January 29th: Career Discussion and Cooper Fun with Inmates

Announcements

• Dr. E. Patrick Johnson
  Sweet Tea--Black Gay Men of the South
  Wednesday, 2/06/2013 @ 7:00 pm
  McKnight Hall
• Dr. Joyce Dalsheim
  Personally Speaking Series Talk: "Unsettling Gaza"
  Reservations requested
  Tuesday, 2/12/2013 @ 6:30 pm
  UNC Charlotte Center City

Reading Quiz on Moodle

And while you're looking at the new Moodle design...The quiz should be released at 6:30 pm, so get right to it. It should take 5-10 minutes, and it closes at 6:40. Please logon to Moodle and click on the Reading Quiz #1--January 29th 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 a teacher.

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!

Other topics for us:

• Business (in general)

• Cost Associated with Programming--fixed or variable?

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

  • Edge Cases (p. 180)
  • Necessary features (p. 47)

• The "divide" between users and programmers

• 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 are some examples of humans fitting themselves to technologies?

English-Centric Topics (with a Toscanoian spin)

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

I want you to write an essay, a career-oriented essay inspired by Cooper. This essay is diagnostic--I want to know your writing abilities--but it's mainly exploratory. I hope that it makes you think more about your future or current career path and the nature of work in general. Here's the page devoted to thinking about Cooper and the essay topics.

Career-Related Study

Assessing Technologies
(time permitting)

Let's break for a moment and take out all our technologies. I'm curious to see what "we" carry around with us daily.

User Doc for Uploading Webpages
(time permitting)

Using all your technical communication ability and expertise, create a user document for creating/updating a UNCC student's webpage. Use any program you'd like to create this document (MS Word, Dreamweaver, Notepad, etc.), but I eventually want this online...like next week.  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

The parameters are up to you, but I want you to try to complete this in the time remaining. You may capture most screen elements by pressing

[Alt] + [Print Screen]

Doing so captures the active window.

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--Frebruary 5th.

Any questions?

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

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