When writing center administrators develop, or think about developing, an Online Writing Lab (OWL), 1 they face a barrage of issues. At Purdue University, we have been constructing an OWL for years and find that although we have learned from our experiences (both good and bad), we are still asking basic questions about creating online environments with and through which students and teachers can interact.

The authors report on a study of writing transfer using a relatively novel method. Specifically, they use screencast videos to study the work of a dozen undergraduates who had taken first-year writing and were now enrolled in an interdisciplinary biology class. The authors argue that students were able to adapt to the writing requirements in the biology class because they implicitly understood themselves to be engaged in Carter's metagenre of "research from sources:' Because students in this study had been asked to engage in that metagenre at least since high school, they believed their writing habits were established well before first-year writing, and consequently they have trouble recognizing the influence of such a course on their subsequent work. The study also revealed that students coordinated multiple texts simultaneously in order to engage in processes akin to what Howard has called "patchwriting" but also similar to the habits of professional writers. Whereas professional writers have well established networks for seeking information, the students in this study worked in relative isolation, using a few sources found haphazardly through library or Google searches. The authors suggest that instructors spend more time helping students develop effective networks of information, including experts and organizations in addition to published sources.

Boundary organizations like Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments RISAs are challenged to support decision-making that is relevant to the dynamic impacts of climate change on the environment and human systems. This requires tools that foster dialogue among scientists, decision-makers, and affected populations. A system dynamics model built with participatory methods can become a “boundary object,” which facilitates data collection and information exchange within a complex system. Our research team, working through the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences & Assessments (GLISA) RISA, developed a system dynamics model, called the Mid-Michigan Heat Model (MMHM), which depicts the dynamics of hospitalizations and deaths over the course of a heat event in Detroit. Global and regional climate models have indicated that more severe and longer lasting heat events are likely to occur in the upper Midwest under climate change. The model produced some important insights on the limitations of cooling centers as a means to reduce heat deaths and hospitalizations, and on the sensitivity of populations that are heat-vulnerable to brownouts. We conclude that joint model building between scientists and stakeholders has the potential to transform knowledge to action by enhancing stakeholders' understanding of system properties and by simulating policy or management decisions to observe their effectiveness. Because model building helps to clarify whether scientists and decision-makers are even asking the right questions or considering all appropriate options, it can effectively be used as a decision-scoping tool, early in the decision process.

This article reports on results of a nationwide survey of alumni in professional and technical communication. It presents a series of snapshots from the results, including the types of texts written and valued, where those types are written, with and for whom, and with what technologies. A range of implications are explored.

Humans routinely fail to comprehend complexity and anticipate long-term consequences. Systems dynamicists try to overcome these weaknesses by developing computer-supported models that can account for multiple variables in non-linear relationships. Using programs such as STELLA and Vensim, systems dynamicists create stock-and-flow diagrams, equations, and, ultimately, interfaces that enable others to interact with the model. This paper describes how one such model was developed and speculates on roles that technical communicators might play in future projects.

In this article we propose a Janus-faced approach to survey design—an approach that encourages researchers to consider how they can design and implement surveys more effectively using the latest web and database tools. Specifically, this approach encourages researchers to look two ways at once; attending to both the survey interface (client side; what users see) and the database design (server side; what researchers collect) so that researchers can pursue the most dynamic and layered data collection possible while ensuring greater participation and completion rates from respondents. We illustrate the potentials of a Janus-faced approach using a successfully designed and implemented nationwide survey on the writing lives of professional writing alumni. We offer up a series of questions that a researcher will want to consider during each stage of survey development.

In this chapter, we explore relationships between two issues. The first is the place of semiotic remediation in the discursive work of a community environmental organization. More specifically, we are interested in describing this organization’s inventional work as it attempted to influence the public discourse of an environmental problem in their community. The second issue is the role of rhetorical activity in the formation and maintenance of organizations themselves, which is a part of a larger chain of agencies required to make and maintain issues of public concern. We understand our work to be concerned with problems of public rhetoric more generally and risk communication more particularly. By ‘public rhetoric,’ we are referring to work in rhetorical theory explicitly concerned with the definition and function of a public in relation to issues of concern (for example, Ackerman and Coogan, forthcoming; Asen and Brouwer, 2001; Banning, 2005). What is meant by public and what counts as a public issue is complex. It is not unreasonable to suggest that these problems are central to the enterprise of rhetorical inquiry and theory itself. Public typically refers to either a forum of deliberation (such as a publication or venue like a legislature) or those groups and individuals who can speak and write in that forum. Or public refers to both. What counts as a public issue of concern can be a matter of philosophical debate (What are proper public issues?’) or rhetorical pragmatism (What can we make a public issue?’).

The authors report on a 3-year action-research project designed to facilitate public involvement in the planned dredging of a canal and subsequent disposal of the dredged sediments. Their study reveals ways that community members struggle to define the problem and work together as they gather, share, and understand data relevant to that problem. The authors argue that the primary goal of action research related to environmental risk should be to identify and support the strategies used by community members rather than to educate the public. The authors maintain that this approach must be supported by a thorough investigation of basic rhetorical issues (audience, genre, stases, invention), and they illustrate how they used this approach in their study.

Because communication specialists often lack the power and prestige of other knowledge workers, such as engineers and product designers, managers who direct the work of communication specialists face unique challenges. This study, based on interviews with 11 communication managers, found that their agency and identity were determined both by the structure of the organizations in which they worked and by their use of genres, technologies, and regulatory techniques. With their work undergoing transition because of globalization, outsourcing, and rapid technological change, the stories that these managers tell demonstrate the importance of studying management as it specifically applies to communication specialists.