Our ethnographic study of a service‐learning class revealed some students benefited in developing civic values, improving academic learning, and accepting responsibility for their own education. Other students struggled to see the connection between technical communication and service learning, felt frustrated with nonacademic writing, and experienced team conflict. We must redefine both technical communication and service learning, help students make the transition to the workplace, and educate community organizations about the role of technical communicators.

Computers and Technical Communication: Pedagogical and Programmatic Perspectives. Ed. Stuart Selber. Greenwich, CT: Ablex. 415 pages.

Designing desktop publishing courses around a model of service familiar In the U.S.—the pro bono publico tradition of professional gratis service—would broaden students’ professional horizons in addition to meeting growing demands for service learning. Such courses would mate volunteerism with the democratic spirit of desktop publishing, a technological platform that provides a means for unrepresented voices to be heard and read. One community project is outlined.

Studies of intercultural communication focus little on the ethical principles that inspire specific communication practices. The ethics of Confucius (including the virtues of goodness, righteousness, wisdom, faithfulness, reverence, and courage), however, genuinely illuminate communication behaviors within China. Analysis of a cultural artifact of technical communication reveals the substantial insight offered by the lens of ethics. A comprehensive understanding of differences in ethical perspectives is necessary to achieve ethical intercultural technical communication.

This article argues for a social perspective of the new technical communication service course, a conclusion supported by several premises: the technical communication profession wants and needs accountability, accountability is demonstrated by evaluation, assessment requires that we define literacy, evaluating technical communication literacy requires portfolio evaluation, portfolio assessment supports the social perspective of learning, and the social construction concepts imply teaching strategies. The argument proceeds from a case study that demonstrates reliability, stability, and validity in its technical communication service course assessment, tasks, and instructor community. This article demonstrates that portfolios can help us both conceptualize and evaluate the new technical communication service course.

This article describes a discipline‐specific communication course for engineering students offered by a Canadian university. The pedagogy of this course is based on North American theories of genre and theories of situated learning. In keeping with these theories, the course provides a context in which students acquire rhetorical skills and strategies necessary to integrate into a discipline‐specific discourse community. The authors argue that such a pedagogical approach can be used to design communication courses tailored to the needs of any discipline if the following three key conditions are met: assignments are connected to subject matter courses, a dialogic environment is provided, and the nature of assignments allows students to build on their learning experiences in the course.

Assessing the efficacy of technical communication service courses is a complex task, yet it is a task that service course providers should embrace as an opportunity to learn more about student and faculty needs and to update and improve curricula. This assessment has become more immediate for many educators because of ABET 2000 (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology), a comprehensive revamping of the way engineering programs are accredited. ABET 2000 criteria require that engineering programs provide evidence of the efficacy of all instruction, including communication. When the new ABET criteria were released, we had already begun a comprehensive evaluation of not only our service courses but also the total writing experience of engineering students at the University of Washington. This paper gives a theoretical rationale for a portfolio evaluation project and describes a directly applicable structure and procedure for such a project.

For small and mid‐sized universities, the 200‐level technical writing service course often represents the primary writing experience for students after their freshman year. Our “service” should help students develop the tools for analyzing language and understanding writing in complex ways. Assignment sequences should engage students in active research to develop four primary literacies: rhetorical, visual, information, and computer. This article focuses on disciplinarity and underlying pedagogical goals in technical writing classrooms by describing a search engine assignment sequence which promotes literate practices in three short reports: 1) A preview/instructions report, 2) An analysis/ evaluation report, and 3) A narrative review of a research activity. This article concludes with implications for these types of classroom practices.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of presenting Web‐based assignments within the technical communication service course. Current research on using the World Wide Web (Web) and Internet as a teaching resource investigates online writing courses, Distance Education (DE), and hypertext authoring. The literature indicates good reasons for moving instruction to the Web, but there is little description of why this migration is needed in terms of the kinds of learning achieved through Web‐based writing, nor is there much specific discussion of what type of useful instructional space can be built with the Web. This study is intended to provide support for centering more instruction within the environment of the Web. This article describes a study using a Web site designed for technical communication instruction. It defines the types of learning students experienced when using the site and presents samples of student work representing a wide range of skill development, both traditional and digital, that support moving instruction to the Web in immediately useful ways.

Abstract Critical thinking has led teachers of service courses and their user departments into common pedagogies. Motivated by calls from industry for students with problem‐solving abilities, both service courses and their user departments have incorporated higher‐level thinking modes into their assignments. Applying the interpretive mode of rationality posited by Habermas, innovative teachers are changing their pedagogical methods from the simple transference of information from teacher to student to assignments requiring team projects where students grapple with parametric problem solving that demands interpreting complex data. Applying the emancipatory mode of rationality, some assignments involve outside clients and working with community‐based social and political issues.

Procedural and Declarative Information in Software Manuals: Effects on Information Use, Task Performance, and Knowledge. Nicole Ummelen. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997. 224 pages. Standards for Online Communication: Publishing Information for the Internet/ World Wide Web/Help Systems/Corporate Intranets. JoAnn T. Hackos and Dawn M. Stevens. New York: Wiley, 1997. 380 pages (including index), plus CD‐ROM. Expanding Literacies: English Teaching and the New Workplace. Ed. Mary Sue Garay and Stephen A. Bernhardt. Albany: SUNY P, 1998. 383 pages.

Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science. Ed. Barbara T. Gates and Ann B. Shteir. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997. 280 pages. Link/Age: Composing in the Online Classroom. Joan Tornow. Logan: Utah State UP, 1997. 253 pages.

Rather than acting as training departments for students’ future employers (a mission reflected in most textbooks and journal scholarship), technical writing programs should be teaching skepticism, critical thinking, and paradigm‐breaking. They should be highlighting the agendas and “narratives” inherent in any text, rather than sustaining a positivist faith in neutrality and objectivity, because students who understand the power of language to shape the workplace (not simply to transmit information) turn out to be the most effective, most successful professionals. This article questions the widespread, largely uncritical importing of corporate paradigms into the technical writing classroom and calls for the university to remain separate from the corporation in its purpose. The article goes on to describe a recently developed senior seminar that challenges students’ assumptions about scientific and technical writing, including their own. Through courses like this, it is hoped that students will enter their professions as savvy, questioning thinkers rather than simply as efficient, problem‐solving doers.

Instead of offering a predictive “history” of the future, this essay explores how we arrive at our attitudes toward the future and the effects of such attitudes toward current practice. We greet the future with attitudes prepared by myths, master narratives that guide our vision of who we are and what we are becoming. One key myth in our discipline, the myth of immediate communication, proves an unreliable guide to the future. Readings in science fiction serve to demonstrate how a critique of the immediacy myth might proceed. The essay argues for a critically informed, open‐minded approach to the future, an approach that encourages an honest self‐criticism within the discipline.

The changes in technical communication education between 1950 and 1998 have led to disciplinary maturity: the development of academic programs and of a body of innovative research. This disciplinary maturity parallels the professional identity and growth of numbers of technical communication practitioners. As a thriving multidiscipline with many direct research and pedagogical connections to the workplace, technical communication can uniquely influence workforce values, providing a new, evolving disciplinary model for higher education. However, technical communication's disciplinary maturity also means a movement away from practice and from the service course, the foundations of technical communication as a discipline and the sources of its workplace influence.

Many technical communication educators are exploring the potential of new and emerging Information technology, specifically the World Wide Web, for delivery of their courses. This bibliography intends to help technical communicators explore the potential of virtual learning environments for their courses and to provide a point of entry into this burgeoning but rather unstructured field of inquiry. More specifically, the bibliography intends to provide a structured overview of approaches to conceptualizing, designing, developing, and evaluating virtual learning environments.

This article examines the role intuition plays in forming ethical decisions. First, the article reviews examples of intuitive ethics in professional communication research. Second, the article suggests that intuition is the naturalization of dominant cultural values and beliefs. Third, the article considers naturalized values within institutions and organizations, demonstrating how naturalized values can lead to unquestioned and oppressive institutional practices. Ethical inquiry, according to this view, investigates and denaturalizes those assumptions that are carried forth by intuition. Fourth, the article offers a pedagogical example of this theory, demonstrating how a group of business communication students investigated the intuitive practices of a non‐profit organization. The article concludes by suggesting the value that a “critique of intuition” may have for the teaching, study, and practice of professional ethics.

Abstract As the discipline of technical communication undergoes increasing scrutiny by scholars and teachers and as the discipline continues to evolve with advancements in technology, we should pause to consider some foundational, historical issues that led to the formation of a technical communication pedagogy in the first place. This piece evaluates shifts in an engineering curriculum from roughly 1850 to 1960 that made possible the development of a technical communication curriculum.

Abstract of the original article Robert R. Johnson's “Complicating Technology: Interdesciplinary Method, the Burden of Comprehension, and the Ethical Space of the Technical Communicator,” published in the Winter 1998 issue of TCQ, points out that there is much for technical communicators to learn from the burgeoning field of technology studies. Technical communicators, however, have an obligation to exercise patience as they enter this arena of study. Using interdisciplinary theory, this article argues that technical communication must assume the “burden of comprehension”: the responsibility of understanding the ideologies, contexts, values, and histories of those disciplines from which we borrow before we begin using their methods and research findings. Three disciplines of technology study—history, sociology, and philosophy—are examined to investigate how these disciplines approach technology. The article concludes with speculation on how technical communicators, by virtue of their entrance into this interdisciplinary arena, might refashion both their practical roles and the scope of their ethical responsibilities.

The number and variety of distance education courses have increased dramatically in recent years with the advent of new delivery technologies. Third‐generation distance delivery methods such as interactive, Web‐based instruction also have led to new levels of access for students. This article presents demographic information about students taking online courses at two institutions. In addition, it discusses some of the changes in learning environments that may accompany the move to the virtual classroom. Finally, it points out some potential problems in delivering courses with new technologies.

Writing in Multicultural Settings. Ed. Carol Severino, Juan C. Guerra, and Johnnella E. Butler. New York: MLA, 1997. 370 pages.

This article provides technical training managers with an overview of the range of Web‐based training solutions available to their organizations. The solutions range from individual drill and practice opportunities to live collaborative group learning. This article defines four broad categories and characterizes each. The most popular type, Web/computer based (W/CBT), is analyzed and four levels of W/CBT programs are presented. Included are tables summarizing considerations for selecting a development approach.

Teaching through the Web requires instructors to reconsider their previous assumptions about the nature of teaching, lecture, testing, and student/teacher interaction. Teaching technical writing online, however, raises additional issues. How can a technical writing instructor create an online workplace in which professional‐level collaboration can occur, while also allowing for purely academic instruction and discussion of theoretical issues? This article will address these issues in relation to the author's design and development of his Digital Rhetorics and the Modern Dialectic, specifically, how instructors must assume different roles as designers and then as teachers of online courses; how useful dialectical exchange on the Web that mimics (and sometimes surpasses) face‐to‐face, in‐classroom discussion can be created; and how technical writing instructors can foster productive online collaboration. This article will be a mixture of theory and practice—leaning a little more toward the practice, making it of immediate use to someone who has just been asked to teach a class online for the first time and is seeking help.

Abstract Initially, online courses were created by pioneers—self‐taught Web site writers comfortable with uncertainty. As Internet‐based instruction has become increasingly popular, others are less inclined to struggle with writing their own Web pages but are nonetheless interested in having an instructional Web site. A growing number of course‐construction programs are becoming available which could make Internet‐based instruction more accessible. Only by addressing both pedagogical and technical issues can evaluation of such course creation products provide information useful for thoughtful and appropriate use of that technology to support and extend traditional pedagogies. This article concludes that creating online instructional sites by hand with the help of an HTML editor is generally preferable to using course‐in‐a‐box software because instructors can select the components needed to support their pedagogy and construct successful learning experiences for their students. On the other hand, the dilemma of faculty intimidated by the technical expertise needed to produce even a basic Web site can be ameliorated by the use of course‐in‐a‐box software. However, that software should be seen only as a stepping stone. Instructional sites created by course‐in‐a‐box software certainly are worthwhile, but the course or site produced by this software remains constrained by its box, even if that box is often commodious.

This paper discusses Industrial and Digital Age educational paradigms, needs, and expectations of adult and traditional learners for Internet‐based education; knowledge management and its impact on technical communication; the Universal Campus Network and the nature of Web‐based education in the near future; elements for success for Web‐based distance education in technical communication; and future directions in electronic communication.

Abstract Educational institutions are employing a variety of processes to support Web‐based courses. In our efforts to help faculty mount such courses, we found it helpful to divide course material into knowledge‐based versus skill‐based elements, and to develop activities that capitalize on the unique environment of the Web. In this article, we discuss our successes and failures, and cover some legal issues we discovered that affect how we use both preexisting and student‐produced materials.

In this article we explore how some contemporary language usage presents challenges for technical editing. Drawing on scholarship in the rhetoric of science and in critical linguistics, we argue that language does affect our perception of reality. Consequently, the language used in some technical documents needs to be reconsidered or even challenged by technical editors. Present textbooks on technical editing do not directly confront this issue, though some scholars have begun to challenge the use of terms such as “studgun.”; We conclude by demonstrating how a critical analysis of metaphors in everyday technical documents would help students question these language choices and draw attention to the consequences of using them.

This essay details the experience of designing, implementing, and evaluating an online course in audience analysis at the graduate level. Through a discussion of the culture of this online course, I describe how the educational culture of the Land Grant Mission flowed into our efforts to create a quality learning experience, and how the Web modules and asynchronous (listserv) and synchronous (MOO) conversations influenced communication and learning.

Analyzing Media: Communication Technologies as Symbolic and Cognitive Systems. James W. Chesebro and Dale A. Bertelsen. New York: Guilford, 1996. 228 pages. Constructionism in Practice: Designing, Thinking, and Learning in a Digital World. Ed. Yasmin Kafai and Mitchel Resnick. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996. 339 pages. Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction of American Culture. David E. Nye. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 224 pages. More Speech, Not Less: Communications Law in the Information Age. Mark Sableman. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1997. 277 pages.

A case study of an experienced professor's comments on a design report in a first‐year engineering class was conducted over the period of an academic year. When compared with the commenting styles of technical writing teachers, the engineering professor's comments were found to be highly directive, and thus at odds with the preference for facilitative comments that prevails in composition studies. However, differences in genre conventions explain much of the discrepancy.

In this article, we build on arguments in risk communication that the predominant linear risk communication models are problematic for their failure to consider audience and additional contextual issues. The “failure”; of these risk communication models has led, some scholars argue, to a number of ethical and communicative problems. We seek to extend the critique, arguing that “risk”; is socially constructed. The claim for the social construction of risk has significant implications for both risk communication and the roles of technical communicators in risk situations. We frame these implications as a “critical rhetoric”; of risk communication that (1) dissolves the separation of risk assessment from risk communication to locate epistemology within communicative processes; (2) foregrounds power in risk communication as a way to frame ethical audience involvement; (3) argues for the technical communicator as one possessing the research and writing skills necessary for the complex processes of constructing and communicating risk.

A common genre of corporate promotional materials in Finland is a video that introduces a company to various audiences, including customers, shareholders, and visitors to the company's offices. The video uses visuals, sounds, and text to establish the company's identity and credibility as well as informing the audience about company products. The video appeals to deep‐seated cultural values to promote its message. This study applied theories of both advertising and semiotics to analyze the first minute of a video produced for a Finnish company that manufactures log buildings and wraps its image around a concept of leisure.

The American International Health Alliance, a national not‐for‐profit healthcare organization initiated in 1992, uses Internet technologies to aid in the exchange of medical information between healthcare providers in the U.S. and their colleagues in Eastern Europe and the New Independent States of the former Soviet Union. A major role in the exchange is played by Information Coordinators—physicians, nurses, or administrators in the partnership institutions in the region. Through a questionnaire distributed during a training session in the U.S. and e‐mail exchanges, we interviewed these Information Coordinators to learn how Internet technologies are being introduced, disseminated, and adopted in their institutions. We then applied Everett Rogers's theory of the diffusion of innovations to help interpret their responses. Although now only in its preliminary stages, this study shows that technical communicators must be aware of the cultural influences—economic, political, ethnic, and institutional—that accompany technology as they communicate about such innovations across borders of culture, expertise, and ideology.

Drawing upon publications in the French press, this article considers three interweaving themes that characterized the construction of the Euro Disney park. It then offers an analysis of the historical context for and the implications of the park's construction, using the literature of French cultural studies and cross‐cultural studies for support. It concludes with a discussion of the possible consequences to the company of Disney's negative image in the French press.

The periodic engineering report can become a source of conflict and frustration when North American engineers collaborate with colleagues abroad. To overcome such difficulties, technical companies may hire writing consultants, who then take on the additional role of cultural interpreters, helping the partners bridge differences in both the practice of engineering and the language and culture of each country. As such a writing consultant, I worked with a Canadian engineering company, its Russian contractors, and a Russian translator to analyze the sources of difficulties in their reports. The language of the reports was English, but differences in tone as well as reader expectations about organization, format, and appropriate content caused misunderstandings among the collaborators. Contrastive rhetorical analysis helped to identify problems in both the conception of the report as a document and the translation of particular text.

(1998). Writing technical documents for the global pharmaceutical industry. Technical Communication Quarterly: Vol. 7, International Communication in the Scientific and Technical Professions, pp. 319-327.