By Kate Crane and Andrea Beaudin | Student Members
If the purpose of technical communication instruction is to provide future practitioners with a theoretical and practical foundation to engage in technical communication, how do we bridge academic theory with “real world” new media praxis? Today, technical communicators must not only be good writers; they must have a degree of new media literacy. Enter the new media lab. At Texas Tech University (TTU), the Multiple Literacy Lab (MuLL) provides a practical playground of sorts for students to use multimedia tools of the trade and to engage in technical communication, both theoretically and practically.
This article chronicles the experiences of ten students who met for a two-week intensive course in which professional deliverables were created for a client—Grinbath, LLC (inventors of EyeGuide eye-tracking technologies). The media lab became a location for “mashing up” technical communication and rhetoric theory and practice while working with real-world clients. It was in this space where lessons about collaboration, time and resource constraints, and working as a professional team became a window to understand how new media works in professional contexts.
MuLLing Things Over
Something special happens every May at Texas Tech: a two-week intensive seminar for the PhD program in Technical Communication and Rhetoric. Online students come to campus to work with faculty and onsite students. A course in new media this past May, taught by Dr. Rich Rice, met for four hours a day, six days a week. The class was asked to understand theories surrounding new media, learn tools needed to produce and revise new media in iterative design processes, work with a client to create new media for business and social media promotional use, and produce a class video documenting our experience. In all, we created ten deliverables in twelve class sessions, including a promotional video (http://tinyurl.com/3zalesj), a white paper (http://richrice.com/5365/Grinbath_EyeGuide.pdf), and a reflective video (http://tinyurl.com/3zbypup) tracing our process.
Dr. Rich Rice in the Texas Tech MuLL
Although it is not much larger than a faculty office or seminar room, the MuLL includes six Mac and two Windows computers (all loaded with industry-standard software), handicams, a tape-to-DVD converter, DVD copiers, a color printer, laminating and binding machines, a plotter, and a myriad of other useful tools for new media production. In the middle of the room are a small round table and several chairs on wheels. Other students and faculty breeze in and out of the lab throughout the day to support their teaching, research, service, and grant writing. It’s a little cramped and a little chaotic—not unlike several professional workspaces—and it is through the “messiness” that we melded theory and practice. But the messiness engendered creativity as we challenged the limitations of our existing skill sets and negotiated task responsibilities among ourselves.
Audience-Driven Project Development
One primary question in the course that we asked, as graduate students and as future educators and practitioners, is: what about new media did we need to know? Does a technical communicator need to master Flash? HTML? CSS? Databases? Premiere? Our class came to the tentative consensus that we might not need to master an application, but we definitely needed to achieve literacy in new media theories and practices in order to inform the work we do. The MuLL was a practical playground in which we learned limitations and opportunities brought about by time and resources. We felt rushed—two weeks seemed too little time, yet in truth, our experiences mirrored the tight turnaround times required of many practitioners. While we actively encouraged each other to learn new skills, at times we had to scrap ambition and stick to accessible technologies and our proficiencies. Our goals included deliverables somewhere beyond proof-of-concept and perhaps a little less than production-studio quality, but they were well considered, well designed, and highly usable. Thus, although we might not claim to be new media experts, the MuLL and the experience of working with a real client under a tight deadline provided a realistic experience in navigating the limitations and possibilities of composing new media.
Newly Mediated Collaborative Practice
New media composition is collaborative. Behind every composition is a multitude of people with varied skill sets, and content producers of all sorts. The roles are fluid, the “author” is not just one person, and the audience collaborates toward a final product through iterative comments and “likes.” Thus, many authors provide input and all points of view are meshed.
Texas Tech PhD students in the MuLL
Whereas the academy often still relies on old media models of practice and assessment, this new media model of producing content is fast, of high quality, and realistic. Most media is created collaboratively with a host of individuals who at times share/battle for/negotiate creative control. Our team had limited resources, worked on different elements of project deliverables simultaneously, and when we were in one another’s way, we divided tasks even further. Work could be done in other spaces, including in the field and our usability testing lab or library. Space and equipment had to be negotiated. Sometimes one team was unable to work on a project until other team projects were completed, which again, is a feature more than a bug in this realistic, newly mediated, collaborative approach.
Much like a new media mash-up, the class broke the project components into pieces and then brought them together. We brainstormed edits, made cuts and additions to our modules, and spliced them into our final deliverables. Each piece has the stamp of individual creativity that is merged into a collective message. It was an iterative process that was chaotic and brilliant at that same time. We would start one project and then switch to another, and when the time was right, we returned to the previous project with new knowledge and content.
Inter-Class Collaboration as Systems Thinking
Working for and with a client was by far one of the most frustrating and motivating aspects of the project, but one supported well by new media lab spaces. Our work schedule was beyond our control because our client (Grinbath, LLC) was preparing to launch a new product. We also worked with students from two other seminar courses, Document Design and Usability Testing, collaborating on other deliverables for the company. Products included branding elements, such as the company and product logos, and usability tests documenting suggestions for improvement, subsequently making new product recommendations to the client. As the product itself was being further refined during this time, we had to be flexible in creating our deliverables. We collaborated between classes to exchange work, such as photo and logo files, and information about and from the client. Such inter-class collaboration is unusual in technical communication programs, but it is good preparation for content creation and sharing in the workplace, and it was necessary for working with our client. Our network included over 25 team members, forcing us to think like an integrated system. Still, we were not always able to get new deliverable versions from other classes in time to incorporate ideas into our own projects. And some members of the larger team continued working on deliverables even after the two weeks passed. This was a realistic workplace experience that is rare in traditional models of instruction.
The Final Mash-up Takeaway
The new media learning lab as a realistic technical communication production environment, as well as the service project integrated across multiple courses itself, which is a sort of theoretical/practical and academic/workplace mash-up, afforded experiences that a traditional classroom could not. What are our most important lessons?
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Effective collaboration, learning, and creativity is a messy process. Working through messiness is a learning opportunity. In tight spaces where resources are limited, chaos is unavoidable, but it can also inspire creativity. Many students expressed the wish for a clear project plan for each iteration. In retrospect, however, much of the learning and creativity came through processes of discovery, failure, recursive thinking, and redesign.
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New media technologies provide possibility and limitation. Although we had access to many technologies, they did not always allow us to do everything we envisioned the client needed. At times, this forced us to be inventive. One group used one software program to get a desired video effect of a single clip that could be imported by another group into more user-friendly video software. The reality of working with new media is this: dream big, but if it fails, pull some of those big ideas into plans B, C, and D.
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Primary accountability should be to the client. Being accountable to a professor and being accountable to a client are different things. Professors are responsible for creating and staying consistent to a schedule and project because, ultimately, course grades have to be submitted on time. Clients may change their minds and may be willing to delay for a better product. In our case, scheduling was often at the mercy of other players: the company, for furnishing us with necessary files; students in other classes, for completing their projects; and the clients again, for providing feedback.
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Expertise should always be respected and negotiated. We can’t all be experts at everything. Learning how to give up control over a project to someone with more expertise is one of the most difficult things for each individual and his or her vision of the work. However, when working with a team, giving up control for the good of the final deliverable is necessary for success. This is an important lesson that can be learned from working in a new media lab. Functional new media literacy is crucial to every student of technical communication and rhetoric.
Through the meshing of varied experiences, equipment, technological literacy, and theoretical understanding developed in a new media lab, a class of ten students was able to succeed in delivering high-quality products to a client in a realistically short and intensive timeframe. The client used these deliverables to launch their eye-tracking products into the marketplace. The hands-on approach of new media lab learning helps prepare undergraduate and graduate students alike for the demands of the field. Understanding the various technologies our field uses and how those technologies are employed requires both theoretical and practical iterative training with such tools.
This article is derived from class wiki posts by May 2011, English 5365: “New Media” students: Chris Andrews, Andrea Beaudin*, Kate Crane*, Debbie Davy**, Lynn Ponder*, Elaine Ramzinski, Danielle Saad, Rhonda Stanton, Michael Trice, and Sandra Wheeler*, with Dr. Rich Rice leading the course. Primary authors of this article are Kate Crane and Andrea Beaudin. (*Denotes STC Student Member; **Denotes STC Senior Member)
