Annotations: Week 15

Giammona, B; The Future of Technical Communication: How Innovation, Technology, Information Management, and Other Forces Are Shaping the Future of the Profession

We had read this article for some other class or for a group discussion in this class, so I’ll summarize what I remember from that time I read this.

This article is about the survey Giammona conducts which asks experienced practitioners of the field questions regarding the future of the field and what these practitioners thought about it.

Giammona asks about the forces affecting the field, and people talk about losing their jobs during that period, mainly because we are seen as not adding any value to the organization, which is not true at all, as we saw in both Usability articles by Redish and Barnum and Palmer in Week 11.

She also talks about our future role in organizations, where the survey audience talks about adding value to the organization we work for, which was what Clark and Andersen said in one of their articles we had to read for Dr. Lam’s class.

Giammona asks more questions like:

What are the global concerns in our field?

How should we be educating future practitioners?

What technologies are impacting us?

Where do we go from here?

Does technical communication matter?

These questions are all answered by the practitioners with positives and negatives, which Giammona converts into recommendations for the field of technical communication. Some of these recommendations come on behalf of industry experts (the survey respondents) as well.

Most of the recommendations seem very useful, but may not be taught in degree courses yet, so the educational institutions should do their part in helping out the industry. UNT seems to have good courses focused towards the industry, so that is always good.

Incorporating business seems to be important as part of our duty as technical communicators, so should technical communication departments include a compulsory business value course?