Programmatic Perspectives

Review of Keywords in Design Thinking: A Lexical Primer for Technical Communicators & Designers

Christina Davidson — 2024-08-05

Keywords in Design Thinking: A Lexical Primer for Technical Communicators & Designers, edited by Jason C. K. Tham, contains a glossary of critical design thinking terminology, each selection connecting the theory and practice of this concept and demonstrating its usefulness to technical and professional communicators in academia and industry. Since its formalization in the early 2000s via Stanford University’s d.school, design thinking as a problem-solving framework continues to grow in popularity across many contexts, including business, healthcare, and education. While valued for its adaptability and human-centered methodology, the concept is also regularly critiqued as being obscure and difficult for professionals to define. By providing design thinking keywords and their developed meanings, each centered in technical and professional communication (TPC), Tham’s selected terms alleviate this known ambiguity, and maintain practical application to the technical communication classroom or workplace.

Review of UX Writing: Designing User-Centered Content

Christopher Morris — 2024-08-05

UX writing (writing for user experience) is a professional field of growing popularity and consequence in which technical writers apply design principles to produce content, texts, and digital applications. UX writing demands usefulness—typically defined as the sum of utility and usability. Utility refers to how well a design achieves its purpose, while usability measures the ease of a design’s function. With UX Writing: Designing User-Centered Content, authors Jason C.K. Tham, Tharon Howard, and Gustav Verhulsdonck provide an exigent and, crucially, useful text that is well-designed in achieving its primary purpose of helping instructors develop UX writing courses. Indeed, for me—an assistant professor in a writing department currently developing a course in writing and design for user experience—UX Writing is a timely, valuable resource for helping me think through applicable genres, theories, learning outcomes, assignments, and potential class activities.

Review of Augmentation Technologies and Artificial Intelligence in Technical Communication: Designing Ethical Futures

Joe Schicke — 2024-08-05

Are you aware of AlterEgo, a wearable device that enhances a user’s cognitive abilities by enabling a silent internal dialogue with an AI agent? While still a research prototype, AlterEgo is one of the many technologies readers will discover through Augmentation Technologies and Artificial Intelligence in Technical Communication: Designing Ethical Futures by Ann Hill Duin and Isabel Pedersen. However, this book’s focus is not only on augmentation technologies, defined as technologies which modify human capability and productivity through cognitive, physical, sensory, and/or emotional enhancement, but also the role that the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) will play in the design, adoption, and adaptation of these technologies. As such, Duin and Pedersen take a rhetorical approach to the topic, seeking to communicate the ways in which augmentation technologies “mediate knowledge, values, and action in professional and personal contexts” (p. 16).

Remembering Bill Hart-Davidson

Steve Benninghoff — 2024-08-05

Bill Hart-Davidson, as many of the online tributes and remembrances have detailed, was a man of insatiable curiosity and a profound ability to connect with people—an extremely relatable polymath.

Artificial Intelligence and the Intellectual Legacy of Johndan Johnson-Eilola

Stuart A. Selber — 2024-08-05

This tribute to Johndan Johnson-Eilola demonstrates the relevance of his research and scholarship to the ongoing intellectual work of the field, particularly in the area of artificial intelligence.

In Memory of Dr. Halcyon Lawrence

Andy Frazee — 2024-08-05

As many across technical and professional communication know, on October 29, 2023 we lost Dr. Halcyon Lawrence, a wonderful and consequential colleague, teacher, and scholar.

Choice Reflection

Michael Salvo — 2024-08-05

IRBs have suffered mission creep, moving from assessing dangers presented to participants in research (human subjects) to becoming de facto assessors of research. This brief essay traces engagement with the IRB, tracing understanding of human subjects research review through interactions with the committee over two decades and through numerous configurations and reconfigurations of the committee, its members, its focus, and its understanding of its role in the research process.

Audience Personas

Scott Mogull — 2024-08-05

An important trend in the expansion of audience analysis from technical and professional communication is the development of audience personas, or documentation of the typified audience characteristics, as technical buyer personas in the field of technical content marketing or user personas in the field of user experience (UX). This article provides technical communicators with an audience persona template that is a composite of the documentation used in industry. Audience persona documentation transforms audience analysis theory into communication practice and prepares technical communicators for positions in technical content marketing and user experience. The coupled audience analysis and recoding of findings in the audience persona documentation helps design technical and professional communications as well as user interfaces. The audience persona also can be used for sharing the concept of a target audience among writers, editors, and media publishers.

Data Analytics for TPC Curriculum

Daniel Hocutt — 2024-08-05

Despite serving as a user analysis tool for technical communicators where usability testing methods fall short, data analytics remains underdeveloped in technical and professional communication (TPC) pedagogy. In this entry, we discuss the value and means to incorporate data analytics in existing TPC courses to prepare students for the workplace, and as a way to provide an accessibility-driven framework to perform user studies through data analysis methods for practitioners.

The Union of Theory and Skill

Timothy Ponce — 2024-08-05

Within the realm of higher education, the question of how to respond to the notable surge in demand for micro-credentials has sparked intense debate. This contentious response to micro-credentials, which in many ways revolves around the tension between teaching theory versus skills, brings to the forefront a long-standing dilemma faced by Technical and Professional Writing (TPW) instructors. How can we effectively strike a balance between teaching critical reasoning based on TPW theory and teaching the practical skills necessary to develop a robust employment portfolio? In this paper, I aim to explore how the skills-based competencies associated with micro-credential coursework can be effectively utilized as a course supplement to enrich the learning experience in the TPW classroom.

Writing for Organizational Change

Jeffrey Bacha — 2024-08-05

This program showcase draws on the long history of client-based service-learning scholarship in professional and technical communication. The authors add to this conversation by focusing on two underexplored areas: writing toward workplace change and partnering with on-campus organizations. The authors argue that, when fully integrated into a professional writing program, course partnerships with evolving on-campus organizations may allow students to study and practice writing for change, perhaps more fully than they can when their client is an off-campus organization that may be less accessible physically and conceptually. To illustrate their argument, the authors describe a multiyear partnership between their university’s writing center and professional writing program.

The Value and Use of the Advisory Board

Nick Carrington — 2024-08-05

Many university programs rely on academic advisory boards for a variety of reasons. In this program showcase, we look at some of the literature surrounding advisory boards to provide a background of what programs in the technical and professional communication field should consider when selecting board members and how programs may choose to use an advisory board based on the program’s goals. Then, we present our specific context, with details about the history of our advisory board, our current expectations of our advisory board members, and how we recognize and appreciate our advisory board members. We also detail the specific way our advisory board members regularly interact with our students, advise our faculty, and contribute to our overall program. Finally, we share some key takeaways that faculty and administrators in other programs may find helpful and what they should consider when building or improving their own advisory boards.

Engaging in Mutual Mentoring

Krista Speicher Sarraf — 2024-08-05

This article describes a new technical and professional communication program director's experience transferring prior knowledge into a new role. The author shares challenges faced and presents a heuristic that aids in transferring knowledge.

Leveraging Design Thinking and Generative AI to Transform TPC Pedagogy

Nadya Shalamova — 2024-08-05

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm and reached an inflection point in 2023 with the release of several influential large language models, most notably the open source ChatGPT-3 and 4 by OpenAI. Generative AI technologies can instantly produce multimodal content, impacting many disciplines that were previously considered immune to automation. Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) industry and pedagogy stand to be profoundly transformed by generative AI, necessitating new ways of thinking, teaching, and learning. In this article, we call on TPC educators to consider incorporating generative AI tools into their curriculum to serve as a powerful tool in the teaching and practice of design thinking. Furthermore, we postulate that generative AI can prepare students for the rapidly changing work landscape dominated by AI technologies Drawing from our experience of teaching undergraduate TPC courses for engineering majors, we provide examples of leveraging generative AI technology, such as ChatGPT, to facilitate students’ deeper understanding of the design thinking process. Our intent is to raise awareness of generative AI potential, stimulate further research, and improve opportunities in TCP pedagogy and programmatic development.

Editors' Introduction to Issue 15.1

Russell Kirkscey — 2024-08-05

TPC Program Administration in Small US Institutions: Recruitment and Assessment

Lynn Russell — 2024-08-05

In the current educational environment, technical and professional communication (TPC) directors are always looking for new and innovative ways to sustain their programs, particularly through recruitment and assessment efforts. This article takes these sustainability concerns to the understudied field of TPC programs in small US institutions which make up a little over a third of all TPC programs in the US. To do this work, I interviewed TPC program directors at twenty-six small US institutions to inquire about how they recruit and assess their TPC programs. This article provides summary narratives from these directors, discusses the implications of those narratives, and then offers reflective questions that TPC program directors at any size institution can use to think about their own recruitment and assessment practices.

Exploring a Case of Surveillance

Morgan Banville — 2024-08-05

This article provides insights into the programmatic and pedagogical impacts of a research study and its exigency in technical communication classes/programs. Grounded in surveillance studies and technical communication, this study defines biometric identification technologies as personal identifiers of the body, focusing specifically on how neonatal nurses use and perceive such technologies within the context of the United States healthcare system. Drawing from a corpus of communication materials from biometric companies, questionnaires, and ten interviews with neonatal nurses, this study explores how major themes and takeaways from the data collection can be implemented in the technical communication classroom. Technical communication courses may benefit from exploration of surveillance technologies in healthcare (and other sites of surveillance). As healthcare (and many other industries) become increasingly reliant on digital technologies, it is imperative for faculty (and students) to explore the ways pervasive technologies impact our agency, privacy, communication practices, and personal/professional lives and careers.

On Developing a TPC Program Graduate Orientation

Codi Renee Blackmon — 2024-08-05

While graduate student orientation is an important form of technical and professional communication for students entering graduate school, providing specialized information to help them succeed in academia and industry, many are not program specific. The main research focus of this study is to determine what currently enrolled graduate students and alums in a TPC program believe is necessary for an orientation program to be successful and feel supported. This article reports on a survey of current students and alumni of East Carolina University's (ECU) Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Writing, and Professional Communication (RWPC) program. Students wanted orientation to excite, motivate, and guide them. Our findings suggest improving graduate student onboarding, including peer-to-peer and faculty-student support for socialization. Key points that graduate students need in an orientation include academic professionalization, faculty and student networking, department or program standards, social and peer connections, and transition and lifestyle changes, amongst others. This study emphasizes the importance of context-specific TPC program orientation thus departmental and program orientation needs to be designed to meet the needs of our specific TPC graduate students. The project advances TPC professionalization scholarship and informs effective orientation programs for TPC graduate students. This research is intended for TPC program faculty and administrators to consider its implications for their program's emphasis.