Content personalization or tailoring content as per the needs of users has been a focus of technical communicators’ work since a very long time. Recently, algorithms have helped trace users’ characteristics such as devices they use, platforms they work on, local language spoken, etc. to personalize content through strategies like responsive content, automatic translation and so on. AI tools have extended algorithmic capabilities for personalization, but at the same time increased the randomness of personalized content. That is, algorithms produce different results for the same user at different times or different results for different users at the same time with the same prompt thus shifting the agency of both rhetors (or content creators) and the audience (or content users). While conventional technical communication pedagogy has focused on writing for users, and more recently on writing for algorithms which serve the users, today it is crucial to understand how technologies like AI impact knowledge consumption processes from a user experience perspective? And how can we teach content personalization and adaptive techniques in the increasingly digital spaces of audience interactions? These questions motivated our research. To follow the roles of algorithms and technical communicators closely, we analyzed three different case studies where algorithms are responsible for a high level of personalization beyond the decisions made by technical communicators. Our findings suggest that we must teach students to investigate concepts such as user personas in UX for understanding audiences, several methods of decision-making for content assets, and rhetorical ecology for a holistic view of content production to dissemination.

As digital technologies rapidly evolve, updating and enhancing models of digital literacy pedagogy in technical and professional communication (TPC) becomes more urgent. In this article, we use "digital life" to conceptualize the ever-changing ways of knowing and being in postinternet society. Using collaborative autoethnography, we investigate features of threshold concepts in TPC pedagogy that may support models of digital literacy that are resistant to tools-based definitions, foster student agency, and facilitate accessibility, equity, and justice.

Teaching writing involves helping students develop as critical communicators who use writing to question often-unseen systems of power enabled by infrastructures, including digital spaces and technologies. This article uses Walton, Moore, and Jones' (2019) 3Ps Framework---positionality, privilege, and power---to explore how, through assignments we developed incorporating the Fabric of Digital Life digital archive, instructors can make visible to students the invisible layers of infrastructure. Using the 3Ps framework, we illustrate how our pedagogical approach encourages students to use writing to interrogate digital infrastructure and the ways it is entangled with positionality, privilege, and power.

Humans are so enmeshed in mobility systems that they identify with themselves through those systems. InCommunicating Mobility and Technology: A Material Rhetoric for Persuasive Transportation,Ehren Pflugfelder (2017) uses the term "automobility" to describe both "the specific kinds of mobility afforded by independent, automobile-related movement technologies" and "the complex cultural, bodily, technological, and ecological ramifications of our dependence on separate mobility technologies" (p. 4). Given identities enmeshed in ecologies of systems involving human and nonhuman actors through which transportation emerges, automobility is described as a "wicked problem" to be solved, in part, by technical communicators and communication designers naming and revealing the persuasive power of transportation systems. Understanding this persuasive power benefits practitioners by revealing the shared agency of automobility among the car-driver assemblage, and academics, by offering a framework for recognizing transportation as persuasive and therefore rhetorical.

research-article Share on Review of "Implementing Responsive Design: Building Sites for an Anywhere, Everywhere Web by Tim Kadlec", New Riders, 2013. ISBN#: 978-0-321-82168-3 Author: Daniel L. Hocutt University of Richmond University of RichmondView Profile Authors Info & Claims Communication Design QuarterlyVolume 3Issue 2February 2015pp 93–96https://doi.org/10.1145/2752853.2752862Published:27 March 2015Publication History 0citation28DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads28Last 12 Months2Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access