Jim Dubinsky

The Role of Reflection in Service Learning

Like Dubinsky, he emphasizes the importance of instructor response in helping students sharpen their reflection. Next, Ava Cross describes a service learning project that encourages students to apply the concepts that define effective corporate communication to documents in the nonprofit sector. Although the goals of the two organizations may differ, the need for effective communication does not. Many of the articles in this column and the previous one describe service learning projects that span the entire term. In her article, Holly Littlefield describes a slightly different approach that focuses on business communication concepts in the first half of the term and their application to service learning projects in the second half. In the final article, authors Linda Mahin and Thomas Kruggel round out this discussion with a return to reflection. Specifically, they describe service learning projects that follow the Stanford model (Bowdon & Scott, 2003) for both graduate and undergraduate courses. But more specifically, they include an excerpt from a student’s final reflection assignment that illustrates not only the student’s positive response to his project but also the learning that occurred in the process.

Creating new views on learning: ePortfolios

approach to such a task. She brought along her DARS (Degree Audit Reporting System) report. As I listened to her situation and read her DARS, I noticed that she had taken a variety of interesting courses to fulfill her core curriculum requirements. When I asked her why she had taken these courses and how she saw them fitting together, she looked puzzled. Then she said, &dquo;They don’t fit together exactly; I just took them to meet the requirements.&dquo; I nodded, but continued with my line of questioning, asking her specifically about courses in Introduction to Women’s Studies, Minority Group Relations, and Business Writing. She paused for about 30 seconds; then she said that perhaps there were connections. After another pause, she started talking about problems women faced in the workplace, differences in cultural perceptions, and strategies for getting people from a variety of backgrounds to work together. I wouldn’t say that she had an epiphany exactly, but she did walk away with a richer picture of her education, and the draft of her statement for graduate school was, I hope, better as a result. One of the most difficult tasks those of us in higher education face is helping students to become architects of their own learning process. Many of our students see the four or five years of undergraduate education as a series of discrete moments, as a list of requirements they need to take in order to graduate. Even within

Book Review: Technical Marketing Communication

viding examples from their consulting experience. As a result, the text would be ideal as a core reading for graduate classes in organizational communication or as a supplemental reading for communication research methods courses. Graduate students would find this book an excellent resource for research because it provides guidelines for communication auditing processes, an overview of relevant literature, and a series of intriguing research questions. On the practical side, the book contains numerous templates for questionnaires and suggestions for conducting focus groups that can be relatively easily adapted both for classroom use and consulting activities. In addition, the comprehensive coverage of auditing techniques makes it a useful guide to assist communication experts with extensive experience to revise various auditing methods. As such, this work is an invaluable resource for communication and business students, both in terms of learning how to conduct the audit and using it as a starting point for further research.

Book Review: Assessing Organizational Communication: Strategic Communication Audits

THE COMMUNICATION AUDITING PROCESS, from rationale to guidance for preparing final reports, is covered in a clear and concise way in Assessing Organizational Communication. Grounded in several theoretical frameworks and supported by examples from the authors’ consulting experience, this book is an excellent read for graduate students and business communication specialists alike. The content of the book focuses on planning a communication audit, choosing areas to assess, teamwork, and auditing tools and techniques. Downs and Adrian lay out the auditing steps from initiating assessment to drafting the final report in a particularly detailed and meticulous manner. Specifically, this work covers auditing techniques and provides instructions for designing questionnaires and surveys, conducting focus groups, and analyzing the data. One of the book’s principal strengths is the authors’ flexible approach to the auditing process. Whereas many organizational communication texts abound in prescriptions and generalizations, Assessing Organizational Communication provides sufficient structure for the auditing process yet leaves enough flexibility for adaptation to circumstances specific to an organization. In most cases, Downs and Adrian provide advice while also highlighting the limitations of their recommendations. Furthermore, they frequently present both sides of an issue in a client-auditor relationship. This approach provides a valuable reminder to communication experts: Clients’ needs must be taken into account even when the auditors do not agree with them. The main lesson is that communication auditors should not approach their work with predetermined ideas about either the client’s problems or potential remedies for them. To audit effectively, an auditor needs to

Book Review: Creating a Web Page With HTML: Visual Quick Project Guide:

HYPERTEXT MARKUP LANGUAGE (HTML), one of the programming languages used to create documents for the World Wide Web, has become so ubiquitous that its acronym has become the default label for almost anything found online. But the ever-evolving world of Web design is not that simple. In reality, HTML is governed by a strict set of guidelines released by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a working group of programmers who strive to standardize the way Web designers create documents and the way that browsers display them. The W3C’s “recommendations,” although not binding on designers or software developers, are generally accepted as the foundation of best practices for the Web. To make matters even more complicated, the W3C has thrown HTML (last updated to HTML 4.01) by the wayside and turned its attention to eXtensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML), a hybrid language that is designed to help programmers write well formed documents now, before forthcoming browser upgrades make some Web documents obsolete. Trying to keep track of the endless progression of programming languages is enough to make most novice learners—students and teachers alike—break out in a cold sweat. The number of how-to books on the subject is overwhelming, and each book itself may be too much to handle, especially in a business communication classroom where Web design is only one of many topics in the curriculum. A brief sampling of the recent crop of HTML books illustrates the problem. The fifth edition of HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, by Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy (2002), checks in at 670 pages; and despite its title, Web Design in a Nutshell (Niederst, 2001) is a hefty 640 pages. Even a book aimed at nontechnical learners, The Non-Designer’s Web Book (Williams & Tollett, 2000), is 304 pages—much too long to be used as a

Book Reviews : Communicating: A Social and Career Focus. 8th edition Roy M. Berko, Andrew D. Wolvin, and Darlyn R. Wolvin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001. 377 pages:

SPEECH COMMUNICATION may not be one of the courses you teach. But even so, you must read Communicating: A Social and Career Foci~s for your own enrichment and for application to the areas in which you teach or consult. Communicating is designed for college speech communication classes made up of traditional and nontraditional students and instructors from every socioeconomic and cultural background imaginable in the US today. Even though the authors address their book to students, they could be talking to anyone who wants a comprehensive, compact review of the theory and application of intrapersonal, interpersonal, and public communicating. As a result, their book

Book Reviews : Language and the Internet: David Crystal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 272 pages

E-MAIL USE has been increasing steadily, but recently a variety of events such as digital signature legislation, anthrax scares, and even increases in first class postage rates seem to have accelerated its growth. This use may cause some to worry that the demise of literacy and spelling may arrive sooner than they anticipated. David Crystal, a linguist and leading authority on language, however, argues the reverse in Language and the Internet. Among Crystal’s many publications are The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, The Cambridge Encyclopedia o f the English Language , English as a Global Language, and Language Death. In this book describing various Internet domains, he concludes that the Internet is an enabling tool. In fact, he concludes that it is a new medium-one that leads to the expansion and variety of language as well as enhanced opportunities for personal creativity. ,

Book Reviews : The Social Life of Information: John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2000. 320 pages

to educational technologies in this chapter helps foreground the book’s main theme-successful students and workers are social creatures, and individuals operating in either (or both) of these capacities benefit greatly from significant contact with other people. Although this theme is reiterated continually in various incarnations throughout Social Life, &dquo;Re-education&dquo; provides an academic context that might be a more accessible point of entry for teachers than previous chapters that, though interesting and useful, cover less familiar, more business-oriented terrain. In &dquo;Re-education,&dquo; Brown, Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and Duguid, a social theorist who is also associated with PARC, argue that access to technology in itself cannot overcome the social distance between traditionally disadvantaged students and those students with ready access to both cultural and economic capital. Unlike many proponents of learning in cyberspace who insist that

Book Reviews : The inmates are Running the Asylum Alan Cooper. Indianapolis: SAMS, 1999. 261 pages

As he notes in the passage quoted above, the population of technology users has rapidly been expanding and changing, as have the contexts for technology use, especially since the commercialization of the Internet in the early 1990s. But software development processes have not changed appreciably to accommodate the needs of these new users. Nor have teachers of technical, professional, or business communication altered how we address audi-

Book Reviews : The Portable Business writer William Murdick. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. 218 pp

more commonplace in a typical business environment, instructors must construct a multifaceted course that exposes students to the wide range of conimunication skills now required for work. One approach is to rely less on a required textbook so that students spend less time reading and more time applying concepts and guidelines to realistic writing projects. For this reason, I find Nl11r~ dick’s The Portable Business Writer very useful. For such a compact text, The Potable Business Writer provides a comprehensive view of the oral, written, and graphic dimensions of business communication for beginning and advanced students as well as full-time professionals.The author’s style reflects a necessary trend in business communication: brevity, clarity, accessibility, and a focus on plain language.