Today, 70–80 women attended the first ATTW Women in TC Luncheon. Women attending participated in small-group discussions addressing topics that included
We would like to thank the women who served as facilitators at tables for different topics.
Anita Ford—"Does Current Technical Communication Curriculum Prepare Graduates for the Real Needs of the Job Market?"
Anita addressed that we have two tracks of education in the TC classroom—theory with emphasis on mechanics and design and applied learning with focus on tool training and skills. In the past, academia has struggled with TC:
Jeff Pruchnic—"The Atlas of Love and Hate: William Bunge's Detroit and the Quantitative Representation of Ethical Relationships"
Jeff shared a paper in which he discussed Bunge's visualizations and the ethical implications that his creations presented and the role of technical communication in these visualizations. He cited Barton & Barton, Dombrowski, Dragga & Voss, Katz, and Young's studies that address TCers responsibility to humanize the representation of data.
The presenters used various mediations of populate science writing to open up questions associated with pedagogical issues in the Professional and/or Technical communication course. Drawing on their own classroom experiences, Some of the questions raised by the panelists included: How do we examine online texts and what research methodologies work in social media platforms? Can we use older, text-based, tools of analysis to examine social media spaces?
HEIMAN & BARTON
Focus on using Wikis in an ethical and meaningful way.
Goal: using Critical Discourse Analaysis (CDA) to better understand how to use Wikis in the classroom and workplace. They identified and explored ideological struggle in the creation of Wikis.
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.
Dave Clark, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, “Do Our Beliefs Scale? Writing Pedagogy and Massive Online Courses”
Stuart Selber, Penn State University, and Michael Faris, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, “iPads in the Technical Communication Classroom: A Research Update and Heuristic”
About 18 attendees.
CLARK
Travis Webster, University of Maryland, “Rethinking Professionalization: Assembling Disparate Ideas of What Counts”
Matthew Cox, East Carolina University, “Rethinking Technology as Foundation: Culture and Context as Core in Professional Writing”
WEBSTER
(This is only part of what Webster covered.)
Brenton Faber—"Analytics, Big Data, and Technical Communication"
"Our technical ability to gather data exceeds our analytical capacity to make meaning from this data." Brenton Faber (Worcester Polytech Institute) told us. Brenton explained that the reviewers of his proposal said, "Show us," so the presenters in this panel sought to show us information rather than just telling us about data.
Michelle F. Eble and Tracy Ann Morse, East Carolina University, “Rethinking Accessibility: Applying Disability Studies to Professional/Technical Writing”
About eighteen attendees.
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