In his 2013 article "Slow Ideas," Harvard professor and MacArthur fellow Atul Gawande discusses two forms of disciplinary change. He describes two surgical innovations from the mid-19th century, and traces why one (anesthesia) was easily and rapidly adopted, whereas the other (antiseptic) was accepted only slowly, over the course of decades. This happened because the more significant innovation (antiseptic) required a fundamental redefinition of the profession of surgery, including a significant rethinking of the field's methods and values. Instead of " warriors against disease," surgeons needed to become scrupulously sterile practitioners of cleanliness-and many, advanced in their careers, resisted such a change. This article contents that usability and user experience represent a similarly slow change in the field of techncial communication, and that we are still in the midst of transformations within our discipline which may require similar redefinition of scholarly work within this field.

The New Media Consortium, in its 2011 Horizon Report, argues that digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every profession, but that the skills aren’t yet well defined or well taught. That claim is certainly supported by my experience as both a digital humanities professor and new media consultant. In this article, I’ll discuss briefly why a multimedia lab can help address the issue, then point out a few of the policies we’ve used and grants we’ve found to support our lab, the Iowa State University Studio for New Media. One challenge of teaching new media is a widespread, pervasive belief in the myth of “digital natives” vs. “digital immigrants.” This stereotype, articulated by writers such as Marc Prensky in 2002, argues that young people who have been raised immersed in digital media (“natives”) are naturally more comfortable and more capable with new media technologies than older users (“immigrants”) to the digital terrain. In my experience, this myth hampers both teaching and learning. Students use it to enable mediocre work— students often have a haphazard understanding of new media and sometimes assume their work is good before it is. Faculty and senior colleagues, on the other hand, often use the myth to justify their own limited digital skills and to justify not teaching digital technologies to students (who presumably already know them). Comments This article is from Intercom (September/October 2011): http://intercom.stc.org. This article is available at Iowa State University Digital Repository: http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/engl_pubs/1 “WHEN I CALL ADOBE® FOR HELP WITH THE “BUGS” AND ISSUES, THEY CONNECT ME TO PEOPLE WHO KNOW LESS ABOUT THE PRODUCT THAN I DO AND TELL ME IT IS: A. BECAUSE I AM USING A 64-BIT COMPUTER (MADCAP SUPPORTS 64-BIT) B. A BUG THAT WILL EVENTUALLY BE FIXED IN THE NEXT UPGRADE (BUT NEVER IS) C. THAT I WILL GET A PHONE CALL WITH AN ANSWER IN 24-HOURS (I NEVER DO) D. THEN A WEEK LATER I GET AN EMAIL SAYING THE TICKET IS CLOSED BECAUSE THEY COULD NOT REACH ME BY PHONE (TRUST ME — I HAVE SAT BY THE PHONE FOR DAYS WAITING FOR THEIR CALL)” PAMELA COCA, DOCUMENTATION MANAGER, COMPRESSUS INC. PUT MADCAP SUPPORT TO THE TEST. NOW GET FREE TELEPHONE SUPPORT WITH ALL TRIAL DOWNLOADS. www.MadCapSoftware.com/Trial COPYRIGHT © 2011, MADCAP SOFTWARE, INC., AND ITS LICENSORS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. MADCAP SOFTWARE, THE MADCAP SOFTWARE LOGO, AND MADCAP FLARE ARE TRADEMARKS OR REGISTERED TRADEMARKS OF MADCAP SOFTWARE, INC., IN THE UNITED STATES AND/OR OTHER COUNTRIES. OTHER MARKS ARE THE PROPERTIES OF THEIR RESPECTIVE OWNERS. “MADCAP SUPPORT IS AMAZING EXTREMELY HELPFUL AND PATIENT PEOPLE THAT WORK WITH YOU UNTIL ALL YOUR QUESTIONS ARE ANSWERED (HAVING DEALT WITH POOR SUPPORT, I CAN’T TELL YOU HOW HAPPY THAT MAKES ME).” SAMANTHA ASCHERI-PHILLIPS, DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS, RADICAL BLUE by writers such as Marc Prensky in 2002, argues that young people who have been raised immersed in digital media (“natives”) are naturally more comfortable and more capable with new media technologies than older users (“immigrants”) to the digital terrain (4). In my experience, this myth hampers both teaching and learning. Students use it to enable mediocre work— students often have a haphazard understanding of new media and sometimes assume their work is good before it is. Faculty and senior colleagues, on the other hand, often use the myth to justify their own limited digital skills and to justify not teaching digital technologies to students (who presumably already know them). Multimedia Labs as Content Incubators By GeOFFReY SAUeR | Senior Member The NeW MeDIA CONSORTIUM, in its 2011 Horizon Report, argues that digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every profession, but that the skills aren’t yet well defined or well taught (3). That claim is certainly supported by my experience as both a digital humanities professor and new media consultant. In this article, I’ll discuss briefly why a multimedia lab can help address the issue, then point out a few of the policies we’ve used and grants we’ve found to support our lab, the Iowa State University Studio for New Media. One challenge of teaching new media is a widespread, pervasive belief in the myth of “digital natives” vs. “digital immigrants.” This stereotype, articulated September/October 2011 10 The ISU Studio, then, was created as a venture to accomplish something similar, on a smaller scale: a comfortable place for small-group collaboration, with high-end computer technologies, not integrated into class assignments, where students, faculty, and staff could collaborate with one another, discover skills they didn’t yet know existed, and learn from each others’ discoveries. Why You Need a Studio Gone are the days when a single “webmaster” was responsible for all information posted to websites. This led to slowdowns that became frustrating for everyone. In the 2000s, content management systems began to enable more people to use templates, simplified “wiki” formatting, and easy browser-based editing. Users learned some of the larger aspects of writing for the Web by writing for the Web—while still not having to learn XhTML/hTML5 coding, Web development in PhP, Python or Ruby, or SQL database design (coding work was done only by a select few CMS developers, often behind the scenes). But Domenic Venuto of Razorfish wrote in 2009 that content management systems (CMSes) face unacceptably Imagine if writing were taught that way. Could students be assumed good writers simply because they’ve grown up immersed in language from television, movies, books, and the Web? Writers need to learn skills and techniques, and to practice using them. Multimedia labs are a place where we can begin to teach digital media to managers and instructors, as well as colleagues and students in this way, as skills and techniques, enabling people to practice comfortably if and when they wish. ISU has long-established degree programs in the field of technical communication, including BS, MA, and PhD programs (http://engl.iastate.edu/programs/rhetoric/). We have built a writing program (ISUComm, http://isucomm.iastate.edu/) that teaches all students at a university of 28,000 what we call four “modes” of composition: Written, Oral, Visual, and electronic (WOVe). We teach upper-division courses in Web development, multimedia documentation, and content management theory. But as we sought to help a broad range of our faculty, staff, and graduate students teach digital media in these four modes, we found numerous problems with how instructors understand what and how to teach. So we created an in-house multimedia lab—the ISU Studio for New Media—to help solve these problems. Our studio is distinctive because it attempts to teach users about producing digital media, without “teaching” in traditional ways. As this article will discuss, we’ve found this model is reproducible, in both industry and the academy. here’s what you might want to know if you’d like to build one of your own. The ISU Studio for New Media The ISU Studio is a small research center, open to all students, faculty, and staff interested in moderateto high-sophistication digital media development. We designed it to seem a bit like a clubhouse, a technology hub, and a classroom. In their 2000 book The Social Life of Information, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid profiled the Silicon Valley in the 1970s, which they described as a community where people interested in computer technologies socialized with one another outside of work. They argue that workplaces had new technologies but assigned employees to very structured tasks, which limited creativity and innovation. University courses, they said, tended to teach older, established technologies. It was social environments outside of work or class—coffee houses and technology-based social clubs—which, they argue, helped to foster the culture of innovation and collaboration that prevailed in the Silicon Valley in the 1970s. Multimedia Labs as Content Incubators Sh ut te rs to ck .c om /G oo dl uz Floor plan for the Iowa State University Studio for New Media 11 www.stc.org MultiMedia

Argues that the technical communication field is expanding far beyond traditional areas of writing, editing, and production. Describes research at the University of Washington that helps clarify the expanding scope of our field.

Technical communication is often misunderstood by those outside the profession or the academic field. These outside perceptions of our work, generally based on extremely limited and narrow notions of the field, can influence the opportunities available to technical communicators. In this paper, three faculty members from the University of Washington's Department of Technical Communication describe their academic assumptions and research activities that range far beyond traditional areas from technical writing such as writing, editing and production. They describe projects that represent the expanding boundaries of the field of technical communication, spanning domains (including medicine, corporate, and public service), methods (including contextual inquiry, content analysis, case studies, and log file analysis), and solution types (including content management, user driven content, computer mediated communication, and strategic management of systems). What these projects share is abroad vision of the field of technical communication and a broad vision of the contributions that technical communication professionals have to offer.

The assertion that technical communicators tend to be `amateurs'---that is, lovers of their work--- is a claim with little foundation. Arguments toward regimentation and systematization of documentation writing are not calls to professionalize a currently-immature field, but rather attempts to emulate the hierarchy we have seen implemented in microprocessor engineering in the 1970s, software development in the 1980s, and content management in the 1990s. Such `egoless' methods may offer advantages to employers, but should not necessarily be considered `progress.'

This report details the findings of a usability study for the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) of traffic and weather information on the Web. The purpose of this test was to examine the user experience associated with retrieving traveler information, such as road conditions, traffic congestion, pass information, construction, and weather, from the WSDOT Traffic and Weather site.