demarcations two

Technical writing has nothing to do with technology. In almost all modern scenarios, we use technology-based tools to ply our craft, but our craft is not technical (put the "writer" back into "technical writer").

Similarly, online teaching and learning is not about technology. Yes, online teaching and learning is technology-enabled, but it should not be confused with "teaching with technology."

Instructional technologists are not (in most cases) instructional designers. Technical writers are not (and in most cases, should not be) technologists.

Lot's of loaded claims.

negative waves

Yes, OK, we get it... DITA isn't new. This is the same old diatribe we hear each time a new standard, methodology, technology, etc. is introduced to the field.

I will, however, take a shot at Palimpsest: I've never read a single claim that DITA can be used to "convert your legacy content or make the output from the Open Toolkit match your formatting requirements."

Strawman bitching comes off simply as bitching.

demarcations

This has been written about before by really smart people, but I want to try to work something out here (albeit briefly).

Today we had a mini-seminar for instructors of WRT 307: Advanced Writing Studio in Professional Communication. SU requires 307 for a good number of the professional majors, such as management and engineering.

I've taught 307 many times in all formats and never gave much thought to the fact that I wasn't necessarily teaching a "professional communication" course. Admitedly, my courses tend to lean toward technical communication -- or at the very least, an introductory foray into the fundamentals of technical writing. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem (for me or the Writing Program) if the official course description didn't read like this:

"Professional communication through the study of audience, purpose, and ethics. Rhetorical problem-solving principles applied to diverse professional writing tasks and situations."

Let me state the obvious: the description does not make even the slightest mention of "technical" writing, communication, or practices. Which is fine, if the course defines professional communication narrowly as business communication.

My question and concern (which our mini-seminar group has taken up) has to do with the text books we're all using in our different sections of 307. The most popular, of course, are the Markel and Lannon texts. Others include titles by Gurak, Woolever, and named "tech com" scholars. So why, in a professional communication course, do most of us use technical communication texts?

I know the answers are obvious and in many ways bundled up with disciplinary identity and programmatic territorialism. With all that aside, I think it will be extremely useful for our little group to develop a clear statement about what "professional communication" means to the Writing Program and how that definition jives with the program's missions, goals, and plans.

foundational knowledge

Anne has got this correct. For a very long time, this is exactly how we've approached end-user support. In some ways, it goes back a couple of thousand years: Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for life.

From the end-user support perspective, we like to reinforce foundational concepts (cut, paste, open, save, etc.). This has become easier over the years as the Windows menu structure and function bundling has become almost ubiquitous. I've seen students and staff move from the Office suite to the OpenOffice.org suite without a blip. Validation.

The concept strums up previous strands I've followed in search of a universal heuristic -- a set of core concepts or "knowledges" that all users, writers, developers, etc. share. Maybe it's as simple as computer literacy. In fact, why does it have to be a complicated theory laden concept? Teach people the basics really well and improve their chances to quickly develop higher level skills on that sound foundation.

I'm sure there's an education scholar out there laughing.

it's just time

Last night H read me an interesting statistic from a leadership development course she's taking: Each year, the average person will spend 912 hours in meetings. That's 38 days of your life you will never get back -- each year.

Case in point: I spent four hours this morning in a strategic planning meeting that could have been completed in one hour. I'm not joking or making this up. Quite literally, we waited 3 hours for any semblance of a call to action. And even when it came, it was more of a gimping sort of cackle than it was a call.

My eyes are open to the possibilities.

governance marbles

The University has asked central IT to look at duplicate and redundant services. This a good thing. A very good and important thing. I'll be scribbling about it quite a bit, I'm sure.

Right now I'm trying to come to some sense of how central IT defines governance. In my small shop, "governance" is a methodology -- a means by which we do our jobs as a reflection of (and in alignment with) the organization's philosophy. It gets tricky for us sometimes because "philosophy" gets easily confused with "mission" when the organization is in the midst of rapid change.

I'm not sure central IT shares this over-simplified definition of governance. In fact, I'm sure it can't. The complexity of a university as a collection of disparate and often competing entities makes it nearly impossible to imagine governance as a functional unifying activity. Framework is more like it. I'll need to keep this in mind as we move forward.

Yes, much more to come on this and the duplicate services initiative.

war skills

I'll waste a good portion of next Monday sitting in a small room with a hack consultant and my frustrated peers. To prepare for the meeting, I'm putting together a list of questions/answers to help get me in the correct state of mind.

The focus of our session? Long-term strategic enrollment management planning. Whew! I'll write that on a cheat-sheet and refer to it often.

My greatest fear? We'll spend a good portion of the morning trying to define "long-term" against an existing shabby definition of "short-term."

Why will the meeting be a bust? The wanna-be academics that lead my organization do not understand that strategy without a tactical framework and execution is just a bunch of text on a meaningless page. A good long stint in the USAF will teach you that.

Open mind. Keep an open mind.

elbow room

Why is Jay Bulbus(head) a pathetic, blow-hard, ACC zionist who, quite honestly, needs to go back to practicing law or riding the bench for some European league team?

Responding to a loose ball incident in the UNC/Aryan Youth game -- a game in which UNC broke 100 and embarrassed his beloved Blue Devils on their home wood -- this brilliant analyst of the game says, "There is no room for elbows in basketball."

Yes Jay, we know you played for Duke. Yes Jay, we know how much you adore the ACC. Yes Jay, we know how you want to marry Tyler Hanbrough and have Coach K as your bridesmaid.

For your own safety Jay, please don't ever bring that wussy smack north of Maryland.

catch up

Oh my. UConn spanking the Orange. No wonder. I could count on one hand the number of offensive sets Uncle Jim had them set up. I don't think it would have mattered. Thabett is the best defensive player we've seen in the Big East in decades.

Duke and UNC in a classic. All of my efforts to leave the ACC behind get thwarted by old-school, home cooking college hoops.

God I love this time of year.

the smell of flowers

I've been thinking about process a lot lately. My current attraction is, no doubt, due to our ongoing work (read: frustration) with part-time student enrollment management. I'm finding all sorts of analogies among our business process and the basic processes teachers of writing (technical and otherwise) have come to know, love, and loath.

Start with the traditional four-step writing process. I like to use this model as an introductory framework with groups new to process mapping and analysis.

• Step 1: Generating Ideas -- a universal activity found within all processes that have a "generative" opening activity.
• Step 2: Mapping the Argument -- essentially the same activity as structuring the iterative phases of the process (actions, decisions, terminal events, etc.).
• Step 3: Composing a Draft -- the build out phase and the fun/creative part where team members begin to "see" the relationships, bottle-necks, and outcomes among discrete activities.
  
• Step 4: Revising -- the point at which we revisit the entire process to refine, improve, tweak, and modify.

So maybe Flowers and Hayes had it right. Buried beneath all the blather about cognitive, expressivists, and social constructionist theory is a timeless, simple, and useful model. That's good design.

my ball isn't crystal

This isn't an "I told you so" moment. I'm not like that anyway. But I do have to smile.

About two years ago, one of our brilliant associate deans (there are only two, so you have a 50/50 chance), decided to hire a marketing communications consultant to come in and review, "how we're doing with the web stuff." That's an honest-to-goodness actual quote. Of course, at the time I wondered exactly what was meant by "web stuff." I'm still not certain that this particular associate dean even understands "the web" as a tool.

Moving quickly by the stupid money that was ponied up, it took the consultant (who is actually a nice, bright, forward-thinking person) all of three days to tell us, "You guys are doing all of the basics really really well." And thank you for that validation. Now maybe I can get on with what I get paid to do professionally.

One of the consultant's parting suggestions, possibly because he had to suggest something, was for us to create a blog. "Make it a student blog, that way prospective students will see what it's like to be a student here. Maybe pay the students to post. Maybe sell ad space. There are all types of models for making money with blogs."

At the time, I'd just finished my share of Anderson, Urban, Watts, and a few other scholarly-esque texts on the power and possibility of social networks. Nowhere in my reading or observations at the time did I see anything akin to a sound revenue model. In fact, other than the long shot of selling advertising or getting into porn (which to me seemed counter to the spirit of the forum), there was no -- is no -- way to make money with a blog.

I argued against the time and cost of creating, shaping, and maintaining a UC blog. The moment and fad passed. The topic still pops up occasionally, but there is less passion and fewer quips about how so and so university is making it work for them. The word is now part of the lexicon, but that doesn't mean that the blog -- as a tool -- is any better understood by our adminstrators and decision makers.

I don't feel smug, just confident in my ability to help the organization make sound decisions about its use of technology.

Higher Education

design perspectives

There's a lot of stuff out there relating to visual rhetoric. I don't do any visual rhet in WRT 407. I figure the engineers have plenty to deal with by this point in their course work. The basic concept of visual rhet is easy enough to get your head around. But beyond the basic, you start getting into things like metaphoric representation. Yeah, a fourth-year electrical engineer needs that. Then again, maybe they do.

One of the WRT 407 individual assignments asks the students to render a block diagram from a textual process description. This year's submissions have surprised me for their depth of visual representation, as well as a consistent use of narrative and declarative information to explain or describe the representation. This is a more mature move than I've seen in the past. It might be because I'm doing such an exceptional job this year. It's more likely due to the fact that this year's small group (15 in all) is highly creative and exceptionally attuned to the requirements I place before them. They really are making this a fun year for me.

Back on an instructional level: I do think there is space to introduce basic concepts of visual rhetoric and the role the visual plays (can play) in effective technical communication.

just keep on swinging

I presented this morning to faculty of the Social Work Program at the School of Human Ecology. The presentation was a pared down and much revised variant of the old dog-and-pony show Coach hustled to program directors a number of years ago.

Our revised effort is not necessarily to educate faculty about the nomenclature, technology, benefits, and value of online teaching and learning. Rather, we move directly into a "this is how easy it is" discussion. In every session I've done, the faculty will ultimately ask the questions about nomenclature and technology. Through our answers and along the way, we hammer home the benefits and value statements. I learned how to effectively position a value-add from watching Anita, my most influential mentor, do this time and again in the face of hostile audiences.

I'm having a lot of fun with this presentation lately. It might be because I finally feel like we've put a design and production process in place that faculty can get their heads around -- it's not intimidating. Of course, I might also be digging on it because there is rising interest across campus to move courses online. The pressures are financial. I offer no pretense to these people that the pressures are anything but bottom-line driven. Five years ago, we couldn't get an audience with a dean. Now deans are telling their program directors and faculty to do it. UC has been doing online really well for a long time. Now we're going to help the rest of campus do it well as they help us do it better.

This isn't necessarily what I wanted to scribble about tonight - per se. I found this article, which brought me back to this morning's presentation. During our discussion, the question came up about research into the effectiveness of online learning. I think this article is a great example of the type of empirical analysis that is being attempted. I've since shared the URL with the Social Work program director. I shared it not to forward a specific position, but merely to illustrate how some scholars and educators are attempting to explore the concerns and hesitancy faculty have toward online teaching and learning. There are a lot of loaded claims and specific questions to be asked about the student populations discussed in the article, but at a fundamental level, I think the faculty will find it interesting.

For all that's going on around campus during difficult and stressful times, there remains tremendous opportunities to do fun, creative, and rewarding work with some really smart and talented people.

stand in the place

I'm done with my diatribes about the organization. I've come to the conclusion that there are people in academia simply because they couldn't be anywhere else. These same poor bastards would starve if they worked in a "real" organization -- in a place where a lack of business acumen would leave them jobless in short order.

What is it about pompous people that leads them to believe they're not the problem? How can a head be so inflated -- an ego so bloated -- that the individual is blind to his own ignorance, inability, insensitivity, incompetence... oh the list goes on!

I've said this aloud. I say it again here simply to commit the statement to the ether: I didn't go to some seminar or workshop to learn how to respect my coworkers for what they bring as individuals to the organization. Some full-of-shit consultant didn't show me how to be a professional. I didn't have to listen to a blow-hard management professor to know how to avoid the petty personal interests that people bring into organizations.

There's a common sense to treating people with dignity and trusting that they are working toward the same goals you are. You can't teach that. And maybe that's the problem. All these shit-birds who haven't stepped off The Hill in 25+ years think they can find the answers in some faculty development seminar. Good luck with that. In the meantime, I have real work to do in moving the organization forward.

talk about the passion

WRT 407 is an advanced technical communication course for senior electrical and computer engineers at Syracuse University. By the time the students get to my 407 class, they've had WRT 105 (the freshman comp course), WRT 205 (academic research course), and WRT 307 (professional communications course of varying quality and focus).

About three years ago I stopped assuming that my 407 students had a framework of basic compositional and rhetorical practices on which to perform their pre-professional writing activities. That's why I wasn't at all surprised when I started reviewing submissions of a recent assignment. The assignment asks the students to write a corporate position statement for monitoring email and Internet use. The submissions ranged from arbitrary diatribe to five paragraph essay. Most of the submissions fell somewhere in between -- sloppily constructed argument.

I took the entire session today to do an argument refresher. We looked at the basic elements of an argument, discussed how each element works together, and reviewed a few of the contexts in which they (as practicing engineers) would be asked to either write or respond to a well-structured argument. We also talked briefly about logic and logical fallacies. Then we did a fun little exercise in which they break up into two groups and develop arguments for the supremacy of a particular candy bar over another. Aside from the animated discussions within each group, the students get to munch on chocolate.

Why am I sharing this? I think it's because I thoroughly enjoyed today’s class. I got to see these young, talented, extremely smart pre-professionals stretch their thinking beyond their capstone projects. I think I got excited to see a writing exercise turn into a generative team-building activity. And maybe I'm sharing because I was reminded how rewarding teaching writing can be... sometimes.

something to say

Some years ago I realized that I would never be any good at golf. In that moment of understanding, I came to view the game from an entirely different perspective.

The same can be said for my continuity with blogging, journaling, and the other forms non-work related writing I thoroughly enjoy but find little time to do. There are those lucid moments in the car, barreling down the road with such a super heightened sense of awareness that you're consciously unaware of everything except the brilliant idea you're telling yourself you need to remember. And "Oh yeah, this will be a great topic to write about." By the time you arrive at the cave and finish the first cup of tar, your brilliance is a fading ember and that fantastic blog post is lost to the next day dreamer.

Commitments are funny things. They do tend to keep you honest though.