1. Christie Daniels
University of Texas at El Paso

2. Overview
 The traditional workplace
 Modernization
 Hardware
 Software and networking
 Pedagogical implications for technical writing

3. Traditional Workplace
 Faber, discussing the banking industry, describes a
traditional workplace which “was a lasting, usually
lifelong, employment, and it provided a comfortable,
secure standard of living through salaried wages and
regularized increases based on longevity with the
company (45).
 Task-centered

4. Modernization
 Begins with the rise of the personal computer
 Laptops and mobility
 PDAs and Smartphones
 Always connected/interconnected
 Increasingly multimedia-driven
 Extends the boundaries of the workplace

5. The Changing Workplace
 Dependent on information - specifically the ability to
obtain and use information
 Drucker, argues that “the typical business will be
knowledge-based, an organization composed largely of
specialists who direct and discipline their own
performance through organized feedback from
colleagues, customers, and headquarters. For this
reason, it will be what I call an information-based
organization” (45).

6.  Spinuzzi, in his white paper on knowledge work writes,
“These connections lead to more flexibility and
collaboration within networked organizations, but also
more communication problems: workers from
historically separated activities suddenly must
interact, collaborate, and learn enough of each others'
social languages and genres to work together.”

7.  In describing the distributed nature of the workplace
in the information age, Spinuzzi explains, “Distributed
work is the coordinative work that enables
sociotechnical networks to hold together and form
dense interconnections among and across work
activities that have traditionally been separated by
temporal, spatial, or disciplinary boundaries” (268).

8. Social Turn
 Emergence of sites like Myspace for personal social
networking is well-known
 Benefits
 Problems
Blurring of division between professional and personal life

 Facebook
 Twitter
 LinkedIn

9. Pedagogical Implications
 Teaching students mundane, standardized tasks
cannot be the focus
 Students must know how to communicate in
rhetorical situations which we may not even be able to
envision in the classroom
 How do we do this?

10.  Current examples
 Personal tools – professional applications
Facebook

 Academic and professional presence
Twitter

 Presidential campaign
 Pundits
 News channels
 Within RWS program at UTEP
 Graduate students share resources
 Professors in the program also have twitter accounts

12.  These examples demonstrate the molding or
utilization of tools to the purposes/goals of the user.
 Our students need to be able to do this with new and
emerging technologies
 How does this play out in the technical or workplace
writing classroom?
 The answer: uncomfortably

13.  Personal experience
 Students like answers; do not like uncertainty
 Participation is a challenge
 Students are used to the teacher telling them what they
need to know
 In order to foster, the skills these students will need in
the actual workplace, students need practice doing.

14.  They need practice in inquiry and problem-solving skills
 In short, rather than always providing a stringently
structured writing environment, they need one
conducive to inquiry
 Ultimately, students need a pedagogical experience
which approximates the workplace where
communication is not simply relegated to plugging
information into the memo format but may take one of a
myriad of forms designed to satisfy a given goal or
purpose.