Stuart A. Selber

Beyond Skill Building: Challenges Facing Technical Communication Teachers in the Computer Age.

By examining computer‐related courses and faculty rationales for offering such courses, this article broadly examines how and why we commonly use computers in technical communication classrooms, and in what ways our current instruction may or may not move beyond skill building to include literacy and humanistic issues. It then broadly outlines three pedagogical challenges that lie ahead as we use computer technologies to support our teaching efforts over this decade and during the next century.

Reimagining the Functional Side of Computer Literacy.

I t is certainly no news to report that a great many colleges and universities are beginning to embrace requirements for computer literacy. The University of Texas at Arlington, Old Dominion University, the University of the Virgin Islands, Marshall University, Utah State University, the University of Louisville, Houston Baptist University, Georgetown College (in Kentucky), and Westminster College-these are just some of the schools that are now requiring students to become computer literate, in response to the urgings of corporate employers and academic accrediting agencies. Florida State University is typical in the way it defines computer literacy: Since 1998, Florida State has had a clearly articulated policy requiring all undergraduate students to demonstrate basic familiarity with computer hardware, operating systems, and file

Sketching a Framework for Graduate Education in Technical Communication.

Graduate education in technical communication should provide students with an expansive view of the field. Toward that end, we offer a three-dimensional framework that represents technical communication as a robust, diverse, complex whole. Although the framework aims towards coherence, it embraces contradiction. That is, the framework represents a totality but does not purport to be the only possible representation. Key to the framework is our belief that the gap between theory and practice can actually be productive. Almost all binaries encourage overly simplistic understandings. But we should not allow the goal of remediating the binary to close off the important tensions that can allow the field to advance. This very gap is actually one of the few sites in which new ideas and approaches can be forged.

A Rhetoric of Electronic Instruction Sets

This article offers a heuristic for conceptualizing the broad contours of electronic instruction sets as they have developed for and in online environments. The heuristic includes three interconnected models: self-contained, which leverages the features of fixed instructional content; embedded, which leverages the features of user-generated metadata; and open, which leverages the features of mutable instructional content. Although the models overlap to some extent, their distinctions help to illustrate the changing nature of online how-to discourse.

Computers and technical communication: pedagogical and programmatic perspectives

From the Publisher: The essays collected in this volume address the full range of pedagogical and programmatic issues specifically facing technical communication teachers and program directors in the computer age. The authors locate computers and computing activities within the richly textured cultural contexts of a technological society, focusing on the technical communication instructional issues that remain most important as old versions of hardware and software are endlessly replaced by new ones.

Metaphorical perspectives on hypertext

This paper examines the dominant metaphors that define and describe three basic components of hypertext (texts, nodes, and links), arguing that they contribute in central ways to the current treatment of this technology in technical communication. It includes a brief overview of the way metaphors filter computer-based tasks and functions, a discussion of hypertext metaphors of identity and the realms from which they are commonly appropriated, and some corollary implications for students and teachers of technical communication. In general, this paper contends that hypertext design choices are both productively and unproductively shaped by social as well as technological forces. >

Solving Problems in Technical Communication

The editors of Solving Problems in Technical Communication state that the book is intended for “students who are learning about the field of technical communication” [p. 1] or professionals “interested in keeping up with new developments in the field” [p. 9]. As members of the second cohort, we agree with that choice of audience wholeheartedly. As teachers of technical communication in an engineering college, we agree that the text is appropriate for students, but we would restrict the audience further, to students who plan to become technical communicators. We believe that this book would be an appropriate textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses for technical communication majors. We do not believe this textbook is appropriate for nonmajors in technical communication courses, such as in our context, where engineering majors have required technical communication coursework. However, as instructors in that context, we may draw from chapters to inform our teaching practices.

Online support systems

Online support systems can be divided into three classes, online tutorials, online help, and online documentation. Online tutorials have the broadest focus, helping users learn about features and tasks through explanation, example, and hands-on experimentation. Online documentation typically has a narrower focus, providing users with overviews or assistance on specific taskoriented procedures [Horton 1990]. Online help has the narrowest focus, supporting users who must solve particularly pressing problems as quickly as possible and with a minimum of interruption.

iPads in the Technical Communication Classroom An Empirical Study of Technology Integration and Use

Integrating and using technology in the technical communication classroom is an ongoing interest and challenge for the field. Previous work tends to focus on best practices and other types of generalized advice, all of which are invaluable to teachers. But this article encourages teachers to also pay attention to sociotechnical forces and dynamics in local settings. It explains how a cartography of affect can be useful in demonstrating how technologies become imbued with meaning and significance in particular pedagog-ical contexts. The authors illustrate the value of this mapping practice through a case study of iPad integration and use in a technical communication service course and its teacher-training course. They also provide examples of heuristic questions that can guide critical cartography projects in local settings.

Online help: exploring static information or constructing personal and collaborative solutions using hypertext

We discuss the evolution of online help book-oriented, exploratory, and constructive. Book-oriented online help mkmrs paper-based documentation it is relatively static, linear, and is structured in a manner familar to most users; but this type of online help is often not efficient at responding to the complex demands of specitlc users and tasks. Hypertext-based online help-either exploratory or constrnctivcoffers an alternative model addressing some of the limitations of book-oriented online help. Exploratory online help takes advantage of a higher level of interactivi~. It is possible to createmultiple paths in a dccument, but it is more complex to navigate (because less familiar to users) than books. Constructive online help representsa higher level of complexity, customization, and interactivity. It can provide a a higher level of feedback between users, managers, and developers. It can encourage users to rcconceptualim projects and work habits but may require time to cons&uct and gatckeep to avoid cognitive overload.