Room 42

In this episode we discuss how industry practitioners, working out on the front lines, can conduct reliable and valid research that can be published and instigate change in the workplace. 

Pam Estes Brewer, Mercer University, researches topics related to communication in virtual teams, online teaching, usability, and research methods. She teaches general technical communication courses as well as advanced and graduate courses in usability research, research methods, and international tech comm.

Practitioners often have not had training in how to conduct reliable and valid research. Pam Estes Brewer explains how you can take your ideas, implement research that is both reliable and valid, and get it published so you can build change and support your career growth.

For transcript, links, and show notes: https://tccamp.org/episodes/how-practitioners-can-get-published-and-ignite-change/

In this episode we discuss how technical communicators can use techniques pioneered and perfected in the games industry in their scholarship, their content projects, and in the classroom. 

Samantha Blackmon (she/her) is a gamer/researcher/games researcher who loves playing games with her daughter and talking about games with anyone else who will listen or watch. She is passionate about games and making the games community a more inclusive space. Her research focuses on bringing together the voices of gamers, academics, and games industry folks in order to get a fuller picture of the games community and all of the people who comprise it. Her greatest academic goal is to create scholarship that is informed by and accessible to those outside of the academy, which makes for some pretty non-traditional work. 

Her recent work has included looking at how to use games in the classroom and a Black Feminist Mixtape analysis of how Black women have affected the video game industry. She is currently working on a project that pays homage to the upcoming 10th anniversary of her blog and podcast, Not Your Mama’s Gamer, and a project that looks at representation and visibility of marginalized people on live streaming platforms. Samantha loves video games, books, crafting, and coffee, definitely coffee.

We talk about the importance of reaching your audience, meeting them where they are, so you can reflect and relate to them. We also discuss how lessons from the gaming industry can be useful anywhere people are learning, absorbing, and interacting with content. For example, Samantha talks about how games have a way of "scaffolding their tutorials" so as to promote quick adoption and long term retention in content consumers. In this session, practitioners learn how to take these lessons and apply them in their daily content projects.

For transcript, links, and show notes: https://tccamp.org/episodes/what-techcomm-can-learn-from-the-games-industry/

In this episode we discuss the role of transnational publics as well as women in disaster management and disaster response. 

Sweta Baniya, is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Professional and Technical writing at Virginia Tech University. Her scholarship centers around the ever evolving, changing, and challenging global issue of natural and man-made disasters, such as earthquakes or climate change. Her research draws upon non-western paradigms into dialogue with contemporary rhetorical framings of natural and man-made disasters to support local and global communities faced with responding to such events. Her work has appeared in Enculturation, Journal of Business and Technical Communications, Journal of Technological Studies.

A former communication practitioner, Sweta Baniya shares on how public voices, actions, and transnational activism is something technical communication practitioners can collaborate with in order to support communities suffering during and after a disaster.

For transcript, links, and show notes:  https://tccamp.org/episodes/how-content-practitioners-can-help-with-disaster-response/

In this episode, Carlos Evia explains how everyone can have intelligent content and how LwDITA can help with that.

Carlos Evia is Professor of Communication in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech, where he is affiliated with the Centers for Human-Computer Interaction, Communicating Science, and Humanities. During the 2020-2021 academic year, he is the faculty fellow at El Centro - Hispanic and Latinx Cultural and Community Center. His research and teaching work focuses on planning and developing technology-based content solutions for workplace communication problems, particularly in situations involving multicultural audiences or misrepresented communities. 

We discuss the benefits of intelligent content, such as single sourcing, content reuse, and multichannel publishing and how, even in practitioner circles, there is pushback and criticism against some of the tools and standards that technical communicators use to produce and publish intelligent content.

For transcript, links, and show notes:  https://tccamp.org/episodes/intelligent-content-for-everyone/

Rebekka Andersen has a Ph.D. in Professional Writing and is an Associate Professor in the University Writing Program at the University of California, Davis. She teaches courses in professional and technical communication and serves as the Associate Director for Professional Writing. 

In this episode, Rebekka Andersen, University of California Davis explains how practitioners can extract value from academic research and increase the relevance of research in their own professional work. Learn how we can all increase the relevance of research. First, learn how academics can increase the value, relevance, and accessibility of their research for non-academic readers. Then, find out how practitioners can get more benefit from academic research.

For transcript, links, and show notes: https://tccamp.org/episodes/relevance-accessibility-value/