Build It Right And They Will Come  

Teaching through the Web requires instructors to reconsider their previous assumptions about the nature of teaching, lecture, testing, and student/teacher interaction. In online classrooms, instructors often serve many design and maintenance roles. Managing the time required for these roles is an inescapable part of online instruction. The simpler the overall course design, the less often the instructor has to shift from role to role. Online instructors must use textual, visual and interactive metaphors consistently to help guide students toward productive forms of interaction. Finally an equal mix of textual, visual and interactive rhetorics is vital for effective online course design.

Gillette, David. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Education>Instructional Design>Online

Looking to Cinema for Direction: Incorporating Motion into On-screen Presentations of Technical Information    

To help technical communicators become better informed producers of interactive new media productions, this article examines how motion can be used properly to create effective interactive information systems for the computer screen. This article provides a brief analysis of how cinema works and then demonstrates how a number of cinema techniques influence new media production. The article then concludes by offering suggestions for how to effectively apply a few basic cinema techniques directly to technical communication practice.

Gillette, David. Technical Communication Online (2005). Articles>Presentations>Multimedia

Metaphorical Confusion and Spatial Mapping in an Age of Ubiquitous Computing    

When computing moves into the shifting, spatially defined information environments that surround us every day, technical communicators need to think about how users already understand and work with the world itself as a type of walk-through, live-in information device. We need to consider how embedding computers into the world will alter the information designs we have been building for two-dimensional on-screen spaces. We need to broaden online design aesthetics and construction techniques by applying not only standard design theory derived from print, film, and television, but also by incorporating theories from the domains of commercial design, cognitive psychology, and architectural and civil design. The first place we can put some of these ideas to use is in understanding how spatial mapping functions in the search for information.

Gillette, David. Technical Communication Online (2001). Design>Information Design>Embedded

Putting the Poetry of Film to Use Online  

This article helps technical communicators become better informed producers of interactive, cinema-like new media objects (help systems, public information and ordering kiosks, promotional technical presentations on the web, and so on) by providing a summary of how cinema works, and then by proposing a few ways that some basic cinema editing and display techniques can be integrated into on-screen technical communications practice. The author makes the claim that if we are to begin thinking and working like film makers, the fundamental poetics and information designs we use in our new media design and development work must also change.

Gillette, David. STC Proceedings (2005). Articles>Documentation>Multimedia>Video