The Academe-Industry Partnership: What's in It for All of Us?    

I'm always puzzled by the misunderstanding, distrust, and sometimes downright animosity between academic and practitioner members of the technical communication family. At its extremes, this attitude manifests itself in practitioners who consider research and theory to be ivory tower games with no relevance to their practice, and in professors who regard practitioners as ignorant anti-intellectuals. The vast majority of us, of course, would never admit to being either academic snobs or practitioner rednecks, but many of us evidence less extreme vestiges of these biases.

Hayhoe, George F. Technical Communication Online (1998). Articles>Collaboration>TC

Academe/Industry Relationships: Balancing Academic Principles and Marketplace Demands  

Recognizing that theory is of value only if it can be applied, academics must envision the world beyond the classroom and prepare students to compete in a market-driven world. Practicing professionals must be willing to share their expertise and their technology with academic programs and must work to strengthen connections with the academy. Advisory boards, mentoring programs, internships and fellowships for faculty and practitioners as well as for students, team teaching, guest lecturing, distance learning, and collaborative research projects– these are but a few of the ways to bridge the gap between and industry, thereby improving the education of future technical communicators and advancing the profession.

Sutliff, Kristene. STC Proceedings (2000). Articles>Collaboration>Industry and Academy

Academic/Industry Relationships: A Challenge for Both Sides    

Emerging technologies create new challenges for academicians and practitioners alike. The two groups must have mutual respect and must strive for balance between academic principles and marketplace demands. Through shadowing, mentoring, internship programs (for faculty and practitioners as well as for students), collaborative research projects, and other means we can begin to share expertise and technology that will help bridge the gap between academe and industry.

Sutliff, Kristene. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Collaboration>Industry and Academy

Accessibility of Online Chat Programs

This article will evaluate the accessibility of three types of popular synchronous communication tools: IRC, Web-based chats and instant messengers.

WebAIM (2003). Articles>Collaboration>Accessibility>Online

The Accidental Beginning of a Highly Successful Special Interest Group (SIG)  

SIGs exist to serve specialized needs within the greater organization. Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and Professional Interest Committees (PICs) are a tool by which the local chapters can serve a diverse range of special interests, boosting chapter membership. The Lone Star Chapter (Dallas/Fort Worth) began hosting SIG meetings three years ago. Currently, with four active SIGs, we are hosting an additional 100 to 200 members per month. This is how we built our SIGs to promote membership in STC. In the spring of 1990, a group of disgruntled contractors began to meet formally to discuss dissatisfaction with insurance plans for independents available through the society. We had been meeting informally for many years, to discuss the job market, rates available, and generally to gossip. We call it networking. personal contact or the sudden ice storm we had that night attendance was down significantly. From that point, we have kept a mailing list updated from our sign-in sheets, and sent postcard reminders about each meeting.

Steele, Karen A. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Collaboration>Case Studies>STC

Achieving Success Outside of the Pack

If you're among the individual contributors of the world, your temperament and aptitudes impel you to flee the flock and take your fortunes into your own hands.

Richardson, Douglas. ULiveandLearn.com (2005). Articles>Collaboration

Advance Organizers in Advisory Reports: Selective Reading, Recall, and Perception    

According to research in educational psychology, advance organizers lead to better learning and recall of information. In this research, the authors explored advance organizers from a business perspective, where larger documents are read under time pressure. Graphic and verbal advance organizers were manipulated into six versions of an advisory report, read by 159 experienced professional readers in a between-subjects design. Their reading time was limited to encourage selective reading. The results show that graphic advance organizers facilitate selective reading, but they do not enhance recall. Verbal advance organizers introducing a problem enhance recall, and graphic advance organizers moderate the effects on both selective reading and recall.

Lagerwerf, Luuk, Louise Cornelis, Johannes de Geus and Phidias Jansen. Written Communication (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Collaboration

Adventures in Collaboration: The Story of an STC Faculty Internship  

Rentz relates the lessons she learned as an academic who contributed to a writing project for a private company.

Rentz, Kathryn. Intercom (2003). Articles>Collaboration>Industry and Academy

Advice for New Managers: Part 1

The central mistake new managers make is egoism. On the surface, the change is all about you: you’ve been promoted, you have a new job title, you have a new office. Perhaps you’ve been waiting for this change for some time, while watching peers or friends get promotions, and now finally you feel you’ve received the respect you’ve earned.

Berkun, Scott. ScottBerkun.com (2006). Articles>Management>Collaboration

Agile Principles Are Changing Everything

There's an irony about agile development. There is no hard evidence that it produces better software, faster. And formal adoption rates, admittedly hard to measure, don't reach the 20 percent mark. Yet the ideas that underpin agile development--defining requirements incrementally, writing software in short stints, seeking customer feedback, testing code as it's written, frequent builds--have caught on like wildfire. They are widely accepted as sound development practices, even among teams that have not formally adopted them.

deJong, Jennifer. Software Development Times (2008). Articles>Collaboration>Agile>Methods

"And Then She Said": Office Stories and What They Tell Us about Gender in the Workplace    

This article calls for a rhetorical perspective on the relationship of gender, communication,and power in the workplace. In doing so, the author uses narrative in two ways.First, narratives gathered in an ethnographic study of an actual workplace, a plasticsmanufacturer, are used as a primary source of data, and second, the findings of this studyare presented by telling the story of two women in this workplace. Arguing that genderin the workplace, like all social identities, is locally constructed through the micro practicesof everyday life, the author questions some of the prevailing assumptions about genderat work and cautions professional communication teachers, researchers, and practitionersagainst unintentionally perpetuating global, decontextualized assumptionsabout gender and language, and their relationship to the distribution and exercise of power at work.

Weiland Herrick, Jeanne. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (1999). Articles>Collaboration>Workplace>Gender

Applying Agile Methods in Rapidly Changing Environments  

The authors (both coming from a heavyweight software development environment) describe their approach to transferring a heavyweight method into a more agile approach. One can argue whether the described result is intermediate or final, the the process described and the choices made are well worth studying.

Kutschera, Peter and Steffen Schafer . Jeckstein.com (2001). Articles>Collaboration>Agile

As We May Think

Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose.

Bush, Vannevar. Atlantic Monthly (1945). Articles>Collaboration>Research>History

Audio Recording of Workshops and Seminars

The AHDS made audio recordings of recent seminars with the aim of transcribing the recordings, and presented them to seminar chairs to facilitate their task of completing reports on each event. This case study looks at some of the issues that occurred as the AHDS recorded and transcribed the material from these seminars. While its findings are based on roundtable seminars, some of them may also be of use to those doing other types of audio recording - interviews, field notes etc.

AHDS (2006). Articles>Collaboration>Multimedia>Audio

Austin's Technical Documentation Focus Group: An Industry/Academic Partnership In Action  

Austin's Technical Documentation Focus Group represents an innovative collaboration between major area publications departments and academia. Designed to provide a networking forum on current publications, the group is managed by its one not-for-profit member, Austin Community College's Department of Technical Communication.

Dunlap, Johnny L., Deborah J. Rosenquist and Katherine E. Staples. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Collaboration>TC

Authorship for Research Groups    

Major clinical research investigations, especially large multicenter trials, require the involvement, cooperation, and dedication of many individuals. Roles and responsibilities range from conceiving the study and designing the protocol to collecting and analyzing the data, and numerous essential steps in between. Following completion of the study, the most important responsibilities are prompt preparation of a manuscript that reports the study findings, and timely submission of the paper to a journal for peer review, publication, and communication of the study findings to the scientific and clinical communities. The number of collaborative studies and multicenter clinical trials seems to be growing, with increasing numbers of published articles involving a study group. For instance, 22% of the 185 research articles published in JAMA as Original Contributions in 2001 specifically identified a study group, compared with 6% of 172 Original Contributions published 10 years earlier. Authorship of these studies increasingly involves some indication of group participation and responsibility, reflecting the cooperative nature, multidisciplinary teamwork, and complexity of such investigations.

Flanagin, Annette, Phil B. Fontanarosa and Catherine D. DeAngelis. JAMA (2001). Articles>Scientific Communication>Collaboration

Barriers and Approaches to Reviewing Documentation

This article discusses some important issues in implementing a software documentation review process. If you are part of a small development organization and have few reviewer resources available, you may have to improvise techniques for providing the services and procedures suggested here.

Boston Broadside (1997). Articles>Documentation>Editing>Collaboration

Behind the Cameras: 10 Non-Instructional Issues to Consider When Coordinating a Distance Education Program with Other Institutions

When she learned that I would be teaching a course in her department, the department secretary made a mailbox for me and made sure that I received a copy of every memo and announcement distributed to the rest of the faculty. Other part-time faculty appreciated this service, so it became a part of the secretary's standard operating procedures. But I never received the mail because the mailbox was in Crookston, Minnesota and I taught the course by instructional television (ITV) from St. Paul, Minnesota, approximately 350 miles away.

Carliner, Saul. Saul Carliner Studio (2003). Articles>Education>Online>Collaboration

Being Personal isn't About Being Their "Buddy"

I have written often about the value of writing online in a personal voice. In particular, emails and newsletters lend themselves to a genuine, personal tone.

Usborne, Nick. Excess Voice (2004). Articles>Collaboration>Writing>Technical Writing

Best of the Best of the Best: Winners of STC's International Competitions  

This article profiles the winning entries in STC's international technical publications, technical art, online communication, and student technical communication competitions.

Intercom (2004). Articles>TC>Collaboration>STC

Beyond Copy-Editing: The Editor-Writer Relationship

Editing is often narrowly defined as making corrections after a document is written. This approach typically relegates the editor to a low-status role within the organisation.

Durham, Marsha. Technical Editors Eyrie (1991). Articles>Editing>Collaboration

Beyond Markets and Firms: The Emergence of Open Source Networks  

Although hierarchies and markets (i.e., autonomy) have been subject to extensive study, heterarchies represent different modalities of organizing that have been little researched. Drawing on complexity theory and the main features of complex evolving systems (CES), this paper sets out to remedy this imbalance by showing that heterarchies feature highly decentralized and relatively stable interactions which are coordinated through an emergent process of parametric adaptation. Implications in terms of learning are discussed casting a new light on the delicate issue of motivation in Open Source software development.

Iannacci, Federico and Eve Mitleton-Kelly. First Monday (2005). Articles>Collaboration>Community Building>Open Source

Bilingual Team Writing: How One Company Is Meeting the Demands of Simultaneous Software and Documentation Release in Multiple Languages  

A company decides to release its software and documentation simultaneously in markets with different languages. For the documentation team, the traditional model of 'write and translate' does not work any longer. A bilingual writing team collaborates to produce a handbook in two languages at the same time.

Duffy, Gerald J. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Documentation>Localization>Collaboration

Bilingual Team Writing: Planning a Project  

A two-person bilingual writing team enabled a software application development group to produce on-line documentation and a user guide simultaneously in two languages. Team writing in an international environment requires detailed planning, constant monitoring, and continuous communication in order to succeed.

MacKay, Brenda. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Project Management>Localization>Collaboration

Boundary Objects as Rhetorical Exigence: Knowledge Mapping and Interdisciplinary Cooperation at the Los Alamos National Laboratory    

This article uses qualitative material gathered at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to construct a model of the rhetorical activity that occurs at the boundaries between diverse communities of practice working on complex sociotechnical systems. The authors reinterpret the notion of the boundary object current in science studies as a rhetorical construct that can foster cooperation and communication among the diverse members of heterogeneous working groups. The knowledge maps constructed by team members at LANL in their work on technical systems are boundary objects that can replace the demarcation exigence that so often leads to agonistic rhetorical boundary work with an integrative exigence. The integrative exigence realized by the boundary object of the knowledge map can help create a temporary trading zone characterized by rhetorical relations of symmetry and mutual understanding. In such cases, boundary work can become an effort involving integration and understanding rather than contest, controversy, and demarcation.

Wilson, Greg and Carl G. Herndl. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (2007). Articles>Scientific Communication>Collaboration>Rhetoric