This study examines the frequency with which 12 writing tutors used hints in their suggestions to 12 engineering students in 13 interactions about technical writing. Of the 424 suggestions tutors made, 106 were hints. Using Weizman's model as a guide, the study describes three types of hints that tutors used: evaluations, general rules, and elisions. It also investigates the benefits that tutors receive from using those types of hints and examines the problems for students that can arise when tutors state their suggestions as hints. Combined with previous research findings, the findings of this study suggest that tutors should pair mildly negative evaluations and general rules with direct suggestions, and tutors should avoid strongly negative evaluations, i.e., criticisms. The findings also suggest that tutors can elude suggestions and provide words and phrases for students' documents but that they should only do this occasionally to model effective tone or syntax.

In this article, we propose that remote, internet-based studies of real users interacting with real websites on their own computers at a time and place convenient for them will provide a solid empirical base from which researchers can extrapolate reliable and valid web-design guidelines. After a discussion of research methods that have been used to support the principles that underlie web-design guidelines, we review some of the methodological issues associated with internet-based research and tools for supporting such work. Given advances in technology, the multitude of users online, and emerging technologies with new interfaces, the time has come for technical communication researchers to enter the arena of internet-based research and conduct remote experiments to support the web-design guidelines that they espouse.

Technical communicators can and should play an important role in the development of information systems to improve the usability of the systems. Besides writing user guides and training material, technical communicators can engage in four other tasks to add value to information systems development: acting as user advocate, writing online help, writing system and error messages, and providing advice on interface design. We assert that technical communicators' involvement in systems development should not be tied to a particular development methodology. Instead, they should be associated with four general tasks in systems development: system investigation, analysis, design, and implementation. We then discuss some notable human factors and their impacts on the tasks performed by technical communicators. Three cognitive mapping techniques-causal mapping, semantic mapping, and concept mapping-are introduced as a means to elicit an individual's belief system regarding a problem domain. These cognitive mapping techniques have great potential for overcoming some behavioral and cognitive problems as well as facilitating understanding among stakeholders in the development of information systems. We discuss how technical communicators can apply various cognitive mapping techniques to improve the usability of the resulting information systems. The use of these techniques is illustrated using a case study.

Research into subjects of concern to technical communicators is occurring with increasing frequency. But as it increases, we must ask ourselves: Is the research serving its purpose? What should researchers be doing? These are the questions that underlie the articles in this special issue.

Two research traditions inform contemporary technical communication research. With its physical science orientation and organizational capaciousness, the tradition of Big Science originated in the laboratory of Ernest O. Lawrence. With its humanistic orientation and individualistic singularity, the tradition of bricolage was identified in the fieldwork of Claude Le/spl acute/vi-Strauss. The current celebration of the former in technical communication research serves to reify a power-driven impulse for utility. The two cultures that result from such an impulse-the organizational professional and the academic researcher-have little common ground for research. To interrupt such harmful dynamics, an orientation to research is offered that celebrates successful past work in technological innovation, information design, the communication process, and the ways those processes emerge in specific contexts. To foster the continuation of such research, a community-based model is offered that draws its strength from the tradition of the bricoleur.

This article explores the dialogic negotiation processes that can enable professional communication academics and practitioners to collaborate in designing, implementing, and writing up research. Drawing on our experiences conducting a collaborative academic-practitioner case study of technical sales presentations in an executive briefing center, we outline the ways in which we dialogically negotiated research questions, data collection and analysis, theoretical frameworks, organizational contexts, identifications, and interpersonal connections. We then discuss potential limitations of academic-practitioner collaborations and conclude by offering a tentative, contextual list of "best practices" for facilitating successful collaboration across the academic-practitioner divide.

Ideally, academic research should inform workplace practices and workplace practices should inform academic research and education. However, as many researchers have noted, a gap often exists between academia and industry. This article begins to bridge that gap by reporting the results of a small-scale study at Microsoft in which 12 individuals were interviewed about their views on usability education and research. This study addressed two questions: (1) What knowledge, skills, and abilities should technical communication teachers stress in teaching usability and (2) how can academic research in usability benefit practitioners? The results indicate that usability education needs to be expanded to include additional usability evaluation methods and that students need strong critical assessment and communication skills when they enter the workplace. The results also reveal that usability research in the areas of return-on-investment, online help, and cognition would be of great use to practitioners.

An increasing body of research relies on genre to analyze academic and professional communication and to describe how members of a community use language. The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of genre-based research in technical communication and to describe the different approaches to genre and to genre teaching. While some research focuses on the textual analysis of genres, other studies focus on the analysis of the social context and the ideology and structure of the discourse community that owns the genre, and on the role of genres as social rhetorical actions of the community. These two perspectives are also reflected in the teaching of genre in technical communication.

Knowledge transfer among geographically separated members is recognized as a critical ingredient for collaborative accomplishment of work in virtual teams. However, due to the "localness" of knowledge, such transfer of knowledge is believed to be inherently problematic; thus, it is important to develop a solid understanding of the factors that enable knowledge transfer in such contexts. Drawing on existing literature on knowledge management and virtual teamwork, we identify four Cs (communication, capability, credibility, and culture) associated with individuals who transfer significant amounts of knowledge to remote members. Next, we test the four Cs in the context of US-Norwegian virtual teams engaged in systems development. The volume of communication, the credibility of the communicator, and the nature of cultural values held (i.e., collectivism) by the communicator were found to significantly predict the extent of knowledge transferred; although, contrary to expectations, capability was not found to have a significant influence. A number of implications for virtual team participants and professional communicators are articulated. Avenues for future research are also suggested.

Many organizations are constantly changing their web presence. Despite the frequency of these redesigns, there appears to be little evidence to explain what kinds of changes are incorporated into each updated version of a web presence. To understand how commercial organizations transform their web presence, we conduct a content analysis and a cluster analysis of press releases describing redesign initiatives in the late 1990s. Findings suggest that the majority of companies redesigned their web presence to expand information and change navigation protocols. Surprisingly, the addition of interactive features such as online ordering and community communication channels is present in only 20% of the redesign cases studied. According to the groups provided by the cluster analysis, most of the changes reported in these press releases are centered on improving the usability of the web presence. Based on this evidence we conclude that initial transformations to commercial websites were more driven by the need to effectively communicate new information than by the addition of e-commerce features.

In this paper, we explore the emergence of subgroups in global virtual teams and consider the impact that subgroups have on the communication patterns and interactions of these teams. The study presented here takes the case of eight virtual teams that were formed between two universities in two different countries. Our findings reveal that subgroups exert different degrees of impact on the team as a whole. Where the impact was high, boundaries were created between team members in different subgroups while the development of team cohesiveness was restricted. Nevertheless, all teams were able to produce high quality outcomes, suggesting that the emergence of subgroups may not always have a negative influence on team performance. We discuss the implications of these findings for research and practice.

E-communication in businesses has been the target of intense research. The theoretical hypotheses that have informed the media richness hypothesis have been influential in some circles and have also been strongly attacked by social theorists. It is argued in this paper that this theoretical polarization involving advocates of the media richness hypothesis and social theorists is due to two problems. The first is that there is a wealth of empirical evidence that provides direct support for the notion that human beings prefer the face-to-face medium for a variety of business tasks that involve communication, which seems to provide support for the media richness hypothesis. The second problem is that the media richness hypothesis is built on a vacuum, as no underlying explanation was ever presented by media richness theorists for our predisposition toward rich (or face-to-face) media. The main goal of this paper is to offer a solution to these problems by providing an alternative to the media richness hypothesis, referred to here as media naturalness hypothesis, developed based on Darwin's theory of evolution. The media naturalness hypothesis argues that, other things being equal, a decrease in the degree of naturalness of a communication medium (or its degree of similarity to the face-to-face medium) leads to the following effects in connection with a communication interaction: (a) increased cognitive effort, (b) increased communication ambiguity, and (c) decreased physiological arousal. Like the media richness hypothesis, the media naturalness hypothesis has important implications for the selection, use, and deployment of e-communication tools in organizations. However, unlike the media richness hypothesis, the media naturalness hypothesis is compatible with social theories of behavior toward e-communication tools. Among other things, this paper shows that the media naturalness hypothesis (unlike its media richness counterpart) is compatible with the notion that, regardless of the obstacles posed by low naturalness media, individuals using those media to perform collaborative tasks may achieve the same or better task-related outcomes than individuals using media with higher degrees of naturalness.

Effective image use is central to successful international communication. It facilitates usability, decreases translation costs, and reduces the time needed to get products into overseas markets. Yet, culture and image design (CID) is often one of the more problematic factors related to intercultural communication due to the different expectations and associations cultures have for particular images. This essay overviews how the cognitive psychology concept of PROTOTYPES can help technical communicators develop more effective images for international consumers.

Various disciplines have extensively studied deception in human communication. With the increasing use of instant messaging (IM) for both informal communication and task performance in the work place, deception in IM is emerging as an important issue. In this study, we explored the behavioral indicators of deception in a group IM setting. The empirical results showed that three types of nonverbal behaviors and three types of verbal behaviors that were investigated could significantly differentiate deceivers from truth tellers. The findings potentially can broaden our knowledge of deception behavior in human communication and improve deception awareness and deception detection in the cyberspace.

This article reports on the utility of personal digital assistants (PDAs) for processing information needed in coordinated, team-based medical work. The author first presents results from a survey of medical professionals, which reveal that medical professionals read PDA-based texts nonlinearly, in short bursts, and without need of a narrative-based organization. The respondents also reported using PDAs to support a range of team-based activities. The author then presents results of a case study of veterinary students using PDAs on clinical rotations. He discusses how the PDA affords uses of text-based information that are suited to medical work that is carried out with the cooperative assistance of people and technologies. After discussing how veterinary students used PDAs to organize information into ad hoc texts, he concludes with challenges and information design guidelines for professional writers in the medical field.

This study contributes to a discussion on collaboration and technical/professional communication in indeterminate zones or less familiar sites for collaboration. The interdisciplinary group for this case study collaborated to write a project proposal to solicit funds from the US government for constructing a test bed for immune buildings as a tactic for combating potential biological and chemical terrorist incidents. Their approach to collaboration coincided with several approaches previously addressed in professional and technical communication research. Novel and creative approaches emerged as a result of this collaboration, but in some instances, disciplinary differences, as manifested by disputes over concepts and terminologies, posed obstacles to collaboration. Such challenges necessitated strong leadership, which was also critical for managing group process.

Receiving innovative end user feedback on an information system is essential for acquiring further development ideas. The feedback gathering method should encourage end users to freely bring out new ideas. The method should be repeatable and transferable to allow its use in various contexts. We employ the principles of collaboration engineering using so-callled thinkLets as building blocks to construct a feedback gathering process. We apply the principles for receiving new development ideas for a multi-university student information system in Finland. We reflect on the experiences and give insights on applying two alternative processes in a complex organizational context.

Electronic collaboration has become a driver for productivity as organizations develop linkages for the planning, sourcing, and execution of goods and services. These organizations require mechanisms to harness the diverse and personalized intellectual resources that are distributed across the world. While electronic collaboration technologies have made it possible to harness intellectual resources across space and time, knowledge management is locked in a paradox of perception-the more valuable a knowledge resource is seen to be, the less it is shared. This paper develops a framework for the activation of knowledge that relies on a view of knowledge-as-identity. The analysis of a case study reveals "activation conditions" that delineate processes in which electronic collaboration technologies can be most effective. This has implications for the creation of collaborative work environments that enhance knowledge activation in organizations.

This article provides an introduction to the special issue on Expanding the Boundaries of E-Collaboration. It presents an operational definition of the term e-collaboration, and a historical review of the development of e-collaboration tools and related academic research. That is followed by an introductory development of the notion of e-collaboration boundaries. The article concludes with a summarized discussion of the articles published in the special issue.

As virtual teams constitute an important and pervasive organizational structure, research with the aim of improving the effectiveness of these teams is vital. Although critical topics such as conflict, coordination and trust are being addressed, research on creativity in virtual teams has been quite limited. Given that creative solutions to complex problems create and sustain a firm's competitive advantage, an investigation of creativity in virtual teams is warranted. The goal of the current study is to explore the influences on creativity in asynchronous virtual teams. Predicated upon grounded theory, this exploration is accomplished through an in-depth qualitative analysis of the team communication transcripts of ten virtual teams. Teams were composed of graduate students who interacted solely via an asynchronous, computer conferencing system to develop the high-level requirements and design for a new innovative product. Significant inhibitors to the creative performance of virtual teams included dominance, domain knowledge, downward norm setting, lack of shared understanding, time pressure, and technical difficulties. Significant enhancers to creativity included stimulating colleagues, the existence of a variety of social influences, a collaborative team climate, and both the surfacing and reduction of equivocality.

There has been a proliferation of competing explanations regarding the inconsistent results reported by the e-collaboration literature since its inception. This study advances another possible explanation by investigating the range of multilevel issues that can be encountered in research on the use of synchronous or asynchronous group support systems. We introduce concepts of levels of analysis from the management literature and then examine all empirical studies of e-collaboration from seven information systems journals for the period 1999-2003. We identified a total of 54 studies of e-collaboration in these journals, and after excluding 18 nonconforming studies - those that were primarily conceptual, qualitative, or exploratory only-we analyzed the levels of analysis issues in the remaining 36 empirical studies. Based on our analysis and classification of these studies into six different clusters according to their levels of analysis, we found that a majority of these studies contain one or more problems of levels incongruence that cast doubts on the validity of their results. It is indeed possible that these methodological problems are in part responsible for the inconsistent results reported in this literature, especially since researchers' frequent decisions to analyze data at the individual level - even when the theory was formulated at the group level and when the research setting featured individuals working in groups -may very well have artificially inflated the authors' chances of finding statistically significant results. Based on our discussion of levels of analysis concepts, we hope to provide guidance to empirical researchers who study e-ollaboration.