I have three things to accomplish in today’s class:
- Discussing informed consent and distributing IRB forms
- Sharing information on putting together a portfolio
- Customizing a SquareSpace site using CSS code
Informed Consent
Megan McIntyre and I are working on a project called “From Assignments to Problems: Postpedagogy and Technical Communication.” Here’s how Megan and I frame our research project:
Post-pedagogy represents an under-investigated area of technical communication pedagogy. Post-pedagogy offers an alternative to traditional classroom practices by offering students spaces to create assignments, engage in processes, and produce artifacts that are useful to their educational and career goals. This study investigates the efficacy of postpedagogy in the Technical Communication classroom. We hypothesize that, while postpedagogy might initially disorient students, such disorientation hails a more robust and autonomous learning process.
And here’s our research questions and objectives:
- How does the implementation of postpedagogy impact students’ creativity, confidence, and self-reliance (three skills we see as key to flourishing in today’s creative economy)?
- How do students respond to prompts/problems and create digital compositions in postpedagogical classrooms?
- How does postpedagogy impact student self-perception and engagement?
This study has 2 objectives:
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to better understand student perceptions of postpedagogical technical communicaiton classrooms
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to investigate students’ writing, thinking, and problem solving processes
Putting Together a Portfolio
Here’s an intro guide by Smashing Magazine for developing a portfolio. While the article is geared toward web designers, I think it offers some pretty helpful commonplace advice. It is a good starting point. TechWhirl offers a nice follow-up geared specifically to technical communicators.
Take a look at the Hicks Design website for inspiration.
Compare that to some of the top google hits for Technical Communication or Professional Writing portfolios:
Compare those to these portfolios by web designers:
- 35 Professionally Designed…
- I would specifically highlight Dave Bushell’s portfolio.
Of course, I know you aren’t all professional designers, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn something from them. You want your digital portfolio to not only showcase your work, but also reveal your ability to frame that work. Organize your work into meaningful categories. Write short but rich descriptions of each project, highlighting its particular successes. Learn to sell yourself.
Customizing Your Site Design In Square Space
Squarespace provides some documentation for customizing your site design. I want us to get a sense for how to insert a background image. Of course, we are all using different templates, so this will be a bit different for each of us.
It should be helpful to know the basic CSS command for inserting a background-image:
body { background-image:url('paper.gif'); background-color:#cccccc; }
Of course, we probably won’t be inserting our background image into the body. Also, there’s the matter of whether we are targeting a local file (as in the example above, targeting “paper.gif’), or an image on the internet (which would require a URL, and would require that the image we want to use is on the net someplace).
I’m going to work with this skyline image in class (you are welcome to use your own).
