Ann H. Duin: I guess we'll go ahead and start.
Welcome everyone to our Spring 2020 Research Showcase,
and I see many of you who presented when we had
this in person in the hall behind me in this picture.
We all know why we're here and
virtually and we thank you very much.
We look forward to nine great presentations.
Now Lee-Ann is going to explain
a bit about how they will work with the Zoom.
Lee-Ann K. Breuch: Hello, everyone, and thank
you for being here.
We're so excited about the research showcase
every year because we get to hear what students are
doing and it's a time to gather our larger community.
Here we have so many TCAB members with us tonight.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
We have other students who were not in
80 505 joining us as well and incoming students, too.
We're just so grateful to have you all attend tonight.
The Zoom orientation.
What we're going to do tonight is have
one large Zoom group.
Originally, we were thinking about some breakout rooms,
but the students have prepared
presentations that will be short
enough that we can all fit it
in a large group discussion.
We will have the single Zoom room here,
and then what we ask is that if you are not
presenting to please mute your microphone,
keep your camera on if you're comfortable with that,
and if you have that, that'd be great.
Then also, there's a feedback form. You'll see.
I've put it in the chat, and I can add it there as well.
It's also available in the email that we sent.
We would invite you to complete
a feedback form as you're listening to the presentations,
it's very short, but just a way to give some feedback and
also invite you to add questions to the chat.
On your menu bar on Zoom,
it'll either be on the bottom or the top.
Actually, that menu might move around.
But there's a menu option
called chat, and if you click on that,
it will open a chat and you'll see the cursor available
on the bottom and
a place where you can direct it to everyone,
and you can add your comment or question to the chat.
Following each presentation, there will be a moderator,
and they can read from the chat and help discuss.
You could unmute yourself as well if you've offered
a question and would like to interact with the speaker.
Finally, the Zoom instructions for
those who are speaking is to
remember to share your screen.
Each speaker will take their turn to share their screen,
and they may have slides or visuals to share.
Then when they're done, they will stop sharing
their screen and we'll have discussion.
I'll pass it back to Ann.
You bet. Thank you so much.
We have three speakers at a time here,
but we'll begin with a focus
on technical communication roles.
Marissa Arnquist will be speaking first,
and she is graduating from our MS program in May
and has found a supreme interest
in corporate e-learning through her research.
As a form of communication that
involves careful textual as well as visual planning,
she believes that technical communicators are well
equipped with the skills needed to
support the e-learning industry.
She's actively searching for a position in this industry.
We'll first hear from Marissa presenting on the role of
the technical communicator in
the corporate e-learning industry. Thank you.
Marissa Arnquist: Hello, everyone.
Can you guys see my screen?
Ann H. Duin: Yes.
Marissa Arnquist: Through my courses as
a scientific and technical
communications masters student,
I've learned that technical communicators do
so much more than just technical writing,
and that opens up a lot of
path career possibilities for us,
which can be a little bit difficult when
you're trying to decide what to do.
One of the industries I was looking
at and thought that was a good fit
for a technical communicator skills is e-learning.
E-learning is an industry that
focuses on communicating through technology.
Through literature review, informational interviews,
and a review of job postings,
I focused on looking at the skills
identified for those people
to be successful in e-learning.
There was a good correlation between
the skills from e-learning
and the skills of a technical communicator.
As well as through my informational interviews,
I learned about the critical importance
of interpersonal communication,
being able to collaborate with others and
analyze what subject matter experts
tell you and to
get everyone on board with what you're doing.
I also learned about the importance of empathy,
which is more than user experience and thinking
about your learners day and what they need.
Finally, the importance of curiosity,
which I think all technical communicators are good at,
just being able to try out new technologies
constantly and not be afraid
when you're not always the expert in them.
I think that there's a good correlation
between the skills of
a technical communicator and e-learning.
I wanted to just emphasize this opportunity for
future students and provide a short guide
on what roles and
skills and tools they might want to learn,
as well as what the current and future trends look like.
E-learning is an industry that's rapidly growing,
especially now with COVID-19,
and it's just going to continue to grow.
I would encourage technical communicators to
explore the opportunities of this new industry.
Ann H. Duin: Thank you so much, Marissa.
Continuing on technical communication roles,
we will next hear from Rachel Blissenbach,
who is also graduating this May with her MSN-STC,
and Rachel's focus has been
on the role that technical communicators
play with emerging technologies
like augmented or virtual reality,
3D printing, and smart devices.
She's interested in working with
these technologies throughout her career.
Rachel Blissenbach: All right,
everybody.
Hi. My name is Rachel Blissenbach and this
semester I wanted to focus
specifically on what our roles as
technical communicators will look like in
the next 10 years or so
alongside the rapid evolution of emerging technologies.
This is including augmented and virtual realities,
3D printing, smart devices, and AI.
To do this, I interviewed
a group of 10 people in various industries.
This included seven technical communicators,
whether they be former
or current technical communicators,
spanning industries like medical device manufacturers,
fitness, academia, freelance work, and software.
This also included three people working
in emerging tech fields like medicine,
3D printing, and AR and VR in corporate retail.
I asked them a series of 15 questions having to do
with what they saw evolve
over time throughout their careers,
including how their jobs have changed,
how their software and hardware have evolved,
and where they see their respective careers
and industries going.
From these interviews, I was able to find
major consistencies of how
our roles have stayed and will stay the same,
including having a solid foundation
of writing and editing skills,
chunking, audience analysis, and so on.
I was also able to put together
a list of what we should watch for in the near future,
including making a shift from
printed materials to building websites or making videos,
creating specified apps, working and
relying more on smart devices
and machine learning, and more.
After that, I was able to draw several conclusions.
Technical communicators are an absolute asset
to any team or project.
In fact, 10 out of 10 people that I interviewed
expressed a need or great praise
for their technical communicators.
We will need to become tech experts in the coming years,
meaning we will not only need to
know surface information on new devices,
but we'll need to know exactly what makes them tech.
We will certainly need to maintain
our solid foundation skills in
technical communication like writing,
editing, audience analysis,
use of whitespace, etc,
as well as knowing how to use
multiple different programs like MS Office,
Adobe Creative Cloud, DITA, and more.
You can see a list of these programs on my poster.
Accessibility and user design
will continue to become more and more important,
as well as learning coding languages and design programs.
Throughout my interviews, I also found it interesting how
few of them rely on academic or published journals.
The majority of people noted that by
the time a journal is published on emerging tech,
it's often deemed out of data or obsolete.
More people also tend to rely on
social media like Twitter or LinkedIn,
blogs, newsletters, conferences, webinars,
or slide sites to stay current in their fields.
Finally, what I want you to take
away from this project is that our jobs as
technical communicators will only continue to shift and
evolve right alongside the evolution of technology.
Make sure to keep your fingers on
the pulse of the emerging tech. Thank you.
Ann H. Duin: Thank you, Rachel.
Our third presenter on
technical communication roles is Ryan Wold,
who's on our PhD program in Rhetoric,
Scientific, and Technical Communication,
and his research teaching and consulting
all revolve around improving our human connection.
He currently teaches business writing courses
at the University of Minnesota where he is,
as I said earlier, also pursuing his PhD.
His title Beyond "Just Use The Free One":
Connecting The Economics and
Use of Technical Communication Tools.
Ryan Wold: Thank you, Ann. Can you all see my poster?
Ann H. Duin: Yes.
Ryan Wold: Good. Technical communicators
need a lot of tools to do their job effectively.
When trying to determine which new tools and
softwares to adopt, unfortunately,
you can't just simply compare
the affordances and usability of
these tools because these tools are
often priced in very different ways.
This project is a response to
my hypothesis that the way these tools are
priced might actually affect the way
a technical communication team uses these tools.
To explore this idea,
I first gathered a list of
30 commonly used technical communication tools.
Then Step 2,
I went to their websites and
tried to answer the question,
How does this tool make money?
I explored their pricing matrix, and in Step 3,
when trying to answer that question, I had
about 25 attributes that
I explored for each of these tools.
Some of the basics of their pricing, such as,
is this a perpetual license or is it a subscription?
If it's a subscription,
what are the payment intervals?
I also looked at the onboarding strategy
for new customers for each of these tools.
Was it a freemium model or was it free trial,
or did you have to set up a demonstration meeting
with a sales representative?
Third, I looked at the versioning strategy.
As you can see in this example of a pricing matrix,
most tools offer different levels of their tools.
Which types of features did they put behind a paywall,
and which types of features did they give away for free?
After gathering all this information,
I began to model the possible implications of
these different payment or pricing schemes based on
the assumption that technical communication teams
have a limited budget.
For example, regarding the versioning strategies,
a lot of tools are priced on a per seat basis.
If you're on a team that needs to save money,
you might need to develop best practices around working
independently because you can't afford
to buy a software license for every member of your team.
But if you're on a team that has more resources,
you can afford to develop best practices around
collaboration because you can
afford a license for everyone on your team.
An example of how onboarding strategies
might influence user behavior.
For example, if you're using a tool with
the freemium model that has limited storage ability,
you might develop best practices around
deleting early iterations of your projects or
deleting legacy content to make sure you
don't exceed the storage limits of this free version.
In conclusion, pricing is more than just
pricing because understanding the pricing scheme matters,
these minor differences at
every level of a company's pricing scheme could
influence the way your team works and behaves. Thank you.
Ann H. Duin: Thank you very much, Ryan.
We now have some time for
Q&A with our first set of presenters.
I see Lee Thomas has a question, Marissa.
What are a few examples of
the skill overlap between Tech Com and e-learning?
Marissa Arnquist: Yes. Thank you for the question,
Lee definitely because some
of the skills are technological literacy,
so knowing different tools is obviously
required for a technical communicator
as well as e-learning.
If you look at learning management systems
and content creation.
Additionally, communication of all forms, obviously,
especially interpersonal communication is
something that came up again and again in my interviews.
Being able to work with a lot of
different subject matter experts and different people
to bring people together
and have quality project management through that.
Ann H. Duin: Anyone else want to add to that?
Rachel, you have a question from Rebecca Anderson.
Did you get a sense through
your interviews how students can best prepare
for working in and being competitive for
jobs in this changing technology landscape?
Rachel Blissenbach: Thanks to the question, Rebecca.
When I spoke to those that are
working in the emerging tech fields,
they were actively looking for people
that know how to make and create websites,
that know how to code in HTML 5,
Python, multiple different coding languages,
people that keep their DITA skills sharp,
people that adapt to environments quickly and that
no platform or a software or a program.
Just try to keep your web skills sharp,
as well as your base
foundation technical communication skills.
Ann H. Duin: Any follow up there.
Please feel free to jump in as best we can.
Ryan, you have a question from Janelle.
Anderson, did you explore organizational risk,
data security when using freemium products?
Ryan Wold: Yes. That was one of the criteria,
and a lot of companies did,
as part of the pricing scheme,
have control over your data
as something they put behind a paywall.
This relates to Leanne's question
as well about how should
teams address the pricing in
the workflow is that when adopting a new tool,
you should be thinking big picture of
your corporation's goals rather than
just avoiding the labor
of vetting these tools at the beginning.
Let's just use the free one for now
because using the free one
early might put pinches on your data,
like the question from Janelle
or might force your team into
a purchasing decision in order not to lose
data you generated in the free version of the software.
To avoid those pinch points,
it's good to have a strategic decision about it early on.
Ann H. Duin: Also a question, Ryan,
did you consider how open source tools like DITA,
the open toolkit might impact the economics?
Ryan Wold: Yes, so it's interesting.
None of the tools that I
evaluated were open source tools.
They're all by commercial companies.
I grabbed the sample from
popular blogs of tools that were popularly used,
so it would be interesting to develop or to
incorporate some open source tools in here as well.
But there's implications with that as well.
Maybe the data privacy or control or things like that,
but I would need to explore that more, so thank you.
Ann H. Duin: Marissa, Leanne had a question,
and I wanted to be sure and touch on it.
In what ways does empathy surface for learning?
What did you find in your research?
Because we're talking so much about empathy right now.
Marissa Arnquist: Empathy came up a lot through my interviews,
and I related it back to
adult learning theory and accessibility as well,
just thinking about the user
if they're really busy and they're
not necessarily wanting to do training all the time.
They might be task oriented as well.
Really being empathetic to
their time and their resources,
if they're looking at a computer,
if they're using an iPad or if they're on the shop floor,
thinking about exactly how they are going to learn.
Empathy isn't necessarily a skill that was identified
as a base technical communicator skill.
That might be something that might just be
inherent to the person who might be a
better fit for learning or
might be a skill that they would want to
develop to fit into the role as best as possible.
Ann H. Duin: Jerry asks,
did you find a growing use of virtual reality?
Marissa Arnquist: I did ask my interviews,
what they were seeing for the future.
One person at e-learning agency
said that they were thinking about it,
but a lot of clients aren't really willing
to pay out the money for that quite yet.
Another interview he said they were actually
looking more at augmented reality.
He works at a machinery company and trying
to train people on the job,
how to do things with their hands.
Augmented reality might come before virtual reality.
Ann H. Duin: I think I agree with that one, too.
Marissa, and Rachel, have you found
e-learning management system tools or tech com roles
that these have changed even more rapidly due to
COVID-19 as it's going on in the midst of your research?
Rachel Blissenbach: Well, for my project,
most people commented on how
important it's going to be knowing how to use a VPN,
a virtual private network,
since this great experiment of working from home is
currently going so well for a lot of the workforce.
Trying to basically brush up on your skills of
what you actually need to do to work remotely.
Ann H. Duin: Daphne, you ask,
what is augmented reality?
When you think of the many different things that
we overlay information with.
You have the information and it gets overlaid with
additional information to help you.
Some might even say if
you're walking along a street and you
see an overlay of that map
that says this restaurant is here or there,
that might be an example.
But seeing it used more, say,
with glasses in a technical communication site,
giving the person the instructions
while they're working with something.
Daphne Olmer: Thank you.
Ann H. Duin: Thank you, Leah.
That's more concise definition here.
Any other questions? Marissa,
did you want to chime in on
the changes mainly due to COVID as well?
Marissa Arnquist: No, I think it's just generally known,
some roles might be doing
e-learning as well as in-person training.
Just being able to support
their project management teams or
different subject matter experts to help
them convert over to e-learning,
just helping people to make that move when they
can no longer do training sessions in person.
Ann H. Duin: Well, thank you, very much.
We'll move on to our next focus
on technical communication procedures.
I want to thank Barbara Horvath,
who's going to help us and lead and monitor this group.
Barbara Horvath: Great. It's my pleasure to introduce
the next three presenters
whose projects involve
technical communication procedures.
The first one is Heather Snow,
who will be graduating with an MS in
Scientific and Technical Communication this May,
and she is transitioning from
creative writing to technical writing,
interesting, with an emphasis in instructional design.
She's done a survey of best practices for
technical communication professionals
dealing with legacy content.
I'm going to turn the screen over,
ask her to present her poster
and give her three minute presentation,
and then ask you some questions or comments. Heather.
Heather M. Snow: Thank you very much. As Arp said,
I'm looking at best practices
for how to deal with legacy content.
I usually get a blank look when I say those words
because it's not a thing for most people,
but you've seen it before.
It's content that has lost its value.
It's original purpose has either lapsed or it's in
a format that is no longer accessible, it's just there.
My question was, what should be done with this content?
Because what usually is done with it is nothing.
It sits there,
it frustrates users, no end.
It bogs down websites,
and it can even lead to non-compliance or litigation.
This is such a shame because content is
a valuable asset, and it needs to be treated.
Ann H. Duin: I just want to be there for them.
Heather M. Snow: As I was going through,
academic literature doesn't really
have a whole lot on this.
I think that's probably because academics
never throw anything away.
But I found some recommendations on practitioner blogs,
websites, presentations about how
people really do deal with this.
The first recommendation I found was,
you have to identify it.
You have to know what it is,
spot it and all this before you can do anything with it.
That takes a content audit.
This is under the broader umbrella of content strategy,
so I can't go into it too much.
But if you do regular audits on your content,
you know what's there and you know what value it has.
Once you've identified it,
second recommendation I was
finding is, well, you deal with it.
There are three general methods that I
found for dealing with it.
I've lumped them together under three Rs,
refresh, reuse, or retire.
Now, the refresh is really simple.
It's something that you can make
a few cosmetic changes and you can turn it right around.
It's almost like new content.
This is best for short format,
social platform, for instance,
if you have a social media content,
usually, you can tweak it a little bit,
put it back up there, it's just like new.
Reuse takes a lot more effort.
The content is still valuable,
but it needs a lot of work
before you can turn it around again.
Biggest example I found of this was when you're doing
a migration to structured authoring, like DITA.
You have to pull it apart,
analyze it, put it back together.
But the end result is new content with new value.
The third method is retire.
That splits off into two,
archive it or destroy it.
Sometimes, the cost
of reusing content is more than the content is worth.
All that really can be done with it
then is secure destruction.
Archiving, though, if there's research value in this,
or if there's regulatory concern about it,
then you have to archive it.
Just quick thanks to
Daphne Olmer who answered a question for me on this one.
Certain industries are very
picky about what you do with your legacy content.
You have to keep it for
at least a certain period of time.
To be honest, if there
were any further research done on this,
I would say it would be in the area of
industry specific recommendations because
every industry has different regulations
that they have to follow.
I work in a financial industry at the moment,
and they are also very
particular about how you keep your records,
how you keep your legacy content.
That would be worth checking out,
I think, in further research. Thank you.
Barbara Horvath: Thank you. Interesting, Heather.
Anyway, we invite chats
or there are a couple of
questions that we'll get to later.
Now I'm going to introduce
the next presenter who is James Jarrett,
who's graduating also in May with
his MS in Scientific and Technical Communication,
and he's a technical writer at
an IT support and innovation company named Agile Defense.
I hope I have this right,
where he supports proposal writing
for the pursuit of IT tracks.
He is exploring methods to improve professionally.
His project was a research project
called essential strategies,
methods, knowledge,
and resources for professional development,
for technical communicators in government,
IT acquisitions proposal writing.
I'll ask him to share his screen and show his poster to
you now. There. Okay.
James Jarrett: Thank you, Barb. As you can see,
the title of my research,
I shortened it a little bit
was essential strategies, methods,
knowledge, and resources for
professional development for technical communicators.
The problem as I saw it was
that when technical communicators,
whether they'd be new to
the profession or new just to a field,
might have trouble figuring out
how to accomplish not only their job,
but how to get better at their job.
The objective was to complete
the research and then to provide
technical communicators with
a framework with which they can
approach professional development in their niche,
their field, their industry.
I accomplished this with a mix
of qualitative research methods,
those being auto ethnography and unstructured interviews.
A little bit of background.
This past December, I joined a proposal writing team
supporting them as a technical writer in
the field of IT innovation contracts.
I was a bit staggered by
the complexity of the information.
It's at the crossroads of government,
defense, IT, it was very confusing.
I accomplished focused retrospective reflection
on notes I had made to myself, certifications I gained,
conversations I had, then through some insights
and key points of
how high accomplish professional development.
Then I also interviewed my coworkers about
what they considered to be essential strategies,
methods, knowledge, and resources,
and then also how they had
accomplished professional development.
I identified these six key categories
which you see in the top center of my poster.
To help accomplish professional development,
technical communicators should practice or
develop soft and hard skill balance,
and that's a mix of
technical and interpersonal skills
that you might need to draw on when,
say, interviewing a SME,
you should practice or develop work repositories.
Those are bodies of referenceable material
such as Heathers just spoke about with legacy content,
for example, boilerplate, self knowledge.
You should know what your personal
or professional strengths and weaknesses
are so you can work from them or to compensate for them.
You should get comfortable with immersive-learning,
which came up a lot in
interviews is that you just have to jump in the deep end.
It's unavoidable. You're not
going to be able to prepare yourself.
You have to learn as you go.
You should cultivate
mentor relationships because they'll act as
an accelerator or a force
multiplier for your professional development.
Then you should just use
your standard referenceable resources
such as professional standards,
organization, and bodies of knowledge,
and then reflect on your own personal experience.
What I did then after taking
those six key categories was I made this cause and effect
graphic that addresses how you can approach the process.
On the macro level or
strategic level, you develop these skills.
On the tactical or micro level,
there's the methods, and then
there's also referenceable materials
and knowledge and resources.
The mentor relationship acts
as a link between all of those,
so it accelerates your development,
and they can show you what's
important to know and what's not,
and it really saves a lot of time.
That's the framework with which
I've drawn up to accomplish professional development,
and, of course, is continuous process.
You're going to need to look back at
this again throughout your career.
In conclusion, technical communicators should practice
to develop these six listed categories when
seeking to orient themselves
in a new field and accomplish
efficient professional development. Thank you.
Barbara Schultz: >> Great. Thank you.
Let's see. We have some questions here.
Hopefully, we'll get to all of them.
Our next presenter is Danijela Krstic,
and please forgive me if I
did not pronounce your name right.
[LAUGHTER]
Danijela Krstic: That's perfect. Thank you.
Barbara Schultz: Oh, good.
She'll also be graduating this summer with
her MS in scientific and technical communication.
She also works as
a technical writer at a software company Sovos,
which led her to an interest in Agile Scrum
and a technical communicators role within that framework.
Her project is a guidebook for
technical communicators in Agile Scrum environment.
There we are. We can take a look. Thanks.
Danijela Krstic: Thank you for that introduction.
As Barb just mentioned,
I started working as a technical writer
at the software company Sovos last year.
When I started there, I was immediately introduced to
new phrases and procedures that I'd never heard before.
One phrase that was new to me on my very first day at
Sovos was the Agile Scrum process.
Agile Scrum was described to me as
a procedure used by product and development teams to
continuously push out software updates
to users every two weeks.
As a member of the product team that
would be utilizing Agile Scrum for our work,
I had a lot of questions about this process.
The first being, how
exactly do I fit into this environment.
Will I be involved in every Scrum meeting in Sprint?
And if so, how am I supposed to get any work done?
These questions and more led me to want to
research how technical communicators
can best fit into this Agile Scrum environment
and develop a guidebook for them.
Through my initial research surveying online resources,
what I really found was a lack of
industry consensus around the issue.
The graphics on the left here displaying
the Agile Scrum sprint cycle.
The technical writer is noticeably missing,
and many other variations I found also failed to
include technical writers as part of the process.
In order to provide some clarity
and guidance on this issue,
I started by conducting
a literature review of the Agile Scrum methodology,
as well as a technical communicators
challenges working within this framework.
The second half of my research consisted of
interviews with 10 Sovos employees.
Two are technical writers,
and the rest were either product owners
or software developers.
After coding the responses to my interview questions,
I identified three major themes.
First, there was a clear room
for improvement in the process.
All of the participants directly
stated that the current practices used
for technical writers in
the Agile Scrum environment are not successful.
Second, there was a need for effective meetings.
A suggestion by most participants was to have
specific documentation meetings at
the beginning of each sprint with the technical writer,
product owner, and then some developers.
Third is the importance of review.
All participants noted the need for
a specific and formal review process
of the documentation.
From this research, I developed a guidebook for
technical communicators working in
Agile Scrum environments.
The guidebook consists of dos and don'ts for
technical writers based on
the previously mentioned themes.
I also created this graphic on the right,
which is a modified version of
the traditional Agile Scrum cycle.
A major change here from the graphics on the left is that
the technical writer is included as
an official role on the Scrum team.
I also included a
documentation meeting and clarified that
the technical writer is not
a required attendee at daily Scrum meetings.
I hope this research can act as
a guide for technical communicators,
and I anticipate that future research
can build upon this and provide insights
from other companies and industries on how
technical writers can best succeed in
the Agile Scrum environment. Thank you.
Barbara Schultz: Thanks. Great. Nice presentations.
We've got some questions.
I think I have about five minutes for questions.
Well, we'll start.
Heather. Let's see.
Heather, from Emily,
how would you say we determine value of
an object or document as archive
worthy or something to be destructed?
She says, this is a big question, probably [LAUGHTER]
Heather Snow: It is a huge question because
it's a question of giving content
a new value rather than
recreating it to have value for ongoing use,
is it worth keeping in order
to help other people coming up later,
one place that I've looked at,
they keep all of
their old training content
so that people who are hired on later
and want an idea for
a new project can go back through
the files and see what was done in the past,
how it was done,
whether it worked, whether it didn't.
And that informs the creation of new content.
Otherwise, there are instances where if
something is in an extremely obsolete format,
it's not worth it.
If it's poorly written,
if it's redundant,
it's an automatic candidate to throw out.
Barbara Schultz: One other question, Heather,
from Matt Brundage.
Do some regulations prevent
editing legacy content in any way?
Do they have to be static artifacts?
Heather Snow: I did not get a chance
to get into that as much,
but I know that, for instance,
in the most strictly regulated industries,
you have to have very careful versioning of things
because a small alteration can make
a huge difference from one version to the next,
and it has to be documented.
Otherwise, it is entirely
possible for a user to come up with
the wrong information and come to grief,
and that leads to bad things.
Barbara Schultz: Thank you. This is to James,
and this is from Kirsten Jamison,
and she's curious about how much folks in
the field see professional development
as an important part of one's work,
worthy of doing at work,
not just on one's own time.
James Jarrett: Thanks for the question. This, of course,
I think it's going to vary company to company.
I don't have a long track record,
but I was very lucky to join the company,
which I am working now, Agile Defense,
and they really place
an emphasis on professional development.
We get a stipend every year to put specifically towards
professional development for reimbursements
for I use it on tuition for this program.
They also set me up with a
mentorship program in which I was
assigned a mentor that relates to
skills that I had identified. I wanted to improve.
They paired me up, and we
have a monthly mentorship meeting.
To answer your question, I think it's going to
depend on company to
company whether or not they're putting
value in growing their employees.
Barbara Schultz: Thank you. There are
more questions and you guys can look at them in chat,
but I have one for Danijela,
and do you see technical writing
as having a key role in product,
user design, or quality insurance in your Scrum model?
Danijela Krstic: Yeah, I actually,
I didn't get the chance
to talk about this during my presentation.
But when I was talking about
the importance of reviewing documentation,
I think that that's something that can be
done by product teams
and developers to check for
content and specific terminology,
but that it should also be done by
fellow tech writers within the company,
just to make sure that style and formatting guidelines
are all being followed.
Then as far as UX goes,
I'm not sure if we should be involved
in the creation of that,
but I think that we should definitely be
aware of early on if there are going to be
major UX changes and to be let in
on those changes and things being
done because if we're supposed to
write a user guide and we don't know what
any of the buttons are going to be
called or what any screen is going to look like,
then it's not going to go very well.
I think it's definitely
important to include [LAUGHTER] us
in those types of meetings and discussions.
Barbara Schultz: Thank you. Well, I'm out of time.
[LAUGHTER] We're moving on
to human experience and design,
and that's with Dan Card.
Dan Card: Thank you, Barb.
The first of our final three presentations
is from Brandi Fuglsby
who is a second-year PhD student in the RSTC program.
She currently teaches
technical and professional writing online,
and her research interests include
intercultural communication and
optimizing the online experience.
Title of her presentation is Instructors and
Students Overlapping and Divided Perceptions,
identifying a human-centered approach to online courses.
Brandi Fuglsby: Thank you, Dan. Can you
see my screen okay?
[NOISE]
I want to research project,
focus on the huge approach online courses
and I wanted to be sure that our PS
and our human connections didn't take back seats
to our content development
and our technological processes.
I realized early on that I needed to
define what I meant by a human-centered approach.
On the left side of the poster,
you can see that process of definition.
Then on the right side,
you can actually see the perceptions and how I went about
gathering data for instructors'
and students' perceptions of online writing courses.
Starting on the left side,
you'll see that I consulted with
Rebecca using Rebecca Waltons supporting
human dignity and human rights article
where she very clearly defines
dignity as humanness automatically
meriting dignity or intrinsic worth.
I relied heavily on that definition.
In that article, she goes on to say that
human rights are what enact
dignity and our dignity is not something that can
be attained by merely being humans, we have dignity.
Then using technical communication articles,
intercultural communication articles,
and curriculum and instruction articles,
I pulled examples to explain and
show what constitutes dignity
versus what constitutes human rights.
Again, human rights
basically support the human dignities.
Once I came to that definition,
I then conducted surveys.
I surveyed instructors and students,
and I sent the instructor student
to those teaching WRIT 3562W,
and the instructors who were teaching that course
online originally at the beginning of the semester.
Then I asked those instructors to send
the student survey to their students.
What I discovered, as you can see with the large V,
is that the green triangle is where students and
instructors perceptions overlapped and
then the blue branching off,
of course, is where they differed.
The main difference, I would
say between their perceptions,
was that the students viewed
online writing courses as much
more independent and even asynchronous,
whereas the online writing instructors view
online writing courses as much more of
a mix between independence and collaboration.
In other words, more of a mix of
synchronous and asynchronous work.
But in that green triangle where they overlap,
their statements actually ended up supporting
the dignity and rights on the table to the left.
For instance, they both
deemed regular communication as important,
which would be an example of respect or
even of ensuring participation.
Another one would be they both
mentioned flexibility and how flexibility is important.
That would be an example of agency
and giving students the agency to make
certain decisions about the course
based on the topic or based on their major.
That's basically what I discovered through my research,
and I look forward
to answering your questions. Thank you.
Dan Card: Thank you, Brandi.
That's just so timely and important right now.
Our next presenter is Brian Le Lay.
Brian Le Lay's research centers
on multiple vectors of low vision,
ranging from accessible data visualization to
the use of Sonic components in
graphic narratives of disability.
He teaches first-year writing for
international students at the UM,
where he is earning his doctorate in
rhetoric and scientific and technical communication.
Brian's presentation today is on theorizing
partial sightedness potentials for
rhetorical scholarship. Go ahead, Brian.
Brian Le Lay: Thank you, Dan. Can you see my poster?
My poster captures the evolution
of my research project for WRIT 8505.
>> For a bit of background,
I have a visual impairment called nystagmus,
which is characterized by involuntary eye movement,
and I decided I'd spend the spring semester
investigating nystagmus not only in
8505 but in my information design
and visual rhetoric courses as well.
In the early weeks of the semester,
as I began my literature review,
I realized that very few studies
had been done on this topic,
and those few were done by ophthalmologists,
not social scientists or humanist scholars.
Given the dearth of discourse on
the subject and the complexity of disability,
I intended to do an exploratory auto-ethnographic study,
drawing together my experience
with nystagmus literature from
a wide range of disciplines
and discussions with subject matter experts.
As I set out to do this in Phase 2, though,
the project became exponentially more complex.
In particular, I met with Gordon Legge,
the head of UMN's Low Vision Lab,
and Gordon proposed a number of
intriguing questions that helped me to grasp
the multivariate nature of
the stigma associated with nystagmus.
For example, how does age factor in?
How might it be similar to and
different from other conditions,
and given that it's often
a symptom of some other condition,
how do people with
those conditions experience nystagmus-related stigma?
At the same time, because I was reading widely
about nystagmus and visual impairment in general,
I started to notice that many of the studies
on low vision focus on legal blindness,
not on partial sightedness.
In trying to understand nystagmus-related stigma,
I was faced with the question of how living with
partial sightedness might be
different from living with legal blindness.
Measures of visual acuity would
suggest that the difference is quantitative,
but vision is far more complex than acuity alone.
At that point, I broadened my focus to
partial sightedness and realized
that the original project
was too extensive for the time constraints of
a single semester and that
the real project was the bibliography
I'd been building all along.
That realization really freed me up to begin
various smaller, more specific projects.
For example, now I'm doing one on ways that
partially cited persons could use sonic components in
composing graphic narratives of
disability and also another on
design lore and how
this disadvantages partially cited users.
Overall this semester, I learned not
to think in terms of seminar papers,
but in terms of ongoing interconnected projects
that build on each other.
The original project I proposed now
stands as an early draft of my dissertation prospectus.
In preparation to develop it further, over the next year,
the challenge for me will be to develop
a set of related projects that will help
me to understand partial sightedness
as distinct from legal blindness.
But I'm really looking forward to
the challenge. Thank you.
Dan Card: >> Thanks, Brian. Our final presenter
today is Christina Yung.
Christina will be graduating this summer with
her MS in scientific and technical communication.
In addition to Tech Com,
she's interested in information design,
usability, and user experience.
She currently works in
academic support resources at the UOM as a technical,
instructional designer, and she
strives to create meaningful,
useful content for all.
Christina's presentation today is
entitled Understanding User Experience
an essential component of academic support resources at
the University of Minnesota. Go ahead, Christina.
Christina Yung: >> Thank you very much, Dan.
I'm going to share my screen now.
Please can you give a verbal yes if you can see it?
Nick Rosencrans: >> Yes.
Christina Yung: >> Thank you. As Dan mentioned,
I was interested in looking
at user experience within academic support resources.
ASR is a service department
at the University of Minnesota,
and ASR includes OneStop,
Office of the Registrar,
and classroom management among several other units.
My research objectives were to investigate
user experience perspectives and practices within ASR.
Explore where UX fits within
a human experience design ecosystem and provide
recommendations for improving
UX maturity within the department.
My methods included a survey to all ASR staff members,
as well as conducting seven semi structured interviews
with business analysts across the ASRIT subunit.
For my results, I received 96 responses from my survey.
Some highlights included, when asked how
important UX is to ASR's mission,
72% said that UX was very
important and 0% said it was not important.
Also, from the survey,
the top six terms for audiences in
ASR included students, faculty,
staff, users, co-workers,
colleagues, customers, and learners.
Additionally, when asked, how much does
UX impacts your relationships with your audiences,
55% said a lot and only 2% said not at all.
From the interviews, I categorized a few themes,
and one of the themes included
the participants having the similar familiarity with UX,
but not necessarily learning
or practicing UX in the same way.
Additionally, the meaning of UX depended on each person,
but they each still talked and focused on the user.
Lastly, all of the interviewees said that
everyone is responsible for UX at some level.
For the recommendations that I provide,
I looked at the results,
and one of them includes
assessing UX maturity within ASR.
One step to do that would be looking at
the Nielsen Norman Group maturity model.
Another recommendation I have is to
prioritize UX work and processes within
the department and making sure that
that prioritization comes from leadership positions.
Additionally, I recommend building, documenting,
and sharing UX knowledge
and skills across the department.
From the results, the knowledge of
UX varied among participants.
Sharing that knowledge and making
a community of practice would definitely go a
long way and also helping to build resources to
retain knowledge if anyone
leaves ASR who knows a lot about UX.
Lastly, I recommend to think
about user experience as part of
the human experience design ecosystem and starting to
understand UX terminology and thinking,
again, as the ecosystem,
UX is an essential component of it and
without one part of that ecosystem,
it can't function fully.
From the results, we saw that ASR has many audiences,
not just the end users,
we also think about our colleagues as audiences.
Lastly, my recommendation is to connect UX
to ASRs mission to make
a positive difference in students' lives.
Thank you very much.
Dan Card: >> Thank you, Christina.
Before we get to questions,
I just want to mention I dropped the link
to the feedback form in the Chat 1 last time.
If you didn't get a chance to drop
some comments to any of our wonderful presenters,
I encourage you to do so I know
they really appreciate the feedback.
I just wanted to say that quickly.
That was a wonderful panel.
I'm seeing a few questions here.
The first one I believe is a comment for Brandi,
comment and question in terms of
the timeliness of this and also thinking about
as students move into
this online environment and they're
thinking perceptions about the pacing of courses.
I think it was Kirsten.
I'm having trouble finding the comment here.
Kirsten, are you in there?
Can you maybe re-articulate your question for me?
Kirsten Jamsen: >> Sure.
I don't know if it was that much of
a question here, I'll bring back.
Now I'm done eating my pizza,
so I won't be eating in front of you all.
It was really just this idea of students seeing
their online work as self-paced
even when instructors don't,
that really struck me because I've been working with
quite a few technical writing students,
the 3,562 students in the Center for Writing,
and they often complain, like, Oh,
I don't have my peer review back or
I'm still waiting for my instructor comments.
They seem so cranky about it and I
realize I think it's their expectation is
that they should be able to go and I
wondered if that jives with what you're seeing, too.
So even as instructors,
as we're trying to community and collaboration,
but students immediate somehow
assume that this is individual.
Does that jive with your research?
Brandi Fuglsby: >> It really does, Kirsten.
Even goes back to Jerry's question just before that
about what did you find is
the biggest challenges of online learning.
That is definitely one of
the disconnects is the individual
versus collaboration between students and instructors.
This was actually one where
the students and the instructors agreed,
and that is how time-consuming an online course can
be and so I think that answers your question,
Jerry, about the biggest challenges,
is that I think neither instructors nor students
realize how time-consuming an online course can be.
Establishing that early on in
the course as part of
the expectations could certainly help with that.
Jerry Grohovsky: >> Thank you.
Dan Card: >> This one's for Brian.
Lee-Ann is wondering.
You mentioned graphic narratives,
but Lee-Ann's wondering what other designs
or genres are you interested in looking at.
She mentions a few examples, learning management systems,
websites, physical environments or something else.
As this progresses, where do you see it going?
Brian Le Lay: >> Lee-Ann, thanks for your question.
At this point, I'm most interested in data visualization.
As a low vision user,
I often struggle to comprehend data visualizations
and this can have a number of detrimental consequences.
At the very least, it can just be embarrassing
for the low-vision user, and at the worst,
it can really affect the quality of work done by
the visually impaired person and also how
others perceive that person based on that work.
By making data visualizations more
accessible for partially sighted persons,
I think we can go a long way
toward mitigating those consequences.
Dan Card: >> Then here's one for Christina.
Oh, it looks like maybe
we have somewhat of a response in the chat, too.
But the original question is from Lee-Ann,
and she wants to know,
given the importance of UX,
do you think ASR would be interested in
participatory design practices or
what other ways could UX be integrated
into ASR design practices?
She's thinking about usability methods.
Christina Yung: >> Thank you for the question.
Yes, I would say that in general,
ASR would definitely be interested in doing
more usability methods and UX methods as well.
I think what comes down to
it and from the results that maybe I wasn't
able to share in my poster presentation
is that sometimes UX isn't
prioritized or it isn't necessarily
thought of first when
projects start or even planning projects.
I think that is one of
the big recommendations that I have in my report is to
prioritize that and to think about
even just thinking about what UX methods or
usability methods to include
because usability testing isn't necessarily
the only way to go about gaining
user research and getting more feedback.
Looking at different positions and who in
ASR has that knowledge
or if we need to look outside of ASR,
how should we go about that?
But, yes, I think it's important and I think ASR
also thinks it's important to look into more. Thank you.
Dan Card: >> Wonderful. Ann, I think it's-
Ann H. Duin: >> We're getting close to time here.
I think everybody needs to raise their hands and do this.
Thank you very much.
Congratulations to those graduating.
I want to thank all the people.
I want to thank Shannon for work
and the creation of the flyer for this.
Thank you, Dan, and Barb,
and Lee-Ann for all the help
in hosting and co-hosting here.
Thank you to all the professors who are attending.
Past 8505 students are here. Thank you.
All of our TCAB members,
just an outstanding display of support.
With any question that we bring your way,
you've been so helpful with us.
There are quite a few questions in this chat.
I am assuming we will keep it up a little bit
here for people to respond.
But as we've reminded you,
at different points, do,
please put those questions into
the feedback form as well because that's great help.
Lee-Ann, any final words?
Lee-Ann K. Breuch: >> Thank you. The chat
has been very robust,
so that's been really fun and to hear
the speakers share some responses to the questions.
We'll share that all with you.
But just so wonderful
at one point, I don't know if you knew,
47 people were here in our meeting tonight,
and that's been great.
We're just so happy to hear these presentations.
You just did a wonderful job,
and it's very engaging,
I think, for the entire community.
Thank you to everyone.
Ann H. Duin: >> Thank you. Stay safe.
Be well. We think about everyone very often.
I think that the students and
some of us will stay to debrief just a little bit.
The rest of you, if you have not used
Zoom before, we have to go.
For me, it's in the lower right
and you have to click on Leave meeting.
But you're not leaving us.
We should think about you. Take care.
Lee-Ann K. Breuch: >> Thank you. John said 50.
Maybe 50 people were here. That's great.