The professional e-mail assignment allows students to gain digital literacies via community, critical engagement, and application.

This short paperback book is divided into 14 chapters and 2 exhibits. The book is designed to provide answers to two key questions - First, how do we reduce the number of emails we find in our mailbox each day, and ,second, how do we teach others to present information in the most effective manner? The solution, according to the authors, is simple: bottom line. In simple terms, it means bringing the subject to the front of the e-mail so that the reader finds the answer to the question "Why should I be interested? quickly. The authors develop a number of approaches that are suitable for most e-mail communication. The authors extend the concept to other business writing as well, but they admit there are circumstances that may require different approaches. The takeaway message is a good one for engineers, technical communicators, and managers alike. The book is an excellent addition to one's reading list and the local library's reference shelf.

This article argues that the online environment is optimal for teaching prospective instructors how to develop and implement online courses. To support this claim, the author draws on hypertext theories to define the online course archive as a constructive hypertext and to describe the work the course archive is able to do when used to instruct prospective online instructors. The claim is further supported through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a course archive.

This article argues that the online environment is optimal for teaching prospective instructors how to develop and implement online courses. To support this claim, the author draws on hypertext theories to define the online course archive as a constructive hypertext and to describe the work the course archive is able to do when used to instruct prospective online instructors. The claim is further supported through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a course archive.

Unlike experienced collaborators, student teams often attempt to collaborate without effective documentation of meetings. This tendency may be exacerbated by professional writing textbooks, which rarely mention minutes in their chapters on collaboration and provide ineffective examples of meeting minutes that follow a parliamentary style of minutes rather than the action-oriented style that is the norm in most workplace settings. Interviews with three engineering managers are supported by published research in professional communication to show how meeting minutes are essential to projecting a team forward by solidifying consensus and holding individuals accountable for actions. A short exercise designed to teach students how effective minutes function as a management tool is presented along with observational evidence of the exercise's effect on student team practices in both professional writing and computer science team projects

Much of America was stunned into mourning on February 1, 2003 as the space shuttle Columbia was reported to have broken up over Texas. The ensuing investigation revealed that debris at liftoff was the cause of the crash, but the official report suggested that NASA's organizational communication was just as much to blame. This article uses transactive memory theory to argue that there were significant gaps in the knowledge network of NASA organizational members, and those gaps impeded information flow regarding potential disaster. E-mails to and from NASA employees were examined (the “To” and “From” fields) to map a network of communication related to Columbia's damage and risk. Although NASA personnel were connected with each other in this incident-based network, the right information did not get to the people who needed it. The article concludes with extensions of theory and practical implications for organizations, including NASA.

While conducting research for this article, I often came across this claim: Rhetorical criticism has traditionally been housed in speech communication de partments.1 One look at the bibliography for this article seems only to validate this claim; almost all of the journals and books are written by and for speech communication scholars. And really, this comes as little surprise when we con sider that the majority of the New Rhetoricians are communication theorists or that speech communication scholarship has been interested in analyzing specific communication situations. In all, the work of these scholars attempts to define the strategies employed, determine whether those strategies were effective to a specific rhetorical situation, and from that, articulate theories based on this care ful observation about different approaches to rhetorical criticism. However, I remain uncomfortable with making the claim that rhetorical crit icism grew up in speech communication, which to me implies that the field of rhetoric and composition does not have a history with rhetorical criticism. Yet many of the publications in our field give lie to that implied claim?Shirley Wilson Logan's We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth Century Black Women, for example, conducts rhetorical criticism of the public discourses and speeches of nineteenth-century black women, while Ken McAllister's Game Work: Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture con ducts an in-depth rhetorical analysis of computer games in an effort to articulate a rhetorical theory that can account for games as a rhetorical text. The reason that rhetorical criticism has historically belonged to speech communication may simply be the fact that speech communication scholars have attempted to define and theorize it as a legitimate disciplinary concern. The purpose of this bibliographic synthesis is to provide rhetoric and composition scholars with a broad understanding of the field so that we can begin to theorize the work we do with rhetorical criticism and think through the ways in which we can enrich our own scholarship. Due to page-length limitations, I am unable to provide a synthesis of all the different approaches to rhetorical criticism. I have chosen to limit my scope to definitions, general methodology, and objects of rhetorical criticism, which com prise the first three sections. The final section will summarize four textbooks on rhetorical criticism, all four of which provide excellent starting places for those

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This study explores social processes associated with e-mail overload, drawing on Sproull and Kiesler's first and second-order effects of communication technologies and Boden's theory of lamination. In a three-part study, the authors examined e-mail interactions from a government organization by logging e-mails, submitting an e-mail string to close textual analysis, and analyzing focus group data about e-mail overload. The results reveal three characteristics that contribute to e-mail overload— unstable requests, pressures to respond, and the delegation of tasks and shifting interactants—suggesting that e-mail talk, as social interaction, may both create and affect overload.

This study presents a case of asynchronous, collaborative problem solving aimed at readying a sophisticated distributed technology for large-scale diffusion. We analyzed e-mail transcripts of 30 technologists negotiating complex technical improvements necessary for wide-scale diffusion and found that the group's social interactions and discursive practices determined the improvements they were willing to realize. We detail these social dynamics and their effects on readying technologies for diffusion and argue that technology teams need to become more aware of diffusion as a social dynamic.

Research Article| April 01 2006 Teaching Digital Rhetoric: Community, Critical Engagement, and Application DigiRhet.org DigiRhet.org Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2006) 6 (2): 231–259. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2005-003 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation DigiRhet.org; Teaching Digital Rhetoric: Community, Critical Engagement, and Application. Pedagogy 1 April 2006; 6 (2): 231–259. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2005-003 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Generally, researchers agree that that verbal working memory plays an important role in cognitive processes involved in writing. However, there is disagreement about which cognitive processes make use of working memory. Kellogg has proposed that verbal working memory is involved in translating but not in editing or producing (i.e., typing) text. In this study, the authors used articulatory suppression, a technique that reduces working memory to explore this question. Twenty participants transcribed six texts from one computer window to another, three of the texts with articulatory suppression and three without. When participants were in the articulatory suppression condition, they transcribed significantly more slowly and made significantly more errors than they did in the control condition. Implications for Kellogg’s proposal are discussed.

Firms that are trying to stay competitive in the current business environment often require the use of groups. The popularity of group work is tied to the promise of improved productivity via the pooling of information, knowledge, and skills. In recent years, group work has been expanded to virtual or distributed environments. However, there are questions about how aspects of group work-specifically group size and social presence-impact group members' ability to voice opinions. This study examines groups of two sizes in three distinct social presence settings: face-to-face, face-to-face using collaborative software, and virtual using collaborative software. This study finds that both group size and social presence affect individual instrumental voice, value-expressive voice, and the group interaction process. The results show that by increasing social presence through the use of collaborative software, it is possible to lessen the negative impact of increasing group size. These results should be of interest to the increasing number of organizations that are implementing virtual group environments.

This study investigated the effects of two different computer texts on readers' recall with three different content types (Blocked Constructs, Ordered Constructs, and Detail Layered Constructs) based on individuals' different working memory capacities. The findings indicated that the format and content types influenced how well information was remembered among readers. Participants with low working memory who read traditional scrolling text produced better recall scores than those who read the paged hypertext in two of the three content types. However, for those with high working memory capacity, all results came out differently depending on the content types.

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.

This article surveys the literature on digital rhetoric, which encompasses a wide range of issues, including novel strategies of self-expression and collaboration, the characteristics, affordances, and constraints of the new digital media, and the formation of identities and communities in digital spaces. It notes the current disparate nature of the field and calls for an integrated theory of digital rhetoric that charts new directions for rhetorical studies in general and the rhetoric of science and technology in particular.

This essay presents analyses of two of the ten site visits of computer classrooms (CCRs) conducted between 1998 and 2003. The two sites are located institutionally within departments of English of two U.S. university campuses. The two CCRs examined here were: (1) observed on site by the author in 2000 and 2001; (2) analyzed according to a set of criteria established before the on-site analyses; and (3) photographed. In addition, a digital writing-rhetoric and/or technical writing faculty member was interviewed in person during each site visit. The analysis, part of a book-length project, provides partial data for determining some kinds of physical and architectural/design issues that existed in selected CCRs in the early 2000s and in a number of similar digital environments today

Since the initial appearance of rhetorical analysis of text-based and hypertext communication, the rhetoric of technology has evolved along with the new media forms it studies. This essay reviews critical consensus that calls for a move away from printcentric criticism. It advocates innovative methods for criticism of electronic texts, such as emphasis on comparative media analysis, visual representation, and attention to the programming and codification of electronic texts.

Abstract This article calls for close attention to the current moment when many technologies are becoming routine, occupying a space between "unknown and unnoticed," and for formation of a digital rhetoric that addresses software's liminality, ubiquity, and exteriority. It briefly examines the emerging discourse of the Free and Open Source Software movements and suggests that a closer alignment with software studies in coming years will be mutually beneficial to both fields.

When mixed-gendered student teams collaborate on technical writing tasks, a single male often emerges as the group computer expert. The effects of this trend on perceptions of workload are unknown. This article reports the results of a study in which 12 mixed-gendered teams answered questionnaires on the division and perceptions of labor in their teams. Detailed case studies of four teams supplement the questionnaires. Findings suggest that computer work was highly visible, highly valued, and dominated by men. By contrast, writing was less visible and selectively recognized. Some men were credited with strong writing skills even though they did not produce writing for the project. Moreover, some students explicitly leveraged their computer expertise to avoid writing; furthermore, these computer experts rarely shared technical expertise with others in the context of the team project.

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.