Business/Tech Writing

The Kansas State Collegian has an article entitled Technology Complicates Classes, Frustrates Students, written by Mary Renee Shirk.

Now professors post a syllabus and change it, sometimes daily, sometimes more than once a day. They expect you to check it every single day and adapt your understanding of the world around you and your work schedule, and your finances, and fit this new set of commandments into your life.
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Now, professors are requiring a thumb drive or hard drive or DVDs or CDs or camera or flash card or batteries or six reams of paper, not to mention access to a high-volume color printer 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
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Some professors now require you to get a Google account or YouTube account or WordPress account or new Facebook account or join some other random website used specifically for and only for that class. All these accounts, of course, require different usernames and passwords that you’ll most likely forget.

Now added to the regular class load and all of the above is watching the latest YouTube video or following the class on Twitter and networking with your classmates on LinkedIn.

Just to make things even more interesting, every professor has a different requirement for the number of times you’re supposed to check your email, the syllabus, K-State Online, the WordPress blog and any/all of the other online resources for that class.

I can totally understand these issues, even the ones I haven’t personally experienced. And I confess to having cringed a bit over changing the syllabus every day, since I know that I do more of that right now (with new classes at a new uni) than I should for the good of the students.

The idea of requiring students to print of hundreds of PDFs (for us oldies, those are the copied books we’d get full of different essays from different sources) is both ludicrous and expensive. However, it may be that the professors expect the students to read the PDFs and this particular student knows that reading online is of poorer quality than reading paper. So the PDF printing might be a feature of the student’s desire to do well in class rather than an actual requirement. However, I can also see the possibility of a professor requiring that they be printed out so that he/she can see that you have at least looked at them. That’s a problem if there are more than one or two.

Then there is the problem of multiple accounts for various things. Since I’ve required students to register for my classroom blog and for Twitter, I know that those can be an issue. However, the blog is available for a semester and a student can change the password without my help, so I don’t see that as a problem. Twitter didn’t have to be only for the class, though they did have to post and follow me (not my @DrDavisTCE account) for credit. But I also know my students have to get on Blackboard and blogging is available there, so my classroom blog might unnecessarily complicate their lives.

So, if technology can unnecessarily complicate students’ lives and definitely frustrates them at times, why am I such a proponent?

Two reasons. (Remember. I have at least two reasons for everything.)

One is that students often have a very limited view of technology. They do not understand how what they do for fun and play and personal things can transfer to academics and the business world. I try to bridge that knowledge gap by giving them experience doing tech for school and/or work projects (in business writing). The students need to know that businesses and schools can access some of their accounts and see what they are doing and that the students should be careful what they post. Discussing this in terms of the classroom situation helps to make that clear.

Another reason is that students often have very limited experience with technology. Ten percent of my students last year had never touched a computer prior to my class. Only ten percent of my students this year had done any blogging and none were on Twitter. Many people, especially older people who might hire my students, assume a much greater experience and facility with tech than my students (both at CCs and at the SLAC) have had. This is a problem for them when they get out into the working world.

A third reason (see, I said I often have more than two) is that all of the colleges at which I have taught in the last five years have felt like it was part of their mission to expose students to technology. One required use of technology in the classroom. All of them offered the option of having tech in the classroom, which I availed myself of eagerly. And my present university focuses on technological innovation being used within the classroom, so I need to be engaged with that.

If social media is such a big deal, and it can be, then why aren’t all the students active participants in it? Why don’t they know tech as well as the older generation assumes?

I think some of this is the fluency with texting, which most older folks don’t have. Also, no one knows how to do something they haven’t been exposed to. Some of the students just haven’t ever heard of programs and opportunities on the net. Some have heard but have never tried them out. I give students a safe place to move beyond their own technology boundaries and learn more. And I don’t just give them the opportunity, I require it.

While technology can frustrate students, and teachers, I think that I would be failing in my mission of teaching my students to write what they need to know how to write in order to graduate from college if I weren’t having them work in technology. Even when that “writing” is a digital presentation.

This element of the conceptual age, according to Daniel Pink, is incredibly important. I agree. My experience has shown that what we do and HOW we do it makes a difference.

If you don’t think so, remember this. Long ago researchers found that typed papers did better than handwritten papers. The design was more uniform and, therefore, seen as better.

Here is an article on how design, and digital visualization, can impact résumés.

This is what such a résumé might look like:

A link to sign up for Vizualize.me.

I listened to a TEDTalk video by Marian Bantjes, a graphic artist, who used her work as a backdrop for her talk.

[O]ne of the things religions got right was the use of visual wonder to deliver a message.
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I am mystified as to why visual wealth is not more commonly used to enhance intellectual wealth.
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seeding the imagination of the populace
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Inspiration is cross-pollinating.

And I think that this is something that would be interesting to insert/discuss/show with a section on visual communication, particularly in technical communication, but perhaps at any time I am teaching visual rhetoric.

The images are just two of the hundreds that she showed and in no way are indicative of the style or presentation of all or even most of her graphic work. They are, however, two in a row at the end, when I had decided to blog, and they are especially beautiful to me, a lover of jewel tones.

What comes after facebook?

Blogs? Blogs old-fashioned in China.
People want to meet and chat.
FB leads to people wanting to meet and chat.
Blogs are not

twitter
FB

return to something that has been lost?
article about ppt
ppt was killing confrences and presenations

Engineers started getting rid of ppts and sitting and talking

chat roulette might be next
like Skype, random pairing

interested in and reliant of technology, push us to the contradictions and the walls that they can’t get us over

twitter and fb are different sorties in this battle

fb allows me to take care of awkward relationships without having to meet in f2f if I don’t like it

Affordances of the various media, like Li talked about… People choosing whatever mode they want to do whatever they want to do.

Where and how is the money to be made?

Understanding Visual Argumentation
Shuwen Li, presently at University of Arkansas-Little Rock, but she will be in the PhD rhetoric/technical/scientific program at University of Minnesota beginning in the fall.

This is a live blogging of the session.

Pre-presentation:
I was a bit intrigued/concerned. Li is going to be presenting on this topic at SCMLA, in a panel for which I am chair/organizer. I realize that people give the same presentation at multiple genres, but the overlap of audience at PCA and SCMLA, especially as PCA is in Texas this year, will be significant.

Having talked to her about her presentation though, I am happy to report that she is going to be presenting the theoretical ideas (at PCA) behind the practical techniques of employing visual argumentation within technical communications/writing courses (at SCMLA).

Presentation:
Interesting visual to start. Fve guys hanging from a clothesline, eating watermelon, with the number 5 after them. Browns and oranges primarily. imayday

Then the computer disconnected again. This will be a problem. She is relying on the tech significantly because of her topic (as she should, I think).

Picture of little girl and a pony yelling at each other.

born in a culture of images, not sounds

as a child I started learning words with individual pictures
“learning words” taking pictures with a single word

comic strips (no words)

child’s drawing (very elaborate, but no words)

In tech writing, started thinking about the tension between words and pictures.

1996 criticized
same year someone else

10 years later other two people proposed modes for visual meaning and themes for visual argumentation

era of computer tech, people communicate with visuals

What are differences between visual and verbal argumentation?
verbal can use visuals, but not main argument
visual =

Visuals
are indeterminate
are unable to construct argument
cannot negate.

visual argument: claim-support pattern
-quotes, but they were too intricate for me to copy and even to understand. Clear speaking, but quiet. There’s a mic, but—as happened often—people don’t know how to use them effectively.

Claim-support
vodka ad, “Add vodka.”
Vodka bottle pouring onto a sleepy city.
Idea that vodka will “wake up” your life.

Visuals are able to refute.
Blackfeet triangular pattern
Christian flower pattern
Blackfeet used flower, but to keep their cultural heritage, also included the triangular pattern.
Not sure how this refutes. Instead it seems that it is contestation, not negation.

Cultural symbols?
1. emotional appeal
2. psychological appeal
3. quick revelation of the thought pattern of the author of the image

Visuals’ application of rhetorical figure:
metaphor
irony image= guy in white taking picture of women in burkas, covered totally
personification = two chairs, “People in Love”
XXX=white raven in a group of black ravens “Hamlet”

For me, visuals last longer than words.

Visual arg: persuasion or psych manipulation or what?
How much control do audiences have of visual argumentation?

Interesting question and I would really like to think about this. Some say that the audience is significantly involved in the ads. I am not sure about that either. Visuals can make the audience think. Of course, that assumes that the audience thinks at all. I’m sure that many people do not. I taught my sons’ visual rhetoric as a representation, claim-support argument, all their lives. Which means that I have a philosophical and deep basis in the discussion on visual rhetoric. Which I did not realize. Interesting.

privacy, orange background, thinker, speaking bubble, mousetrap caught on the bubble

Appeals can be used in visual rhetoric:
pathos, An Inconvenient Truth with polar bear

ethos, An Inconvenient Truth with Gore on front

logos, An Inconvenient Truth with an industrial plant spewing pollution

Audience
Focuses on symbols that add argument and dissonance.
Can construct arguments.
Rely on their understanding, individual judgment.

Reconfiguring “Visual Rhetoric” for Technical Writing
Carlos Salinas, University of Texas-El Paso

This is a live blogging of the session.

Pre-presentation:
Salinas and I discussed the “floodgates” of attendees from PCA who would NOT be coming to the presentation. I told him that I thought that the title of tech comm. was off putting to some. He agreed, listing off groups where techies would be: gaming, cinema, etc. I said I thought the facebook paper would be intriguing to folks and he suggested perhaps we should add “social media” to the title. I think that would work next year. …I’ll have to think about how I use social media in my tech writing classroom so I can submit.

Presentation:
Most of what I am going to talk about… I am going to read to you…. Read for 10 or 15 minutes and then a couple of things to show you.

What I am reading to you: arguing that there is a problem with the term visual rhetoric
tend to think of visual images as representations, as illustrations, as displays
should be thinking of them as heuristics or presentations

Images are important to English studies.
Literary and media critics look at paintings and photographs, movies, etc.
Political, social, and cultural systems have also been looked at. Icons, etc
Verbal imagery long study for rhetoric and poets
Visual perception and thinking studied by psych folks

Visual rhetoric

Increasingly rely on images
preferred mode of communication

JT Crest
Cindy Stone

tech change in image

Why is the image at issue? What is at issue for whom?
Rhet and comp, cultural studies, tech studies = visual rhetoric

Visual rhetoric problems:
terminologically unwieldy
forces us to re-examine (domains, terms, theories, practices)

Hill and Helmers’ argument:
Defining Visual Rhetorics
(a collection of essays)
by Hill and Helmers

H&H want individual scholars to present their own definitions.

Folks want studies, not long definitions.
(And he said “I’m giving lengthy definition.” lol)

Visual rhetoric:
structure
credibility
definition

suggest should be less-structured, incoherence, kairos

H&H disciplinary conventions constrain by boundaries and lack of acceptance
it may be too soon to settle on an accepted practice

word privileged over image to point where words and pictures are divided
Every person submitting to the essays said they cannot be divided so clearly. Discourse is used to respond to and interpret images.

Salinas’ plan:
Problematize or re-problematize visual rhetoric.
Discuss the production of images.

Look at a particular image, one of the oldest in existence:
Image of cave painting from the caves in France

Used a teeny tiny image. It’s a thumbnail. I have no idea what part of the cave painting it is. I taught those cave paintings this semester, so I ought to be able to recognize it, but I can’t.

1. We need to talk about it.
2. Conference that claimed image was visual rhetoric. I doubted that the cave painters were thinking about rhetoric.

Problematized:
How can a cave painting be an example of visual rhetoric?
You can examine it in terms of rhetoric, but was rhetoric used in its creation?
I can argue about what it says now, what I think the frame is, how I think it influenced/spoke to its original audience, an interpretation frame…
But all these critical approaches concentrate on analysis, not production.

From our time, we can see this as visual rhetoric. But doubtful that the creators thought of/used visual rhetoric.

I think that they may indeed have intended visual rhetoric.

Sullivan and Porter in Opening Spaces and others…
Write about mapping as a rhetorical way of scholarship
Mapping uses visual material, but is not meant to be a representation of a process. Seeks to portray theories, fields, definitions, disciplinary boundaries, ideologies…. Maps work heuristically. They are used to start, but are not the thing itself. Maps encourage heuristics and can be revised. Visual and spatial, though some say can involve (or should involve) time.
To the extent that the map is meant to be interpreted, the interpretation is often presented in words.
EX: stasis theory

Tech difficulties. The screen isn’t working for the computer.

Images: “How our laws are made” a map in orange, blue, green, yellow, with a light green background… How bill becomes a law. … Color to represent stages… A complex map, but still a representation, not a heuristic map.

Edward Tuffney’s (web says Charles Minard’s) famous map of Napoleon’s march, but still a representation, but not a heuristic.

Student sample of a heuristic map: “What the material was about” with metaphor of a chemical compound
Mapping the dominance of scientific discourse, with various different fields and various different methodologies.

The student used the map as a starting point to clarify thinking and presentation.
It is a presentation or heuristic of the student’s understanding of this field, ideology, …

Questions:
Graphic was small. Listserv was where cave painting pic came from.

What am I looking for if I am looking at heuristic versus representation?

respresentation: re-presents, an illustration, a diagram

heuristic: starting point, way of articulating what our thinking is, meant to be the invention of argument

Read in an article, about Archimedes, abstract geometry of Greeks… Puts us into abstract thinking… What Archimedes would do, was he would talk about his mathematical ideas on his belly. “This given point A” was a way to spark his thinking… He wasn’t talking about his belly… but the mathematic… Abstract becomes very concrete.

Metaphor is a way to take an abstract thought and give it concrete.

Did the cave painting serve as a heuristic to prompt you to think about visual rhetoric?
Think about idea maps, outlines, tree, mindmaps… Meant to initiate start thinking…

Perceived Interactivity and Genre: A Genre Analysis of the Facebook Interface
Katie Retzinger, Old Dominion University

This is a live blogging of the session.

Pre-presentation:
Retzinger gave me both the paper copy she had prepared for attendees and a computer version as well, so that yall can enjoy the handout too. I’ve made a jing of the genre analysis of facebook model, as you can see, if you scroll just a bit.

I loved the idea of this topic when I saw it in the schedule and I was a bit disappointed to not have had her ask to present at SCMLA, until I looked at where she is from. Old Dominion is in Virginia, which is a bit out of the SCMLA area.

Presentation:
From dissertation.

FB is the artifact for study.
Interactivity, how does it work?

2007 in Newsweek “in the Ivy League… fb is a key piece of social structure”

Problem trying to address: How is interactivity is defined in the literature?
Problem is the social versus structural interaction.

How people communicate with each other = social interaction
different than an interface where people are engaging with the text itself

metaphors used in interactivity discussion are

can’t always take elements from f2f and apply to textual-interactivity comm.

elements of perceived interactivity: rely on user’s perceptions or what they think are interactivity

Categories:
control
speed or response time
directional comm. ->back to f2f comm., clicking on something or with others or with the work itself

In study used surveys, interviews, genre analysis.

Not an accepted theory for interactivity. Data used to build a theory on HER research, but not generalized or perhaps generalizable.

(This would be an interesting job talk.)

Genre analysis confirmed results from surveys and interviews.

Model used is on the handout. Model based on Askehave & Swales 2001 and Askehave & Nielsen 2005.

What is discourse community?
1. purpose
of fb creators
of fb users
2. goals = completed actions
3. values = what important in the actions

Features within the interface:
1. navigation and hierarchy
2. interaction -> click or not click, drop downs, and perception of use
3. constraints = factors that shaped the study

User purpose:
to keep in touch with friends and families, to make contacts and meet new people
most said to keep in touch with friends and families

FB creators’ purpose, Mission purpose is on fb:
defined later as open media having access to information and helping people stay in touch
having one world
fb transcends national/geographical boundary
free-flow of information
able to share and connect in any medium and any information
“but we still come to work everyday and make decisions we think are best for (users)”

User goals:
check on other folks’ updates
creep (stalking)
comment on pictures
update profile and status
information sharing

Features analyzed:
those that were indicated
like button
comment feature
pictures
profile itself
status updates
and a whole bunch of other things

Features were used to make connections.
“Doesn’t need to communicate … but can make conclusions by what they post”
assumes people come to see what she posted

some features do imitate f2f
talking or chatting wasn’t always chat feature
b/c of app on phone, respond right away, so becomes synchronous on something that was created as asynchronous

favorites:
72% looking at pictures
40% chat

did not like:
17% info on games, etc
privacy set-ups, default settings did not always work
changes to the privacy settings are in flux
provides services users don’t want
felt that the too much information was upsetting, but later was accepted

news articles, esp Newsweek and Time articles, problem of merging of social relationships

emphasize user purpose when looking at how interface is used and understood

distinguish how we are using the terms within the situations, interactive experiences

Question:
surveys first
195 surveys

interviews 2, one of the interviews didn’t use
3 people said they would come, one didn’t show up, but threw friend out because wasn’t rich,
used graphic theory for
memos, journals thoughts, memos progressed to track my thoughts, allowed me to create a rich description
half an hour interview, audio recorded, page recorded,
used cantasia screen recording, taking notes the whole time
able to see things later with the page report
got a ton of information from those two interviews

Purpose:
Want other people to be open, but don’t want to be open with their privacy… She follows trail of other people’s posts, but wanted to keep their stuff private. Mad when the person keeps it quiet.

10035 Technical Communications (Salinas): Technical Communication and Imagery: RC-Salon G
Session Chair: Carlos Salinas

Perceived Interactivity and Genre: A Genre Analysis of the Facebook Interface
Katie Retzinger, Old Dominion University

Reconfiguring “Visual Rhetoric” for Technical Writing
Carlos Salinas, University of Texas-El Paso

Understanding Visual Argumentation
Shuwen Li, University of Arkansas-Little Rock

Jacob de Gheyn’s “The Exercise of Armes”: The Gentleman’s Quarterly of 17th-
Century Military Manuals
Celia Patterson, Pittsburg St University

Pre-presentation:
I wonder if the woman scrolling through her 6-pt font notes is Patterson. But, no, that’s someone else.

Patterson has been injured and will not attend.

I really like the idea presented by Cary Moskovitz of Duke University in her Chronicle of Higher Education article “Reader Experts Help Students Bring the Write Stuff.”

Even when an instructor can successfully role-play, students who have rarely composed papers for anyone other than their teachers and professors often struggle to write with any other audience in mind.

…When professors include their courses in the [Thompson Writing Program] project, their students can get comments on drafts of papers from an alumnus or employee who has relevant experience in the field, like the Coast Guard commander or the wildlife expert.
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Readers are provided with instructions and examples for giving feedback in which they comment on their reactions to the students’ draft as “consumers” of the text rather than as editors or evaluators.
…
Nearly 300 alumni and employees have volunteered as readers, and 350 students have participated in more than 40 courses. Several courses have become regulars in the program.

This would be SOOOOO cool! It would take a lot of work to get it off the ground, but I think it would be incredibly helpful to students. I think it would be especially helpful to students at the CC level, because then they could see that their writing will impact their future and their future jobs. But I can see why it would be easier with a strong alumni group like Duke University has.

I’m going to start talking this idea up. I think it could really make a difference, even to developmental writers. Or, perhaps, especially to developmental writers.