A faceless cybernaut prepares to explore cyberspace. Image created with Stable Diffusion.
For today’s class, my ENG2700 Introduction to Professional and Technical Writing students read two articles about social media and professionalism in the Technical Communication field:
Ferro, T. & Zachry, M. (2014). Technical communication unbound: knowledge work, social media, and emergent communicative practices. Technical Communication Quarterly, 23(1), 6-21.
Verzosa Hurley, E. & Hea, A. (2014). The rhetoric of reach. preparing students for technical communication in the age of social media. Technical Communication Quarterly, 23(1), 55-68.
I plan to discuss the difference between active and passive approaches to building an online professional identity (and why the former is the way to go–giving an example about LinkedIn from Dr. Rebecca Burnett).
While my students were diligently completed their Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) feedback forms today, I took photos while walking around the Namm and Library buildings on the fourth floor (afternoon class) and the sixth floor (evening class). Some are mundane, some are technological objects, and some have interesting compositions (to me). Afterwards, I shared my work my students and encouraged them to do the same to build up a personal library of photos that they might want to make use of in their multimodal compositions.
I mentioned this to my students the other day, but I wasn’t able to find a photo of what I was talking about. Now I have, so I’ll show it to them in class tomorrow.
This is my project board while I was an MA student at the University of Liverpool. My monk’s cell had a felt-covered corkboard that I repurposed as a project scheduler by writing upcoming work and ideas on 3″ x 5″ index cards and pinning them into one of three columnar categories: Course Work, or assignments and readings in my classes; Commitments, or work product deliverables like writing a book review or preparing a conference presentation; and Thinking About, or projects and ideas that I was considering but hadn’t committed myself to yet.
This board was the key to my academic success at that time, because it gave me a way of tracking the work that I had coming up and I could see at a glance from my desk what needed to be prioritized to keep my output going.
Over time, the board became quite full of index cards. It was always satisfying to take a card off the board when that task had been completed.
Using a daily planner or a calendar app can serve a similar purpose. Whatever method and tool that works best for you, make a commitment to stick with it so that it can keep you on track for success.
Toward the end of lecture, when I was talking about lessons learned from Hart-Davidson’s essay, which includes being a life-long learner and keeping up-to-date on changing technologies of writing and communication, Prof. Sarah Schmerler, a City Tech English department colleague with a shared interest in Generative AI technologies, stopped by and participated in the class discussion with my students. It was informal and impromptu, but I think my students enjoyed their perspective and lived experience. I enjoyed our conversation during and after class.
I wanted to jot down some of the conversation and additional thoughts spun off from the conversation here:
How can you expect to be a good writer without learning, at least in part, from reading many examples of writing by others?
Writing is reading in reverse. Instead of the words coming into you from the world, you are sending the words out into the world.
Reading and writing go hand-in-hand. Developing skill in one, enriches the other.
Reading heuristics, such as lateral reading and vertical reading, can support getting as much as possible out of one’s reading time, energy, and needs (e.g., is this for a research thesis vs. learning enough about something for a journalistic article).
Our needs–enjoyment, learning, work, etc.–play a key role in what strategies (large scale) and tactics (smaller scale) we employ to accomplish reading goals.
Reading can be a passive exercise, but active reading that engages the text and combines cognition, reasoning, and imagination yields the greatest returns in terms of understanding, analysis, and memory.
Isolation, quiet contemplation, and dedicated time can aid the development of reading and writing.
Teaching writing requires a rethink on how we approach reading and how important reading is to developing writing skill.
Students do lots of different kinds of reading, which we as educators can tap into and help the student connect their reading interests to writing development. Furthermore, it can open doors to other kinds of reading that they were not previously aware of. Knowing where they are and interested can lead to possibilities and knowledge that were around them but unseen. Browsing and finding the neighborhood, in Prof. Schmerler’s terms, connects students to new reading opportunities.
Between the melees, try to find some joy and peace. I’ll be doing that with my Professional and Technical Writing students today. I’ll bring LEGO to class for a bit of educational play that combines the use of their imagination, haptics, educational knowledge, organizational thinking, and writing skill.
They will design a small model that represents something about their specialization (e.g., Biology, Psychology, Computer Science, Fashion Design, etc.) and then write an instruction manual like this example that I made for them based on the model above that I call a “Quiet Reading Corner.” Scroll down to see it deconstruct, which I presented in reverse in my instruction manual.
