A case study of a graduate-level community literacy seminar that involved a tutoring project with adult digital literacy learners, this essay illustrates the value of community outreach and service-learning for graduate students in writing studies. Presenting multiple perspectives through critical reflection, student authors describe how their experiences contextualized, enhanced, and complicated their theoretical knowledge of public rhetoric and community literacy. Inspired by her students’ reflections, the faculty co-author issues a call to graduate programs in writing, rhetoric, literacy studies, and technical communication to develop a conscious commitment to graduate students’ civic engagement by supporting opportunities to learn, teach, and research with community partners.

Theorists of multiliteracies, social semiotics, and the New Literacy Studies have drawn attention to the potential changing nature of writing and literacy in the context of networked communications. This article reports findings from a design-based research project in Year 4 classrooms (students aged 8.5-10 years) in a low socioeconomic status school. A new writing program taught students how to design multimodal and digital texts across a range of genres and text types, such as web pages, online comics, video documentaries, and blogs. The authors use Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device to theorize the pedagogic struggles and resolutions in remaking English through the specialization of time, space, and text. The changes created an ideological struggle as new writing practices were adapted from broader societal fields to meet the instructional and regulative discourses of a conventional writing curriculum.

This study examined the impact of different forms of feedback on the writing of a group of 82 adolescent students in secondary English classes. During a 6-week intervention, students were randomly assigned to one of three feedback groups: peer feedback on pen-and-paper drafts, teacher feedback delivered electronically through a course management system, and automated feedback generated through computer-based writing evaluation software. Pre- and post-measures of student writing quality, length, and correctness were analyzed, and survey data explored student perceptions of their experiences. Findings indicate that all students, regardless of which form of feedback they received, wrote longer essays and scored higher on holistic ratings at post test than they did at pretest. Neither language status nor group assignment had a greater or lesser impact on performance on length or holistic quality. However, differences between feedback groups spiked on the proximal measure that examined mastery of particular aspects of the genre being taught. Both peer feedback and teacher feedback delivered electronically had a statistically significant impact on student performance in the genre of open-ended response. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for future research and instruction in the secondary context.

Reviews 419 tional textual forms than they might have appeared when first becoming widely available and used in the 1990s. And yet, the contemporary history narrated here doesn't always seem right. McCorkle acknowledges that many digital rhetoricians often equate delivery with medium. He himself seems to equate them early in his book, in some of its opening sentences: “This book is about the moving parts of the rhetorical process: the raised arm, the clenched fist, the shifting counte­ nance, and (more recently) the array of typefaces, color palettes, graphics, background audio files, and other multimodal content used to help covey a given message to its intended audience" (1). Ultimately, however, the materi­ ality of digital interfaces is not embodiment, even if such interfaces remediate approaches, positions, and stances from embodied rhetorical performances. Late in the book, McCorkle acknowledges this: "In the era of digital writing, rhetoric has disembodied the canon of delivery" (160). Such disembodiment suggests that what is at stake in contemporary delivery is more than just an interplay of older media forms and newer media forms. As he puts it: "expanding the theoretical scope of delivery to include texts not uttered by the speaking body extends the conceptual language of the canon beyond the traditionallv understood constraints of space and time, making it a far richer part of the rhetorical process" (160). Yes, surely he's right. But perhaps digital delivery is not just disembodiment, or portends a new set of relations between communication and bodies? Such a question lies beyond the scope of McCorkle's book, but it's to his credit that his analysis leaves us wondering what new bodies of knowledge our digital technologies might deliver to us. Jonathan Alexander University of California, Irvine Costelloe, Timothy M., ed. The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 13 + 304 pp ISBN 978-0-521-14367-7; Eck, Caroline van, Stijn Bussels, Maarten Delbeke, Jurgen Pieters, eds. Translations ofthe Sublime: The Early Modern Recep­ tion and Dissemination of Longinus' Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre. Leiden: Brill, 2012. xix + 272 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-22955-6 Just as aesthetics is undergoing something of a revival in classical studies, so too is the heritage of the sublime increasingly getting its due again. The two collections under review contribute mightily to both trends. And they do so above all by marshaling a strong army of scholars from a number of disciplines, from Classics and modern literatures to philosophy, geography, architecture and design, art history, theater, and rhetoric. The diversity pays off: the sublime is shown to flourish in each of these areas, 420 RHETORICA often unexpectedly, as if diffusing its radiant light into all conceivable corners of the modern world and into the present. If you had any doubt whether Longinus made an impact on modernity, you need look no further than here. Costelloe's volume, though not explicitly concerned with the reception of Longinus, is nonetheless heavily informed by this agenda. The Introduc­ tion and the first chapter ("Longinus and the Ancient Sublime" by Malcolm Heath) set the tone for the remaining chapters, which quickly rush into the eighteenth century, starting with Burke, Kant, representatives of the Scot­ tish Enlightenment (a refreshing change), French neoclassicists, and then the sublime of Lyotard and company, the most recent French heirs to Boileau and company. These essays constitute the first part of the collection, which offer less of a "Philosophical History of the Sublime" than a drastically fore­ shortened version of that history. The second part spreads out in fascinating ways to look at the sublime in the Netherlands and in America in the 18i/7 and 19f/z centuries, in the fields of the philosophy of nature and the environment, in religion, among British Romantics, and against the background of the fine arts question and in architecture. The most interesting essays are those that broach unfamiliar territory. The associationalism of Gerard, Karnes, Alison, and Stewart reconstructed by Rachel Zuckert and put in relation to the sub­ lime will likely send readers off to the library (or to Google) in search of X these intriguing figures, as will Eva Madeleine...

“Assessment, from our perspective, should help us understand what we are doing and improve the ways that we are doing it.”

Oral history projects about rhetorical studies contribute to transdisciplinary histories by creating living texts that reflect the dynamism of scholarly cultures. Through interviews conducted at the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology (ARST), we chart the organizational and intellectual history of a field, its contributions to science studies, and its potential future directions. These digitized, archived oral histories serve as an articulation point for transdisciplinary reflection, but they also represent an important strand of digital humanities work that creates living texts and keeps them open for future articulations.

Professional identity is oft explored in the field, but such identities usually reside institutionally and may exclude women who engage in professional communication from the workplace of the home. One instantiation of this extra-institutional professionalism is mom blogs, the authors of which create content, find sponsors, and address issues important to mothers. Yet the women lack legitimacy as professionals because of the title “mommy blogger” and because of the notion that blogging is a hobby. My qualitative study explores how mom bloggers claim a professional space in communication. I interviewed 22 mom bloggers, using Faber's (2002, [18]) theory of professionalism and Durack's (1997, [17]) ideas of redefining terms, such as “workplace,” to include women. My findings show that mom bloggers engage in the characteristics of professional communicators, model egalitarian professionalism, employ an ethic of care that combats elitism, and challenge the field to include their work, from the home and through new media, as professional.

Research problem: Adding contextual information to a core message has been shown to be critical in improving communication quality, especially in computer mediated communication. This paper models how people contextualize messages in the face of changing communication complexity. Research question: Can changes in communication complexity that occur during the communication process explain and predict contextualization? Literature review: Theories of human communication and studies of computer supported collaboration suggest that communication complexity reflects potentially problematic conditions resulting from 1) the difference in perspective and context held by the collaborators; 2) the incompatibility between the message representation and the way it is interpreted and used by the receiver; and 3) the intensity of information exchanged between communicators. We use this definition as a basis of for developing a measure of cognitive communication complexity. The literature further suggests that higher communication complexity induces higher contextualization. Methodology: First, we conducted a pilot study to develop and validate measures of communication complexity. Second, we conducted a laboratory experiment, in which 258 participants working in pairs collaborated on a sixteen-step assembly task. They used a tailored system that structured each message as core (the essence of the message) and context (additional information that explains the core and the sender's perspective). We used unbalanced panel data analysis to examine the repeated measures of contextualization and communication complexity associated with each step of the task. Results and discussion: We found that collaborators respond to changes in communication complexity at the expense of higher collaborative effort. We offer a cost-benefit framework in which, at the step level, people contextualize to reduce the communication complexity, and at the task level, they additionally consider the impact of contextualization on task performance. The main limitation of this study was the need to structure the communication between collaborators, to control and measure contextualization. Future research can adapt and extend our measure of communication complexity to less structured communication.

English educators are contending with the proliferation of mobile devices in students’ lives, and with the imminent integration of mobile devices into classrooms. Concurrently, literacy researchers using social semiotic theories of multimodality to investigate adolescents’ digital composing have focused on screens, paying scant attention to the bodies moving with them. Responding to recent critiques of multimodality that have centered on a lack of attention to embodiment and affect, this article leverages the concept of real virtualities to avoid artificially bifurcating screen and body, and to contribute a beginning theorization of the embodied experience of composing with mobile devices, which includes feeling-histories, affective atmospheres, and the felt experience of time. The data analyzed in this article come from a 12-week enrichment course in which five adolescents composed digital narratives with iPods. The overarching analysis describes all literacy practices with mobile devices in the course, and the microanalysis, using multimodal interaction analysis, compares two students with contrasting histories of mobile device use. Findings show these students’ literacies as more body-centered than techno-centered, and evince tensions between institutionalized learning environments and adolescents’ affective, cultural histories of being mobile while engaged in literacy. Further, findings describe how the feeling of tools and semiotic material influenced the trajectories of students’ bodies and narratives. Theories of digital composition should continue expanding to account for connections between mobility and affect, and the pedagogical importance of motility. The changing nature of literacy in the milieu of mobile computing compels researchers to consider the role of the moving, feeling body in literacy with more scrutiny.

“Our overarching assumption, one that carries through all principles and practices for curricular and program design, is that no one individual should be the center of the program.”

Rhetorical approaches to identification have tended to favor it over its counterpart, division. However, compensatory divisions can be rhetorically productive for protest movements that challenge the state. An analysis of the use of these divisions in the Occupy Wall Street movement—particularly the use of the human microphone and computer networking—shows that these technologies aid in enacting divisions between protestors and the dominant social structures that they challenge, thus creating the potential for rhetorically productive sociality.

Cultural shifts in technology and organizational structure are affecting the embodied practice of symbolic-analytic work, creating the need for more fine-grained tracings of everyday activity. Drawing on interviews and observations, this article explores how one freelance professional communicator's social media use is intertwined with inventive social coordination. Networked writing environments help symbolic analysts gain access to communities of practice, maintain a presence within them, and leverage social norms to circulate texts through them.

Research problem: Corporate websites have been the subject of several research endeavors, and most of the research has focused on usability and interactivity. Since the emergence of the term Web 2.0, more websites have added social features to their base functionality, and this new type of interactivity has yet to be investigated. This study explores the research evolution in this field. Research questions: How has research on interactivity in corporate websites evolved? How can prior research be categorized? In each category, which of the research challenges has little or no research support? Literature review: Our approach to the topic is guided by four major streams of research-(1) the diffusion of innovations theory; (2) the technology, organization, and environment framework; (3) the institutional theory; and (4) the model from Iacovou et al. The analysis of the evolution of corporate websites showed three common types of corporate websites classified by their purpose and interaction intensity. Corporate websites hereby often benefit from the inclusion of design principles and patterns induced by the term Web 2.0. While examining the characteristics of corporate websites, usability and interactivity were found to be most important with reference to positive user response. Therefore, we clarified the concept of web-based interaction and reviewed the research on consumer response. Methodology: To gain a deeper understanding of the evolution of research on the interactivity in corporate websites, our study conducted a systematic and exhaustive literature review in which we identified and categorized several research issues. We conducted a qualitative analysis of 166 articles and classified relevant contributions by research issue and category. Results and conclusion: Among the identified research issues concerning interactivity that facilitates communication of the organization, only relationship management emerged as a dominant issue. Research issues concerning interactivity that facilitates e-commerce could be found most and they tend to focus on two main areas: decision support systems and recommendation agents on sales-oriented e-commerce websites and loyalty, satisfaction, and trust as key variables. Research issues concerning interactivity for interpersonal communication mainly focus on the user's individual motivation and successive behavior, and contain many different references to computer-mediated interaction and online communities. Research issues in the field of designing for interactivity discuss interface design questions and focus on numerous website characteristics and their impact. Given those issues, we make suggestions for future research that would explore the organizational behavior related to innovation diffusion on corporate websites.

Winner of the 2014 Computers and Composition Michelle Kendrick Outstanding Digital Scholarship Award Con Job: Stories of Adjunct and Contingent Labor describes and makes visible the pedagogical, economic, and ethical costs of higher education’s growing reliance on adjunct and contingent faculty. Armed with a borrowed video camera, Megan Fulwiler and Jennifer Marlow, two teachers of composition, set out to record the voices of faculty who are often invisible in and marginalized by the institutions where they teach.

Writing Assessment in the 21st Century: Essays in Honor of Edward M. White Norbert Elliot and Les Perelman, eds. Race and Writing Assessment Asao B. Inoue and Mya Poe, eds. Writing Assessment and the Revolution in Digital Texts and Technologies Michael R. Neal Digital Writing: Assessment and Evaluation Heidi A. McKee and Danielle Nicole DeVoss, eds.

I argue in this article that digital composing practices require composition teachers to rethink the way we articulate learning outcomes and conduct classroom assessment. To accomplish this, we must revise the language we use to talk about outcomes and assessment in the context of new media. We also need to better understand how technologies are changing student compositions, thus driving the need to change our learning outcomes and assessment practices. The purpose of this article is to provide rationales and strategies for doing so, as well as classroom activities that can be used to assess new media compositions.

Classifying the literature survey course as an exit from literary study more often than an “introduction” to advanced courses, this article explores how sophomore-level literature courses can use the genre of published literary blogs to help student writers find relevance in their reading of unfamiliar texts.

As Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) utilized in workplaces, classrooms, and community organizations continue to proliferate, it follows that the kinds of knowledge necessary to assemble those technologies in order to engage in effective professional communication are becoming increasingly complex. This article details a study conducted of two student teams engaged in a service-learning class in which they were tasked with producing high-quality digital products---a mini-documentary and a simple, but interactive website---for client organizations---an art classroom in a local public school and a mentoring initiative within a local non-profit. The main findings of this study are that students mobilized a variety of resources and created a flexible network of technologies, knowledges, people, and modes of communication in order to address issues pertinent to their clients. In addition, I argue that the most important resource students mobilized was knowledge itself, indicating that one of the most important aspects of digital composing may be in-depth, practical knowledge of technologies, modes, and the genres they involve. Ultimately, the implications of this limited, classroom-based case study are that a situated understanding of how to assemble knowledges for the effective design of communication within a given communication infrastructure may be more important than access to the most cutting-edge modes and technologies, especially when working with resource-poor organizational clients.

Although rhetoric and composition has long engaged with emerging digital technologies, historians in our field have not yet in large part entered these conversations. In this special issue, we present four essays by scholars building digital historiographic projects, each of which directly addresses values and concerns that lie at the heart of critical practice in rhetoric and composition: engaging underrepresented and marginalized communities; taking up critically important questions regarding historiographic investigation; and emphasizing collaboration among both scholars and stakeholder groups. Together, these essays contribute significantly to the still nascent conversation regarding how the digital intersects with the historical.

This article suggests ways digital tools and platforms can help researchers capture the local and global forces that interanimate local literacy scenes. As a concrete example, we offer Remixing Rural Texas (RRT), describing the way this digital tool works to capture a targeted literacy scene: the civil rights efforts of two African American students on a recently desegregated campus in 1967–68. RRT features an eighteen-minute documentary about these efforts, remixed almost entirely from existing archival materials, and a data-source annotation tool that connects the local literacy scene to global events. We conclude with an extended treatment of local stakeholders and the way RRT enables more sustainable, reciprocal, and participatory partnerships with the local community.

Since the 1960s, computer scientists and enthusiasts have paralleled computer programming to literacy, arguing it is a generalizable skill that should be more widely taught and held. Launching from that premise, this article leverages historical and social findings from literacy studies to frame computer programming as “computational literacy.” I argue that programming and writing have followed similar historical trajectories as material technologies and explain how they are intertwined in contemporary composition environments. A concept of “computational literacy” helps us to better understand the social, technical and cultural dynamics of programming, but it also enriches our vision of twenty-first century composition.

Public writing spaces, such as blogs and social media sites, are expanding quickly with new websites, web applications, and other interfaces constantly available to users. As these digital composing spaces continue to expand, it is important that writers are capable of operating within them, yet many composition students lack the rhetorical awareness to present effective arguments in multimodal digital interfaces. To address this issue, the author designed a project to introduce students to public writing while reflecting on the implications of the permanence of their writing, the searchability of these public spaces, and their responsibility as writers. This project began by asking students to reflect on their own online personae, be it through Facebook profiles, personal blogs, or online class forums. Utilizing websites like Yelp and YouTube offered students the opportunity to see how others present themselves online and the effectiveness of composers in these digital spaces. Taught in an online course format, this project demonstrates how writing can live outside of the traditional classroom space and contribute to the students’ community. For the writing teacher, it creates the occasion to delve into students’ understandings of ethics in online writing while illustrating the rhetorical components necessitated by composing in digital media.

It is a well-attested fact among the academia that the terminology and discourse of computer science is pervaded with metaphors. Yet, almost all the studies on metaphor application in computer science have approached the issue of the metaphor use and its influence on the user-computer interaction from an intralingual stance leaving the field of literature related to this subject with a lacking for the adoption of an interlingual attitude. The question is whether metaphor is as extensively far-reaching in its influence among the computer users across the globe as it has been pervasive in its use in computer discourse? This study, through drawing the scholars' attention to the significance of user metaphoric awareness in the receptor communities regarding the recognition of any metaphoric application based upon the notion of transparency or opacity of metaphoric meaning in terms of the user's command of the language in use in computer science, tries to put forth the idea of globalization of metaphoric meaning in computer science and its influence upon the users and at the same time propose some possible alternatives to the computer writers and decision-makers both in global and local levels in order for the user metaphoric awareness being promoted.

The authors of this volume (Ilpo Koskinen, John Zimmerman, Thomas Binder, Johan Redstrom, and Stephan Wensveen) argue that design research needs more than mathematics: it needs many other vocabularies as well, including art, cultural studies, anthropology, cognitive psychology, and communication. The book is clearly written and helpfully designed, with focused case studies and incisive cartoon-like summaries of key concepts. The reference section is extensive and truly useful: international in scope and broadly multidisciplinary. The authors, all academics, work in art, design, computer science, social science, filmmaking, engineering, and philosophy.

Research problem: Due to globalization and the increased availability of online collaboration tools, individuals are now likely to work together in settings where computers are their primary mode of communication. However, because communication characteristics are different in virtual team settings, especially when they are text based, communication problems, such as deception, arise. Recent research found that deceptive individuals in virtual teams can have a negative impact on group task performance, and it recognized that in addition to the communication medium, task and group characteristics, such as task complexity and group member experience, are important influences in these settings. However, the impacts of these additional influences have not been empirically examined. Research question: Does group members' experience with each other and task complexity affect their deception detection accuracy and task performance in a computer-mediated communication setting? Literature review: Previous literature has shown that deceivers are an important influence on computer-mediated groups. However, few studies have compared different group settings, and no studies have empirically tested the impact that task and group characteristics, such as task complexity and group member experience, have on these types of groups. Methodology: An experiment was designed to test the effect of group member experience and task complexity on computer-mediated groups facing deception. Two-hundred fifty-six undergraduates (256) were selected for the experiment. Results and conclusions: Quantitative analysis, which included multivariate analysis of variance, revealed that (a) groups performing a low-complexity task were better at detecting deception than were groups performing a high-complexity task, (b) groups with members who had experience with each other had higher task performance than did inexperienced groups, and (c) experienced groups did not have higher accuracy in detecting deception than did inexperienced groups. These results highlight the importance of understanding the different affects that task complexity and group member experience have on virtual teams facing deception, and they provide insight into what practices can help minimize the impact of interactive computer-mediated deception.

Teaching problem: Students' written assignments show that they tend to list ideas rather than provide evidence-based arguments. This might be because they do not have a framework to base their arguments on. Research question: Does the communication model framework help students to write evidence-based arguments when evaluating the communicative effectiveness in corporate blogs? Situating the case: The ability to engage in argument from evidence is one of the Next Generation Science Standards for scientific and engineering practices. Thus, it is important for engineering students to know how to present evidence-based arguments. The communication model framework was introduced to provide students with a framework to base their arguments on. This framework builds on the genre-based and academic literacies approaches to teaching writing. More companies are now using corporate blogs (an open, participatory, and globally networked social media tool) to engage stakeholders directly across multiple contexts. The framework is useful in analyzing evolving genres like corporate blogs because it is not only structured but also flexible. About the case: This teaching case describes the use of the communication model framework as the basis for students' arguments. The framework was used in a general writing course for engineering students. Working in groups, the students used the framework for their oral practice critique and their critique assignment on a given piece of academic writing or corporate blog. They also had to write a reflection paper individually at the end of the course. Results: Overall, the mixed groups and international students groups made a stronger attempt to apply the framework compared to the Singaporean student groups. The students' educational backgrounds, the group dynamics within the group, and the nature of the discussions affected the level of adoption of the framework in their writing. Conclusions: This teaching case reflects the value of mixed group, face-to-face discussions, and personal reflection in teaching students evidence-based writing, and calls for more research on flexible frameworks as genres evolve.

Writing has changed due to the affordances of digital technologies, and writing assessment has changed as well. As writing programs integrate more digital writing work, students, teachers, and administrators face the rewards and challenges of assessing and evaluating multimodal and networked writing projects. Whether classroom-based or program-level; whether in first-year writing, technical communication, or writing-across-the-curriculum; whether formative or summative; and whether for purposes of placement, grading, self-study, or external reporting, digital writing complicates the processes and practices of assessment.

Computer-assisted translation (aka machine translation) is on the fast track to becoming a utility. Translation will automatically become part of everything we do. Computers, websites, touch screen devices, in-car navigation systems, kiosks in public places, ATMs, airline self-service terminals -- basically any consumer-facing graphic user interface -- will include a "translate" button. In fact, the beta version of the Android operating system includes just that in the latest rendition of the Chrome browser. That's just the start of things to come. Machine translation will soon be ubiquitous!

A reflection onA Thrilla in ManiLA(Kairos17.2), this work examines the challenges and pleasures of composing a work on an iPad 2, a device that is not often recognized for its digital composing potential. This Inventio piece features a voice-over narration that talks about the process of composing and collects a series of related links (gathered below) that reveal earlier stages in the composing process.

The use of online course or learning management system (LMS) tools proliferates as writing instruction grows online along with administrative concerns to improve teaching efficiencies and program assessment. While many institutions use the template feature in LMS systems (e.g. Blackboard Vista) to generate a location for teacher resources, some institutions are using LMS tools to standardize course content, delivery, and pedagogy to varying degrees. However, digital literacy issues that affect both teachers and students can negatively impact teaching and learning with LMS tools, especially in Web-based settings. It is important to understand how such tools may or may not be used effectively in standardizing writing pedagogy, particularly how designers’ unfamiliarity with course content and their own and their students’ inexperience with the tools can negatively affect pedagogy and learning with such tools. I describe a specific example of problems encountered within an extreme form of standardization in a Web-based writing course delivered via WebCT/Vista, identify implications of such standardization, and suggest considerations that educators should be aware of in their efforts to standardize writing pedagogy through LMS tools.

This article introduces teachers to some freely available online resources designed to help writers – those of all skill levels, especially language learners – with collocation. It shows how wildcard searches in search engines, online corpora, and concordance tools can be used to check and explore collocations in writing.

This study investigates the usability of print and online video instructions for computer tasks. Usability tests, comprehension tests, and questionnaires were collected from participants, and 4 areas of usability were analyzed: effectiveness, retention, satisfaction, and preference. Findings show marginal differences between the 2 mediums, except in terms of user satisfaction and instruction length. This research helps technical communicators better understand the affordances, or potentials and limitations, of print and video instructions.

This essay explores the role of rhetoric in everyday online activities, arguing that scholarship in digital rhetoric can be informed by Raymond Williams's theory of media flow. Turning to Martin Heidegger and John Poulakos, I argue that the Web's rhetoric of the possible encourages a momentum of text consumption by which users are tempted to further immerse themselves in a “flowing” media experience. As digital technologies provide new opportunities for the surveillance and personalization of our Web practices, this article concludes by encouraging scholars to be critical of the tempting possibilities—and possible selves—crafted by this rhetoric.

Research problem: Although much research exists on virtual worlds, very few studies focus on professional virtual worlds used for working in a global setting. Research questions: (1) How do global managers currently use and experience professional virtual worlds (Virtual Worlds) as a communication media for global work? and (2) How do these Virtual Worlds support global and professional communication in a geographically distributed context? Literature review: We reviewed Virtual World literature in the area of social sciences, education, and games. Little research has been conducted on Virtual Worlds for workgroups. But those studies support the assumption that Virtual Worlds are suitable for global distributed work as a collaboration and communication medium. Methodology: With an explorative and qualitative interview research approach, we conducted 47 semi-structured interviews with virtual world vendors, researchers, and managers using virtual worlds in their work. Data were analyzed based on Grounded Theory Analysis methods. Results and conclusions: The results show four different use cases applied for professional Virtual Worlds: small team meetings, trainings, community building, and conferences. Furthermore, our findings confirm Virtual World literature that states that the professional Virtual World as a communication and collaboration tool supports geographically distributed work as well as visualization and learning in a global context.

Since their introduction, self-service ticket vending machines (TVMs) have become an increasingly important distribution channel in the public transport sector, progressively replacing the traditional ticket counter. In a public transport setting, where ticket counter closures have left different groups of people dependent on TVM to meet their mobility needs, a single, effective system is required. Research questions: (1) Which barriers do currently hinder the usage of TVM? (2) Which requirements should a barrier-free TVM fulfill? (3) How can we design a new self-service TVM for a nationwide public railway company? (4) How can we ensure that the usability and user experience (UX) is high for all users, especially for those with low levels of technological affinity? Situating the case: Most other studies on the use and usability of TVMs were conducted as post-hoc evaluations. In contrast, our case study presents a user-centered design (UCD) approach that takes the needs of the different target groups into account throughout the whole development process. Theories and concepts that guided the case included UCD, which involves alternating test and evaluation loops that actively involve users to create a usable product and UX, which describes the quality of the experience a person has when interacting with a specific computer system using a specific interaction technique. Methodology: More than 250 participants were involved in focus groups, observations, interviews, and experiments from the very first stages of development. Interface designs were presented to the future end users to obtain their feedback, with the results fed back into the design process. About the case: A prototype for a novel generation of TVM was developed in three phases: First, the context of use was analyzed. In the second phase, we conducted a requirements analysis. Third, different hardware and software interaction designs were iteratively tested and evaluated. The resulting prototype met the requirements of most user groups, though further adjustments are necessary. Conclusions: The UCD approach proved to be a valuable framework for the development and design of self-service systems.

Research problem: This study explores how established patterns, means, and services influence the users' first experience when encountering a novel self-service application. The application (DB Cairo) is a passenger information system for public transportation running on mobile phones. Research questions: Is the users' first experience with the application influenced by established communicative patterns, means, and services? Are they used as reference objects? Which attributes of the application are relevant? Is there a leading reference object (prototype)? Do reference objects vary depending on the personal factors age and gender? Literature review: Little is known about user experience in first contact situations regarding passenger information systems. For our investigations, we used a theoretical framework combining Linguistic Evaluation Theory, Prototype Theory, and Linguistic Genre Theory: Evaluations are regarded as an integral part of user experience. Evaluation is conceptualized as an act where a subject evaluates an object with a certain purpose at a certain time by comparing it with other objects. Every object has various attributes-some are relevant for the evaluation, and others are not. Communication quality is seen as a crucial complex attribute for the evaluation of communicative applications. Methodology: We conducted a qualitative study: Data from two user test series (n = 12)with thinking-aloud protocols and retrospective interviews were analyzed with qualitative content analysis procedures. The participants were male and female, age 25-35 or 55-65, mobile-phone users, and multimodal travellers. The tests were conducted in a laboratory with a computer-based mobile-phone emulator. Results and conclusions: Results show that the participants explore the application by comparing its attributes with attributes of reference objects. Reference objects vary depending on attributes of the application. Regarding topic-related attributes, participants rely on established artifacts, which form a topic-related multimedia network. Within this network, the website of German Railways functions as prototype. Age- and gender-specific differences were not detected. The findings indicate that research into user experience and development practice could benefit from reconstructing and analyzing topic-related artifacts. Limitations of the study were a small sample size, the test location, and environment. Future challenges are the investigation of influencing factors and the development of new methods/tools for data collection infield studies.

This essay explores potential connections between feminist historiography in rhetoric and the digital humanities. We investigate how specific digital innovations might invigorate feminist historiographic study, and we pause to consider how a turn to the digital might run counter to feminist methodological imperatives.

Service-learning courses have typically encouraged students to write for or about communities. Such courses rarely involve students writing with the communities they serve, despite the growing number of opportunities for collaboration afforded by digital media. Scholarship on collaborative writing with communities in service-learning courses is scarce; research on collaboration using digital, multimodal texts is more so. Arguing that digital technologies have the potential to make service-learning more reciprocal and effective for all participants, this article 1) suggests that digital spaces are an underutilized technology in community-university partnerships; 2) discusses common barriers to using digital mediums collaboratively; and 3) recommends a set of best practices for introducing collaborative digital writing into service-learning courses.

Humans routinely fail to comprehend complexity and anticipate long-term consequences. Systems dynamicists try to overcome these weaknesses by developing computer-supported models that can account for multiple variables in non-linear relationships. Using programs such as STELLA and Vensim, systems dynamicists create stock-and-flow diagrams, equations, and, ultimately, interfaces that enable others to interact with the model. This paper describes how one such model was developed and speculates on roles that technical communicators might play in future projects.

Problem: This teaching case presents the authors' experience planning, teaching, and evaluating a semester-long course within a computer science undergraduate program; the aim of this course was to develop soft skills that enable students to actively contribute within multicultural and transdisciplinary teams. Research question: How can an undergraduate-level course help computer science students better understand the multicultural and interdisciplinary scenarios that compose today's working environment? Situating the case: The literature review contextualizes the case as part of a broader group of literature concerned with curricular reforms that replace the traditional emphasis on memorization of fixed disciplinary knowledge with what have been called “21st Century Skills.” In addition, it builds a theoretical framework followed by the course that brings together Hofstede's Cultural Theory and Vygotsky's ideas regarding the social formation of the mind. Methodology: The researchers conducted two studies with a group of 62 students who participated in the course. The first one measured how students appropriated the concepts presented in the course and learning outcomes. The second one evaluated the students' perception of the course a year after they had enrolled in it. About the teaching case: Results show that the vast majority of students appropriate the concepts of the theoretical framework used throughout the course. In addition, most students perceive the courses' contribution to their professional lives positively-particularly regarding understanding cultural and transdisciplinary issues. A small group does not consider a course like the one proposed to be useful. Conclusions: The implication of this teaching case is that the ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences is something that can be addressed directly by a specifically designed course within a computer science curriculum (rather than exclusively being a secondary outcome of other courses). The limitations of the study are that it presents the authors' own teaching experience (therefore, it is not a third-party report) and that it uses pretesting and posttesting as an asessment tool for multicultural and transdisciplinary abilities. Future work would show how similar experiences could be conducted across other cultural scenarios and possible ways in which to engage the small group of students who do not consider the course useful.

Research problem: The purpose of the study is to understand how affective reactions to color impact learning attitudes and outcomes in a computer-mediated learning environment. Research question: How do color differences change affective processes and outcomes in computer-mediated communication? Literature review: Several previous studies exploring particular characteristics and learning in computer-mediated environments influenced the review of the literature. The literature on color psychology indicates that color preferences and affective reactions to color can influence behaviors and attitudes. The literature on goal achievement motivation posits that affective dispositions influence goal orientation, motivation, and individual outcomes. The literature on affect infers that affective reactions are responses to events, and these reactions influence attitudes and behaviors. The current study draws on these prior studies to examine affective reaction to color and learning outcomes in a computer-mediated learning environment. Methodology: We conducted a quasiexperimental study with 79 participants, who listened to a visual presentation lecture with either blue or yellow background and then completed a survey on their affective reactions, learning attitudes, and outcomes. Results and discussion: The results of our study indicate that color is not neutral and may influence learning attitudes and outcomes and, hence, the color of computer technology interface design can influence learning outcomes. Practitioners and academics must take people's affective reactions to color into account in designs and studies of visual information presentations. The sample size and the focus on two color hues (yellow and blue) may have some limitations on the conclusions and generalizability of this study. Future studies should examine more color hues and color saturation to further our understanding of affective reactions to colors and consequent impact on attitudes and behavioral outcomes.