<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> This paper evaluates the role of reprocessability and symbol sets, two of the media capabilities identified in Media Synchronicity Theory, and different recipient characteristics on knowledge transfer. An experimental study manipulating the two specific channel interface characteristics was conducted to test the proposed model. Results indicate that symbol sets have a positive effect on knowledge possessed and knowledge applied. Motivation to learn significantly affected knowledge possessed and knowledge applied, while absorptive capacity was found to only influence knowledge possessed. The hypothesized relationships between reprocessability and knowledge internalization were marginally supported, and future research is suggested to address this issue. </para>

Global virtual teams provide numerous benefits for corporations employing virtual organizational forms and for individual teams and team members. However, virtual collaboration also presents some well-recognized challenges. A growing body of research has examined the process of virtual teaming and the challenges inherent in that process. This study seeks to address some of the gaps in the existing literature. Specifically, it examines leadership roles, socioemotional communication strategies, and the use of technology to establish relational links among team members. The study focuses on virtual-team collaboration among technical communication students at the University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland, and at the University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida.

By integrating Media Richness Theory, Channel Expansion Theory, and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), we study the postadoption use behavior of instant messaging. We developed the construct “use richness” as a measure of the extent to which users use the media communication capacity after adoption and proposed a conceptual model of the antecedents of use richness. Through a field survey with 272 valid responses and structural equation modeling, we empirically tested our model and found that use richness is positively affected by perceived media richness, perceived usefulness, and perceived social usefulness.

Arguably, usability testing is most effective when integrated into the user-centered design process. One way to encourage this integration is to reemphasize the value of paper prototyping. In a recent test of a university library website, we married low-fidelity paper prototyping with medium-fidelity wireframe prototyping. When user navigation led to nonexisting pages or dead ends, users were encouraged to create what they thought should be where there was nothing. This blank-page technique gave us insights into users' mental models regarding site content and design, providing developers with useful data concerning how users conceptualized information they encountered.

The authors assemble an easy-to-read account of research methods in technical and professional communication, provide previously published examples of research in the field, and analyze those examples to demonstrate the relationship between theory and practice. This is an overall good resource for educators, students, and practitioners who wish to perform, systematically and methodologically sound research in technical and professional communication.

Talking to the media often becomes part of the job description for subject matter experts (SMEs) who can discuss an organization's research or new products. Media training can prepare SMEs for media interviews by helping them identify major points to discuss and showing them how to present that information to the reporter. Prior research in professional communication supports the need for media training for scientific or engineering SMEs based on the public's increased interest in these areas. As part of this media training tutorial, I introduce eight guidelines based on my own experience as a public relations counselor and on research conducted in an organizational setting with SMEs in health information technology.

In 12 chapters, the author moves through topics such as the art of speaking, preparation and planning, the strong opening, platform mastery, vocal mastery, the strong conclusion, and a few other tips on negotiation thrown in along the way. While the book could provide ideas for an accomplished or experienced speaker, it could also serve as a quick reference for someone embarking on a new career or career enhancement.

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> Standard in many professional communications classrooms is the teaching of the general business letter and sometimes, more specifically, the complaint letter. This tutorial draws upon the scholarly research from professional communication, education, and business to address the methods of how to teach a response-to-complaint letter. I recommend a theory-based tutorial for the undergraduate professional communication classroom. This tutorial complements existing teachings on standard form-letter writing and could serve as a supplemental component to a marketing or management course. </para>

This slender but informative book provides a look at the evolving practice and importance of technical communication in a growing company (Lukens Steel Company of Coatesville, Pennsylvania) in an expanding industry and market (iron and steel) during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> A major challenge in engineering education is to prepare professionals for communicating well in writing and speaking, using appropriate technologies, within professional contexts. Communication in the global engineering world includes collaboration on cross-functional teams, virtual-project team management, and writing for multiple, complex audiences. This tutorial discusses how one small engineering school has integrated technical communication teaching and assessment throughout the curriculum with demonstrated success. The integrated curriculum, formative and summative assessments, and real-world contexts offer one model to address growing communication challenges. </para>

Assessing the quality of student efforts and products is a continual necessity for academics and practitioners in technical communication; however, the process of constructing valid and reliable rubrics remains an underexplored topic in the field. This paper first addresses some of the assessment concerns and then describes a case study that documents the development and implementation of one holistic and five analytic rubrics to evaluate undergraduate projects. The discussion focuses on identifying site-specific criteria and training effective raters and is intended to help academics respond to their required accreditation mandates and offer practitioners alternatives for evaluating products and services.

Currently, colleges and universities have developed assessment systems that can collect student work products for evaluation in an effort to make student learning transparent and ensure accountability in higher education. At the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, we have developed a digital portfolio system, the RosE Portfolio System (REPS), that allows for efficient data collection; the results of portfolio evaluations are used by academic departments and programs to improve curricula and provide evidence to external accrediting agencies. The results of evaluations of student performance are also used to ensure the quality of academic curricula.

A recent International Civil Aviation Organization initiative mandates that pilots and air-traffic controllers operating on international routes demonstrate adequate English-language proficiency for successful communication. The Versant Aviation English Test was developed to serve this purpose. It is a fully automated speaking and listening performance test, where administration of the test tasks and scoring of the candidates' responses are computerized. We argue that not only do candidates engage in cognitively and linguistically appropriate interactions, but that computer-generated scores and human ratings are consistent (r = 0.94) , enabling valid score-based decisions to be made on the basis of automated language testing.

The assessment of engineering products and services is central to the work of engineering, but the evaluation of human communication and its development in engineering and other technical professions has not yet received enough attention in IEEE research and publications. This special section begins to remedy this situation by calling for more research in the assessment of professional communication skills and training programs as well as in the development of better assessment tools and procedures. It features four new articles on the topic in the hope that these will inspire even more research related to the assessment of human communication in scientific and technical professions.

Presents a review of this humorous book on grammar by June Casagrande. The book is a comprehensive, authoritative, and easy-to-use guide for professional communicators.

Technical communication consultants steeped in conventional academic notions of writing pedagogy may encounter different assumptions about the nature of writing and the significance of grammar in writing instruction when they consult with professional engineers. This paper examines historical, theoretical, and practical reasons for these sometimes contradictory beliefs and traces the authors' efforts to reconcile these differences while planning and conducting a writing seminar for an engineering firm. A strong emphasis on grammar and mechanics can lead to numerous benefits, including a stronger sense of shared purpose between consultants and engineers and a point of entry into additional conversations about institutional writing practices and writing environments.

The author describes his experience with Microsoft Office Visio 2007 and three books that explain the operations of the program.

Adopting the supply chain paradigm, we define customer service as a multifunctional sequence of process activities supported by an intricate tapestry of information technology (IT) and non-IT resources that enable the coordination and communication necessary to create value for the customer. The resource-based view (RBV) serves as our theoretical lens for assessing the strategic contributions of IT in the customer-service process of third-party logistics firms. Our findings support the RBV assertion of significant direct and indirect impacts but suggest that the challenges of fully integrating IT resources as process components go beyond merely leveraging complementarity, as emphasized by RBV.

Information and communication are playing an increasingly important and more sophisticated role in humanitarian-service activities involving logistics, organizational learning, health-care delivery systems, assessment, and education. This role is impacted by important trends and environments within which the humanitarian sector operates. These include a shift of focus from providing direct aid to capacity building, empowerment, and assessment; a shift in project focus from technical solutions to broader sociotechnical strategies; and increased emphasis on demonstrating effectiveness, improving efficiency, and collaborating with other organizations. Five articles in this issue address these areas, including two pieces on developing information and communication tools to support the work of humanitarian organizations, two pieces on preparing students to work in the humanitarian environment, and one on organizational culture and the challenge of enhancing organizational learning in the humanitarian sector.

In this paper, we describe our approach of using value-sensitive design to guide the design, development, and implementation of health information systems for use in rural areas of two developing countries in Africa. By using shared conceptual investigation, we are able to create a generalized list of stakeholders and values that span multiple projects without losing any of the power of the conceptual investigation. This process can be applied to other projects to develop a stronger set of stakeholders and values. We also present a technical investigation of a vaccine delivery project in Sub-Saharan Africa and plans for an upcoming empirical investigation for a mobile-phone-based support tool for community health workers in East Africa.

This index covers all technical items - papers, correspondence, reviews, etc. - that appeared in this periodical during the year, and items from previous years that were commented upon or corrected in this year. Departments and other items may also be covered if they have been judged to have archival value. The Author Index contains the primary entry for each item, listed under the first author's name. The primary entry includes the coauthors' names, the title of the paper or other item, and its location, specified by the publication abbreviation, year, month, and inclusive pagination. The Subject Index contains entries describing the item under all appropriate subject headings, plus the first author's name, the publication abbreviation, month, and year, and inclusive pages. Note that the item title is found only under the primary entry in the Author Index.

Disaster areas and developing economies put great demands on relief and development personnel to adapt efficiently to fast-changing conditions. We draw on experiences at Mercy Corps and the literature on learning organizations, adaptive expertise, and communities of practice to identify five systemic tensions that need to be balanced when designing effective learning solutions: (1) employees' desire to learn versus the pressures of the job, (2) investing in strategic learning initiatives versus the need to keep organizational operating costs low, (3) formal learning versus informal learning, (4) maintaining flexibility within a local context versus organization-wide standards that create efficiency and accountability, and (5) people versus technology. We offer examples of possible solutions to the individual and organizational learning challenge in relief and development organizations.

This paper reintroduces concepts from sensemaking in media synchronicity theory (MST). It focuses on how media should support synchronicity to fit communication needs when making sense of a humanitarian crisis situation. Findings from interviews with senior management of humanitarian aid organizations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo show that, contrary to what is suggested by MST, low synchronicity media are not sufficient to support conveyance processes. Instead, information and communication systems should support these actors in connecting, building, and maintaining their networks of contacts. Also, information and communications systems need to be designed to support the observed sensemaking communication activities of noticing, updating, inquiring, triangulating, verifying, reflecting, enacting, and interpreting.

Business case studies have been a standard pedagogical tool in technical communication classrooms. However, the expansion of engineering practice-including the design and implementation of appropriate technology in the developing world-suggests the need to complement such studies. This paper analyzes three business and three humanitarian case studies. It highlights the complexities of audience and context that distinguish the humanitarian case studies, and it argues that incorporating humanitarian cases into technical communication courses would promote higher levels of learning, student engagement, and the global citizenship that will be requisite for all engineers in the twenty-first century.

Although listening is valued in engineering education literature, it is conspicuously absent from engineering curricula. Using interview data, data from published literature, reflective instructional experiences, and the intersection of those three data sources, this study investigates two primary issues: (1) engineering students' sources of resistance to listening instruction in a sustainable community development initiative, and (2) benefits from such instruction. Findings feature a proposed theory of contextual listening and suggest that sources of resistance include the paucity of listening instruction in the engineering curriculum and curricular components that may devalue listening. Benefits of a listening intervention are described, and implications are discussed.

This tutorial explains and describes the use of several microformats, which make information marked up in HTML available for use in applications outside traditional Web browsers. Because microformats consist of minor additions to the HTML backbone of common Web pages, they represent a simple but significant move toward what Tim Berners-Lee has called the ldquosemantic Webrdquo-but without requiring the technical and practical shifts and time demands of a complete XML-based semantic-Web-development approach. Microformats also provide technical communicators with literacies and a conceptual foundation to approach more advanced semantic Web technologies and suggest ways to refine current Web design practice.

The information economy is based on the collection and the exchange of data and ideas. We all either contribute to or use materials from the information economy in most aspects of our everyday lives. Few of us, however, understand all of the nuances of the information economy or the communication factors that affect its operations. This special issue of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication seeks to "open" this economic model through articles and tutorials that examine the connections between communication technologies and the products, practices, and services that constitute the information economy.

This book provides an overview of a form of information management called tagging. The primary audience for this book consists of web designers, developers, information architects, user experience developers, and product managers.

This is a text in which scholars discuss some of the issues associated with conducting qualitative research via the internet. The editors address six broad questions, one per chapter. The book would be a useful addition to a graduate course on qualitative internet research.

Technical and professional writing pedagogies have traditionally understood collaborative writing as an aggregate, cooperative venture between writers and subject matter experts. In contrast, this tutorial argues that Web 2.0 technologies offer technical and professional communication pedagogies more advantageous conceptions and practices of collaborative writing. The tutorial analyzes how new media technologies create a different collaborative writing environment and then discusses how these environments help collaborative writing methods create an alternative writing situation. The study concludes by examining the outcomes of student Web 2.0 research projects and by offering technical and professional writing instructors new pedagogical strategies for teaching collaborative writing.

Previous studies have often highlighted macro factors as explaining the adoption and use of cell phones in developing economies. However, micro factors, which directly affect the end user's motivations, have been underinvestigated. We examine the influence of micro factors on both individuals' attitude toward and their use of cell phones. Data were collected through a survey of 463 cell-phone users in Guinea. Results show that mobility, familiarity, social influence, and resources possession influence the attitude toward and the use of cellular telephones. In contrast, the hypothesis that subscription conditions are the main influence on cell-phone use is not verified.

This paper explores the extent to which technical communication businesses with Websites are attempting to reach an audience of prospective clients through an intermediary audience of search engines. It draws on a survey of 240 principals of these businesses, brief interviews with half of them, and an analysis of their sites. Results show that search engines are among the most helpful methods leading people to these business sites and that higher levels of such search engine helpfulness are strongly associated with higher percentages of clientele who originate through these sites. Most businesses take search engines into account at least minimally; however, meaningfully pursuing that audience requires ongoing investments that some technical communication businesses are reluctant to make.