ABET Countdown  

How could four letters strike such fear in the hearts of normally stalwart faculty? Why would administrators loathe the mere mention of the word 'accreditation'? The source of their fear and frustration is a cycle of evaluation, assessment, and reporting that constitutes a six-year accreditation period.

Williams, Julia M. IEEE PCS (2006). Articles>Education>Academic>Engineering

Redefining Curriculum and Research Initiatives: A New Model of University Industry Partnership  

Our profession is changing daily, and this growth has an impact on industry, and our universities, who must address the academic requirements this change brings with it. We must work as a team 10 share plans, develop cooperative solutions, and direct our energy and resources to a common goal: developing quality programs that will bring us beyond the leading edge of our technical profession.

Hans, David F., Roger A. Grice, Edward J. See and Robert Krull. STC Proceedings (1996). Articles>Collaboration>Academic

Results of a Survey of ATTW Members, 2003    

This article presents the results of an April 2003 electronic survey of ATTW members. Results and interpretations are categorized as follows: a professional profile of respondents; member observations about ATTW and its activities (member participation, appraisal of benefits, and preferred topics for TCQ); and current issues and views of the field's future.

Dayton, David and Stephen A. Bernhardt. Technical Communication Quarterly (2004). Articles>TC>Academic>Surveys

STC and Academe: Pooling Our Expertise, Enhancing Our Profession  

Academe and business can learn much from each other about technical communication. The Chicago Chapter STC Institute for Professional Development, now in its fourth year, fosters the integration of knowledge and experience by bringing together teachers, researchers, and practitioners to plan and team teach courses that link theory and practice. All parties have realized extensive benefits. Academics confer with practitioners on research opportunities. Course participants interact with practitioners, who provide real-world examples and employment opportunities. Corporations offer a novel self-development opportunity to employees who became technical communicators through expediency, not necessarily training, and who lack a theoretical basis for practice. STC gains prestige as a professional organization with vision and capability.

Abbott, Christine, Mary Ryba Knepper, Joy Mason and Barb Ostapina. STC Proceedings (2001). Articles>Collaboration>Academic

Theorizing the Borders of Academic Technical Communication  

As technical communication programs come to accept our field's (emergent) status as a profession, we need to discuss more carefully how to judge the boundaries of technical communication as an academic field. Although many writers have recently called for efforts to span traditional borders between workplace practice and academic study of the field (Carver 1998, Sutcliff 2000, Eaton 2001 and Smith 2002 among others), doing so in practice can be quite difficult. From my experience as a member of the editorial board of the EServer Technical Communication Library (http://tc.eserver.org/), a website of resources in the field (originally founded explicitly to support such interdisciplinarity), I would today suggest that there are numerous practical and theoretical issues still remaining to resolve in how the field delimits and judges the diverse forms of work we perform.

Sauer, Geoffrey. CPTSC Proceedings (2003). Articles>TC>Academic

Longitudinal Trends in Academic Web Links    

Longitudinal studies of web change are needed to assess the stability of webometric statistics and this paper forms part of an on-going longitudinal study of three national academic web spaces. It examines the relationship between university inlinks and research productivity over time and identifies reasons for individual universities experiencing significant increases and decreases in inlinks over the last six years. The findings also indicate that between 66 and 70% of outlinks remain the same year on year for all three academic web spaces, although this stability conceals large individual differences. Moreover, there is evidence of a level of stability over time for university site inlinks when measured against research productivity. Surprisingly, however, inlink counts can vary significantly from year to year for individual universities, for reasons unrelated to research which undermines their use in webometrics studies.

Payne, Nigel and Mike Thelwall. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Web Design>Academic>Hypertext

A Comparison of Academics' Attitudes Towards the Rights Protection of Their Research and Teaching Materials    

This paper compares two JISC-funded surveys. The first was undertaken by the Rights MEtadata for Open Archiving (RoMEO) project and focused on the rights protection required by academic authors sharing their research outputs in an open-access environment. The second was carried out by the Rights and Rewards project and focused on the rights protection required by authors sharing their teaching materials in the same way. The data are compared. The study reports confusion amongst both researchers and teachers as to copyright ownership in the materials they produced. Researchers were more restrictive about the permissions they would allow, but were liberal about terms and conditions. Teachers would allow many permissions, but under stricter terms and conditions. The study concludes that a single rights solution could not be used for both research and teaching materials.

Gadd, Elizabeth, Steve Loddington and Charles Oppenheim. Journal of Information Science (2007). Articles>Intellectual Property>Copyright>Academic

An Exploration of Concepts of Community Through a Case Study of UK University Web Production    

The paper explores the interrelation and differences between the concepts of occupational community, community of practice, online community and social network. It uses as a case study illustration the domain of UK university web site production and specifically a listserv for those involved in it. Different latent occupational communities are explored, and the potential for the listserv to help realize these as an active sense of community is considered. The listserv is not (for most participants) a tight knit community of practice, indeed it fails many criteria for an online community. It is perhaps best conceived as a loose knit network of practice, valued for information, implicit support and for the maintenance of weak ties. Through the analysis the case for using strict definitions of the theoretical concepts is made.

Cox, Andrew M. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Web Design>Community Building>Academic

Getting The Most Out Of Your Library

Think of the library system as something akin to the open-source movement before software. Subsidized institutions buy books, subscribe to journals and proprietary databases, and pay people to help you find “stuff”, all essentially at no cost to you.

Hicks, William. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Academic>Information Design

The Effect of Input Device on Video Game Performance

First-person shooter (FPS) games have become increasingly popular, and the player’s ability to accurately control their weapon is very important in these games. This study assesses players’ accuracy on eliminating targets in the FPS game Star Wars Battlefront II using three different input devices (mouse, Playstation 2 controller, and joystick) with two different rifle types (sniper and blaster rifle). No significant performance differences were found between input devices although subjectively participants believed they peformed the worst with the joystick.

Lenz, Kelsi. Usability News (2008). Articles>User Interface>Human Computer Interaction>Academic

Less is More for University Websites

Many university websites are poorly organized, and filled with out-of-date content that has been directly published from print. Delivering a better service to students and staff faces challenges because of decentralized management structures and concepts such as academic freedom.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2004). Articles>Web Design>Academic

Interpretative Management in Business Meetings    

Middle managers interpret experiences and observations of employees and relate them to organizational contexts, practices, and strategies. By analyzing authentic verbal communication between middle managers and employees, this article will draw five conclusions about how interpretational work support organizational goals and values: 1. Middle managers and employees collaborate in interpreting tasks in relation to organizational context; 2. This interpretative work is based on language acquisition: learning the vocabulary of the organization; 3. The managers articulate the process, explicitly defining reality and influencing language use; 4. Employees show expectation of having their experiences interpreted by managers; 5. Employees may challenge managers with competing interpretations. This article will contribute to the study of leadership communication by combining organization communication theory and conversation analytic methodology. The article shows important ways in which middle managers "do leadership": by contextualizing employee actions and bringing employee perceptions in accordance with executive-level perceptions of organizational practices.

Nielsen, Mie Femø. JBC (2009). Articles>Academic>Business Communication>Organizational Communication

"Just the Boys Playing on Computers": An Activity Theory Analysis of Differences in the Cultures of Two Engineering Firms    

Using activity theory as a supplement to genre studies, this article explores a case of the disintegration of a traditional engineering firm. It focuses on the causes of such disintegration and the role of different types of communication in serving as sites where contradictions can be brought to visibility and resolution. The authors’ goal is both to show the power of activity theory in illuminating issues of tension, contradiction, and dissonance that lead to the breakup of the original organization into two separate firms and point to fundamental differences in the cultures of traditional engineering firms and software design enterprises.

Artemeva, Natasha and Aviva Freedman. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (2001). Articles>Academic>Genre>Engineering

The Pedagogical Missions of Professional and Technical Communication Programs: What We Say in the Journals and What We Say on the Web  

This article examines the construction of the pedagogical missions of professional and technical communication (PTC) programs, focusing on two forms of professional discourse. Specifi- cally, I look first at discussions and debates about our pedagogical missions in the internally directed or private conversations of scholarly journals. Then, I examine the externally directed or public discourse of 123 PTC program websites. To compare these two discourses, I frame their differences in terms of the doxa, or unspoken beliefs, upon which they ground their approaches to teaching students the techne, or principled practice, of PTC. The main conclusion of my study is that these differences reflect more than mere genre variations; they reflect important internal conflicts within the attitudes and perspectives on the role of PTC programs as sites of pedagogy. I conclude with the recommendation that we consciously resist the doxa that values pre-professionalism for its own sake by designing websites that refer directly to the topics and themes that arise in professional journals.

Gordon, Jay L. Programmatic Perspectives (2009). Articles>Academic>Education

A Call for Copyright Rebellion

Copyright law was originally intended to protect those who create for profit (Lessig used the example of recording artist Britney Spears). But academics also create original works, he said, and they are — or should be — motivated by a desire to advance human knowledge, not line their pockets. Therefore, sealing their work behind copyright barriers does no social good.

Kolowich, Steve. Inside Higher Education (2009). Articles>Intellectual Property>Copyright>Academic