Featured Articles, Proceedings, and WebTexts

The documents linked to this page represent aspects of my scholarship. Links to both documents and multimedia are prefaced by a brief introduction and/or an abstract.

The first document linked below is titled, “Redesigning Audiences in Technical Communication.” It appears in the SIGDOC ’19: ACM Special Interest Group in Document Design Conference Proceedings. This proceedings article was born from my dissertation work and shows the promise of my research for improving pedagogy.

• Abstract: This paper examines changing approaches for understanding audience in Professional and Technical Communication (PTC). By analyzing shifts in audience theory, this work defines a networked audience framework reconfiguring the boundaries of what an audience is for digital composition. It draws upon distributed usability of user-audience network influences to provide a framework redefining audience and how it effects and is effected by local and hyper-mediated networks. Further, this paper offers insights for teaching the new audience concept to maximize impact of digital communication designs. It posits that we may appeal to conventional, positive multimedia experiences, design in response to participatory networks, and by addressing the need to provide clear, learnable, memorable, and usable communication designs to user networks to support and constrain communication artifacts. Therefore, this paper formulates a framework for networked audiences which reassembles many of the sociocultural and technical boundaries of PTC audience theory and offers new instructional directions.

Redesigning Audiences in Technical Communication

The second document linked below is titled, “Changing Culture, Changing Public: Redesigning the Rhetorical Public.” It appears in volume 16 of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. This article addresses the changing public audience and how our pedagogy must adapt to address this new public.

•  Abstract: The idea of the Public and its influence on communication and civic activity has concerned rhetoricians since the Sophists sought methods to persuade the city-state. In fact, many ancient concepts of the Public are strong antecedents to modern ideas on social constructionism, agency in online communities, and exigencies for user-audience motivation. The current concept of the rhetorical Public is changing, however, due to new influences from digital culture. This article posits that modern rhetors must identify not only beliefs and values: they must create spaces where the Public’s expectations are met, where they may play the roles they desire to play, and where they are afforded the means to play those roles. Many of these pressures stem from changes wrought by a growing digital sphere. Thus, this article examines how the digital sphere is reshaping today’s concept of the Public. It reports on the impacts of changing digital-cultural spaces, the advent of online microcosms where fragmented Publics develop knowledge cultures (Jenkins 2008, 27), and, it ultimately culminates in the redefinition of the rhetorical Public for teaching today’s digital rhetoricians.

Changing Culture, Changing Public: Redesigning the Rhetorical Public

The third document linked below is titled, “Design: Changing Zeitgeists, Changing Communication.” It appears in IVLA’s Book of Selected Readings 2018/19. This book chapter began during my first year in the PhD program as my dissertation interests took shape. It shows my dedication to justifying my work and following it through.

•  Abstract: Teaching and learning how to communicate effectively is influenced by the zeitgeist of each new age. During each age, changing ideology, culture, and technology reshape communication and necessitate instructional redesign. An examination of communication instruction over the last half century reveals a trajectory toward designing documents using multiple modes of communication—the written, oral, visual, and electronic forms. This study looks at pedagogical change toward designing these artifacts in technical communication. It examines cultural attitudes affecting teaching practices and shows how communication instruction is trending toward visual, design-based methods for training technical writers. Ultimately, learning a design thinking practice is taken-up as a worthwhile addition for teaching multimodal communication and document design for the digital era.

Design: Changing Zeitgeists, Changing Communication

The forth piece is a multimedia project linked to the image below. It is a collaborative training project I completed for Iowa State University aimed at teaching students how to make their own ePortfolio websites using Moodle. I created the ISUComm Sites for Students series of training videos and my colleague Bremen Vance made the Sites for Instructors. My parts of the project were: drafting, recording, and editing the videos, designing the title sequence and presentation components, and developing Blu-ray and DVD versions of Sites for Students using iMovie, Audacity, Powerpoint, Moodle, and Adobe Encore. Mr. Vance did the same for faculty. Click the image below to visit my part of the project.