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As an educational medium, interactive television (ITV) is shaped by perceptions that all participants bring into the ITV classroom. Many articles, handbooks, and other support material already deal with standard operating advice for leading courses using ITV; here, the authors focus on the physical and mental spaces produced by ITV and explore the expectations created by the presence of such technological artifacts as television screens, microphones, and lighting banks. They explain the roles that teachers and students may assume in the ITV classroom and discuss how lack of familiarity with the technology's purpose and potential tends to reify those roles and the interactions they proscribe. Finally, they offer suggestions for responding to these issues by concentrating on students’ crucial first impressions with the technology—impressions that instructors can help negotiate so they and their students can engage in pedagogically sound, education-ally rich interactions in the ITV classroom.

In the workplace setting professionals use language to create boundaries of exclusion and inclusion, using the discourses of their professions and of specific workplace domain. Some boundaries are marked by formal tests—directed memos, posted notices, stamps that read “For Your Eyes Only.” Less overt forms, and arguably more effective, are specific rhetorical devices relying on knowledge of the corporate and professional culture. People are included or excluded from such cultures by their knowledge and ability to manipulate professional fables and folklore, historical data, workplace experience narratives, and practical knowledge. These discourse practices can be used to promote solidarity and positively strengthen professional cultures, but they can also be used to obstruct communication and to create social fragmentation in the workplace. This article examines some examples of discourse practices among managers and employees in the customer service department of a large manufacturing firm, and shows how knowledge of the ways that language can both include and exclude people from cultural groups in the worksite can help professional communicators facilitate more effective and responsible communication practices in workplace settings.