January 31st: Career Discussion and Cooper Fun with Inmates

Reading Quiz on Moodle

The quiz should be released at 6:35 pm, so get right to it. It should take 5-10 minutes, and it closes at 6:45 Please logon to Moodle and click on the Reading Quiz 01--January 31st link and enjoy.

A Brief Story

Long ago in the last century I was working in litigation support as a document analyst. I got upgraded to a CD burner for the first month of the second summer I worked at this job because I knew how to burn CDs.  While my buddies were getting carpel tunnel entering data (a rather tedious job), I was surfing the net while creating CDs that would go to the client, the prosecution, and us. A friend of mine at the job remarked, "a monkey could do your job."

Well, anyway, I got promoted again, so they needed someone to take over. We hired a monkey, and I wrote up a manual and then trained him...this was the beginning of my career as an instructor.

Career-Related Study

Last class I (might have) mentioned that I would bring in the consent forms for the study on career-related perspectives of students in technical communication courses. Please ask me any questions you have about the study. I will pass out the forms now, and you may return them to me at the break. There is a folder up here at the front you may place them in. I have more information on the study's consent/overview page. One thing that you should focus on is the "Length of Participation Section" on the consent form. For your class, I will only review discussion posts and your IRA-Career essays (due next week--2/07). Remember, you don't need to do any additional work--all work collected is part of the course goals. Because I'm doing this study with multiple classes, I had to put down the types of assignments I would collect from various classes: Your class will only have Moodle posts and the IRA-Career Oriented Essay

IRA Discussion

As I've been rumored to do, I'll ask, "What did you think"?

This book was about interaction design for hi-tech products, so what could it possibly offer us in a class on usability, usability testing, and user-centered documents? Please don't feel as if you have to agree with all that Cooper says. I do, however, expect you to be able to support your reasons and be open to questions about your positions.

This guy's a know it all!

English-Centric Topics (with a Toscanoian spin)

Other topics for us:

• Business (in general)

• Cost Associated with Programming--fixed or variable?

• Who can and/or should affect change for software lifecycles?

• The "divide" between users and programmers

• New Economy Economics

• Consumerism

• Any relationship to Office Space or South Park

• Your experiences with "problem" documents or products

• Anything Cooper's missing

• Value-centered design

• Theoretical issues in Humanistic Technical Communication Studies

  • This asks you to reflect on human issues in regards to technology.
  • Do we as humans have to fit ourselves to the technology or should technology be made to fit to us?

What's Perfect Software?

I get the feeling after Ch. 13 that Cooper believes software (and, therefore, computers) can be made to do anything. I'm skeptical of that. I am, however, in total agreement about the problem of thinking that "natural language" will one day be the program language. An interesting idea gets passed around concerning the future of programming. Here's a hierarchy:

• 1st Gen--Machine Language (the matrix 0s and 1s)

• 2nd Gen--Assembly language

• Compiler (translates source code to machine language)

• 3rd Gen--High-level programming language (FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, Pascal, Java, Visual Basic)

• 4th Gen--Very high-level programming languages often used for databases (SQL, Mark IV, MAPPER)

  • In theory, they "are designed to reduce programming effort, the time it takes to develop software, and the cost of software development" (para 3).
  • Also, the "4GL is an example of 'black box' processing, each generation [of language] is further from the machine" ("History," para 3).
  • Hmm...this seems to follow the fact that most new (communication) technologies take users further away from the source or from controlling features.
    
    
• "5th Gen"--Removing the programmer further from the machine, this language should allow the computer to solve some problems without the programmer. Programmers need only specify what the problem is and its parameters and leave the execution up to the computer.
  • I, Robot anyone?
  • There is some debate as to whether or not these even exist, and there's some issue with 5GLs actually being more automated 4GLs
  • There's an interesting change in how we see programming languages advancing. When I was in high school, this fifth generation was to be "natural language" according to a previous model of conceiving programming languages. Think COMPUTER on Star Trek.

But Natural Languages would be next to impossible as Cooper points out. Let's think about why...

IRA-Career Essay

After you've read Alan Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum, I know you'll have an opinion or two about his view of the IT world, a world all of us inhabit and some of us think we run. As you read this book, I want you to think about how the information could be useful for your career or career path. You might not be able to claim Cooper directly is useful, but he may be indirectly useful by getting you to think about what your future may hold. After you've finished the book (and I'm giving you lots of time to read this book), I want you to write an essay, a career-oriented essay inspired by Cooper.

All essays are meant to be at least five pages in a normal typed, double-spaced format. All should have a title other than, "The Inmates are Running the Asylum Essay." Also, all essays should be well written, unified, coherent documents nearly free of mechanical, logical, or structural errors (representative of appropriate upper-level college writing). See the Assignments Page for more detail.

My First User Document (con't)

When you were reading Cooper's book, did you think about the frustrations you had with not only uploading a webpage but documenting that process? What parallels did you find?

At about 8:45 pm, I'm going to release you to try to perfect those user docs from last week. 

Remember, please include the following original items:

• Title
• Overview--explain what the person will do
• Screen captures (or other graphics)
• Steps for updating/creating a UNCC student webpage

Consider this your personal "cheat sheet" on how to upload webpages.

Before We Go...

Your first graded assignment will be an essay on Alan Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum. This is a diagnostic essay, so please do it. This assignment is due next week--February 7th. Let's get a preview of the assignment if we have time.

If you have questions about participation or reading quizzes, now's the time to ask.