Salvo, Michael J

Critical Engagement with Technology in the Computer Classroom

This article proposes a model for critically engaging technology in technical communication graduate curricula. While computers and writing studies concentrates on academic writing, the development of the field provides a model for engaging technological issues in professional and classroom contexts. Technical communicators have an ethical as well as intellectual responsibility to engage the interface between technology and culture. This article describes one example, a graduate class in information architecture, as a model for engaging the nexus of literacy, technology, and culture.

A Case of Exhaustive Documentation: Re-centering System-oriented Organizations Around User Need

Braun Corporation's home-grown documentation processes served the organization well for its first 50 years as it grew from a local to a nationally-competitive producer of mobility and accessibility products. Now poised to become a global leader in its field, this corporation found its efforts hampered by ineffective and outdated documentation practices, which were hurting the company's competitive advantage. This article describes Braun Corporation's curious mixture of global reach and local isolation. By bringing in a technical communicator with expertise in user-centered design, Braun has begun reforming its formerly exhaustive documentation and communication practices. While technical communicators have incorporated a variety of strategies to develop user-centered and task-based documentation, less attention has been placed on changing the cultures of these organizations. The case presented here represents a shift from establishing documentation procedures to critically assessing and reforming existing procedures for the global workplace, describing the shift from ineffective and exhaustive processes to effective processes with defined goals and measurable outcomes. The article concludes with an inventory for determining whether other organizations are over-documenting processes and products, and offers suggestions for creating better documentation procedures.

Advanced Professional Writing

English 515 is designed for undergraduates and graduates interested in professional writing for both print and electronic publication. Students learn to produce documents and coordinate writing projects, study and apply principles of document design and electronic publication using appropriate application software, and work in teams in computer-networked environments. Students will work both individually and collaboratively as they document, utilize and analyze writing practices, literacy tools, and research methodologies.

Visual Rhetoric

This course focuses on articulating rhetorical opportunities present in the visual turn; the role of perceptual processes, time, movement, and memory in the act of seeing; the interanimation of the verbal and the visual in representation; the circumstances of visual culture and art; visual communication in print and on the Web; and identification as a visual/rhetorical process. Is there potential to create critical verbo-visual literacy? The course explores what such definitions of literacy mean for communication, argumentation, persuasion and narration.

Accessible Information Architecture: Participatory Curricular Design

This presentation describes the process of engaged negotiation that re-engineered an inappropriate course design to one that met student needs.

CoverWeb? Adding Multiple Authorship to Multi-Linearity

This multi-vocality and multiple authorship allows an enactment of some of the collaboratory promise of hypertext while web publishing allows decentralized publication. Finally, the CoverWeb allows Kairos to deliver texts appropriate to many tiers of readers. This issue's CoverWeb on educational MOOs includes basic introductions to MOOing linked to discussions of the pedagogical possibilities of virtual spaces linked to problems of administering MOOspaces. We have tried to cover a spectrum of possible interests as well as familiarity to MOOs in education and this layering simply wouldn't be possible in print.

A Response to the Special Issue on Ethics

Whatever one claims to have said in oneï¿s narrative, whether ethical explication or narrative self-building, is not always under the selfï¿s control. The practice of self-knowledge argued for here is more accurately self-formation, a will to power over the self. What these authors propose is a valuable and powerful act of self-making through representation. This formation of narrative self-representation connects actions with identity, forging identity from fragmented memory. It requires an attempt to tell oneï¿s story as honestly as possible, and to resist narrating oneï¿s self as one desires to be seen. In the process, these authors assert, our self learns how to see itself through the lens of retrospection.

Building a Print/Digit Interface

The new Computers and Composition segment, 'Print/Digital Dialogue,' is designed to enable communication between print and digital forms of professional conversation. For some time, email discussions have been peppered with references to other digital resources as well as print resources. Rarely do professional print journals refer readers to digital resources, even with scholars such as Janice Walker creating citation guides for references to digital scholarship in print. Print is important -- this effort to put digital and print resources into conversation should not be seen as a threat to on-line discussion but as an opportunity to expand the professional community of Techno-rhetoricians. We are members of a hybrid community, existing both on-line and off, and need bridges between on- and off- line scholarship. It is a translation from one established realm into another, perhaps less developed one.

Deafened to Their Demands: An Ethnographic Study of Accommodation

After a semester of working with the population of Deaf students on a larger southwestern, suburban University campus, it became clear that the institution would not be able to provide reasonable accommodations requested by deaf students. As I witnessed students, rightfully fighting for reasonable accommodations (as outlined in the Americans with Disabilities Act), I saw individuals both inside and outside the institutional structures attempt change only to find themselves rebuffed. The institution itself was not able to accommodate the reasonable and lawful demands of the deaf population of students at the university, but interestingly the efforts of reformers inside the institution were similarly unable to enact significant change. The institution was unable to hear the pleas of its students but was equally unable to accommodate the demands of members of the administration seeking to provide services to these students.