Stephanie Vie

Understanding digital badges through feedback, reward, and narrative: a multidisciplinary approach to building better badges in social environments

Digital badges are studied and implemented for a variety of purposes. Regardless of the specific application, all badges have one thing in common: they contain explicitly designed information meant to motivate users. This information is created by the badges developer, transferred using the badge as a vessel, and assimilated by the user. In other words, badges are devices for communication. This article examines this communication process within social environments from three different perspectives---badges as rewards, feedback mechanisms, and narrative. For each of these perspectives, this article provides examples and discusses the type of information that can be communicated as well as the design considerations required for successful communication.

Games in Technical Communication

Recently, research into the intersection of computer games and technical writing has been increasing, with more conference presentations and publications interrogating communication within the comp...

Training Online Technical Communication Educators to Teach with Social Media: Best Practices and Professional Recommendations

ABSTRACT The author reports on social media research in technical and professional communication (TPC) training through a national survey of 30 professional and technical communication programs asking about their use of social media in technical communication. This research forms the basis of recommendations for training online TPC faculty to teach with social media. The author offer recommendations throughout for those who train online TPC faculty as well as for the teachers themselves.

Tech Writing, Meet "Tomb Raider": Video and Computer Games in the Technical Communication Classroom

This article examines the common genre of the usability study in technical communication courses and proposes the incorporation of computer and video games to ensure a rhetorical focus to this genre. As games are both entertaining and educational, their use in the technical communication classroom provides a new perspective on multimodal literacies that is appropriate to meet the needs of twenty-first-century learners. This article both describes a theoretical rationale for the inclusion of video and computer games in the classroom and also offers suggestions for their practical pedagogical incorporation.

Technology as a Site of Struggle: The Interplay of Identity, Morality, and Power in Four Popular Technologies

In this review essay I examine four technologies which, as a result of their integration into American society, have changed scholars’ views of the nature of writing, the nature of authorship, and the nature of writing instruction. Throughout, I call upon the three texts under review to show how they join in the conversation regarding the ethical, moral, and economic impact of these four technologies—the World Wide Web, peer-to-peer networks, plagiarism detection services, and video games—upon our society. The authors showcased here shed new light on technologies many of us take for granted; the questions they raise are ones academics should continue to consider as we grapple with the impact of computerized technologies on our moral lives.