fallacies and entrenched thinking

To the entrenched faculty I will be working with this fall...

When I come to your faculty meetings to discuss online teaching and learning, please understand that I am not a zealot. I am merely an advocate of online education for a number of reasons, many of which have to do with access, opportunity, and outreach. I am also truly committed to helping our University expand it's instructional portfolio with purposeful intent.

So here I ask, before you launch into me as a messenger of coming doom and belittle my vocation as nothing more than a fad, consider this:

The high school teacher you meet with at your child's next Parent Night will likely have completed a Masters degree online. The next morning, when your child awakes with a bad cold, the nurse at your doctor's office will likely have completed a BSN online. If it's good enough for them, could it be good enough for you?

Understanding and objectivity. That's all I ask for.

moving toward me1

In preparing for minor exam 1, I'm recovering a Sullivan & Porter essay that considers how writers view and use usability information. I'm finding a constructive framing position in the following conclusion they draw from this and previous studies: "... the writer's use of information is guided by that writer's rhetorical orientation, particularly his/her view of the audience/user."

While this all may seem obvious, its a position that I can use to foreground my on the exam. I need be conscious of -- and describe -- my rhetorical orientation and how it will/does guide my interpretation of usability results. This is important, as the exam will not be the usability and IA analysis, it will only be a discussion of the results of the analyses.

My rhetorical orientation is going to filter the results. So how does one go about recognizing and describing one's rhetorical orientation? I can start by asking a set of questions that Sullivan & Porter presented to their study subject:

• What are my general beliefs about the way discourse works -- what is my model of communication?
• Where do I place priority in writing -- who do I measure effective writing?
• What are my attitudes toward authority -- who do I look to for validation of my perceptions an conclusions?
• To what degree am I an advocate for the texts/systems I will be evaluating?

The difficulty here is that we all observe from a particular rhetorical stance. There really isn't a neutral or objective stance, even if it is something occasionally babbled on about by an old-school technical writer.

random connections: idde

I'm recovering a thread I started to follow a few years ago that considered TC's and Comp's treatment of heuristics. My coordinating theme was Speech Act Theory. I argued then that TC departs from Comp's treatment of heuristics at the point were traditional rhetorical techniques fail to help readers adequately learn complex tasks. Such tasks require representations at a level higher than what is possible with traditional rhetorical tropes and techniques; readers/users can see their conceptions described in the documentation.

As with most of my writing, thinking, and teaching, things look so much more narrow and limiting through the lens of experience. However, I do still space for Speech Act as a bridging theory for TC and IDDE. In a recent re-reading of a few Redish essays, I'm again intrigued by the way she invokes the reader/user as an active participant in the writing process. More importantly, her treatment of "reading to do" and "reading to learn" activities places the TCer in the same design/development space as the IDer when creating particular types of information products. Reddish illustrates this common location by having us consider the tutorial as a specific type of information product -- one that requires the user to read "to learn to do." "... treating reading-to-learn-to-do materials like traditional reading-to-learn materials doesn't work. Tutorial users will not read long prose passages, advanced organizers, or prose summaries... we have to build knowledge through their use of the product, not by giving them pages and pages to read."

This is the point at which I see TC looking toward IDDE. While there are a few TC programs that include exposure to instructional design theory, most practicing TCers "do" ID without much theoretical framing. Consider this comment from Tom Johnson, a highly respected practitioner and TC blogger: "From what I could gather reading Kulman’s blog, the basics of instructional design are fairly intuitive. Create active versus passive learning, give the user control, help the user apply the learning while he or she is learning, select content using the 80/20 rule... Not sure I would need a PhD in instructional design for this, but surely the same could be said of tech comm."

I'm digressing a bit here... I'm still trying to fit activity theory into this space between creating "reading-to-learn" and "learning-to-do" information projects. In a very tangible way, activity theory gives the TCer the means by which to shape text in such a way as move the reader to learn and to do.

More on this to come.