Open reSource: Digital Literacy for Technical Communicators

The Open reSource is a project for improving software literacy among technical communication students and practitioners. While the resource encourages students to learn using free and open source software alternatives to expensive proprietary software, it also aims to build a digital literacy that is effective across similar programs and platforms.

For example, rather than providing tutorials tied too explicitly to OpenOffice.org, a popular alternative to Microsoft Office, the resource attempts to draw out the rhetorical activity of working with office-suite software. The resource therefore emphasizes:

1. The importance of deliverables (such as spreadsheets or word-processed documents) for reaching particular audiences. The software used to make those deliverables does not matter; what does matter is that the intended audience is able to read and, if necessary, modify them.
2. Software literacy instead of software proficiency. Truly literate individuals can quickly learn just about any given piece of software in almost any domain. Proficient individuals, on the other hand, may understand how to use a particular brand and version of software--but may require time-intensive training with each new version.

To support those two emphases, the site is structured around three basic kinds of resources:

• Microtorials: Basic and brief, the microtorials (micro tutorials) area fine-grained, common tasks that writers encounter within particular types of software or across multiple types of software.
• Concepts: One of the shortcomings of the way software is often taught and learned is that tutorials and other materials do not often explicitly help people build clear mental models of what it is that they are writing and doing. Concepts-based resources aim to help technical writers build the kinds of mental models that allow them to focus on their broader communication tasks, rather than the intricacies of software.
• Macrotorials: Macrotorials bring together both the microtorials and concepts in order to guide readers in specific kinds of digital writing activity. This means either linking to different microtorials and concepts, or including them directly into the macrotorials using features built into the wiki.

About the Project

This is an ongoing project, whose embryonic form is being developed during Fall 2008 by graduate students under the guidance of Dr. Karl Stolley. The graduate students are supported by a CPTSC Research Grant, the proposal for which is available here.

Getting Involved

The project is initially being built by students in the Ilinois Institute of Technology's graduate programs in technical communication. Many of these students have strong interests in instructional design.

Eventually, though, we hope to build a resource that's large enough, and clear enough in its structure and content, to gradually involve larger numbers of people in the project, including students at other institutions, practicing technical communicators, and others.

For more information on the project, contact its lead, Dr. Karl Stolley.

Online Research Lab: lab space created by Freddrick Logan