Matt Sharp—"Who Believes in Structured Authoring? Exploring Discrepencies between Industry and Academia"

Matt listed some industry leaders who are discussing structured authoring: the case for structured authoring, the cost to launch a system, the savings created by a structured authoring system, and the newest technologies available for a system like this.

He then showed evidence—a review of five industry journals (JTWC, IEEE-TPC, JBTC, TCQ, and TC)—that academics have discussed structured authoring and content management (e.g., TCQ's 2008 issue) but have decreased that "conversation."

Matt challenged us to act in four ways:

• Critique—How does it work and is it working as well as we hear?
• Theorize—What does structured authoring mean for rhetoric?
• Innovate—What is going to happen in the future? And what is the academy’s role in the future?
• Teach—How can we teach students to compile information and use structured authoring as technical writers in the field?

We need to teach students how to use single sourcing effectively in the workplace.

Marie Paretti—"You Believe What? Exploring Beliefs about Communication and Teamwork among Engineering Faculty and Students"

Marie reported on a current research project that focuses on engineering students and faculty.

Methods: Five research sites geographically distributed, diverse (public/private, technical/comprehensive), but consistent in discipline (civil, mech, indust, eng); semi-structured interviews and focus groups with students and student survey.

Faculty Findings—Everyone valued communication and taught it, communication linked teamwork/collaboration, and “faculty teaching correlated most closely with high autonomy AND high competence.” She also reports that faculty who taught communication felt that they were competent as communicators and if they were competent as teachers.

Student Findings—Students want templates and models as well as justification of how to create documents. They were confident in their writing skills and creations of visual aids, and they claimed they learned most communication skills in engineering courses, and students felt they learned the most from group design projects and from work/internships (only 45% from feedback from faculty). Students also emphasized interpersonal skills—e.g., listening, articularing one's own ideas within a group, persuading others of your views while being respectful. And students requested the chance to get valuable feedback and revisions, particularly on presentations.

Tammy Rice-Bailey—"Veteran Technical Communicators Confront our Assumptions about Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)"

Tammy was researching how TCers work with SMEs. The literature and her own experience indicates that TCers can experience challenges working with SMEs. She asked, "What challenges do TCers face in working with SMEs?" and "What techniques do we use to effectively work with SMEs?"

She studied seven TCers (two surveys with follow-up)—diversity in location and fields with most having more than 20 years of experience.

She found that the greatest challenges that TCers experienced with SMEs:

• time and accessibility (themes: time constraints, high demand, and conflicting priorities)
• respect and trust (themes: arrogance and dismissive SMEs, TCs credentials ignored, not respected or trusted)
• information (themes: SMEs complicated information that was not thorough or was incorrect)
• language and distance (themes: global work and geographical barriers, remote even with technology, and language barriers)

And she learned what strategies TCers are using:

• Making decisions about media for communication
• Asking intelligent questions (be prepared)
• Collaborating (themes: understand, find mutually acceptable solutions)
• Coercing (themes: use flattery, give fake deadlines, use psychology)
• Minimizing time interruptions
• Making connections

She suggests that we consider this information as we teach students because the number of TCers in the field is and will increase in the future.

As TCers, we need to acknowledge that we have complicated relationships with SMEs, consider the issues of global and remote work teams, investigate more diverse information (e.g., corp cultures and newcomers' experiences), and define interpersonal skills.