Deborah C. Andrews

Building a Shared Virtual Learning Culture An International Classroom Partnership

Business professionals increasingly use digital tools to collaborate across multiple cultures, locations, and time zones. Success in this complex environment depends on a shared culture that facilitates the making of knowledge and the best contributions of all team members. To prepare managers for such communication, the authors designed and implemented a semester-long intercultural virtual team project between a management communication course in the United States and one in Canada. To prevent faultlines between subgroups on each campus, the authors set a clear outcome for students’ research, established equity between the two sites, structured assignments so that students worked interdependently across sites”, and encouraged inclusive communication. Faculty considering such a partnership should incorporate a robust collaborative workspace, incorporate preliminary exercises before a large project, provide intensive mentoring and instruction on peer review, arrange for a real visit or videoconference between locations, and expect the project to be both fun and demanding.

Teaching Professional Writing to American Students in a Study Abroad Program.

Studying abroad enhances the intercultural competencies of American students, but that enhancement strategy may be seen as an obstacle to those in business and technical fields who follow a tight curriculum and work to cover expenses. To meet their needs, U.S. professional communication faculty are designing short courses that can be delivered abroad during between-term periods and that foster an understanding of the situations and genres of the field within a context of cultural dislocation. Based on the courses described in this article, the best approach is to settle students in one location rather than touring; keep student numbers low by an entrepreneurial approach to keeping costs low; encourage students to live as the locals do, in apartments rather than hotels; explicitly plan appropriate access to technology; use class time to provide structure and reflection, but allow free time for collateral learning; and make sure the course grows local roots.

Making the Familiar Strange: Thinking Visually in a Study Abroad Course in Professional Communication.

Business and professional communicators increasingly rely on visual thinking and design strategies to create effective messages. The workplace need for such thinking, however, is not readily accommodated in current pedagogy. A long-running study abroad short course for American students taught in London provides a model for meeting this need. Addressed to students in art and design and framed through principles of discovery learning, the course approach and assignments can be productively adapted to enhance the visual competence of students of professional communication.

How Do We Know We've Won?.

Editor’s Note: At the 71st Annual International Convention of the Association for Business Communication (ABC), held in San Antonio, Texas, October 26-28, 2006, Deborah C. Andrews (editor of BCQ from 1997 to 2005) was honored as the 2005 recipient of ABC’s highest award for teaching: the Meada Gibbs Outstanding Teacher Award. The following is a transcript of Debby’s plenary address, which was delivered to convention attendees the morning of October 26, 2006. The address was part of a session that also featured the corecipients of the 2005 Kitty O. Locker Outstanding Researcher Award, Gail Fann Thomas and Mirjaliisa Charles. Their addresses will be published in a forthcoming issue of Journal of Business Communication. BCQ thanks Debby Andrews and the members of the ABC Committee on Teaching for permission to publish her remarks.

Document Design: The Sequel

&dquo;THE MEDIUM&dquo; noted media seer Marshall McLuhan in 1967, &dquo;is the massage.&dquo; Although McLuhan spoke of electric media which did not include computer technology (computers, in his time, were giant behemoths spewing forth mountains of punch cards and mounds of magnetic tape), the passage of 30 years evidences the accuracy of his aphorism in regard to information design. The medium of the computer screen influences not only the actual message but also massages the receiver’s brain through visual display. It is a different message than what paper displays: even if the actual wording is identical, a different medium changes the physiology of the content. Computer technology forces an alternative way of seeing-and thinking-than does print. Electronic technology requires that we abandon, to the extent possible, the linear, sequential modes of thought engendered by print and adopt a more global &dquo;simultaneous&dquo; awareness.

A Space for Place in Business Communication Research

Many corporate leaders believe that the physical environment of the workplace can play a major role in fostering the interdisciplinary collaboration they link to organizational innovation and in creating a brand that attracts and keeps highly talented employees. Their belief aligns with a recent materialist turn in scholarship that addresses the mutual creation of objects and subjects. Taking advantage of ubiquitous communications technology, the open plan design of these new workplaces offers a variety of settings, created more through furnishings than architecture, to support the four modes of 21st-century work: collaborate, socialize, learn, and focus. In this flexible, “mobile” workplace, people and things mutually reconfigure themselves as projects and preferences change. A tension exists, however, between group-oriented communication conducted face-to-face and private, individual thinking. Exploring the fit between the rhetoric of what space can do, especially enhancing collaboration and achieving innovation, and results on the ground, is an inviting, largely untapped, area for business communication research.

Book Review: The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information, by Richard A. Lanham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 312 pp

This is a clever, witty, and engaging—if at times frustrating—book. The central thesis is that in our information age, made possible by digital technology, the scarce commodity to be allocated (and thus a matter of economics) is not “stuff,” broadly defined as what you can kick or the information based on such stuff (also, stuff). We’re drowning in stuff. Instead, it’s attention that’s scarce, and allocating attention is a matter of style, of rhetoric. That makes sense. What becomes more complicated is Lanham’s further development of distinctions between stuff and nonstuff (called “fluff,” for ease and wit). Those distinctions are not fixed but can “change places in a wink” (p. 157). The pattern of thought necessary to pay and draw attention in the digital world is toggling, oscillating between descriptions of the world and what we think about the world. Sometimes we look “through”: We see transparently to the substance. Sometimes we look “at”: We are drawn to selfconscious, dramatic style and expression. Sometimes style is substance and sometimes not. Lanham explains, “If you are a car designer, for you the style of the car will be the substance. If you are a philosopher, ‘what you think about things’ will be the ‘things’ of your world” (p. 157). “Revisionist thinking”— seeing and then seeing again, toggling between “contending opposites”—is at the heart of creativity and innovation (p. 254). In eight chapters, Lanham elaborates on this at/through toggle—a “rhythm of attention” he says has been overlooked as a figure of speech; he names it oscillatio (p. xii). He suggests a new theory of digital expression and notation, discusses changes in the educational system needed to incorporate such new thinking, and shows how digital technology fosters new concepts of property. Three of the chapters are reprints (or versions of earlier work). One, on copyright, is a stretch in this context, although Lanham ties it in with a headnote. Another, “The Audit of Virtuality,” on how virtual universities provide a critique of 4-year, campus-based ones, seems dated (it’s from 2002) and a bit off track. The other, “What’s Next for Text” (Chapter 3), is more appropriate. These chapters, along with new ones, do, however, contribute to the

Book Review: Critical Power Tools: Technical Communication and Cultural Studies, by J. Blake Scott, Bernadette Longo, and Katherine V. Wills (Eds.)

As the subtitle implies, Critical Power Tools applies a cultural studies approach to the field of technical communication, and an approach that should prove useful to business communication as well. The purpose of this collection of essays is to “historicize technical communication’s roles in hegemonic power relations—approaches that are openly critical of nonegalitarian, unethical practices and subject positions, that promote values other than conformity, efficiency, and effectiveness, and that account for technical communication’s broader cultural conditions, circulation, and effects” (p. 1). Critical Power Tools includes a foreword, introduction, and afterword as well as 11 essays divided into three segments: theory, research, and pedagogy. Three essays (the first in each segment) are reprinted and the others are original contributions to this volume. Each essay aims to broaden the scope of technical and professional communication beyond the merely pragmatic and formulaic. In their introductory chapter, the editors define cultural studies as “critiquing and intervening in the conditions, circulation, and effects of discursive-material practices that are situated in concrete but dynamic sociohistorical formations, that participate in ideological struggles over knowledge legitimation, and that help shape identities” (p. 5). This new look at technical communication is a welcome one. It enriches our understanding of the various roles technical communicators play in organizations and appropriately questions long-standing views about the simplicity of those roles and their kind of hand-maiden status in corporate structures. Some essays dip into unnecessarily obtuse language; accumulate statements that repeat rather than develop a point; call on odd uses of personification (“Cultural studies has certainly expressed desire to participate in the production . . . ” [p. 222]); and spin theory in a vain search for substance. But for the most part, this is a collection that should have a real impact on research and teaching in the field.

Book Review : Writing Workplace Cultures: An Archaeology of Professional Writing By Jim Henry. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. 260 pp. Index

locations. More recently, however, such qualitative research (called ethnography) has been conducted closer to home, especially (with the Chicago School of Sociology in the 1920s) in educational institutions, where researchers look at variations within ethnic and racial groups (for more information on ethnography as a research method, see http ://labweb.education.wisc.edu/cni916/def_eth.htm). Currently, ethnographers are examining an even wider range of cultural settings, including urban street gangs, suburban communities (gated and ungated), Internet discussion groups, and members of a profession. Writing Workplace Cultures can be seen as one such examination.