Bissonet's article typifies the mixed attitudes trainers hold when discussing the role of high technology as a training tool. He advocates the use of high technology in training because it saves both time and money, yet recognizes its primary drawbacks-both time and money.
High technology training (HTT), Bissonnet argues, is cost effective. When groups need to receive the same type training but are dispersed or not ready for the training at the same time, a standardized, readily available training program is the solution. Training time also is reduced, as is preparation for multiple sessions, when high tech approaches are integrated into training programs.
Simulations by computers or video programming saves time and money and provides training without risks. A 1984 IBM study, Bissonnet reports, shows "interactive video to be about three times more effective at teaching than an instructor." He, however, recognizes problems in determining which type of training is best suited for interactive video and hopes an answer will be found in the 1990s.
One key benefit to HTT is its ability to expand training beyond a classroom. Private industry uses HTT to bring training into the plant. An example at Northrop and Martin Marietta demonstrates how an Apple computer is used to break a process into short bites for immediate on-site learning. Rapidly changing techniques also can be demonstrated and taught through HTT. Bissonnet reports that 75 percent of the workers employed in 1988 would need retraining by 2000. Today's young workers may have four careers - two of them may not even exist today. That speaks loudly for a need for improved in-service training techniques.
One key complaint regarding high technology training is that it is only for the rich. The high cost can only be justified if many people are going to use the training or if simulators are the only realistic alternative because the real items are too expensive to use in teaching skills through traditional methods. Currently only the Government and Fortune 1000 companies are implementing HTT on any large scale.
Another stumbling block is the short life of hardware and courseware. Ignorance and a dearth of objective standards of evaluation, he says, allows some poorly designed programs to be marketed. Combined with potential compatibility problems, HTT faces massive adoption problems. "With all the different laser formats, transmission standards for data, and hardware differences, it is no wonder nothing works outside of a very narrow spectrum defined by the manufacturers." As trainers, Bissonet says, regardless of personal stands on adoption of HTT, the changes imposed on the role of training is intimidating.
"The fact remains," he said, "that high-tech communication products will be used in training. The important questions are how those products will be used, what technologies are most effective for different subjects (not to mention different students with different learning styles), and what technologies will emerge as dominant."
Bissonnet's only prediction for the future is simply that the best technology and methods will rise to the top, and then hindsight will make everything crystal clear. Newer toys will always be vying for attention.
Bissonnet never unequivocally voices an opinion for or against HTT. He does, however, provide the reader with preliminary information. For those readers seeking support for implementing a training program integrating a mixture of technology tools, the article does present aspects on the cost and scope such a venture entails. But ACE readers will be disappointed that Bissonnet does not make the transition from industry to campus settings or offer even hypothetical campus examples.
From the post-Civil War geological surveys of the American West to the present, visual images have played a crucial role in the public debate over wilderness, land use, and natural resource policy in the United States. This issue of Aperture, a quarterly journal devoted to what its editors describe as "the most significant work in photography," explores how photographs -and more recently video- have communicated environmental concerns and influenced political decisions.
The power of the visual image is no surprise. The photographs of the USDA's Farm Security Administration photo project etched the economic and social consequences of the Depression in our national memory. Photographs were instrumental in the civil rights movement and Vietnam. But this issue of Aperture holds special interest for land grant communicators because it deals with a subject close to our hearts: communicating about the land. Not so many years ago that primarily meant chronicling the wonders of ever increasing agricultural productivity. So, today, many of us are now having to respond to requests from our administrators, scientists and Extension staff for help in addressing environmental issues.
If nothing else, this collection of short essays and exquisitely reproduced photographs demonstrates the intertwining of photography and environmentalism. And it reminds us that environmental concerns didn't begin with Earth Day in the early 1970s, but rather have a relatively long history in the United States.
That history is admirably reviewed in "Land and Landscape," an essay by Aperture editor Charles Hagen. Hagen explores the influence of the publications issued by various environmental groups. The Sierra Club pioneered the "exhibit format" book, oversized and carefully printed books with inspiring wilderness photographs and poetic texts. This is the American Earth (1960) and In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World (1962) focused on the beauty of the American landscape. Other books led the attack on specific conservation issues. The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado (1963) alerted Americans to what had been lost to government dam building. Time and the River Flowing: The Grand Canyon contributed to the successful fight against two dams the Bureau of Reclamation proposed to build in the Grand Canyon.
Magazines published by environmental groups place heavy emphasis on photography. T.H. Watkins, editor of Wilderness, the monthly magazine of the Wilderness Society, says his magazine is using more photos now than ever before. "People can't save what they don't know, and photography is still the best medium for getting this across....Photography gives the magazine tremendous weight on the Hill and among TV and newspaper people."
In "A Growing Awareness: Environmental Groups and the Media," Joel Connelly, national correspondent for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, explores how environmental groups have used the media. Referring to Mao's admonition that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, Connelly says, "In the world of the 1990s, however, political and environmental change flow through the lens of a camera. Environmentalists learned this lesson long ago."
Connelly discusses examples of how such groups as the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and the Natural Resources Defense Council have successfully carried their messages through the media. Says Brock Evans of the National Audubon Society, "Visual images are the key for us. They've kept ancient forests standing and oil rigs out of the Arctic Refuge." This issue of Aperture is profusely illustrated with photographs by notables ranging from Barbara Bosworth to Alan Tibbetts. Of special note is a series of aerial photographs of the Kansas prairie taken by Terry Evans.
The title of this issue, "Beyond Wilderness," is the theme that unifies Aperture's essays and photos: It is time to turn public debate away from wilderness preservation and direct it instead toward developing a new, enlightened land ethic that applies to all land. The controversies over old growth forests and the fate of Columbia River salmon runs are an indication that the debate has already begun in the Pacific Northwest.
If we, as land grant communicators, are going to provide our scientists and Extension staff the best possible counsel, we must be aware of the history of land issues and the key role played by visual images. "Beyond Wilderness" is a good place to start.
Document design began in the 1930s, but much of its theory, research, and practice was between 1980-1989. This article provides a brief evolution of document design and stresses the need to integrate theory and research with practice. From it, we get a feel of what to expect in the 1990s if we are to communicate successfully through our publications.
Document design is not the process of formatting text to make it visually appealing nor is it desktop publishing. The organization and format of a document may be just as important as its language.
Document designers are frequently hired to find creative solutions to a wide variety of ill defined communications problems facing business, industry, government, and education. Document designers are discovering that distinguishing the writing they do for novices, intermediates, and experts is becoming increasingly important.
Document design is the theory and practice of creating comprehensible, usable, and persuasive texts. Text in this article includes oral, written, visual, and verbal text. Document design draws on the theory and research about how people produce and use text, particularly how they read, write, understand, and are motivated by text. It is concerned with readers and writers and how writers can provide readers with texts they can use and understand. It emphasizes both verbal and visual dimensions.
Ten years ago document design highlighted the importance of composition, cognitive psychology, instructional design, readability, human factors, graphic design, and psycholinguistics. The knowledge that a designer needs to draw on expanded rapidly during the past decade. Now, new factors include rhetoric, social psychology, reading comprehension, human and computer interaction, computer technologies, discourse analysis, and cultural studies.
Cognitive psychology tells us some of the key decisions people make as they read and write. Social psychology sheds light on how people form impressions of others and how they negotiate communication situations. Psycholinguistics looks at the complex interactions between readers and texts. Computing technologies makes us aware of innovative ways to deliver. A recent addition to the field is cultural studies which help us anticipate the assumptions, motivations, and reasons that people read and write as they do.
Key Clusters Of Research In Document Design Document design is an emerging discipline. Most of the work up to now has clustered in five areas of research
Cluster One: Research Focused on Writers - Research in the past 10 years focused on both writers' processes and writers' context. Researchers are studying the process of writing itself and looking at how context influences what writers do.
During the 1970s, attention was focused on written products; in the 1980s, on writing processes; and, in the 1990s, research includes processes and products in context.
Cluster Two: Research Focused on Readers - Research into readers' needs investigated the goals, expectations, information requirements, preferences, performance abilities, and learning strategies of readers with varying backgrounds.
One of the more interesting findings is that readers' ability to construct meaning from text is partly related to their ability to think about their own understanding as they read.
Cluster Three: Research Focused on Text Design - This research concerns the effects of various text designs on readers' comprehension, performance, and textual preferences. Researchers are trying to - determine why some texts are easy to understand while others make readers struggle for understanding.
Cluster Four: Research Focused on Text Evaluation - This research develops, refines, and tests alternative methodologies for assessing the effectiveness of text. Today, most research is into persuasiveness, comprehensibility, memorability, and usability. This is playing an enormous role in education, the military, and industry. In education, researchers are investigating methods for assessing the effectiveness of textbooks used by children and adults. This is the most critical area of research. Experienced text evaluators are paying close attention to text problems caused by what is written and what is left out. They are sensitive to problems of commission such as faulty syntax and problems of omission such as missing examples.
Cluster Five: Research Focused on Communication Technologies - Major research thrusts include how people use the new media and how particular features influence human-machine interaction. New media includes online information, online help, natural-language interfaces, hypertext, video disk, CD-ROM, etc.
The old industry stereotype that "anybody who can speak can write" is proving grossly inadequate. When just "anybody" writes, they almost always fail. As the 1990s progress, companies around the world have or are planning to create departments dedicated to document design. Many colleges and universities are developing programs in document design. Managers of publications departments and writers are now expected to have master's or doctoral degrees in rhetoric, document design, or professional or technical communication.
Two problems persist to constrain document design research. They are the status of document design within the academy and the lack of funding.
Traditionally, nonacademic discourse has been viewed as an ugly stepsister of academic discourse and had the lowest political status in English departments. Today, the progressive departments have tenured rhetoric, document design, and technical communications faculty as well.
Since the U.S. government sponsored the Document Design Project (1978-1981), it has allocated no major funds for document design research. When companies fund document design, it is frequently to "put out fires." Because government and industry tend to fund "revisions of X" or "guidelines for Y," designers have generated a lot of excellent solutions to communication problems. By addressing global issues, document design will become a powerful and respected discipline.
Schriver feels optimistic that the next 10 years will mark a turning point in document design research internationally. She says it seems likely that governments and industries throughout the world will become more concerned with understanding the communications practices of other cultures. Such a realization may lead to collaborative efforts for funding research on problems common to communicators.
Public-sector magazines often bog down in blandness. Limited resources coupled with an Ivory Tower ignorance of audience can lead to dry books full of inoffensive (read: unimportant) information. The result? Bored readers less-inclined to support your agency or institution. But your magazine can resist and thrive. The answer, writes Peter Jacobi, journalism professor at Indiana University, lies in the art of editing. In other words: Write for the reader, serve fresh content and study your audience. As editor, your job is to "breathe life" into the publication. Writing for the reader means writing for "thinking people," Jacobi explains. Targeting the lowest common denominator denigrates the audience and weakens the magazine's personality, he says. Instead, you should blend "the predictable and the surprising, the constant and the dynamic, the continuing and the innovative so the reader will be both comfortable and stimulated in the reading." Jacobi says editors should keep in mind that the reader comes first, not the editor or staff. And he recommends that editors develop, then work within, a flexible formula and editorial policy.
Each issue should offer fresh, comfortably challenging content, Jacobi says. To do so, the editor must keep ahead of changes in the field of coverage, society and the competition. Jacobi quotes the late A.C. Spectorsky, former Playboy editor, who said,"The successful publication leads its readership, rather than following it." A basic of journalism - the element of surprise, importance, or unusualness - is key, Jacobi notes. The goal is to separate your magazine from the rest of the pack, making it indispensable to the reader.
You make your magazine indispensable by knowing the reader's needs, Jacobi says. And you understand those needs by "searching outward" through reader research, he says. Jacobi promotes two methods: letters to randomly selected readers, and focus groups:
Jacobi's art of editing doesn't directly address our problem of limited resources. But it does foster better magazines - publications that give more bang for the buck. A quality magazine, Jacobi implies, follows certain tenets regardless of budget.
When they are working on the desk under deadline pressures, editors complain they waste too much time fixing mechanical errors in reporters' copy. Instead they want to concentrate on substantive stylistic and content concerns. At issue is the editor's desire for journalism educators to return to teaching the fundamentals of grammar. Currently, journalism instruction tends to examine the process of writing rather than the product.
The basic question in this debate has rarely been broached, let alone studied: How important is a working knowledge of mechanics to good professional writing? Other questions relating to this subject include: (a) what broad factors form professionals' evaluation of writing?, (b) do editors and reporters agree on their assessments of writing? and (c) what is the relative importance of specific writing abilities to good writing?
Data were gathered from a stratified random sample of 86 reporters and their editors from eight Pacific Northwest daily newspapers. The sample was selected proportionately from small, medium and large papers in Oregon and Washington, all part of the Allied Daily Newspapers chain. Reporters completed a 100-item, multiple-choice test assessing their knowledge of spelling, parts of speech, punctuation, types of sentences, agreement, case and usage. The test included a section to check reporters' ability to identify problems in sentences.
Reporters' writing abilities were measured four ways:
Using factor analysis (principal components analysis with varimax rotation), the editors' ratings showed three distinct patterns, or factors.
"Writing mechanics," the first factor, accounted for 29.5 percent of the variance and included the categories of spelling, grammar, punctuation and knowledge of the Associated Press Stylebook. "Expressive ability," the second factor, accounted for 25.3 percent of the variance and contained creativity, liveliness, writing style, ease with language and word usage. "Journalistic ability," the third factor, comprised 23.0 percent of the variance. It related to preparing good copy under the journalistic constraints of conciseness, speed in writing, clarity, organization, and self-editing ability.
The reporters' self-ratings were similar to the editors, except for a two-item shift creating a fourth factor called "job skills," which consisted of speed in writing and knowledge of AP style. Since this factor did not meet the minimum statistical standard for exploratory research, it was discarded.
Test results indicated many reporters lacked knowledge of writing mechanics. Reporters who majored in English as undergraduates did significantly better on the test than reporters who majored in journalism or communications. While editors and reporters generally agreed on the three broad factors used to judge professional writing, reporters tended to rate their expressive and journalistic abilities higher than their editors did.
The four areas used to measure reporters' writing abilities were correlated, revealing several patterns. First, editors' ratings of reporters' writing are highly interrelated. Second, overall ratings of writing are closely associated with expressive writing abilities for both editors and reporters. Third, overall ratings of reporting are closely associated with ratings of journalistic ability. Fourth, ratings of reporters' professional writing are associated with reporters' and editors' ratings of writing mechanics. Fifth, no statistically significant correlation was found between test scores and winning writing awards or receiving compliments.
Educators can best prepare their students by designing all three factors into their curriculums and workshops so they see the connections among mechanical, expressive, and journalistic writing abilities. The authors maintain that journalism educators can use tests of writing mechanics as a valid measure of students' professional writing abilities.
The results of the research come from a limited, homogeneous sample of editors and reporters, all employed by the same newspaper chain. One might argue the editors were employed because they had similar abilities and expectations regarding reporters. The same might be said about the reporters as well. Research on a more heterogeneous group is needed.
Ward and Seifert suggest that future research on good writing might look at corporate communications. Their research suggests ACE members who want to interest/influence editors, must meet the writing criteria editors apply to their reporters. They must know writing mechanics and show both expressive and journalistic ability if they want their news releases published.
Getting information on displays and exhibits is difficult. The "Trade Show Marketing Idea Kit" provides an excellent starting point. It's full of practical suggestions and, for me, new and innovative thinking about exhibits.
It is not an advertisement for Skyline Displays, but an compilation of well written articles on planning and organizing for a trade show, generally drawn from Exhibitor Magazine. Although its focus is commercial exhibits, agricultural communicators face opportunities where exhibits might be the appropriate communication medium - fairs, meetings, recruitment, schools, Extension initiatives, and malls.
Organized as part of a course on exhibits and displays, the "Idea Book" bundles such major exhibit concepts as basic planning, getting traffic to the exhibit, and maximizing the entire venture through evaluation with helpful aids. The aids include a 16-week planning cycle and design-planning worksheet; tips for selecting the right show; work forms on organizing the corporate strategy, listing goals and objectives; budgeting; space selection; trade-show direct mail; at-show promotion; exhibit design; lead cards and evaluation techniques. Did you know strategies exist for selecting the right booth location? "Trade Show Marketing" offers at least ten. Here are some of them:
This entire section on exhibit placement was a very stimulating one. How do you make exhibit design more effective? A very nice section on exhibit ergonomics tells you. The strategy is based on an adult's area of sight - a radiating pattern of 30 degrees up and down, and side-to-side. Exhibit lettering and title placement are based on this 30 degree cone. The author discusses type styles and color preferences, contrast and color, and contrast and legibility, as well as work area ergonomics. Using a speaker within an exhibit to draw an audience is considered as well. This fascinating section was full of new information. It suggests aesthetics often determine an exhibit's look and some general graphics "rules" can and should be broken.
Checklists and forms are plentiful. The reading is easy and lively. The "Trade Show Marketing Idea Kit" is a real pleasure and should be on the shelf of anyone consulting or doing displays.
Effective use of television as a teaching medium may depend on how well viewers can recall what they see on the screen. If they don't recall what they just saw, it seems unlikely that those visuals contribute to their learning. On the other hand, recalling what they saw should help them remember the information presented.
Doris A. Graber, a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, studied the types of visuals viewers recalled seeing in television news. In order, viewers recalled:
Viewers generally failed to recall:
The research indicated the greatest information gains come from two types of subjects - unusual sights and pictures of people that provide viewers with information they can use to develop reactions to the people in the pictures.
Although Graber's research focused on television news stories, the results can apply to educational television programs and news spots that ACE members produce.