Which model of communication will technical communicators employ in the future?

About 44 minutes into his presentation, Michael Wesch talked about network size and the effect it traditionally has on the ways teachers communicate information to students. He said as the audience size increases, teachers have found they’ve had to get their students to participate less and follow more. He argued educators should and could move back to… Read more »

Is the future of education also the future of technical communication?

I stumbled across another great video of Michael Wesch talking about the issues facing educationalists.  Many of the problems they face are the same as those faced by people involved in producing user assistance. The video is here Dubbed “the explainer” by popular geek publication Wired because of his viral YouTube video that summarizes Web… Read more »

The debate on the future of technical communication

My Vienna presentation on the future of technical communication and building a career has sparked a debate on a couple of Web sites: Tom Johnson’s blog How to Avoid Extinction as a Technical Communicator has generated 12 comments so far. CJ Walker has posted her thoughts on her blog, too It’s interesting getting feedback on… Read more »

The “Google or Death?” choice for technical authors

July’s edition of Science magazine includes a study that shows scientific researchers are now more inclined to get their information from the Web (specifically, “quick and dirty” searches in Google) than from specialist scientific resources. If scientists are focusing on only a tiny bit of research – the bits served up by Google – what are typical users… Read more »