all the organizing committee for inviting Lisa and me to participate in the 2010 IWCA-NCPTW Conference here in Baltimore.Lisa was, unfortunately, unable to be with us today, but this talk is very much a collaborative effort, one that grows out of a larger project which we have just completed.

The challenges of redesigning and reviving Longwood University’s Rhetoric and Professional Writing program involved skills in collaboration, negotiation, and advertisement. While unexpected obstacles arose, taking an honest look at the existing program design and working to maintain the focus on rhetoric helped to circumvent failure. Finally, student involvement, student feedback, and the use of online resources became key elements in bringing a weak program to life.

Since 2003, the International Writing Centers Association has held a Summer Institute for Writing Center Directors and Professionals. Encouragement of scholarship, writing, and publication are important aspects of the institute. We have compiled a bibliography of scholarly works emerging from the first seven institutes. These works include web publications, peer-reviewed journal articles, conference presentations, dissertations, and one book. The entry for each work is followed by a narrative by the author or authors describing the influence of the Summer Institute, how they conceived and developed the work, and how they met their collaborators. Through these narratives we see that the IWCA Summer Institute offers a model for seeding an active community of practice that brings people together from diverse institutions, giving them new perspectives on their work through mentoring, collaboration, and the development of professional friendships. For many, this also results in development of a professional and scholarly identity more deeply connected to writing centers and their attendant fields. We also speculate on the meaning of identified publication patterns and make suggestions for future endeavors.

Technology use and adaptation are the center of attention in research on virtual teams. Through empirical observations from six interpretative cases of virtual teams, we suggest conceptualizing the relationship between technology-use practices and collaborative practices as a technology-alignment process. We define technology alignment based upon four key perspectives on technology-use practices: continuous iterative process, reflection-on-action activities, malleability and reconfigurability, and transformation. Moreover, we show how these four key perspectives influence the design, the outcome, the task processes, and the socioemotional processes of the particular virtual team.

In light of what has taken place since their presentation at the IEEE International Professional Communication Conference in 2005, the authors describe additional requirements and merits of matching technical writing students in the US with translation students in Europe in a collaborative assignment. Where the original article dealt with how to set up and organize the collaboration, this tutorial delves into the pedagogical challenges and the process dynamics involved in such an exchange, including mediation, power, and teamwork issues.

This study assesses the benefits and drawbacks of assigning a collaboratively written midterm paper in nontraditional and traditional introductory college composition courses. Students’ responses suggest a radically different model to be tested in the future.

This article defines research centers as associative enterprises for solving scholarly and societal problems that cannot be adequately addressed by individuals. We identify more than fifty research centers in rhetoric and writing, past and present, and argue that they function as change agents by emphasizing collaboration and conducting research focused on publics.

This study explains the development, implementation, and preliminary findings of an after-school pilot writing program that drew upon a peer collaborative model and a community literacy perspective. Preliminary findings suggest important benefits of this partnership for young children, parents, and the surrounding community.

The work highlighted in this essay focuses on an ethnographic study of a group of African American women, members of Phenomenal Women, Incorporated, who come together not necessarily to read and write, but who, in their “sista space”—their club—often read and write when they come together. In this space, they promote self-help through reading and writing and use their literacy skills to promote civic action and engagement and cultural enrichment. This essay examines the literacy practices in which these women engage in two types of literacy events during their annual Black History Month celebrations.

Analysis of required reading lists sheds light on the factors that underlie admission to pedagogical canons. These variables can serve as a springboard for collaborative faculty development of pedagogical literary canons. By constructing and enacting criteria-based pedagogical canons, professors will be better able to maintain their authority over curricular content.

The fragmentation of science and medicine research in recent years has led to the creation of subdisciplines with distinct identities and ethics. Like many social communities, these subdisciplines have found websites of federal funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) to be an effective and efficient home in which to solidify that identity and communicate those values. Despite the lack of collaborative, Web 2.0 technologies, the sites of NSF and NIH are able to communicate the ethics of the science communities they serve through rhetorical structures as diverse as graphics, page layout, and site structures. This article explores that role of NSF and NIH, including the rhetoric used, the ethics presented, and their broader implications.

This article reports on a digital ethnography that examines writing, authorship, and self-publication in an online niche market. Drawing on interview and web data collected over 3 years, it focuses on the writing practices that have supported the production, distribution, and sanction of 13 ebooks self-published by online poker players. The article advances an understanding of authorship as sustained interaction among writers and readers as the work of publishing becomes absorbed into online networks as literate activity. In lieu of the capital investment of publishers that produces the materiality of the book, participants in these spaces have manufactured valued texts through collective literacy practices, coming to a loose consensus on what constitutes a book, and working together to enable proprietorship over texts, even amid environments of mass collaboration.

Technical communication and usability (user experience, or UX) have a long, intertwined history, dating back at least to the 1970s. The author, who has been active in both fields for the last three decades, gives many examples of how technical communicators have influenced UX practice and how usability specialists have influenced technical communication. The author also explores how technical communicators can continue to contribute to future UX theory, research, and practice through collaboration, through their communication skills, dealing with the reality of ever-increasing complexity in products and processes and dealing with the need to adapt to more rapid change.

Distributed work is an increasingly common phenomenon in a number of technical and professional settings, and the complexity of this work requires high degrees of knowledge sharing and integration that move beyond assembly-line approaches to collaboration. Since participants in distributed-work settings rely almost exclusively on written and spoken language to mediate their collaborative relationships, professional communication faculty need educational approaches that empower students with language practices designed specifically to support effective teaming in these complex environments. To address this need, we employ discourse analysis and Speech Act Theory to identify these language practices in a case study of two cohorts of distributed, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural student teams. The findings show correlations between language practices and successful collaboration. These correlations have significant implications for teaching and practice.

In the midst of Tea Party protests, party politics, and political programming which marked the recent mid-term elections, one question kept returning to me: What would it look like if dialogue, a sense of mutual listening and response, was the norm and not the exception? What would it mean to engage in political issues, but to do with a sense of collaboration, cooperation?

This article describes a beginning research partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and two Mexican universities, the Universidad de Quintana Roo (UQROO) and Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, that has developed and implemented an environment merging the pedagogies of English as a foreign language (EFL) and writing across the curriculum (WAC). The article presents a theoretical background for this partnership based on the research on globally networked learning environments (GNLEs) and then focuses on the early stages of the project as the research teams define their objectives, research methods, and teaching approaches.

In a globally networked learning environment (GNLE), 16 students at a university in Sweden and 17 students at a university in the United States exchanged peer-review comments on drafts of assignments they prepared in English for their technical communication classes. The instructors of both sets of students had assigned the same projects and taught their courses in the same way that they had in the previous year, which contrasts with the common practice of having students in partnering courses work on the same assignment or on linked assignments created specifically for the GNLE. The authors coded the students’ 816 comments according to their focus and orientation in order to investigate the possible differences between the comments made by the L2 students in Sweden and those made by the L1 (English as a second language) students in the United States, the possible impact of peer reviewing online, and the influence of the instructors’ directions on the students’ peer-reviewing behavior.

This article draws on activity theory, politics of the artifact, and speech act theory to analyze how language practices and technology interplay in establishing the social relationships necessary for globally networked teams. Specifically, it uses activity theory to examine how linguistic infelicities and the politics of communication technologies interplay in virtual meetings, thereby demonstrating the importance of grounding professional communication instruction in social as well as technical effectiveness. That is, students must learn not only how to communicate technical concepts clearly and concisely and recognize cultural differences but also how to use language and choose media in ways that produce the social conditions necessary for effective collaboration in globally networked environments. The article analyzes two case studies—a workplace and a classroom—that illustrate how the mediating functions of language and the politics of technology intersect as mediating tools in globally networked activity systems. It then traces the implications of that intersection for professional communication theory and pedagogy.

Abstract In this article, I argue that to understand technical communication instruction in non-Western countries, one has to pay close attention to the impacts of local cultural, educational, political, and economic contexts on technical communication practices. I identify two localized programs that share features of technical communication in China and review their programmatic positioning at national and local levels. I also suggest ways for U.S. technical communicators to start cross-cultural collaboration with local programs.

Some scholars trace the start of writing across the curriculum to the 1970s. However, in 1929, when appointed president of the National Council of Teachers of English, Ruth Mary Weeks initiated A Correlated Curriculum (1936), a significant interdisciplinary project that specifically viewed English as the mechanism for achieving an integrated curriculum. Although her goal was not fully realized, Weeks's efforts are important in their attempts to open education to broader classes of students, to promote learning as a collaborative process, to prepare all students to meet the demands of transforming social and industrial circumstances, and, ultimately, to restructure industrial America.

Writing courses increasingly incorporate Internet and online learning activities as part of the syllabus and teaching materials. How does this change our teaching practices, and which free and collaborative online tools can be most appropriately applied in online and blended writing courses? This is the first part of a two-part article focused on freely available Web 2.0 tools and how they can promote collaboration in the context of social networking. Part I places writing in the context of new views of literacy due in part to revolutionary changes since the turn of the century in how content finds its way to the Internet. Web 2.0 and cloud computing have made it possible for writers to publish not only prose but a range of other media online without having to pass through traditional gate-keepers, and tools and mechanisms have evolved for networking communities of like-minded writers online. Among the many impacts of this development is the possibility now for student writers to write purposefully for worldwide audiences. Part I examines the production side of this dynamic, while Part II (to appear in the first issue of this journal in 2011) explains how the Internet resolves the marketing side of the role once played by traditional publishing and how writers and audiences can navigate the seemingly chaotic preponderance of content available online to find one another’s material and carry on conversations about it, thus providing truly authentic motivation for their writing.

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.

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.

This article argues small departments are ideal laboratories for innovative structures of collaboration. Beginning with the smallest nit—an individual teacher “collaborating with herself” to mine good ideas from one course to another, and graduating to larger and more ambitious structures of collaboration—team- teaching, service- learning, performance and interdisciplinary syllabi, and courses taught between campuses and across the globe—Moffat shows how deliberate collaboration can yield more from less. Using examples from colleagues' work in small departments at Dickinson College, Moffat suggests how creative collaboration can expand pedagogical methods, increase student diversity and demand for a range of courses, establish interdisciplinary communities, and widen the curriculum.

This forum essay explores a collaboration between a teacher and a book. Combining autobiography with teaching notes about a variety of colleges (the writer held adjunct appointments in six colleges in fifteen years before joining the Keene State College faculty), the article claims Scholes, Comley, and Ulmer successfully show how to teach college students difficult texts and critical thinking through imitating language and forms drawn from wide-ranging models. In so doing, students realize how ideas circulate between popular and high culture, and how literary texts inform one another. Though some deem writing by Erving Goffman, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida, however important for understanding current critical debates, too difficult for entering students, let alone their instructors, Dizard says Text Book “teaches well.” Quoting from student papers for proof, Dizard shows that advanced as well as uncertain students can and will master difficult material, provided the teacher is willing—-and brave enough—to learn anew.

Four service-learning projects were conducted in technical communication courses using wikis. Results confirm previous findings that wikis improve collaboration, help develop student expertise, and enact a “writing with the community” service-learning paradigm. However, wikis did not decenter the writing classroom as predicted by previous work. Instructors using wikis to scaffold client projects should calibrate standards for evaluation with students and client, and they may need to encourage clients to stay active on the wiki.

<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>

In her essay "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center," Andrea Lunsford offers a much-needed critique of the traditional "garret" and "storehouse" models for writing center instruction, and she argues for a collaborative model in which students work together in groups to discuss, question, write, and revise.In contrast to the storehouse and garret models that reinscribe rigidly authoritarian or naively libertarian beliefs about language use, this collaborative model dramatizes the "triangulation" or "dialogism" that theorists such as Donald Davidson, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Ann Berthoff place at the heart of composing: as students seek to join in a conversation that precedes and takes place around them, as they seek to understand, complicate, and communicate their perceptions with and through others.In the collaborative writing center, Lunsford writes, students learn how knowledge and reality are "mediated by or constructed through language in social use . . . the product of collaboration" (4).Through collaboration, Kenneth Bruffee writes, students come to internalize those social conversations; they develop "reflective thought" and learn to play "silently, in imagination, the parts of all the participants in the conversation" as they write and reflect (5).While these aims of collaborative learning are ones I enthusiastically support, I find myself resisting jumping on the "collaboration bandwagon" (Lunsford 4) if by collaboration we mean only and always peer-group writing and response or conversation with another person.Peer groups can produce discussion, negotiation,

Writing centers are sites around which folklore circulates.Staff meetings, classrooms, newsletters, and journals are filled with tales of individual and collective actualization, celebrating one-to-one teaching as deeply social, collaborative, and empowering.Legends from the writing center also speak to the tensions inherent in the spaces, reflecting divisions of tutoring as prescriptive versus directive, banking versus dialogic, and peer-driven versus expertowned.Following their review of writing center theory, history, and practice, Paula Gillespie and Neal Lerner advise, "What is most important is to understand where our practices come from and to unravel the various influences on those practices" (154).Knowing these conditions of possibility makes for more effective tutoring, and this awareness also speaks to a politics about learning and the production of writers.Gillespie and Lerner describe commonplace mindsets about writing centers as garrets for skills -building and testing, as generative spaces for confidence and collaboration, and as critical arenas in which to problem-pose institutional and social discursive practices (147-50).For each domain, the tutorial and the social actors in and surrounding it are implicated in a certain identity politics.In the storehouse writing center, skill-building and knowledge transmission posit the writer as a vessel in need of filling, and identity becomes conferred as a sort of membership card or rite of passage.In the generative writing center, the writer emerges from social interaction, and identity becomes a negotiation of assimilation, separation, and subversion.In the critical/activist writing center, consciousness-raising produces writers aware of the constellation

Based on a study of observable changes author-users made to three Wikipedia articles, this article contends that Wikipedia supports notions of revision, collaboration, and authority that writing studies purports to value, while also extending our understanding of the production of knowledge in public spaces. It argues that Wikipedia asks us to reexamine our expectations for the stability of research materials and who should participate in public knowledge making.

Creating a group paper has always made unusual demands on students as they figure out their role in the process of collaborative authorship. Inviting writers to work with newer technologies, such as online word processors and wikis, can provide opportunities to make the process and outcomes of collaboration more transparent. In this article, collaborative writing approaches that use a number of Web-based tools are discussed, including cooperative synchronous writing with Google Docs, inquiry-based writing with wikis, multigenre writing in response to literature, and collaboratively constructed study guides.

This article addresses the "problem of speaking for others" in a joint community-based research project between the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Reading, Pennsylvania branch and Penn State Berks to uncover, document, and disseminate to the public African American history in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Integrating community partners' and students' voices with her own, Grobman suggests that the Berks County African American History project approached a model of CBR in which whites and African Americans spoke (and wrote) with one another. She argues that this productive, but highly complex collaboration between community partners, students, and faculty reminds us that theoretical understandings of such concepts as hybridity, border-crossing, and blurring of group-based differences and identities do not necessarily occur in practice; rather, the Black-white binary, sometimes for very good reasons, is not dissolved. Grobman recommends strategies that will aid others involved CBR to create venues that approach equal authority rather than paternalistic service.

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.

With the “counterhegemonic figured communities” of HBCUs as our lens, our idea(l)s are shaped within specific rewritings of race, access, and education that move us toward a new framework. Alongside teaching narratives, we foreground collaborative revisions of identity, critical mentoring, and coalition-work as an alternative theory of pedagogy and composition.

This paper draws on two sources to theorize gender literacy. First, it examines several influential theories of social change embedded in community literacy scholarship. Next, it uses two of these theories to analyze qualitative data from an after-school program. In this program, university students mentored Latina middle-school students to promote both gender literacy and academic literacy. Based on this analysis, it argues that (1) only a collaborative, negotiated approach can promote effective social change, (2) that such efforts must include reflexive work by researchers to produce viable negotiations, and (3) that this approach highlights the intersection between pragmatic and ethical concerns that underlies effective social change.

This article examines the characteristics of collaborative work and overlapping activity systems in the popular online game World of Warcraft. Using genre theory and activity theory as frames to work out the genre ecology of gameplay, the article focuses on how players coordinate ad hoc grouping activity across and through genres. It articulates the related development of open systems in online gaming in a discussion of interface modifications (AddOns) and online information databases that players generate, drawing on De Certeau's formulation of strategies and tactics and Warner's discussion of publics and counterpublics. The article concludes by discussing implications of online gaming for an open-systems approach to information design in professional communication and for professional communication in general.

Genred documents facilitate collaboration and workplace practices in many ways—particularly in the medical workplace. This article represents a portion of a larger grounded investigation of how medical professionals invoke a wide range of rhetorical strategies when deliberating about complex patient cases during weekly, multidisciplinary deliberations called Tumor Board meetings. Specifically, the author explores the role of one key document in oncological practice, the Standard of Care document. Each Standard of Care document (one for every known cancer) presents a set of national guidelines intended to standardize the treatment of cancer. Tumor Board participants invoke these guidelines as evidence for or against particular future action. In order to better understand how genred, generalizable guidelines like Standard of Care documents afford decision making amid uncertainty, the author conducts a temporal and contextual analysis of the document's use during deliberations as well as a modified Toulminian analysis of a representative sample. Results suggest that, while on its own the document achieves an authoritative, charter-like purpose, it fails to make explicit a link between individual patients' experiences and the profession's expectations for how to act. Implications for how genred, generalizable guidelines—given the way they encourage certain ways of seeing over others—organize and authorize work are discussed, and a modified Toulminian approach to understanding the relationship between claim and evidence in multimodal texts is modeled.

Moving Out/Moving In: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of the Immigrant Experience is a service-learning course created and taught by Mirta Tocci in the Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College in Boston, MA. Tocci describes the five-year history of her collaboration with community partner, lnquilinos Boricuas en Acción, focusing on how Emerson students' study of the psychosocial effects of the immigrant experience inspires art projects created by Emerson students and Latino children aged 5-12 enrolled in IBA's Cacique after-school program.

This collaboratively written essay explores and advocates for the rich potential of community -university educational-activist partnerships for praxis-oriented learning that enrich the lives of all by unleashing the collective power of students, teachers, and community members. Offering four perspectives from such a collaboration in Minnesota, a place that has been a magnet for national and regional anti-immigrant activity, we reflect on the false notion of a town-gown divide, the emotional, political, and deeply personal investments we have in making these collaborations successful, and the critically important and imperative nature of community-based work for shaping a more humane and just future.

Attention to the similarities between an academic class and a magazine illuminates how periodicity affects the reading and learning experience. Focusing on the subscribers' power in shaping the continuing life of a periodical, the teaching methodology presented here also underscores the collaborative nature of all teaching.

Fueled by disciplinary disagreements and resource fights, comp/lit conflicts continue. However, productive collaboration is possible and an opportunity remains in developing general education writing courses. A general education course in teaching writing through literature is argued for on the grounds that English studies has been positively transformed by the mainstreaming of composition, pedagogy, and cultural studies.

This article makes a case for using MySpace as a pedagogical tool in the survey course. MySpace can draw attention to the kinds of restrictions the collaboration between “literary” and “history” places on how the survey course interprets the past. The article gives detailed accounts of how students uploaded MySpace sites for a cross section of literary figures on the Brit Lit II survey syllabus in Spring 2007. Placing figures from the syllabus on MySpace got students to rethink the past as a series of interconnected networks of complicated and evolving conversations throughout the century. Students used the kinds of communication that MySpace makes possible for their personal lives and used it as a way to manage speculative and informed conversations between literary figures on the course syllabus. Excerpts from student essays suggest that transplanting figures like William Blake, Robert Burns, John Keats, Mary Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf onto MySpace impacts how we understand the kinds of conversations the nineteenth century has with itself, and what this tells us about their literary and historical legacy.

A recent British national intelligence-based Assessment (2002) illustrates how one government agency communicated science to serve its policy goals. This article analyzes some of the values that drive science, public policy, and national intelligence, and traces how those values affected the Assessment writers' goals and communication strategies. Through close reading of the Assessment's foreword and first section, this study shows how the writers shaped scientific and technical information to satisfy their disciplines' values and to naturalize their “proper perspective” on the policy case. Further analysis of similar documents will extend current research on scientific rhetoric, multidisciplinary collaborative writing, and public communication.

Larry Sanger, a Ph.D. philosopher (The Ohio State University, 2000), was, along with Jimmy Wales, a co-founder of Wikipedia. Sanger is currently the Editor-in-Chief of a new wiki encyclopedia project called Citizendium. He has written and spoken extensively on the subjects of online knowledge communities and what he calls "the new politics of knowledge" in the age of the Internet. He also offers consulting services on the design of online collaborative communities for Internet businesses

Joanna Wolfe is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville where she teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, human-computer interaction, and research methods. She is author of the forthcoming textbook Team Writing from Bedford-St. Martin's, a guide to writing collaboratively and working on a team. Her previous scholarly work has appeared in journals such as Written Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning.

Writing faculty, tutors, and librarians at West Virginia University took a team-approach to teaching research, reading, and writing as intertwined processes. This collaborative project encouraged each member of the team to re-examine professional and disciplinary boundaries, and resulted in new assignments and activities that successfully engage students in researched writing.

Abstract As the City of Houston's Bureau of Air Quality Control embraced new policies, technologies, and rhetorical strategies, they simultaneously moved through Lukensmeyer and Torres's "four levels of public involvement," which include the information, consultation, engagement, and collaboration levels (Lukensmeyer & Torres, 2006 Lukensmeyer, C. J., & Torres, L. H. (2006). Public deliberation: A manager's guide to citizen engagement. IBM Center for the Business of Government Collaboration Series. Retrieved November 2007 from http://www.businessofgovernment.org/pdfs/LukensmeyerReport.pdf [Google Scholar]). Because of the technical and scientific nature of air quality inspections, increasing public involvement, especially the involvement of those in a predominantly African American and a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, has been a challenge. This article describes the Bureau's journey through the information level, where the Bureau opens public access and participation in the investigation and reporting process; the consultation level, where Bureau staff go door-to-door in poor and minority neighborhoods collecting citizen feedback regarding perceived environmental hazards; the engagement level, where the Bureau conducts monthly environmental meetings with neighborhood residents; and the collaboration level, where citizens are taught to collect evidence of environmental violations.

Instant messaging (IM) has the potential to be a powerful collaborative workplace communication tool. As this information and communication technology (ICT) becomes more diffused at work, it is important to consider how the workers will cope with yet another communication option. Using a cost-minimization perspective, this proposition-building piece links three types of costs associated with IM use, delay, access, and error, with two salient workplace concerns, productivity and communication overload. The delay costs associated with IM use are considerably lower than with other ICTs. While increased use of IM can enhance productivity, it might also lead to perceptions of overload. IM access costs include organizational access, interruptions, user experiences, user differences, and generational differences-variables that influence one another and can lead to either outcome. Error costs come in two forms: single-channel factors and message quality issues. These likely lead to increased communication overload and decreased productivity. Combining IM with other ICTs is a likely moderator in this relationship and might help overcome the single-channel factors. The resulting eight propositions and theoretical model provide a predictive framework to focus future workplace IM use studies.