Course Home and Latest News

Housekeeping Matters

September 29, 2009

I have made some fairly major changes to the Course Calendar, particularly regarding due dates. Essentially, project due dates, including one KM tech presentation, have been pushed back a week. This is to give you a little more time to observe your communities for Project 2, since I wanted everyone to have a full month's time viewing that activity.

Note that though the due dates have changed on projects, the reading schedule moves ahead as planned. Up this week, Spinuzzi's Tracing Genres Through Organizations and its set of reading questions.

I am also scrapping the original idea for Project 3, because it's not going to work with this group. I'll have a new version of Project 3 up next week, which we'll review and then organize into groups for.

Reading Questions, Wiki Matters

September 8, 2009

I've placed all of the reading questions on their own page, and will continue to add them there as well as on the individual week pages on the wiki.

Also, if you have not yet posted a bio for yourself at your name page (e.g., mine at KarlS), please do so. Also provide a link to your bio page at the Course Members page (see and copy my example there, too).

And hey...is anyone on Twitter? Have we created a hidden profile of Twitter users in this class?

Room Change

August 27, 2009

It's official: our class will meet in SH237 this semester. See you there on Tuesday.

Twittering Machines

August 25, 2009

As a means for developing a sense of broader discussions within technical communication and knowledge management as well as networking with people in the field, I am strongly recommending (but not requiring) that you actively use Twitter this semester. That can include Tweeting during class, if you're using our course hashtag #com542 or our subject-matter hashtag, #km (which is already used by others interested in knowledge management on Twitter).

While you can use the Twitter website to read and post, there is an abundance of Twitter applications that run on desktop and/or mobile devices (particularly the iPhone and some Blackberry models). One of the best all-around apps that runs on desktops (Mac and PC) and iPhone is Tweetdeck, which is great not only for posting and reading the tweets of people you follow, but also for grouping people or watching particular search terms, such as hashtags.

For iPhone and iPod Touch, both Twitterific and Tweetie are popular (but for-pay) apps. There are some free Twitter apps, but most of the free versions feature advertising, such as Twitterfon. Shop around.

I'm not a Blackberry user, but I've heard good things about Twitterberry. (Perhaps if there are Blackberry users in the class, you'll post additional apps here.)

And if all else fails but you want to read and post away from a computer, you can set up Twitter to work with the SMS/texting on your phone. Better if you have an unlimited texting plan.

A Pre-Semester Assignment

July 31, 2009

So that we hit the ground running, I am assigning you two pieces to read that we will discuss the first night of class, on 8/25.

The first is Michael Salvo's "Ethics of Engagement: User-Centered Design and Rhetorical Methodology," from Technical Communication Quarterly v. 10, n. 3, which you can access by searching through our library portal at http://library.iit.edu/

Because we will be spending the semester thinking about the design and construction of systems that support knowledge management, broadly conceived, we want to start thinking about the role of users--and the interesting position that technical communicators occupy between/as both users and designers. Salvo's is an excellent introduction to user-centered and participatory flavors of design, and will prepare us to think carefully about both users and designers, and the complicated, sometimes blurred boundaries between them.

The second and more challenging piece is "Activity and Consciousness," a foundational work in what has become known as activity theory, written by Soviet psychologist Alexei Leontyev (sometimes transliterated as Leont'ev or Leontiev). You can access this piece online for free, and note that it prints quite nicely: http://www.marxists.org/archive/leontev/works/1977/leon1977.htm

Activity theory (AT) is one of the central theoretical apparatuses that we will grapple with in this class, primarily in a book-length study of AT and technical communication (Spinuzzi's Tracing Genres Through Organizations) and in a book devoted to AT with respect to interaction design (Kaptelinin & Nardi's Acting with Technology).

As you read these articles, I want you to think about--and come prepared to discuss--the following questions:

1. What are "dialogic ethics" and "dialogic engagement," as Salvo explains them? Why are they important to this article?
2. Salvo claims that "technical communicators regularly find themselves at the end of the design-development-marketing cycle" (p. 280). What strategies does he offer for changing the position of technical communicators in that cycle? What might knowledge management have to do with changing that position?
3. Leontyev outlines a hierarchy of levels of activity: activity, actions, and operations. What is each level of the hierarchy aimed at or oriented towards?
4. Why on earth would we read such a piece as this in a technical communication program and in a class on knowledge management? Does Leontyev's perspective on activity have anything to do with either technical communication or knowledge management?

And finally, at some point before class starts, I want you to send me an email of about 500 words talking about your expectations of this class and your work in it, and your work and ambitions within the technical communication program generally.