Laura Gonzales

Revising a Content-Management Course for a Content Strategy World

Background: This teaching case describes the evolution of a course on content strategy aimed at advanced undergraduates and graduate students in the digital and professional writing programs at Michigan State University. The course has gone through three major shifts to reflect corresponding shifts in focus among professional and technical communicators: from developing content for the World Wide Web (original focus) to single sourcing; from single-sourcing to Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECMS), and from ECMS to content strategy. The case primarily focuses on the most recent shift. Research questions: How can a course on content strategy be useful to both advanced undergraduates preparing to enter the job market in industry and graduate students interested in learning theories in technical communication? In turn, how can a course on content strategy reflect current practices in industry while maintaining grounding for the course in academic research? Situating the case: Three emerging themes relevant to teaching content strategy emerge in the literature. The first is the role of the content strategist as an Editor-in-Chief, who creates a repeatable system for designing and managing all aspects of a website [1, 2, 3]. The second is the need to develop strategies for addressing stakeholders, especially clients and users, whose goals are to learn more about why they should invest in an organization and its broader vision. The third is adapting content for reuse, which involves designing content that can be easily accessed through various platforms and formats. How the case was studied: This is an experience report by the four faculty members who, together, have taught every section of the course in the last 15 years. Two of the instructors also participated in the course as students. About the case: The most recent version of the course is a one-term course that teaches theory and best practices for managing dynamic and distributed web content, while also incorporating assignments that help students practice content strategies with real clients. It addressed these issues with the previous version that focused on content management by collaborating with industry practitioners to help students understand the real-world implications of developing strategies for and creating web content with clients and organizations. It specifically addresses three themes identified from the literature-emphasizing the role of the content strategist as an Editor-in-Chief, differentiating the needs of clients and users, and designing for reuse. Course assignments include a landscape analysis of content-management systems and strategies used by various companies, designing content templates for specific clients, and developing a content strategy for a client selected by student groups. Key issues to address when developing the most recent version of the course included creating a course that was useful to graduate and undergraduate students aiming to enter content strategy professions, developing a balance between theory and practice in course readings and assignments, and revising a course to reflect current industry demands for skills in content strategy. Results: Anecdotal evidence from students is that the course was successful and acts as a defacto capstone for the program. Through their course evaluations and unsolicited follow-up emails, students exiting the most recent version of this course became valuable assets who help organizations develop big-picture strategies for adaptable content to be shared through various platforms. Conclusion: A course on content strategy that incorporates current industry perspectives helps graduate and undergraduate professional writing students become more adequately prepared for their future professions working with organizations.

An Analysis of Twitter Conversations at Academic Conferences

Academic conference organizers encourage tweeting during presentations to promote access and engagement. In this paper, I provide a methodological framework for analyzing Twitter conversations during academic conferences. An analysis of tweets archived during the 2014 Conference on College Composition and Communication is included as an example. Tweets using the #4C14 hashtag (N=12,522) were analyzed to determine 1) when people tweet during conferences, 2) what sessions they tweet about most, 3) how often participants tweet during sessions, and 4) what people tweet about at conferences during times of high Twitter activity. Results suggest conference attendees tweet most frequently during the middle of each day during the conference, presentations related to technology yield high Twitter activity, and retweeting particular sessions extended presentations far beyond the designated time blocks of each conference panel. These results provide valuable information for conference organizers and experience architects interested in promoting participatory digital spaces during academic conferences.

Social Justice in UX: Centering Marginalized Users

The primary assumption of human-centered design is that humans should be the focus of design and decision making when creating technology and information products. However, when certain types of people are consistently centered, others are intentionally or unintentionally pushed to the margins or left out altogether. In this panel, the speakers discuss how centering overlooked, vulnerable, or marginalized audiences leads to different design considerations, methods, practices and resulting designs. Topics include issues of queering consent, humanitarian organizations and interventions, multilingual user experience, and women of color in design. The panel concludes with a discussion of the implications of centering marginalized audiences and a call for a reinvigorated conceptualization of ethics in UX.

Developing Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Online Technical Communication Programs: Emerging Frameworks at University of Texas at El Paso

ABSTRACT This article addresses emerging calls for online education and cross-cultural technical communication training, specifically by outlining and reporting on the development and sustainability of two online programs: the graduate online technical and professional writing certificate and the emerging undergraduate bilingual professional writing certificate at the University of Texas at El Paso. Data presented suggest cultural and linguistic diversity should be embedded and streamlined across all aspects of online technical communication programs.

Portable pedagogy: how interaction design made us better teachers

This presentation discusses findings from research conducted with students, faculty, and other university stakeholders around the user experience of assignment writing sheets. We demonstrate how the pedagogical and theoretical takeaways from this research have been translated into personas, conceptual models, and interactive mockups for PromptMe--- a web application that prompts data-driven conversations between instructors and students regarding expectations in assignment sheets. At SIGDOC, we will share our designs, discuss how we see pedagogy reflected in Prompt Me, and highlight the value of designing technologies as a learning strategy. This conversation will spark ideas for enacting democratic teaching through interaction design.