Journal Entry Prompts

Your response to the journal prompts (below) should be reflective entries about your thoughts on being a technical/professional communicator who is confronting the concept of critical technological literacy (awareness).  Please take careful thought in these journal entries because they may become the basis for your post-English 2116 techno literacy skills.  Each week I will post a question on the website to guide your thinking for your journal response; the question/topic may be specific or vague, and you may be introspective—reflecting on yourself in relation to the topic—or you can focus on outside issues. The length for weekly journal responses should be about 300 words.

Although I don’t grade these individually, I will collect these (or view them online) during the midterm (February 28^th) and once again during the final exam meeting (May 11^th).  I will read them.  Entries that consistently show a lack of critical reflection or incomplete entries will adversely affect a student’s grade.

January 26:  Resume Preflection

Now that you've been assigned your résumés, I want you to think about what will make you the ideal candidate for a particular career, your (possibly) future career.  Of course, I don’t expect you to be able to be too specific about what your career may be, but I do expect you to consider the big picture—how do you plan on staying abreast of technological developments in the future?  What challenges can you foresee?  Why do you foresee these challenges?  What has history taught you (or us) about technology in relation to labor, communication, or even just life? 

As always, don’t feel you have to answer the questions above point-by-point.  In fact, you don’t have to answer them at all, but I do want you to reflect on technology in your (possible) future. Something else that may help you get started is to think about what technological skills you listed in your résumés and cover letters. Why did you include them? Why did you not include certain skills?

February 9: Role of Technology

I would like us to be comfortable with discussing critical technological awareness vs. computer literacy.  Take a step back and reflect upon how technology has impacted you.

Please reflect on technology as it relates to your life. Consider the following issues: how you use technology; when you first developed ideas about technology; how you think you will use technology later in school and after you leave school; how technology has molded you as a person; what you feel is important about technology; what benefits and horrors do you feel technology has brought (or will bring) to your lives; what issues concern you about access to technology (computers and such). [Remember, these are suggestions and not the list you must answer.]

This topic is open ended because I don’t want a summary of your technology experiences (which I should have already gotten in the Tech survey).  Instead, I’m asking you to critically analyze your life as it relates to technology.  One of the assumptions I’m making is that technology has influenced all of us.  However, sometimes we don’t think about the way technology has molded us.

February 23:  Imagine

Is there room for imagination in professional communication?

The idea of critical technological awareness may or may not have sunken in just yet, but critical thinking (or having a critical awareness) means attempting to look at the big picture of something or looking at something from an unfamiliar point of view.  I’m convinced racism exists to this day not simply because people have closed minds—meaning they don’t accept differences—but because approaching topics from unfamiliar (and possibly uncomfortable) positions is much harder than continuing through life with blinders on.  Call not being critical whatever you’d like—ignorance is bliss, being comfortably numb, burying your head in the sand—but critical thinking isn’t the easiest route to take in life.

Now that I’m done editorializing, I’ll give you your prompt.  Many of you may have heard about the 9/11 report that came out in the summer of 2003.  As with other disasters, such as the Space Shuttle Challenger and the Space Shuttle Columbia, communication leading up to an event is one area the government investigates.  Most of the time they must sift through pages and pages of documents looking for clues as to what went wrong and, of course, who’s to blame (“Sue’s to Blame! She made the costumes”).  Then a panel of experts gets together and attempts to sort things out and produces a final report (often written collaboratively).

What struck me about the report was what one of the CNN talking heads, commenting on the report, said about the evidence the FBI, CIA, and other agencies had before 9/11:  he claimed that “[the government agencies in charge of surveillance] knew about terrorist activities in the US and knew about suspected terrorists in the US training to be pilots since the early 90s, but we didn’t have enough imagination to foresee the type of attack that happened on 9/11.”

Well, there were people who did have the imagination to envision a group of terrorists hijacking a plane and flying it into a building, but that’s another issue.  For your journal entry, I want you to think about the role (if any) imagination plays in technical communication**.  Is a critical mind important for technical communication, or is technical communication simply about standard operating (communicating) procedures?

** For our purposes "professional communication" and "technical communication" mean virtually the same thing.  Any writing done OVERTLY to convey information as opposed to writing done for interpretation (i.e., literature, philosophy, or historical texts) is technical. No one reads a technical manual for literary allusions and figurative language. Technical/professional writers write to convey information—facts and figures that their audience needs or wants. Therefore, business writing, which is professional writing, is technical in nature because you write to convey information to an audience.

Remember, I'm collecting the first three at the midterm--February 28th

March 16th:  Technical Communication and Science Fiction

You’ve just read I, Robot, a novel, for a technical communication course. This is not considered a conventional approach in the field of Technical Communication. I argue that science fiction is mediated by ideology, which, in turn, mediates our beliefs, attitudes and values associated with technology. Therefore, if science fiction communicates value-ladden messages about technology, it is a form of technical communication. I consider all discourse surrounding technology to be fair game for the field of technical communication, but I also recognize their are prevailing views about what specifically constitutes "proper" technical communication instruction. There's plenty of room to discuss the various forms of technical communication, so I'm not in danger of leaving out essential issues.

The genre of science fiction does cultural work. By cultural work, I mean that the genre responds to and reflects the context from which it comes. That context could be society at large, a subculture, a historical time period, a gender(ed) perspective, a racial critique, and so on. Science fiction doesn't so much predict the future as it reflects the contemporary culture.

Although you might not have learned anything accurate about technology through science fiction narratives--books, films, video games, TV shows, etc.--and you might not even be a fan of science fiction, you have most likely consumed science fiction texts. From what you recall about the genre, respond to the following: What cutural values about technology (or somethng else if you can't find anything about techno values) does/do the text/s convey? It might help to focus on one text or universe. What do I mean by universe?

If you can't think of anything because you just utterly despise science fiction, explain WHY you consider the genre of science fiction "not your thing." What would you rather read, watch, play, etc.?

March 30:  More on Your Future as a Technical Communicator

Many technical writers and technical writing scholars (yeah, how interesting would that title be at a party: “What do you do?” “Well, I’m a technical writing scholar.” ”Wow! That sounds so interesting…) claim that any writing done in the professional and scientific world is technical. Why do you think they say that? What’s technical about the professional world? What does the professional world mean to you? Is it because the audience is specialized? Is it because it deals mainly with technical aspects?

I want you to consider the possible technical aspects of professional communication that you may have to encounter in the future. What type of audience (or what types) do you believe you’ll need to address in the future? What skills or knowledge do you expect those audiences to have? This journal prompt is purposely open ended because I want you to really think about possible communication you will engage in.  this shouldn't be a re-hashing of your resume reflection.

April 13th: Ethics in Technical Communication

We’ve just talked about ethical issues, so I’m sure ethics is on your mind. Put yourself in the position of either a worker (non upper management) or supervisor for the following scenario:

Your company is about to install software on all the computers that will track key strokes, time spent online, places gone to online, amount of non-company e-mails received, the nature of those e-mails, amount of time spent on the phone, and how much time you spend actually in front of your computer. Besides tracking the time you actually spend in front of your computer, the technology for monitoring your every computer action (and phone action) exists.

Scary, huh? How do you feel about the above scenario? Again, state whether you are in the position of either a worker (non upper management) or supervisor.