Norm Gayford presented on the history and challenges of technical writing courses, particularly those offered online or through distance learning. He discussed how the field has evolved through different modalities like telecourses and online learning. Some challenges discussed included engaging students in online discussions and conversations, as well as ensuring students understand conventions in their fields. The presentation argued for taking an artistic/creative approach to technical communication and online learning. It also highlighted some common misconceptions about how students learn best.

1. THE ‘ACCEPTABLE’ WRITING
COURSE IN COLLEGE
Presenter:
Norm Gayford, Professor of English
Genesee Community College
nrgayford@genesee.edu
2015

2. • As someone who has taught technical writing at the
community college level since 1989, seeing it morph and
move through various iterations nudged and guided by
changes in technologies, settings/venues, politics, and
pedagogy, I will present a discussion of the history and
current challenges in eLearning modality and how we
attempt to achieve those technical communication
hallmarks. The goal is to strengthen and ‘repaint’ the
bridge between education and professional practice,
making the case that the seeming ‘pragmatism’ of
technical writing enables its survival.

4. • ’Being Some Other Name’: Tech Writing From Telecourse, to Distance
Learning, to eLearning
• Communicators by any other name: beyond titles and tools
Juliet:
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.“ (II.ii. 1-2).
While Juliet tries to neutralize the power of names, opting for the being behind, the
signified rather than the signifier, most of us know that the aphorism ‘sticks and
stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me’ is a tub of bilgewater.
Behind ‘communicator’—behind a genre or modality—what is actually
signified? Juliet wants name to be illusion. What do we want of
communication?
We think we have communicated but HAVE we?

5. • So, what does one mean by ‘acceptable?
• The ‘pragmatic’ course—the one that addresses careerist intent over academic
anchorage, from the institution’s viewpoint. But the sign ‘acceptable’ signifies or
implies five constituencies: governmental funding entity, institution of learning,
teachers/instructors, student audience/learners, and hometown stakeholders.
A Challenge: Vid-tapes back then, textbook websites now; the mediative elements
are still not wholly transparent, forming a collective challenge.
An Illusion: that tools themselves address the problems satisfactorily.
A Challenge: Fractious nature of webinar conversations, skype, chat—reference the
train trip to NYC.
An Illusion: Students in eLearning uniformly know how to have ‘conversations’.
A Challenge: eLearners present an audience seemingly focused on professional
interests.
An Illusion: eLearners are aware of the conventions in their fields and connections
among their fields.

6. Arshavskiy doesn’t uniformly push the models to all
applications; she acknowledges the use of traditional
contexts, especially when it comes to psychomotor focus.
Rural populations not-educated community poor are
naturally behind—ah the spatial metaphor!--
Put Our Kids everyone does not take advantage of medium in
equal ways pp. 211-212.

7. Here’s what I teach:
ENG106 Technical Writing examines the special rhetoric of technical communication.
Focuses on the fusion of process and product in the organizing of usable information.
Considers audience and user needs, information design, visual forms, engaging in
description and definition, creating process explanations, developing proposals,
organizing reports, and writing instructions. Develops critical thinking skills through
analysis of conventions applied in document design. Use of computers required.
Prerequisite: ENG101.
Ms. Ross is talking about promoting technical communication and
yourself as a communicator;
here’s where this presentation connects:
Mr. DeLuca is talking about mining your experience for ‘career gold’
here’s where this presentation connects:

8. Question the general assumption of ‘net’ generations—a creeping but
understandable privacy/guardedness issue exists in the non-urban contexts in
which I teach—
Blended learning/hybrid—we continue to experiment. The
shapeshifting continues, like Proteus! Hybrid works better with
eyes-on live contact built in, not just for cheerleading, and not
synchronous contact mediated by tech (Skype, Blackboard
chat, gmail chat, yada yada).—Which takes me back to the
1989/90 dog-n-pony show.
Frankly I find some ‘older’ students more willing to use tech, particularly
nurses—the ‘ed’ population seems very iffy, as do the students from the most
technical of professions (in part because they feel put upon by having tech
writing required, in part because they want little to do with any tool beyond their
own profession.

9. At heart, I think we need to see eLearning, particularly
technical communication/writing, from the artistic/creative
viewpoint.
“Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information
passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be
of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the
riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life -- it is
precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
In other words, what’s in a name—science, the technologies that spill therefrom—
is of paramount importance if communication is not to be an illusion. This is
difficult even among some beginning tech writers.

10. • Henry Miller
• “[D]on’t wait for things to change…whether you are working at the bottom
of the pile or on top, if you are a creative individual you will go on
producing, come hell or high water….One has to go on believing in
himself, whether recognized or not, whether heeded or not” (ix).
• “When you find you can go neither backward nor forward, when you
discover that you are no longer able to stand, sit or lie down…when you
are convinced that all the exits are blocked, either you take to believing in
miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird. The miracle is that the
honey is always there, right under your nose, only you were too busy
searching elsewhere to realize it” (ix).
There is a set of illusions about how learners learn. eLearning
contexts make those illlusions clearer, if we are willing to look.

11. • Peter Brown, Henry Roediger III, Mark McDaniel
They present some of the ‘illusions’ about learning, which are particularly important to
technical writing and to eLearning.
• “Rereading text and massed practice of a skill or new knowledge are by far the
preferred study strategies…but the least productive” (3).
• “Retrieval practice—recalling facts or concepts or events from memory—is a more
effective learning strategy” (3).
• “When you space out practice at a task and get a little rusty between sessions, or
you interleave the practice of two or more subjects, retrieval is harder…but the effort
produces longer lasting learning and enables more versatile applications” (4).
• They are cognitive psychologists who did a set of studies over 10 years, with the
intention of focusing on teaching and learning across fields, for business, industry.

12. • Peter Brown, Henry Roediger III, Mark McDaniel
• “Mastery in any field…is a gradual accretion of knowledge,
conceptual understanding, judgment, and skill….[requiring] striving,
reflection, and mental rehearsal” (18).
• It is imperative that in eLearning, we make our best effort to create
layered classes, with foundational knowledge, as well as recursion and
reflection. Anchoring this must be the kinds of questions we ask, both in
synchronous and asynchronous contexts.
• “to learn better and remember longer: various forms of retrieval
practice, such as low-stakes quizzing and self-testing, spacing out
practice, interleaving the practice of different but related topics or
skills, trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution,
distilling the underlying principles or rules that differentiate types of
problems” (21)

13. • Peter Brown, Henry Roediger III, Mark McDaniel – from the chapter “Avoid Illusions of Knowing”
• “metacognition” or “Monitoring your own thinking….Learning to be accurate self-observers”(102).
• “Our understanding of the world is shaped by a hunger for narrative that rises out of our
discomfort with ambiguity and arbitrary events” (109).
• “What psychologists call the curse of knowledge is our tendency to underestimate how long it will
take another person to learn something new or perform a task that we have already mastered”
(115)
• “Our susceptibility to illusion and misjudgment should give us all pause, and especially so to
the advocates of ‘student-directed learning,’ a theory now current….[which] holds that students
know best what they need to study to master a subject, and what pace and methods work best
for them” (123). Student persistence in retrieval practice has to be formally guided.
• Peer instruction techniques [which presents challenges in eLearning but which I try to do with
guided discussions], cumulative quizzing [very do-able in eLearning]
• Teams of complementing expertise layers are good for tech document check
• Critically important to know: they studied the learning styles assumptions and theories.
Compelling evidence does not exist: “very few studies designed to be capable of testing the
validity of learning styles theory in education, and of those, they found that virtually none validate
it and several flatly contradict it. Moreoever…it is more important that the mode of instruction
match the nature of the subject being taught….When instructional style matches the nature of
the content, all learners learn better” (145-146)

14. Henry Miller writes, “To refrain from giving advice, to refrain
from meddling in the affairs of others, to refrain, even though
the motives be the highest, from tampering with another’s
way of life—so simple, yet so difficult for an active spirit!
Hands off! Yet not to grow indifferent, or refuse aid when it
is sincerely demanded” (18).
• I’ve been thinking about this as I’ve reconsidered the
oceanic layers of the eLearning class.
• Proteus did NOT want to prophesy; he made his
questioners work for it.
So, as eLearning practitioners, what are we to do?
Plunge ahead, seemingly counterintuitively.

15. We must not assume that all learning can be
measured empirically. That in itself is an illusion.
Freud privileges illusions capable of correction.
“What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human
wishes….Illusions need not necessarily be false—that is to say,
unrealizable, or in contradiction to reality” (31).
What is technical communication, ideally?
• We need only to visit Star Trek 

16. KHAN: If I understood your manuals, that's an overload in progress. Your ship flares up like an
exploding sun within minutes.
KIRK: Flood all decks with neural gas.
SPOCK: Impossible. Intruder control systems inoperative. Mister Khan was very thorough in his
study of our tech manuals
KHAN: I've been reading up on starships, but they have one luxury not mentioned in
the manuals.
KHAN: Captain, I wonder if I could have something to read during my
convalescence. I was once an engineer of sorts. I would be most interested in
studying the technical manuals on your vessel.
SPOCK: I note he's making considerable use of our technical library.

17. The perceived work of technical writers must resonate
with the authority of usability, accuracy, ethical intent.
Parker Palmer writes, “Authority is granted to people
who are perceived as authoring their own words, their
own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a
scripted role at great remove from their own hearts.
When teachers depend on the coercive powers of law or
technique, they have no authority at all.

18. Arshavskiy, Marina. Instructional Design for eLearning. NP: yourelearningworld, 2013.
Brown, Peter C., Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel. Make It Stick: The Science of
Successful Learning. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2014.
Cambre, Marjorie A., Barbara Erdman, and Leslie, 1964- Hall. "The Challenge Of Distance
Education." Journal Of Staff Development 17.(1996): 38-41. Education Source. Web.
29 Mar. 2015.
Fink, L. Dee. Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing
College Courses. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, 2003.
Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. NY: W.W.
Norton, 1961.
Miller, Henry. Stand Still Like The Hummingbird. NY: New Directions Books, 1962.
Spears, Suzanna, and Randy L. Tatroe. "Seamless Education Through Distance Learning: State
Policy Initiatives For Community College/K-12 Partnerships." New Directions For
Community Colleges 99 (1997): 33-42. Education Source. Web. 29 Mar. 2015.
Yang, Jack Fei. "Modes Of Delivery And Learning Objectives." Proceedings Of The IADIS
International Conference On Cognition & Exploratory Learning In Digital Age (2004):
457-462. Education Source. Web. 29 Mar. 2015.
Bibliography

19. Thanks for your attention! And thanks for the discussion.