Digital Literacy For Technical Communication

Digital Literacy for Technical Communication helps technical communicators make better sense of technology’s impact on their work, so they can identify new ways to adapt, adjust, and evolve, fulfilling their own professional potential. This collection is comprised of three sections, each designed to explore answers to these questions: How has technical communication work changed in response to the current (digital) writing environment? What is important, foundational knowledge in our field that all technical communicators need to learn? How can we revise past theories or develop new ones to better understand how technology has transformed our work? Bringing together highly-regarded specialists in digital literacy, this anthology will serve as an indispensible resource for scholars, students, and practitioners. It illuminates technology’s impact on their work and prepares them to respond to the constant changes and challenges in the new digital universe.

Digital Literacy for Technical Communication helps technical communicators make better sense of technology’s impact on their work, so they can identify new ways to adapt, adjust, and evolve, fulfilling their own professional potential. This collection is comprised of three sections, each designed to explore answers to these questions: How has technical communication work changed in response to the current (digital) writing environment? What is important, foundational knowledge in our field that all technical communicators need to learn? How can we revise past theories or develop new ones to better understand how technology has transformed our work? Bringing together highly-regarded specialists in digital literacy, this anthology will serve as an indispensible resource for scholars, students, and practitioners. It illuminates technology’s impact on their work and prepares them to respond to the constant changes and challenges in the new digital universe.

Practical Models of Technical Communication is a college-level textbook for technical writers and communicators. Written in plain and accessible language, this textbook is designed to provide students with solid tools, useful models, interesting scenarios, and a vocabulary of technical terms that will allow them to communicate effectively as part of a fast-paced, global workforce. Its approachable, real-world examples and detailed visuals guide students in creating multimodal, technical documents that reach a broad audience. This book explores the fundamentals of technical communication, expanding on the following topics: • Writing and organizing an array of technical documents such as definitions, descriptions, instructions, procedures, proposals, and reports • Embracing ethical communication visually and in writing • Designing documents for readability, emphasis, and organization • Increasing rhetorical awareness of multimodality in all types of communication • Researching and documenting source material effectively • Crafting successful job materials for entering the workforce • Communicating professionally within various work environments • Navigating the changing needs of audiences that technical writers meet along the way

This book enables readers to interrogate the technical, rhetorical, theoretical, and socio-ethical challenges and opportunities involved in the development and adoption of augmentation technologies and artificial intelligence. The core of our human experience and identity is forever affected by the rise of augmentation technologies that enhance human capability or productivity. These technologies can add cognitive, physical, sensory, and emotional enhancements to the body or environment. This book demonstrates the benefits, risks, and relevance of emerging augmentation technologies such as brain–computer interaction devices for cognitive enhancement; robots marketed to improve human social interaction; wearables that extend human senses, augment creative abilities, or overcome physical limitations; implantables that amplify intelligence or memory; and devices, AI generators, or algorithms for emotional augmentation. It allows scholars and professionals to understand the impact of these technologies, improve digital and AI literacy, and practice new methods for their design and adoption. This book will be vital reading for students, scholars, and professionals in fields including technical communication, UX design, computer science, human factors, information technology, sociology of technology, and ethics. Artifacts and supplemental resources for research and teaching can be found at https://fabricofdigitallife.com and www.routledge.com/9781032263755.

The second edition of Digital Literacy provides a highly focused exploration of key critical concepts in understanding digital media in a clear, engaging, and accessible way for an introductory audience. This updated edition explores a variety of approaches to digital literacy, including prescient work by media theorists, the historical influences of legacy media, the contemporary transformations of the digital environment, and the way our communication ecology is constructed. The book argues for an understanding of the changes in traditional media, the rise of Big Tech, and the challenges these pose to privacy and to democratic ideals. Important themes explored in chapters across the book include digital identity, the internet as infrastructure, the web as a collaborative tool, and domestic and global digital divides. The new edition also explores digital literacy and the pandemic, as well as the growing body of research around the effects and impact of the digital technologies we use every day. Also included are useful Applied Skills Appendices outlining core areas of digital practice. The text is an ideal resource for students and scholars of mass communication, media literacy, digital information literacy, and digital technology courses, as well as for all those wanting to know more about the deep on-going impact of communication technologies on our lives.

In Citizenship and Advocacy in Technical Communication, teachers, researchers, and practitioners will find a variety of theoretical frameworks, empirical studies, and teaching approaches to advocacy and citizenship. Specifically, the collection is organized around three main themes or sections: considerations for understanding and defining advocacy and citizenship locally and globally, engaging with the local and global community, and introducing advocacy in a classroom. The collection covers an expansive breadth of issues and topics that speak to the complexities of undertaking advocacy work in TPC, including local grant writing activities, cosmopolitanism and global transnational rhetoric, digital citizenship and social media use, strategic and tactical communication, and diversity and social justice. The contributors themselves, representing fifteen academic institutions and occupying various academic ranks, offer nuanced definitions, frameworks, examples, and strategies for students, scholars, practitioners, and educators who want to or are already engaged in a variegated range of advocacy work. More so, they reinforce the inherent humanistic values of our field and discuss effective rhetorical and current technological tools at our disposal. Finally, they show us how, through pedagogical approaches and everyday mundane activities and practices, we (can) advocate either actively or passively.

Provides information on integrating digital storytelling into curriculum design.

Provides the instructors of introductory technical communication courses with a set of resources for their classrooms.