Notes: Writing for the Web, by Crawford Kilian

Crawford Kilian, Writing for the Web, 4th ed., Self-Counsel Press: Bellingham, WA, 2009.

I just finished reading Kilian’s Webwriting guide. I would enjoy teaching English from this text. Kilian does a good job of putting communication into our clickety-quick context.

Kilian maintains a good Webwriting blog with lots of useful resources. Here’s my summary of key points and resources from the text:

1. The Interactive/Constructivist Communication Model: When you write online, you need to think beyond the standard instrumentalist model of communication. That model says your sender transmits a message to a receiver, with the intent of making the receiver do something. Kilian says nuts to that: online, you’re having a conversation. Sender and receiver constantly change roles, interacting to jointly construct message and meaning. Corporate writers often have a hard time getting this (see Chapter 6).
2. 25% Slower: that’s the oft-quoted stat from Jakob Nielsen on how much more slowly we read online. Paper has better resolution than computer screens. Our screens are getting sharper, but even on the iPad and Kindle, Nielsen found reading speeds 6% to 10% slower than in printed books. Write acordingly online: keep it short (Kilian says 100 words max!).
3. Orientation, Information, Action: These three principles should guide all writing. Online, first orient your readers: make it clear to them where they are and how to get around your site. Inform them: be clear and correct (spell things right!). Then direct them toward action, whether it’s leaving a comment, contacting Congress, donating money….
4. Advocacy and Marketing: Chapter 8 concisely summarizes tips for persuasive writing. The section on propaganda types, myths, and devices could make nice bite-size handouts and classroom activities.

Some online style guides cited:

• A List Apart
• The Economist
• Tim Berners-Lee’s CERN Style Guide
• Jakob Nielsen’s Writing for the Web (research and guidelines)
• Lynch and Horton’s Web Style Guide

 

Citizen as Conducer: Digital and Media Literacy Required

consumer + producer = conducer: It’s not just wordplay; it’s the paradigm for citizenship in America (and Earth!) 2.0:

Coming the day after U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan released the National Education Technology Plan, Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action provides four broad strategies and 10 specific recommendations on how to provide students and adults with the knowledge and critical thinking skills to sort through the overwhelming amount of digital information they receive every day in our media-saturated society.

“Full participation in contemporary culture requires not just consuming messages, but also creating and sharing them,” writes [Dr. Renee] Hobbs. “To fulfill the promise of digital citizenship, Americans must acquire multimedia communication skills and know how to use these skills to engage in the civic life of their communities.”

This is why the Commission recommended that digital and media literacy be integrated as critical elements for education at all levels through collaboration among federal, state and local education officials, and that public libraries and other community institutions be funded and supported as centers of digital and media training [Amy Garner, “Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action,” Knight Commission, 2010.11.10].

The new citizenship requires knowing not just the Constitution, but Google and Flip cameras. Teachers, get to work!

 

iPad, Meet IndiaPad… Just $35

Imagine a mobile computing device that puts word processing, Web browsing, and videoconferencing in your hands for less than what you’d spend on one family dinner at Perkins. Think that might have an impact on the market?

If the Indian government has its way, we’ll find out next year. Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sabil just unveiled a prototype touchscreen tablet that could market for 1500 rupees — $35 — or less. The minister says Indian tech students and professors designed it. They cut cost by using open-source software and, of course, Linux. The device runs on a memory card instead of a hard drive (remember the advantages of solid state). For a few rupees more, you can add a solar panle, boosting appeal for remote users (and for me when I’m camping!).

Steve Jobs might not need to start quivering yet: this same ministry made a splash last year with announcement of a $10 laptop that has yet to materialize. But Minister Sibal says this new gadget is ready for production: “We have reached a (developmental) stage that today, the motherboard, its chip, the processing, connectivity, all of them cumulatively cost around $35, including memory, display, everything.”

India envisions this tablet primarily as an educatinoal tool. If this thing works, we could equip an entire classroom of kids with Web-capable devices for the cost of one good laptop. Textbooks and graphing calculators cost more than this. I’d feel a lot more comfortable requiring students to haul around a $35 piece of equipment than an electronic device so expensive the school has to require parents to buy insurance.

 

21st Century Classroom: Everywhere, Everything, Every Moment

Robert Hawkins, senior education specialist at the World Bank, sees the following Top 10 Trends in ICT and Education for 2010. DSU majors in tech and ed, pay attention!

1. mobile learning: walk and chew gum? piece of cake.
2. cloud computing: smaller terminals, bigger world
3. one-to-one computing: everyone will be packing!
4. ubiquitous learning: does that render the term homework obsolete?
5. gaming: how better to learn teamwork?
6. personalized learning: tech helps us figure out where each student should start and deliver what each student is ready for
7. redefinition of learning spaces: fewer big-box classrooms… more windows!
8. teacher-generated open content: the lesson plan revolution will be wiki’d and blogged…
9. smart portfolio assessment: …and so will student work, constantly updated and reviewed
10. teacher managers/mentors: teachers move from font of knowledge to learning partner (Toby! this is it!). In other words, less “Here’s what you need to know” and more “Let’s figure out what we should know… and how we should find it!”

 

Applying Fair Use in the Media Literacy Classroom

Media literacy can be a huge part of Dakota State University’s technology mission. Especially in our digital media courses, we need to teach our students how to interpret and create messages and meanings. In Speech 101, I’m looking for ways to help students meld the basic skills of traditional speech communication with all the technology we have to connect with broader, distributed audiences (stay tuned for our Model UN coverage on DakotaStateUtube!)

But to teach and learn media literacy, teachers and students need to interact with a wide range of multimedia artifacts. When we share existing content and incorporate existing work into new products in the classroom, how do we determine fair use?

Center for Social Media to the rescue: the American University group offers The Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Media Literacy Education. It’s not a definitive legal guide or list of rules of thumb. The Center for Social Media actually rejects “cut-and-dried rules” (some percentage of pages, certain number of seconds of video) and emphasizes that “Fair use is situational, and context is critical.”

A key point in determining fair use is transformativeness. Simply duplicating and distributing material is asking for trouble. If you “add important pedagogical value,” you can start making a case for fair use. Teachers and students transform material when they use an excerpt to illustrate a point and orient discussion. They transform material when they use selections from other texts to demonstrate their own learning and creativity.

The Center for Social Media makes clear that transformativeness and other guidelines are not final answers or license to sample and mash at will. You still need to obtain your materials legally, give due credit, and be a generally responsible digital citizen.

But CfSM also notes that getting sued for using various media in class is “very, very unlikely.” They know of no instance of an American media company suing a teacher over classroom use of materials. And even if you do cross a copyright line, you’re more likely to get a cease and desist letter, not a “Go Directly to Court” card.

 

Digital Learning & Literacy: Big Changes Ahead?

Encyclopedia Britannica is publishing a blog series on “Learning and Literacy in the Digital Age.”

The SVO of that sentence — The Encyclopedia Britannica is publishing a blog series — is a fine synecdoche of what’s going on with our brains and social knowledge.

EncyBrit offers the following questions for its bloggers. Here are my Sunday-morning swings at these profound issues:

Will students continue to learn in classrooms? DSU’s graduate program already has at least as many off-campus students as on-campus. (In one class I took, off-campus outnumbered on-campus 2:1.) My wife is pursuing ordination as a pastor through an online seminary program that meets on the Luther campus for just two two-week sessions each year. Online resources will expand opportunities for students, especially adult students, to get training and certifications without interrupting their work and family life.

People still want to get together. Teachers and students generally feel they can communicate most effectively in person. But as Internet tools advance in capability and ubiquity and as we get better at using them, we will find ways to “make the channel richer” — i.e., to convey more of the social cues, the emotion, the body language, the signals that human interaction more informative and satisfying. As that channel gets richer, learning online will feel less isolating, and more students and teachers will find it a suitable substitute for traditional classroom learning.

Will students still use print-based libraries? Do they now? I’d love to do a survey of DSU students to see how many have actually picked up a book in the Mundt Library.

I hope print materials will stick around. I find a profound difference in how I read online and how I read when I’m holding a book. I can feel it even with my netbook. I can rotate my display and hold my computer sideways to read a full page (especially a PDF) in portrait format. In that format, I hold the computer like a book. My fingers are out of typing position. I can’t suddenly punch in a URL or click as conveniently to check my other e-mail or RSS reader. I’m more likely to sit and read that single document longer. Holding the computer like a book feels more contemplative, more patient, more… right.

But then I cut my teeth on the paper library. Kids growing up with Kindles may not feel the same comfort and tranquility I feel interacting with old paper books.

Just remember: books boot instantly.

Will they learn to read and write on the basis of traditional rules of grammar, the building blocks of writing as a potential artform, or merely at a level sufficient for texting and search-engine utilization? Here I don’t anticipate a major change. We’ve been teaching the traditional rules of grammar and writing as artform for generations, but even pre-Internet, how many could compose a truly artful and effective business letter? The Internet, with so many convenient venues for self-publication, may reveal more writers who can produce essays and other literature worthy of public attention. It will also capture a great deal more of the informal chats and semi-literate rantings about work and sports and TV and sex and everything else that makes up the bulk of everyday communication. I doubt online tools will decrease our language skills; they’ll just record a lot more of our generally sloppy language skills in e-print (much to the joy of linguists everywhere).

Will reading even be necessary when (and if) we reach that brave new world of direct “brain-to-brain communication”? – the “mind meld” some fear and others eagerly await. Numerous cultures, like our Lakota neighbors, transmitted knowledge from generation to generation without ever developing reading on their own. Even in our text-heavy culture, we learn all sorts of tacit knowledge by experience and practice. Reading is certainly necessary, but it is far from sufficient for mastery in most fields.

Reading is an artifact of cultural practice and available technology. Build a better means of transmitting explicit knowledge (“I know kung fu“), and certainly reading will become obsolete for learning. The bigger question will be not what technology might replace ink on paper or electrons on screens, but what effect that technology will have on our minds (See Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet Versus the Goddess for the effects of alphabetic literacy on our brains.)

 

USF Theatre of Social Change: Students Connect with Blogs

Kim Bartling, professor of communication studies and theater at the University of Sioux Falls, posts the blogs of her students in USF’s CST409 Theatre of Social Change:

In Sioux Falls:

• Dominique Schuler – http://mischiefchild.blogspot.com/
• Holly DeVos – http://www.livinalive.blogspot.com/
• Liz Boden – http://cowgirl-up-life-rocks.blogspot.com/

In New York:

• Mariah Ethington – http://mariahethington.blogspot.com/
• Jon Hardcastle – http://jon-hardcastle.blogspot.com/
• Teake Bartling – http://sufuteake.blogspot.com/
• Erik Perry-Kolvak – http://erperry-kolvek.blogspot.com/
• Jordan Nilson – http://scriptedimprovisation.blogspot.com/
• Haley Ward – http://haleyward.blogspot.com/
• Anne Wentworth – http://wentworthanne.blogspot.com/

The course description:

This class will expose students to the critical issues and creative methods that lead to theatre of social change. Through research, writing and empirical exercises, the class will explore the connection between the artist and his/her community.

This J-term course fascinates me. It’s grounded in experience: students get out of the classroom to see and use theater as a means to understand and change the community. They use blogs to simultaneously reflect on their experiences and connect with the world they hope to affect through their learning.

Kim’s project appears to epitomize the sort of methodology Toby and I believe in, an approach to knowledge that values our personal experience yet always directs us outward to connect with the community. Kim’s use of blogs in this course puts her students’ learning in the spotlight, challenging them to analyze and explain their experiences in ways that will be valuable beyond the classroom, in ways that everyone of us can learn from.

 

MIT Admissions Embraces Student Blogs

When we’re all connected, you can’t control the message. The Internet generation will see through and skewer silly marketing messages.

M.I.T. kens the zen of marketing to some of the Web-savviest customers in the world: the august genius haven incorporates student blogs, complete with open, unedited comments, on its Web site. The result: authentic content and conversation with current and prospective students.

But oh my, don’t you run the risk of someone saying something—gasp!—negative? Don’t you need to screen out those potential naysayers?

“You want people who can communicate and who are going to be involved in different parts of campus life,” [MIT admissions director of communications Fred McOwen] said. “You want them to be positive, but it’s not mandatory.”

And not all posts are positive. Ms. Kim once wrote about how the resident advising system was making it impossible for her to move out of her housing — expressing enough irritation that the housing office requested that the admissions office take her post down. Officials refused,instead having the housing office post a rebuttal of her accusations; eventually, the system was changed [Tamar Lewin, “MIT Taking Student Blogs to Nth Degree,” New York Times, 2009.10.01].

When everyone can talk to everyone, the truth comes out. If you try hiding the truth behind a slogan or an editorial policy, you will come out looking like a dope. Your only option is to simply perform, and let your actions—and your students, your clients, whoever—speak for themselves. And if you’re doing things right, you’ll get the good word:

But most of the blogs are exuberant, lyrical expressions of the joys of M.I.T. life, like last month’s post on returning as a sophomore:

“Something’s changed,” wrote Chris Mills. “Now you know what you’re in for, you know the sleepless nights and frustrations are never far away, but this knowledge can’t seem to remove the exhilarating smile on your face. And it’s in that masochistic moment that you realize who you are. That this is what you’re made for” [Lewin 2009.10.01].

Exuberant, lyrical… when’s the last time your marketing department turned out text that won descriptions like that from the New York Times? M.I.T. gets text like that from students for $10 an hour.

By the way, DSU Admissions is hosting some student blogs. One post by Jordan Frisch suggests “a true DSU student” celebrates homecoming by going “to the bars… to hang out with my friends and tip a few back.” Note drinks and bars, plural.

Perhaps not lyrical, but at least exuberant and authentic….

 

New Literacy: Interactive Web Good for Writing

Wired’s Clive Thompson (via Rafe Colburn) cites a study finding all this blogging, Twittering, and texting may actually be good for our writing skills. Stanford researcher Andrea Lunsford dares call it a “literacy revolution”:

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago [Clive Thompson, “Clive Thompson on the New Literacy,” Wired, 2009.08.24].

Kairos, audience… that’s what communication is all about, connecting to the community, finding and building what we have in common. Lunsford finds that student writers recognize the importance of community to communication: they don’t get enthusiastic about in-class writing because they know their class essays and term papers usually have an audience of one and serve little purpose beyond getting the grade. That sounds to me like all the more reason to move classroom writing online: always have students write for an audience beyond themselves and the teacher’s grammar pen. Always make them think about how their words will withstand public scrutiny. Always make them take public responsibility for their thoughts and language.

Hmm… maybe we should do that with speeches, too: tell kids they’re going face a potential audience of six billion viewers, and YouTube ’em!

Thompson also notes that the Internet expands our writing ability with different formats. The strict limits of Twittering and text can foster conciseness, while blogs allow writers the freedom to write grand opi on their favorite topics.

We still have work to do on the consumer side of literacy, teaching kids how to critically evaluate and synthesize sources into coherent, reliable, workable understandings. But on the producer side (and remember: those sides are merging!), I’m excited to see what literacy will look like in 20 and 50 years.

 

Blog to Write, Write to Live… in Grad School

I had an e-mail conversation with a new enrollee in our doctoral program last week. Along with answers to her questions about courses and exams, I offered this bit of advice about writing and blogging. It certainly applies to my experience here at DSU; I think it may generalize to all graduate programs where students have to crank out lots of scholarly prose.