Tenure-line faculty—teaching onsite or online—are typically perceived as resident scholars and instructors who live local to their institutions. A geographically diversified tenure-line faculty, however, could also serve the education of students by bringing a wider array of influences and opportunities to the online classroom. Programs in technical communication must examine how to incorporate extralocated faculty and how to prepare willing and eligible faculty for extralocated teaching, research, and service.

Programs in technical and professional communication are continually challenged by issues of location and dislocation. Historic changes and interdisciplinary initiatives are in progress at colleges and universities worldwide. The five articles of this special issue will offer a portrait of the multiple ways that technical communication programs are positioning themselves to do innovative teaching and research.

(2001). Guest Editor's Column. Technical Communication Quarterly: Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 245-249.

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

Theories of ethics typically emphasize either good character (asking "Who will I be?") or right behavior (asking "What will I do?"). Studies of ethics in technical communication have typically focused on the analysis of behavior, offering heuristics for deciding ethical dilemmas. Interviews with 48 technical communicators, however, reveal little exercise of such analytical processes. In making moral choices on the job, the majority look to feelings, intuition, and conscience. Ethics might be more effectively taught through a narrative perspective, especially by identifying models of moral courage and integrity.

In the United States, the majority of technical writers and technical writing teachers are women. Their dominance of the profession has several causes, including the attractiveness of writing jobs for women, widespread associations of women and superior writing ability, the social acceptability of women in writing jobs, and occupational segregation. Women's dominance of the profession brings with it the risk of diminishing wages and prestige. To avoid this depreciation of the field, professional associations ought to equip technical writers and technical writing teachers with information regarding satisfactory salaries and working conditions, and teachers ought to communicate this information to their students.

Teachers of technical writing typically have limited knowledge of the principles of effective pictorial communication. Goldsmith's rhetorically oriented theory of illustration offers the necessary guidelines. This theory is easily accessed through a practical 12‐question heuristic that directs the technical writer's composition and evaluation of pictorial images.