writers” operate in the workplace (37). It's the "close reference" were we seem to fail in the classroom.

I’m trying to jive this more focused concept of situatedness with the activities of the net worked worker. The socio-economic network is in constant flux, which implies shifting contexts in which net workers perform their activities. How then is it possible to teach contextualized writing when the contexts are always changing relative to the network and the net work? Writing in the workplace is “… regularized but not fixed; fluid, flexible, and dynamic; emerging and evolving in exigency and action; reflecting and incorporating social needs, demands, and structures; and responsive to social interpretation and reinterpretations of necessarily shifting, complex experiences” (23). As we noted in the study of net workers at Telecorp, “…writers rely on situation-specific knowledge in the preparation of texts” (8). The interconnected nature of net work – the cross-disciplinary, non-specialized activities—require “individuals to write as members of a group ... writers often work with others in preparation of texts within a wide variety of co-authoring arrangements…” (9).

One clue to teaching contextualized writing: teaching genre grounded in rhetorical analysis. “…it ties the textual to the social, sees texts as action and texts as in dialogue with each other…” (19). I’ve had this described in less formal ways by a number of writing teachers.

Regarding activity theory and the skills needed of the symbolic-analytic worker—the modern technical communicator: “… it is the subject or subjects who interpret what activity they are involved… the action of reading, depending on the goal, can realize the activity of play, or work, or learning (24-25). Can we substitute any net work activities for “reading” and make the same claim?

760: on spinuzzi chapter 6 and conclusion

2010-02-07T09:02:00.004-05:00

Not having read chapters 1 through 4, I found myself making a lot of assumptions about the holes in Spinuzzi’s claims. It wasn’t’ until that back end of chapter 6 and the conclusion that I had a better understanding of his framework. This is a must-read text for any student of comp, rhet, or tech com.

The issues with training identified at Telecorp are, as Spinuzzi notes, typical of most organizations. The field work for the text was conducted in 2000. From my perspective, not much has changed since. Arguably, the same issues have been plaguing organizations for decades. As I noted in my previous post, I find it difficult to tie Spinuzzi’s and others’ work here directly to the “modern” socio-economic network of the information age. “…this was a function of the spliced organization, in which it became important not just to learn, but to identify who to ask…” (186). I had this same problem when I was slinging dough at Mario’s Pizzeria in 1982 – what did I need to know and how would I come to know it? Mario’s was a far cry from Telecorp, but the fundamental issue appears to be the same.

Disconnected learning (training) spread across multiple activities and domains is not unique to organizations that employ knowledge workers. One might argue, using the activity frameworks that Spinuzzi erects, that learning is simply another activity domain to which workers are connected. In fact, there has been a tremendous amount of research on how learning can be embedded into the daily activities of workers.
We would all agree (as Spinuzzi notes) that lifelong learning is a byproduct of a networked economy in which nomadic workers fill hybrid jobs that require them to collaborate across functional areas. Again, I have this sense that this phenomenon is not new – and realize that it being new isn’t really the point. However, it still feels like we’re trying to retrofit something here. Yes, that’s clunky, but I can’t quite but my finger on it. Was there ever a pre-information age production organization that didn’t struggle with “…how to retain and extend the insights of each as we continue to deal with rapidly changing work organizations” (197).

I do feel comfortable assigning Spinuzzi’s project, analysis, and claims to the “symbolic-analytic” worker theme I’m trying to string through the readings. “The vital rhetorical skills that were needed to support them [different functional groups] in a networked environment … were developed and supported informally through opportunistic volunteer mentoring” (194); “…rhetoric is a vital part of net work: net workers have to build turst and alliances, persuade others, negotiate, compromise, and haggle to build shared settlements” (206) and the implications for workers: they become rhetors, time managers, project managers, adaptable, liaisons – human APIs, information aggregators, strategic thinkers.

I also see Spinuzzi’s project fitting in nicely with research that considers documentation (technical, professional, training, etc.) as a built in activity to what workers (knowledge or otherwise) do every day. Through this perspective of the reading, I can see the groundwork to argue for structured information architectures and content management. This is certainly something that Telecorp would have benefited from. In the absence of these types of formal structures you get internal documentation that people develop out of necessity – just like at Telecorp. And yet, this “on the fly” documentation tends to be minimalist, practical, highly procedural, and not wrapped with a lot of unnecessary declarative information. It works, and maybe that’s just the point.

I did find interesting the emphasis on stories that contextualize workers learning within a company. I’ve long been interested in scenario-based instruction as a way to capture stories and narratives. What we’ve found in some of our work is that when a story (scenario) is not fixed and regularly reinforced, the stories morph as readily as textual genres do to be shaped for particular purposes. This, in turn, leads to misinformation and incorrect practices.

760: on spinuzzi chapter 5

2010-02-06T09:35:00.002-05:00

Whoa!! That’s some serious field work. I like this text because Spinuzzi is accessible. Without over theorizing, he makes his analysis work because it is grounded in observed activity.

The concept of “net work” complicates some of the calls we worked through last week. For example, if the application of knowledge and information is what characterizes the technological revolution and information capitalism, what are we doing to prepare our students? Are we equipping them to understand, navigate and exploit the new distributed economy? "...negotiation becomes an essential skill" (143). Where are students getting exposed to these new life skills? Can we expect students to “skilled-up” in their humanities courses? I see in Spinuzzi’s analysis a case for rhetorical instruction. "It means making connections and circulating things: texts, money and its many representations, heterogeneous resources, and people. It means bringing different trades and activities into contact: massive influxes of social languages, genres, and chronotypes" (144).

Specific to technical communications, is there an argument to be made that all workers in the socio-technical network are performing the work of technical communication? Across the scenarios that Spinuzzi provides in chapter 5, we see workers in various roles performing the symbolic-analytic activities of trained technical communicators (activities we identified in last week’s readings).

The prominence of "texts" in the net worked organization (or, at the very least, in Telecorp) requires that all workers be symbolic-analytical workers. The net work enables socio-technical networks. Texts, in all of their various genres, function as sets of transformations, helping “to hold together and form dense interconnections” across the network (137). I don’t want to over-simply Spinuzzi’s claim here, but can we not use his argument to support a mandate to immerse writing and rhetorical analysis in the curriculum – any curriculum? “Texts are inscriptions that represent phenomena, belong to genres that construct relatively stable relationships, and function as boundary objects that bridge among different activities" (148). Does that statement not ooze big “R” and little “r” rhetoric with a good dose of Composition?

I realize it was necessary to link the field work and the analysis to broader concepts of economics, production, and the changing nature of work in an increasingly technology-enhanced world. However, in some ways I see the work in the scenarios as not that different from the work one would observe in, say, Thomas Edison’s laboratories during the early part of the 20th century (see Bazerman’s The Languages of Edison’s Light). The flow diagrams Spinuzzi includes in the chapter all seem to illustrate a modular approach to production rather than the net worked activities of sociotechnical network. In fact, the genre ecology diagram on 160 simply seems to illustrate how worker roles are connected through the circulation of common documents. Are we really seeing net work here? I’m certain it’s a perspective and I’ve missed something in the reading, but I’m struggling to see how different the processes and activities in the scenarios differ from the processes and activities of companies dating back well before the information age. What I do see in the scenarios is exactly the type of symbolic-analytic work we discussed last week. Spinuzzi identifies workers and roles with varying illiteracies, competencies, and access to tools and technologies.

760: on dicks’ the effects of digital literacy on the nature of technical communication work

2010-01-31T11:49:00.005-05:00

I wish I’d had Dick’s perspectives when I was trying to work through Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Theory and how it might apply to the information products created by technical communicators.

As I worked through Dick’s narrative about factors that changed and continue to shape technical communication, I kept coming back to this theme of preparation – of what we should be doing to better prepare technical communicators (and others) to be effective and successful communicators. I very much agree with Dick’s introductory claim that we should remember, “when discussing current and coming trend in the discipline, that they largely have to do with the tools and technologies associated with the discipline, and not with the core competency skills that the discipline continues to require” (52).

It seems that if we are to prepare technical communicators to see themselves as “symbolic-analytic workers,” that we need to do more than teach “technologies and methodologies such as single-sourcing and information, content, and knowledge management” and how to optimize “information development for multiple formats and media” (55). It seems that we’re calling for a more tools-based approach to teaching, and yet at the same time requiring technical communicators to understand the rhetorical, linguistic, and social aspects of what they are doing and the information products they are producing.

How does teaching tools and technologies prepare a technical communicator to “move across disciplines, constantly learning and performing a variety of job tasks and doing the symbolic-analytic work” (57) Dick and others have described?

Another aspect of this “tools and technologies” theme is the cost (real and otherwise) of continuous retraining. In describing management and business principles that affect the role and purpose of technical communicators, Dick restates the growing trend to outsource symbolic-analytic work to contractors. While working as a contract technical communicator appeals to some, I have never met a single freelancer who didn’t bemoan the costs of staying ahead of the latest tools and technologies.

As Carliner noted and Dick reasserts, “Not only is what technical communicators write about more complex, but so are the tools and methods they use for doing their work” (77). It’s that “write about” piece that I worry about. A technologist is not necessarily a technical communicator, although as we’ve seen, they are regularly asked to do the symbolic-analytic work demanded by modern organizations, industries, customers, etc. Similarly, I’m concerned with this flattening or stretching of the technical communicator. The demand for specialization in tools and technologies competes with the demand for generalization in composition, rhetoric, language, communication, and culture. When the tool trumps the art and craft of technical communication, I think the discipline of technical communication loses something that will be difficult to recover.

760: on carliner’s computers and technical communication in the 21st century

2010-01-30T20:53:00.003-05:00

Carliner highlights a principle problem facing technical communication (as a discipline and practice) in the 1970s. The problem would continue to persist well into the 1990s. “The main qualification for the job of a technical writer in this environment was experience supporting and servicing products that were the subject of documentation. These workers developed competency in writing through training and on-the job mentoring… during the 1970s, this employer typically emphasized technical knowledge over writing skills.” (22, 23). Subject-matter-experts writing in the style of their trainers and mentors, who themselves were subject-matter-experts. Adherence to house and industry style guides were essential, as formal education in writing, composition, or English were not the norm. These individuals were typically carrying forward what they had learned in freshman comp – and that’s assuming they had an undergraduate degree.

Much as Ceruzzi’s historical narrative alluded to, Carliner notes that through the 1970s, most technical documentation was written for technical audiences. The late 1980s saw the emergence of the technical communicator as author, content collector, synthesizer, and information product producer. Most significantly, however, was the shift away from information products for technical or highly trained audiences to audiences with specific information requirements and varying degree of technical competence.
In reasserting Mirel’s call to action from a decade earlier, Carliner notes the following in regard to distributed authorship: “Much information is published as individual topics; that is, as a series of one-screen discussions of a subject, rather than as complete manuals. Users typically find topics by searching the database, following well-identified links, or by being directed to a specific Web page by a cross-reference from another Web page or by a person” (28).

Carliner notes that during the fourth phase of technological developments (mid 1990s to mid 2000s), “Many technical communicators worked in a state of continuous production of information, rather than going through peaks and valleys…” (41). While the focus is, of course, on technical communicators, it should be noted that these technological developments were changing the way in which all knowledge workers produced and managed information. In many ways, the activity of producing information products was decentralized and moved out of documentation groups. Business analyst were writing and publishing use-case studies. Programmers were writing help statements as conditional code statements. Quality analysts were writing FAQs and user documentation. These individuals were not recognized as technical communicators, technical writers, editors, publishers, or any of the myriad of labels Carliner notes. Yet these individuals were, and continue to be in many organizations, producers of technical information products; hence the demand to infuse the curriculum of degree programs (particularly professional degree programs) with the type of instruction and skills development Spilka identifies in her introduction.

On a personal note, Carliner’s narrative about the phases of technological developments reminded me of how much fun and challenging it was to be working in tech com in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His second and third phases are especially poignant, in that I was reminded of the many talented and creative technical writers I had the opportunity to work with during those years. Their access to new technologies and their ability to quickly adapt it to their changing roles motivated me to apply to a graduate professional and technical communications program. Good times. Yeah, good times.

760: on spilka’s introduction

2010-01-30T10:18:00.004-05:00

Rachel Spilka has always been good at bridging theory and practice. She’s constructed an anthology here that connects the academy to the field in a way that almost blurs the definition of “practice”. It’s likely to be clearer within the essays, but across her introduction, Spilka conflates the teaching of technical communication with the work of technical communicators. Maybe this is a necessary move – link a call for change in the way we prepare technical communicators to what technical communicators do (and they do it) in the field.

General thoughts:

“Now numerous other fields are claiming a stake in information and content design development and management, just as we are…” (4). Composition, Information Science, etc. Isn’t it the reflexive nature of disciplines to claim a stake in activities that involve applying the discipline’s theories?

In describing the “easing up of artificial ‘”fences”’ between disciplines” (5), Spilka is exposing a foundational question (one that we’re attempting to answer in 760): What is technical communication? By replacing the introspective question, “who are we” with a range of questions about how we adapt and contribute, Spilka is invoking the floundering toward legitimacy and purpose that seems pervasive in humanities-based disciplines. Replace “we” with “Composition” in her set of questions on page 6. How similar does this sound to Comp’s historical narratives?

During our first day of class, someone mentioned the anxiety of teaching a technical writing course without the benefit of having "done" technical writing. Consider Selfe and Hawisher’s definition of digital literacy, which Spilka includes in her introduction: “the practices involved in reading, writing, and exchanging information in online environments as well as the values associates with such practices – social, cultural, political, educational” (8). Based on that foundational definition, I would argue that any current student of the CCR program is both qualified and capable to teaching, at the very least, and introductory course in professional or technical writing.

validation and coincidence

2010-01-30T09:43:00.006-05:00

So I'm sitting here this morning working through Spilka when I get the following email (extensively abbreviated to remove the soft-marketing) from Joann Hackos' company, Comtech:

Oh! The Changes We’ve Seen! Comtech celebrates our 30th anniversary!

As of February 2010, Comtech Services, Inc. will be officially 30 years old. We’ve been thinking a lot recently about the changes we have witnessed in technical communication over 30 years. Perhaps the technology changes have been the most dramatic.

After we incorporated, we did a lot of writing with pen and paper. The first major word processor was a DEC dedicated machine handled by our word-processing operator. She transferred handwriting to word processing. The results were printed on a line printer so that the text looked pretty much like a typewriter.

Today, we use more complex technology than ever before. We have more than one content management system installed. We use one to manage our websites and others to emulate customer environments so that we can help them solve problems and test new functionality. More of our authoring is now in XML and DITA, even though we have not written manuals since the mid-90s. We do produce electronic and print newsletters, proposals, reports, and marketing materials, all requiring good design and ease of authoring.
The basic concepts of information development have changed very little while the technology has marched on. Today we can produce much better documents more easily and less expensively than any time in the past. But the quality of the information is still dependent on our understanding of our customers and how they learn. Without that, we will continue simply to make the product specifications look nice.
Kristi Bullard
Kristi L. Bullard, Business Manager
Comtech Services, Inc.

How's that for an indirect book plug Professor Spilka?

760: on hackos’ foreword in spilka

2010-01-30T08:23:00.002-05:00

Before looking at Spilka’s introduction, I want to take up a claim that Joann Hakos makes in the foreword. Hakos states, “Part of the resistance to computer-mediated structured authoring … appears to be based not so much on the technology but on a cultural change that the technology demands and fosters… The cultural change required of technical communicators is a product of cost-reduction strategies developed in a competitive business environment” (viii).

Let me just state that, from my humble perspective, it's not a resistance to the technology, it's the time and cost associated with keeping pace with the technology. Joann Hakos is an extremely successful industry consultant. She has lucrative contracts with fortune 500 companies around the globe. She is paid handsomely to speak at technical and scientific communication events. The seminars and workshops her company (Comtech) delivers here and in Europe start at just under $2,000.000 a pop per person. So to hear her tying resistance to cultural change to cost-reduction strategies comes off a bit hollow.

Not all organizations can afford to send their technical communicators to workshops in San Jose or Heidelberg so the communicators can better “adhere to standards and work in highly collaborative environments… [to] work collectively and to submit their work to constant review for compliance with standards” (viii) – stated as if compliance to standards is a bad thing! Why is constant review of one’s work a problem?

Joann Hakos has long practiced what she preaches. For at least the last 25 years (likely longer), she has been an active voice in tech comm – an advocate for professionalization and recognition of the discipline. Here, however, I think she makes a sloppy rhetorical move by setting issues of digital literacy into an “us vs. them” binary. That’s not fair to technology, progress, or the organizations and industries in which technical communicators work. Most importantly, it's not fair to technical communicators who actively seek change (cultural or otherwise) for the right reasons.

760: on mirel's writing and database technology

2010-01-27T20:37:00.007-05:00

I like Barbara Mirel’s work because it always seems to focus on knowledge and meaning making in the workplace. With this essay she continues on a trajectory of how knowledge workers (she does not refer to them as such in the essay) navigate and communicate information; and how that information can both serve and hinder individual and organizational purposes.

Here, Mirel is making an explicit argument for exposing the rhetorical aspects of data reporting, focusing on understanding the users of reports as the key to serving a rhetorical aim or strategy. In some ways departing from the quasi-utopian themes of last week’s readings, Mirel touches upon the negative aspects of accessible yet poorly utilized technologies. “Thanks to distributed computing, nontechnical employees in every department can mange their own data and compose data reports for important business purposes” (382). This, she points out, is one of the principle reasons why all disciplines need to provide more than simplistic professional/business writing instruction to their majors. It’s not enough to expect that a single course (such as WRT 307) will provide students the appropriate knowledge and skills to create usable information products. As Mirel states: “… little attention is given in either business or in technical and professional writing classes to building people’s skill in writing effective data reports” (382). Within these technology-enhanced (digital?) environments, Mirel is calling for the type of authorial agency that Slack defined as the act of articulation.

Mirel is arguing for the communicator (technical or otherwise) to have a more holistic understanding of “meaning making” – of the how, where, and why to locate specific information, and of how best to package that information for specific audiences and purposes: “…writers, on the one hand, [need] to be adept at rhetorical strategies for invention, arrangement, and delivery, and on the other hand to understand the logic and capabilities that a program offers for designing, searching for, and retrieving data and for organizing it into printed reports” (384). This “integrated view of competencies” would be taken up later by other tech comm scholars, such as Johnson-Eilola, Hart-Davidson, and Selber.

I wonder about Mirel’s treatment of “rhetorical invention” and how she assigns the activity to the strategies and processes of search for retrieving data. She seems to be working from a narrow definition of invention by tying it to the classical basic categories (topoi) – of relationships among ideas and not something broader and less rigid. Is she associating the fixed structures of databases with the way in which topoi serve to guide the discovery of what to write and how to write it?

Mirel does make a somewhat broad assumption in her claim that data reports share a fundamental purpose “to answer a business concern…” (382). An unintended byproduct of access to data and the tools to author reports is that too often reports are written/produced that serve absolutely no purpose. The “report for reporting sake” is the activity that keeps content and knowledge management system vendors in business.

I’m curious to know what the rest of our group thinks about the relevancy of Mirel’s call to broaden the curriculum to “extend students’ rhetorical skills beyond linear prose paragraphs to graphic forms” (390). Would we agree that an increasing number of our students are entering the writing studios with more experience than their instructors in regard to non-linear prose and graphical communication? Would a more appropriate approach be simply to expose students to the rhetorical aspects and consequences of various forms of data reporting, and leave the tools and technologies to the work place?

760: silly perspectives

2010-01-27T14:07:00.006-05:00

Did you ever notice how, after you start a set of readings, you begin to see things through a particular lens? Maybe it's just me.

Melissa and Justin led a wonderfully engaging discussion on Tuesday. They showed a couple of clips from three "futuristic" movies (Thias, Metropolis, and Things to Come), which illustrated some of the more social and cultural aspects of the week's readings. It was a great way to bridge the essays. When I got home and opened up a recent issue of Information Week, the following ad looked a little too familiar:

How similar does the space in the ad look to the technology-enhanced worlds imagined during the early decades of the 20th century? Do we still aspire to create such high-tech, white-glove, production environments? Have we already reached that place? I'm thinking specifically about the environments in which processor chips and other fine-tolerance micro-electronics are produced.

A few pages into the same issue, I had to laugh when I found this two-page ad:

We continue to assign human characteristics to technology... this ongoing theme of the "computer as brain." Somehow I think Wells imagined something physically bigger than a server, but the essence of his interconnected knowledge base is still there.

760: on berners-lee’s information management proposal

2010-01-24T19:02:00.005-05:00

I read Tim Berners-Lee’s Weaving the Web while I was working on Polaris. We had been using the old WinHelp spec, but it’s .rtf format was proving restrictive as Polaris matured and more functionality was added. I’d used hypertext before for help systems (there was that clunky HyperCard system for Seagull Press in ’94), but I felt like I needed to understand hypertext in a broader context. That’s why I picked up the book. I read it in a few days and went on an evangelizing kick, trying to get all of the writers and testers in our little group to bone up on hypertext theory. I argued that the morphing HTML specification and more scalable help systems (such as Compressed HTML Help and JavaHelp) would require us to understand what we were creating. The old practice of committing text and images to the ether and wishing for the best wasn't going to cut it any longer.

Looking back, it’s obvious I really didn’t get it myself. It seems we would have been better off by simply immersing ourselves in a hypertext environment, as Berners-Lee described in his CERN proposal, and let the system take a shapes that reflected our changing needs, skills sets, knowledge, etc.

There are two aspects of Berner-Lee’s original proposal that are only now beginning to fully emerge on the web. The first is the ability to modify (edit) information directly through the browser. The WorldWideWeb browser (and later Opera and Amaya) would provide this feature. And in fact, a number of knowledge management systems, such as Canterbury, would ship with propriety viewer/editors. But I think it was the distributed nature of the connectedness of the Internet (and later the web) that made (and continue to make) this feature impractical outside of dedicated communal knowledge systems, such as wikis.

The second aspect of the proposal that took a while to take shape is what we identify today as Web 2.0 technologies. Before mash-ups, RSS, XML, and new media, technical communicators were struggling to adapt the first HTML specifications to create interactive help systems. The closest we came was context-sensitive help (and later embedded help), which allowed us to push specific topics to the end-user at specific points within a workflow. It was clunky, but it worked.

Reading the CERN proposal brings a lot of that work into focus in a good way – a fun way.

More specific to how we’re being asked to consider the proposal against the rest of this week’s readings, Berners-Lee is imagining a system dramatically different from the one-dimensional “fetch-retrieve” system envisioned by Wells and manifest in the early computing systems of the late 1940s and early 1950s: “For this to be possible, the method of storage must not place its own restraints on the information. This is why a ‘web’ of notes with links (like references) between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system.”

In specifically addressing the problem with “tree” hierarchies of data, Berners-Lee is re-articulating Bush’s vision of non-linear, dynamic relationships among information objects. Perhaps more important to the progress narrative among the readings, Berners-Lee is refining Licklider and Taylor’s imagining of a communication system with the capabilities to capture communicative models: “When describing a complex system, many people resort to diagrams with circles and arrows. Circles and arrows leave one free to describe the interrelationships between things in a way that tables, for example, do not. The system we need is like a diagram of circles and arrows, where circles and arrows can stand for anything” (Berners-Lee).

Berners-Lee’s vision is impressive when it’s considered against the modern web. Here’s a guy who was responding to the age-old problem of retaining organizational knowledge in a way that would be useful to those who stayed on and those who came in. His simple proposal, coupled with enabling technologies, has quite literally changed the way the world communicates.

760: on licklider and taylor’s the computer as a communication device

2010-01-24T15:26:00.003-05:00

This is an interesting essay in that it was written by one of the architects (Licklider) of the network that would become the Internet.

Licklider and Taylor (L &T) outline a simple interaction between computers and users. However, they do not seem to be claiming that this "communication system" would assume a role more than facilitating and fostering communication and ideas: “… the computer alone can make no contribution that will help us, and that the computer with the programs and the data it has today can do little more than suggest a direction and provide a few germinal example” (28).

To pick up on one of the themes I found in the earlier readings, L & T seem to move well beyond the positivism that Wells expressed in imagining a system of interconnected information. In fact, L & T seem to directly bridge the void that Wells left in his description of the universal encyclopedia: “Society rightly distrusts the modeling done by a single mind. Society demands consensus, agreement, at least majority… The requirement is for communication, which we now define concisely as ‘cooperative modeling’—cooperation in the construction, maintenance, and use of a model” (22).

L & T are imaging fully integrated information systems in which knowledge could be created – not the singular and stand-alone computers as processors or repositories of existing information. Like the Internet we know today, their distributed system relies on complete computers connected to a network by a conventional network interface. This is in direct contrast to the computing systems Ceruzzi’s described. Most importantly, L & T are imagining a distributed computing environment that is managed through economies of scale – the production of commodity hardware, compared to the lower efficiency of designing and constructing a small number of custom, self-contained computing environments.

A nice brief essay that illustrates the vision of the people behind our modern technology-enhanced interconnected world.

760: on ceruzzi's the advent of commercial computing

2010-01-24T13:33:00.004-05:00

Ceruzzi’s chapter [Ceruzzi, P.E. (2003.) The advent of commercial computing, 1945-1956. In A History of Modern Computing, 2nd Ed. Cambridge: MIT Press. 13-46] is curiously situated among the more futuristic claims of Wells and Bush.

In the chapter, which documents the evolution of computing from roughly 1945 to the late 1950s, we do find hints about society benefiting from computers – about the computer as "a device that one interacted with, a tool with which to augment one's intellectual efforts" (14).

More interesting, perhaps, is that Ceruzzi identifies a point in time at which the computer becomes something nearer to what Wells and Bush imagined, "regarding the UNIVAC as an information processing system, not a calculator” (30). And while not directly addressing the social implications of the paradigm shift, Ceruzzi notes, “[UNIVACs] replaced not only existing calculating machines, but also the people who tended them... Indeed, the analysis of the UNIVAC’s benefits was almost entirely case in terms of its ability to replace salaried clerks..." (30, 33).

To add context to the chapter, I went back through some old notes and discovered the following time line, which seems more interesting to me now when placed against Ceruzzi’s narrative:
1953 -- Society of Technical Writers (STW) founded.
1953 -- Association of Technical Writers and Editors (ATWE) founded.
1954 -- Technical Publishing Society (TPS) founded.
1954 -- Gordon Mill’s Technical Writing is published.
1957 -- STW and ATWE merge to form the Society of Technical Writers and Editors (STWE).
1960 -- STWE and TPS merge to form the Society of Technical Writers and Publishers (STWP).
1968 -- Houp and Pearsall’s Reporting Technical Information is published.

I’ve read histories of technical writing which argue that the proliferation of commercial and non-military computing products during the 1950s is a critical event in the history of technical writing. The claim is that these products (and the consumer-oriented products they spawned) required user documentation. This requirement led to opportunities writing user manuals, hardware installation manuals, quick sheets, etc. In turn, the commercialization of computing (information?) technology required technical writers to have different knowledge and capabilities as new job categories were created. The economic conditions, coupled with increased access to computing technology, placed increased demands on the skill levels of technical writers, in turn affecting the types and forms of writing taught in technical and professional writing programs.

It all sounds reasonable – more so after reading Ceruzzi’s chapter. An interesting snapshot of an interesting time.

760: on bush's as we may think

2010-01-23T16:14:00.005-05:00

I've always wondered what Vannevar Bush would think of the Internet and all its ancillary technologies as they exist today. He lived long enough to see the deployment of ARPANET, but I've never come across any commentary on his reflections of it.

After reading the Wells essay, Bush appears to address the short-comings of Wells' reactive system: "... every time one combines and records facts in accordance with established logical processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machine .... The machines for higher analysis have usually been equation solvers. Ideas are beginning to appear for equation transformers, which will rearrange the relationship expressed by an equation in accordance with strict and rather advanced logic" (4, 5).

Beyond the futurist examples of applied information technologies Bush provides in the essay, the section I've seen most cited is his description of the "memex" (6). I've seen the description referred to as an early imagining of the personal computer, relational databases, and the Internet. What I like most about the memex is the way in which Bush addresses the problem of "selection" and "the artificiality of systems of indexing" (6). This is where he moves beyond the elementary descriptions of vast accessible repositories of data and the textual and numerical taxonomies constructed by early information scientists.

With the memex, Bush is proposing something akin to a neural network. "When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions" (7). Bush's "trails" are the hyperlinks of today and the associative relationships being imagined for the semantic web. "Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage" (6).

Bush's intelligent system argument seems to take something of an anti-positivist perspective (or at least less positivistic than Wells): "If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get far in our understanding of the physical world ... A new symbolism, probably positional, must apparently precede the reduction of mathematical transformations to machine processes. Then, on beyond the strict logic of the mathematician, lies the application of logic in everyday affairs" (4, 5). And yet, how much of this argument, like Wells', is in reaction to global war and unprecedented man-made destruction. There is this theme of "information as all-empowering" -- that an intelligent information system will keep the mistakes of the past accessible and present in such a way as to not be repeated by future generations. "The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house... They have enabled him to throw masses of people against one another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good" (8).

In regard to its relationship to technical communication, I've always liked this essay because of when it was written. Casual historians of technical communication like to point to World War II as the birth of the discipline of technical communication (technical writing). These historians argue that, similar to the business and societal demands of the Industrial Revolution, World War II placed unfair demands on schools to graduate technical writers who could write military procedures, technical descriptions, and weapons instructions for readers with below-average language skills. However anecdotally appropriate these casual conclusions may be, the true effects of World War II on technical writing had more to do with socio-economic factors than with demand for effective technical communicators. Like all of society, post-war American colleges found the world a different place. From 1940 to 1945, the top research schools (and a good number of teaching schools) had become part of an interdependent economic complex, one that tied together government, industry, and higher education. This relationship was most apparent at the engineering schools, were it was recognized and capitalized on by many teachers of technical and science writing courses.

760: on wells' contribution to the new encyclopédie française

2010-01-23T13:00:00.007-05:00

I always find these historical perspectives fascinating. Like early 20th century essays about how Babbage's difference engine would eliminate human toil, Wells' essay falls somewhere in the long line of arguments for the humane application of technology to solve the world's ills.

With the exception of scale, the conditions Wells describes in 1937 are apparent and relevant today: "... gigantic increase in recorded knowledge and of a still more gigantic growth in the numbers of human beings requiring accurate and easily accessible information" (83). He could be describing the knowledge management challenges of any modern-day organization, regardless of size. Yet, throughout the essay I had to resist the urge to compare Wells' system to the web or modern knowledge management systems, which I think is an easy move to make. Wells seems to be envisioning a reactive system that attempts to catalog existing facts -- what is currently known and understood. "There is no practical obstacle whatever now to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge ... a complete planetary memory of all mankind" (85). His system is not necessarily a vision of the modern web in that it does not seem to account for the active creation of knowledge -- of the artifact being created, synthesized, coordinated, and applied as new knowledge is created.

From a systems perspective, Wells seems quite ingenious. "It need not be vulnerable as a human head or a human heart is vulnerable. It can be reproduced exactly and fully... It can have at once, the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba" (87). In this simple metaphor, Wells describes a distributed physical topography with fail-over redundancy. That's geekily impressive. The difficulty of implementing his system -- I think -- would be creating and maintaining a centralized logical topography using the technologies of the day available to Wells. But practical implementation doesn't seem necessarily important to the essay. Wells is predicting the capabilities of future technologies that will make the encyclopedia possible.

I do wonder about Wells denouncement of the university system of his day. Was he calling on universities to be the drivers and shapers of the new encyclopedic enterprise? Was he commenting on the state of higher education at the time -- against a backdrop of world wars, despotism, rampant nationalism, etc.? I do understand that universities of the time were the repositories and distributors of knowledge -- accessible, controlled and coordinated by an elite few. Was it this structure that Wells was addressing? His denouncement, however, doesn't seem to jive with his overall claim that world peace could be achieved through a common human knowledge system (88). This claim aligns Wells with 19th century positivism -- the careful study of the scientific method by a small group of elite intellectuals leading to an objective and therefore universal view of the world. Was Wells arguing to shift control of knowledge from the universities to the "competent editors, educational directors and teachers..." (88)? How would Wells' system self-correct when incompetence or intentional mis-information was introduced into the encyclopedia? How does Wells make accommodations for human nature?

I like the way Wells writes. I like his eclectic nature and admire the way he expressed meaningful ideas in times that demanded clarity. I'll remember this little essay.

760: on rutter’s history, rhetoric and humanism

2010-01-22T20:38:00.013-05:00

I first read Russell Rutter’s “History, Rhetoric and Humanism: Toward a More Comprehensive Definition of Technical Communication” in Becky’s CCR 690 as part of a small project titled A Rage to Sub-Discipline: A Brief History of Technical Communication.

I discovered in this recent reading that Rutter was making a call for disciplinary independence. Using recognizable tropes, he focuses on people (students of technical communication) to better understand the disciplinary work of creating a body of content. He focuses on the professional practices of technical communications to better understand the pedagogical work of shaping and preparing technical communicators. And he focuses on working conditions (the practice of technical communication) to better understand the cultural and social aspects of the discipline. Looking back on Rutter’s essay, I can see how he fits into a line of scholars who were laying out a framework for the discipline.

During our 760 class discussion earlier this week, the group seemed to agree that Rutter’s most prescient claim was that technical writing is, at its core, a rhetorical practice:

“If technical communicators actively create versions of reality instead of serving merely as windows through which reality in all of its pre-existent configurations may be seen, then technical communication must be fundamentally rhetorical: it builds a case that reality is one way and not some other way” (Rutter, 28).

In some ways Rutter’s claim seems moot today. Transformations occur in a society's rhetoric. This we know and understand. So when did the transformation occur in regard to technical communication? That’s a clunky question. What I’m trying to get at is something like this: In the context of technical communication, changes in rhetorical theory and practice have been related to changes in popular and scholarly notions of literacy, as indicated by changes in technical communication curriculum. The curriculum, in turn, is always (OK, maybe not always) responsive to the changing economic, social, and political conditions in society. So how does Rutter’s claim sound today? Why is it so readily understood in technical communication programs that a practicing technical communicator is a practicing rhetorician?

Maybe Rutter’s purging and scouring has paid off. Maybe the discipline has shed Dobrin’s “narrowness and excessive commitment to pragmatism.” Or maybe the discipline has matured to a point where it understands the balance between scholarship and practice. Unlike Miller, Rutter wasn’t making a call to action as much as he was asking us to simply recognize and wait for change. I think that change has come, to a certain degree, but not necessarily to the extent that Rutter imagined.

760: on miller's humanistic rationale

2010-01-22T14:46:00.007-05:00

Holy disciplinary comfort zone Batman! We kicked off CCR 760: Tech Comm in the Digital Age this week. Yes, this IS a CCR course about technical communication! Within minutes I realized how much I missed course work.

The first set of readings included Carolyn Miller’s “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing.” It was like a warm slice of banana bread. I hadn’t read the essay since at least 1995. What struck me most about this reading was Miller’s attention to the presence of positivism within technical writing textbooks and the emerging disciplinary literature. I found my own reaction to her claim interesting because twenty years ago, the presence of positivist rationale in my practice didn’t bother me. I’d been taught to be an objective, mechanistic, impersonal minimalist at all costs.

For at least the last ten years, I've found myself resisting positivist tendencies – they’re still present and easily adapted by busy practicing technical writers – that hasn't changed. What has changed since the publication of the essay is the way in which pre-professional technical writers are educated. I think we would be hard pressed to find a tech comm program anywhere in the country that doesn’t provide a generous portion of humanistic exposure in the curriculum – particularly in regard to language, linguistics, and rhetoric – regardless of where the program resides organizationally within the academy.

Miller’s focus on four distinct features of technical writing pedagogy (varying definitions of tech writing, emphasis on style/organization, focus on specific tenses/tones, and vague notions of audience analysis) are, however, as relevant today as they were in the early 1980s.

In regard to varying definitions of the field, consider the ways in which technical writers have tried to define themselves over the years. In 1996 I attended a series of seminars on information mapping. At the first session, I was sitting next to a woman who introduced herself as an “Information Architect.” I was impressed and confused. I asked her what an information architect does. She said, “I write instructional guides for a hardware integration company.” I said, “Oh, so you’re a technical writer.” She said, “No, I’m an information architect.” We didn’t talk much after that. A few years later I took a job as a technologist with an instructional design and development group. I looked up one day and found that my title had been changed to Information Architect. It felt a little creepy, but it did look good on a business card.

Maybe it’s a movement toward simplification, but I find fewer practicing technical writers referring to themselves with pretentious titles and labels. It could very well be a recognition of the maturing the discipline, which gets paid forward into the field by practitioners.

Issues of style/organization, unrefined focus on tense and tone, and struggles with concepts of audience analysis are still present in both the instruction and the practice of technical writing. I do think the current broader humanistic curriculum makes pre-professionals more aware of the implications of these moves and issues. And that awareness is sometimes all they have as they use what they know to negotiate the demands, expectations, and requirements of the job.

I’ve always like Miller’s writing and perspectives. She’s accessible and thoughtful. And as this essay continues to show she was and is a technical communication scholar who can recognize and articulate a disciplinary concern in such a way as to make it a call to action. That’s just good scholarship.

quite hogging my scene

2009-12-02T17:04:00.005-05:00

Scenario-based instruction -- I love it. And I love this presentation from Cathy Moore.

We spent a lot of time some years ago developing scenario-based instructional models. Our designers didn't seem to care much for it. I think they found it too practical -- really. They typically preferred more theory-based strategies that emphasized complex assessment activities. When we moved instruction (problem solving) to shop-floor activities, most of the designers backed away.

I like linking learning activities to work activities. It's an approach I've seen work exceedingly well in many of Dana's courses and programs. I need to keep scenario-based instruction in the toolkit as we begin to work with more faculty on undergraduate online courses. Having faculty consider real-world scenarios in which to embed their instruction could make the design and development processes more interesting and rewarding -- for them and their students.

i am stuck on band aids

2009-12-01T16:11:00.003-05:00

I've been working on a loooong-term online course for a corporate HR group. We did the whole analysis and design thing. We prototyped an instructional model with pre- and post-tests, and even got into designing a course evaluation tool. At the outset, when everyone at the site wanted a say in the product, I tried to impress on them the need to focus on the content. When some hack with a VP title started blathering on about adherence to the corporate color schemes, I implored them to worry about all that later -- that we could address the colors, buttons, and spinning burning skulls when we got to a point of development. At that point in time, I really needed them to focus on the content.

Two years into the project, I get an email from a kid in their marcom group requesting a copy of the course so she can "brand" it correctly. I emailed her and the project coordinator stating that I'd be happy to deliver the course (and all associated source files), if the coordinator was ready to sign off on the project. That would mean I'm done with my stuff, I submit my final invoice. Within minutes of my reply -- literally minutes -- I received an email from the coordinator stating that he still had content to provide and that he was, by no means, ready to conclude the project.

Why? Why is it so hard to get through to people? I've tried a range of tactics -- from hard-liner to soft-shoe -- to get people working on learning products to understand the value of content. I've concluded that they resist, squirm, and avoid content because it's the hard part. Any monkey's ass can sit around and talk about color schemes and button choices. The content takes time. It takes focus. It takes thought.

So I'll spend the next two days making interfaces changes around barely enough content for a three-page comic book. I'll submit the revision and an iterative invoice, and patiently wait for the content.

ode to tradition

2009-11-30T07:48:00.005-05:00

When I started working here, my boss (mentor, friend, conversationalist extraordinaire) had a tradition of wearing a Christmas-themed neck tie every working day between Thanksgiving and Christmas. When he retired, he gave some (likely most) of the ties to me -- about fifty or so.

Today I started my fourth year of carrying on the tradition. It doesn't get old. It's a fun way of getting into the holiday spirit because the ties are so eclectic -- just like my old friend. My wife, however, is a different story. About the second week, she gets really tired of me asking every morning, "Does this tie go with this shirt?"

tank you veddy much

2009-11-26T06:50:00.004-05:00

During my course work, I was taking a class with an associate faculty member who had a habit of having us consider every topic through a lens of Native American persecution. The uniqueness wore off quickly as his personal agenda began to trump individual exploration and discussion. Nice guy. Good writer. Crappy professor.

Just thought I'd share that, as every Thanksgiving since that class (which is going on four years now) gives me a moment of pause to consider what I really should be thankful for. For that moment of pause, I'm thankful to my crappy professor -- each and every year.

We all need to pause today. If for any reason, let's all be thankful we live in a country that gives us the opportunity to change the world. Tomorrow we can debate if that change is good or bad. There may even be time to entertain a diatribe or two about the inhumane means by which we've been given this opportunity. For now, just be thankful. Thankful that we are free to express, create, incite, inspire, and shape.

Happy Thanksgiving!!

touch too much

2009-11-25T14:21:00.005-05:00

The next time a Luddite faculty member tells me there are some things you just can't teach on line:

be cool or be cast out

2009-11-25T13:20:00.008-05:00

The academhack had the following comment in a post about the launching of a new major in emerging media:

"There is a new type of literacy developing, one between those who will understand the digital network media landscape, and who use it to produce, to organize, to take ownership over their lives, responsiblity for their community, to be critical of it, to engage with it . . . and with those who merely consume it. A divide between those who will be passive consumers at best, victims at worst, and those who will be active participants."

There are implications embedded here for higher education -- particularly in regard to online teaching and learning.

On which side of the divide will we find "older" faculty who are facing increasing presure to move lower-division / high-volume courses online to accomodate increasing student demand for flexibility and access?

On which side will we find adult learners returning to school with limited information and technology literacy skills?

And perhaps most importantly, how will those of us supporting these populations be asked to bridge the divide?

two old guys

2009-11-25T12:57:00.005-05:00

Another funny conversation recently overheard at the YMCA. Context note: Jake is 83 years old and Will is 76.

Will: "Hey Jake, Dorothy had a great big smile on her face this morning."

Jake: "Was it because she saw you walking into the pool with no trunks on?"

Will: "No, the water was warm as a bathtub. But come to think of it, she did say she liked my new trunks."

Jake: "We'll there you go. Try the speedo tomorrow and let me know if you get a bigger smile."

google me this

2009-11-25T12:45:00.008-05:00

Funny conversations overheard recently:

Nephew’s Girlfriend: “I really like your Grandmother. She’s nice. What’s her name?”

Nephew: “Grandma.”

Nephew’s Girlfriend: “You don’t know your Grandmother’s first name?”

Nephew: "Yeah, it's 'Grandma'."

Nephew's Girlfriend: "Her parents didn't name her 'Grandma'."

Nephew: “OK, so let's Google her.”

Nephew’s Girlfriend: “And what are you going to Google? Grandma?"

Nephew: “Of course, isn't that her name?”

here's to hoping

2009-06-11T07:47:00.009-04:00

There's something prescient in Roxanne's post here. I've found a similar theme through much of Derek's public writing a few years ago. There's been plenty of it in my own anguish over qualifying exams that I never seem to get closer to. I'm like that guy in Kafka's The Castle -- you know, the idiot who can't seem to gain entrance to the castle? The sad (and most frustrating) part of the story is that all he had to do was walk in. So you're left wondering, did he really want to get in or was he happy enough just sitting around bitching about how everyone was making it so hard for him?

I think it's accurate to say that hope is the fuel that fires the part-time student's (and, arguably, all adult students') motivation to succeed. Life-long learning is about taking action -- and hoping we never lose the desire to continually improve ourselves and the lives of those around us.

catfish are jumpin'

2009-06-11T07:25:00.006-04:00

I can't blame this gap on the way things tend to slow down in the summer. Things don't slow down for us in the summer. WE ARE SUMMER! Yeah, baby -- we are summer damit! Beyond the administration's hysteria about making that point clear to all staff, there is a marked excitement around here from late May to early August. It's the excitment of purpose. Despite our organizational issues, we continue to be extremely good at providing programs, support, and services to part-time SU students. Between the spring and fall, that excellence extends to all SU students enrolled in courses and non-credit programs during the summer semesters. We can call our support and service excellent because students tell us so. And that's why we do what we do everyday. I don't think it's naive. I think it's about purpose -- about doing something of value.

da da da

2009-05-01T14:48:00.004-04:00

"Teaching presence is referred to as the design facilitation and direction of cognitive and social processes for the realization of personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes."

This is exactly why faculty are coming to our Introduction to Online Learning workshops with that pleading look on their faces. They don't want this blather. They can read this crap five different ways in five different academic journals. This isn't what they want. This isn't what they need. Faculty want plain language help. They want models and examples. They want someone to hand them the tools, template and prescription. They're smart enough to figure out the rest.

Yes, faculty certainly are smart enough to realize their own personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes.

timeless

2009-04-30T20:18:00.006-04:00

In 1905, Sir T. Clifford Allbutt penned the following sentence in his still relevant text, Notes on the Composition of Scientific Papers:

"At present few people have time to wade through pages and pages of discursive and ill explained writings on the off chance that they may ultimately light on an interesting result."

There's a couple of reasons why I like this sentence. Nothing has changed in the 104 years since Allbutt made the claim. He was writing within an argument for concision, clarity, and simplicity from scientists and authors of scientific (specifically, medical) articles. Today, scientific journals are still just as laden with "pages of discursive and ill explained writings."

Similarly unchanged is the time factor. As both author and reader find themselves with less time today, we find ourselves bleeting, blogging, twittering, and tweeting - micro-babbling about nothing of any real import. If he were around today, Allbutt would shudder at his odds for ultimately lighting on an interesting result within most scholarly journals, discussions, forums, and outlets - print or otherwise.

Round and round.

the lowly engineer

2009-04-21T14:14:00.004-04:00

OK, last one and I'll leave it alone:

"Indeed the engineer does bungle language deplorably. He makes a fetish of efficiency, yet he shows no regard for the effective use of one of his most important tools -- the pen; he believes devoutly in accuracy, yet he employs a weapon of precision as carelessly as a small boy handles a gun." ~ T.A. Rickard

This is how all technical writing texts need to be written. Analogy, metaphor, whit, and humor. Can you imagine Markel or Lannon trying to pull this off?

I'm going to drop this line on my WRT 407 engineers next fall -- all 50 of them.

it's not that weird

2009-04-21T12:32:00.003-04:00

I love this guy:

"Our first aim is to be understood. The art of writing is based on scientific method. Science is organized common sense. A blunder -- made not infrequently even by scientific men -- is to assume that good writing is extrinsic to its subject." ~ T.A. Rickard

more old smart old guys

2009-04-21T12:24:00.005-04:00

Continuing with my reading of the Rickard classic... I came across this quote of Huxley: "Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of the same thing."

This is the essence of what we've attempted to do with WRT 407. We've "attached" (although I still like the term embedded) the writing -- the literate activities -- to the engineering activities -- the science of the practicing engineer.

One hundred plus years later, and we're still arguing the same case. Something to be said in that, I think.

said that

2009-04-21T07:06:00.005-04:00

In a lecture to mining engineers at the University of California, T.A. Rickard said, among many other things, "Technical writing is the precise expression of special knowledge."

Rickard made that claim in 1916. Last weekend I started re-reading his classic, Technical Writing. The SU SciTech library has a first edition and a third edition on the shelves.

There's been plenty written about Rickard's little book and it's influence on the field of technical communication. When you remove all of the positivist, constructivist, crapolavist debate, it really is just a finely written little story by a guy who was passionate about concise, clear, and meaningful technical prose. It's the book I want to write someday.

I'll leave you with Rickard's ditty on user-centered techncial writing, or as he puts it, "Remember the reader."

"Somebody must put hard work into every technical article that is written for publication; if not the author, then the editor; if both the author and the editor shirk their duty, the reader will have a headache."

back to basics

2009-04-16T13:37:00.004-04:00

It's my own fault. For the past 10 or so years, I've been working on a series of software user guides for a small, creative, and extremely cool company in Ithaca. Here's a hint to the product line lineage: the first app was running on Windows NT.

Over the years, the apps have expanded and contracted in various forms and stages. At one point, two different enterprise apps were being developed using completely different technologies and methodologies. One based on Java and something akin to an agile development methodology; the other based on C+ and VisualStudio tools following a traditional waterfall development methodology.

As the enterprise and ancillary apps have matured, there's been a conscious move on the part of the developers to reuse and share objects across the apps. This is all very good from a project management perspective. However, it's created a basic documentation dilemma for me: Trying to find a way cast entire sections of the guides in a generic style without compromising the product brand.

For a long while I've been using FrameMaker conditional text as a band aid. That approach is quickly becoming unwieldy as the amount of shared functionality across apps increases. What I need to do before it gets any worse is to back out, take a functional/object view of the information across the guides, and start building DITA-esque libraries of information. I think this approach will move me as close to an integrated set of information types as I can get without a full-blow DITA implementation.

Oh, this is the fun stuff. It really is.