The Freefall and Trainers and Technical Communicators

In several other blog posts, I've posted links to articles about the freefall of the newspaper business and the near-freefall of the broadcast television business.

For those of you who are trainers, instructional designers, or technical communicators, you're probably wondering, "what does any of this have to do with me?"

On the one hand, on an instinctive level, I always figured there was a link. As the commercial industry goes, so goes the custom (private) industry. On the other hand, I wasn't sure, at first, how it would play out.

Then I saw the article, "Customer Service? Ask a Volunteer," by Steve Lohr in the New York Times (Viewed at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/business/26unbox.html?_r=1&hpw) and the implication hit me like a ton of bricks: user-generated content.

So many of us are excited about Web 2.0 and the opportunity to have users generate content. But if users are generating all of the training and documentation, who needs professionals?

To be honest, I think there IS an answer to that question and some organizations will get it, and value what these two professions--ones in which I have invested years in both academic and industry environments. But I also believe that there's a similarly large group of organizations that will ask "who needs professionals?" and conclude, "certainly not us!"

And that, in turn, could have serious implications for future employment of people in both fields.

Data versus Instinct in Design

In “Data, Not Design, Is King in the Age of Google,” (New York Times, May 10, 2009) Miguel Helft reports the very public departure of Douglas Bowman as Google’s top visual designer. In his blog, Bowman explained that he left Google because:

Google was not friendly to designers.

Mr. Bowman’s main complaint is that in Google’s engineering-driven culture, data trumps everything else. When he would come up with a design decision, no matter how minute, he was asked to back it up with data. Before he could decide whether a line on a Web page should be three, four or five pixels wide, for example, he had to put up test versions of all three pages on the Web. Different groups of users would see different versions, and their clicking behavior, or the amount of time they spent on a page, would help pick a winner.

The article then explores the tenuous relationship between data and instinct in making design decisions and considers the limits of user data in making design decisions.

On a personal note, I’ve seen articles exploring the same issue in Business Week (which covers design better than any business publication), which provide examples from the auto industry of the limits of consumer data in making design decisions. Even soap operas (readers would know I would have to bring this up some time) have failed, in part, because they’re being written to please focus groups, rather than to surprise viewers.

Read the full article at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/business/10ping.html?hpw.

Another Take on the Freefall of Print Journalism

In “The American Press on Suicide Watch,” Frank Rich becomes the latest in a string of New York Times columnists to discuss the sharp, sudden decline of the print new media. (Maureen Dowd seems to have been writing nearly exclusively about this for a month or so.)

On the one hand, he does not feel that this is necessarily the end of the world, talking about the strong resistance with which radio and movies initially greeted television, a resistance that would eventually fall and a reinvention of both that eventually occurred. On the other hand, he notes with concern that online readers don’t seem too keen on paying for news yet advertising alone will not cover the cost of serious news gathering by Internet-only organizations (indeed, he notes, that Google doesn’t pay for news (it merely links to other people’s news)).

In the process of making that argument, Rich also notes that the distinction between opinion that passes for much of news these days and real news gathering—as well as the impact of that effort on democratic societies.

As an aside, Rich notes a little-reported statistic in the broad media coverage of Twitter: that 60 percent of subscribers drop their subscription after a month. He doesn’t draw any conclusions, though my assessment is that Twitter—like much social media—is still in tire-kicking mode. People want to try it out to see what it’s all about, but we’re still a ways off from long-term, effective uses of it.

Read the full column at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/opinion/10rich.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=all.

Why the Internet Is So Costly at the Hyatt, Hilton, and Marriott

In “The Price of Staying Connected,” (New York Times, May 10, 2009) Michelle Higgins describes the high cost of Internet service in high-end hotels. In contrast, wireless Internet is usually free in most medium- and low-end hotels.

Among the reasons: money. Differences in the way that hotel chains are compensated for their affilitations with high-end hotels (management contracts, based on revenue) and medium- and low-end hotels (franchise agreements—fixed fees), results in separate charges for Internet at high-end hotels, and free Internet at others.

Read the entire article at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/travel/10pracwifi.html?hpw .

The TVs I Have Been Waiting for

In “Can Widgets Save the Television Industry?”--one of the articles--in Business Week’s special section on the future of television, Helen Walters describes how the new Internet TVs work.

She described the Yahoo-Samsung TV, which is out now and due on other brands of TVs later this year (and not just in the US, but 17 other countries, but I don’t know whether those countries include Canada), and raves about its clear, nearly intuitive interface. (The only thing that interferes with the intuitive—ness of the interface is that applications (widgets—“ small software applications that offer tailored, pared-down versions of sites found online”) are divided between Samsung-suggested applications and Yahoo-suggested ones, a division resulting from licensing contracts and not the logic of the division.

I’ve been anxiously awaiting the convergence of high-definition, Internet, and television before making a significant investment in TV (well—other than shacking up with someone who already had a high-definition TV), and this looks like the one I’ve been waiting for. (But as my partner advises, it also needs to have wireless communication with speakers.)

Read all about the device at http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/apr2009/id20090413_723482.htm?chan=innovation_innovation+%2B+design_top+stories

Power-Pedia

In an April 2, 2009 post on the blog of the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, Seb Chan talks first about the people behind the entries in the Wikipedia.  Then he describes how the Wikipedia is the largest referrer of visitors to the Powerhouse Museum website and the implication of that to the museum.  As a result of that, his museum set up a meeting with some keep Wikipedians in Australia.  The museum provided the Wikipedians with a tour of its facilities (including its storage), then described its mission and some of the challenges of using its resources online because of copyright and licensing issues.  

View the entire blog post at http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2009/04/02/working-with-wikipedia-backstage-pass-at-the-powerhouse-museum/. 

Wiki-opolis

In his article March 28, 2009 article in the New York Times,  "Wikipedia: Exploring Fact City, " Noam Cohen compares the experience of using the Wikipedia to that of exploring an ancient, well-built city, and the etiquette of  contributing to the Wikipedia to that of living in a city. 

Interesting food for thought.  

(Too bad it took me a month to get around to reading this.)  

View the entire article at  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/weekinreview/29cohen.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all. 

Food for Thought

In his recent New York Times article, "No, You Can't Get an Upgrade," David Segal describes an upgrade-oriented approach to life, from the upgrades one receives as compensation for a bad customer service experience to the upgrades in friends that people inevitably go through.  

The concept reminded me of a book I read about (but, admittedly, have not yet read): Sunnyvale, The Rise and Fall of a Silicon Valley Family, by Jeff Goodell, which describes the fallout of a planned upgrade.

View Segal's article at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/weekinreview/26segal.html?ref=weekinreview.

Carrots, Sticks, and Copyright Laws

In his recent New York Times article, "Sneaking Into the Movies," Michael Cieply describes how large media companies are using both carrots and sticks to ensure compliance with copyright laws.  

The sticks are well known-mostly lawsuits.  The article suggests that most media companies realize these efforts will have, at best, limited impact on pirating copyrighted music, movies, and television shows.  

The carrots are not well-known, but primarily involve creating "events" around the music and movies, such as using concerts-not records-as a primary revenue stream for performers and creating one-of-a-kind events around movies, which  viewing the video can't repeat (like the opening events associated with Disney's documentary, Earth.)

View the entire article at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/weekinreview/26cieply.html?ref=weekinreview 

Checking Up on New Employers and Other Tips for Using LinkedIn

In "Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn," re-published at the LinkedIn blog, Guy Kawasaki offers a number of useful tips on getting value from this service.  Some of the more interesting ones:

• Using LinkedIn to investigate a potential employer by checking up on the hiring manager and possible high turnover in the organization
  
• Using your LinkedIn profile to improve Google search results about you 
  

View the entire article at http://blog.linkedin.com/2007/07/25/ten-ways-to-use/.

Could SuperUsers Replace Super Technical Communicators and Instructional Designers?

In his recent New York Times article, "Customer Service? Ask a Volunteer," Steve Lohr describes a trend in which organizations seek out super-users to voluntarily contribute insights and advice in their online communities, speaking specifically about a trial project at Verizon.  

As a scholar, the discussion of research on the different classes of users was helpful: a class of super-users who provide expert advice to others and suggest improvements to product design (sometimes making the improvements themselves), who comprise about 1 percent of a user community; a second group of users that actively participants as raters of experts' advice (about 9 percent), and the majority (as much as 90 percent  of users), who simply read the contributions of the other 10 percent.

As a teacher of future creators of content, however, the Verizon trial (and other projects like it) seem like the embodiment of the "informal learning future" that so many in training and instructional design describe.  But this vision of the future doesn't really hold much room for company staff, except to reward the 1 percent who contribute.   

View the entire article at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/business/26unbox.html?_r=1&hpw.

A New Way of Viewing the World

In “Lit Critics Who Peer Under the Covers,” New York Times contributor Patricia Cohen discusses the impact of the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a co-founder of queer studies who, in the process of co-founding a field, challenged academics to look at the world in new ways.

Cohen writes:

For starters, the ideas that she and others developed helped to usher in the era of multiculturalism, which challenged traditional scholarship as well as the primacy of Western thought and peoples. The resulting battles over ideology and values that composed the culture wars made their way into the national conversation.

Cohen adds that Sedgwick felt that all “defined categories” fail to “capture reality.” More than focusing on GLBTQ issues, Sedgwick had an impact on all of the identity studies. Sedgwick noted a tension between the “universalizing view,” in which minorities should be treated like everyone else, and the “minoritizing view,” in which miniroties should be viewed as “oppressed.”


Cohen notes the impact of Sedgwick’s scholarship not only on academe, but in the broader community and suggests that it was one of the drivers of the conservative outrage at academic scholarship.

To be honest, I’ve noticed the tension between the universalizing and minoritizing not only in the queer world, in Quebec (which struggles with language issues), and in the Jewish community, which struggles with isolation and assimilation.

As much as I probably should not be admitting this (but to be honest, although I’m queer, but I’m not a queer scholar), I had not heard of Sedgwick but hope to learn more.

Read the full article at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/weekinreview/19cohen.html?ref=weekinreview&pagewanted=all.

Integrating IT

In “Tech Skills Crucial to Any Career, Students Say,” Denise Dubie reports on an IBM Academic Initiative survey that:

“found that 80 percent of 1,600 college students polled agreed that high-technology skills will help them succeed, and a majority expect to have to master new technologies while in the workforce. More than 50 percent of the students said they plan to improve their technology skills before they graduate, with technology being the top skill that students want to pursue, followed by writing and marketing skills.”

True. But that’s not exactly a new finding. The late Helen Loeb presented a similar finding from her survey of engineering students over 20 years ago at the Society for Technical Communication Annual Conference (can’t remember the exact one; I think it was Denver 1987).

She also compared those results with a survey of students 10 years after they received their degrees. By then, they realized that communication skills were the most important in moving their careers forward.

What’s different by the IBM survey is that it was not conducted with technically-focused students. It encompassed students in other fields, like healthcare, and found that IT is basic to even these fields. Mark Hanny, an IBMer involved with the study, concluded that:

"Studying IT and technology in a broader sense is the right approach; it helps students understand how technology is applied to various businesses to help streamline operations," Hanny says. "IT is being embraced by students as a core competency across many professions and no longer considered a narrow, specialized skill set."

That’s an especially important finding for a field like educational technology

Reason versus Emotion

In his April 7 column in the New York Times, David Brooks comments on the roles of reasons and emotions in making moral judgments:

. . . They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong.

In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it.

I now know why being logical rarely gets through to people.

For the full column, visit http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07Brooks.html.

Data-Based Decisions, Again

In Failing to Push Paper in the Digital Age, Gordon Pitts explains how AbitibiBowater, (it’s one of those huge companies that most people never hear of—it’s the largest manufacturer of newsprint) ended up in bankruptcy.

Many of the issues that this 95-year-old company are financial: the company assumed bigger is better and over-leveraged itself becoming big.

But a part of the problem is a failure to carefully read industry trends. Pitts describes how the company tried to continue growing despite a 20-year downward trend in the demand for newspapers, and never fully responded to that trend. Furthermore, one of the companies this one bought had as one of its best assets a top-notch CEO. But the purchasers did not that CEO in their top job. So when the bottom fell out of the news industry this past year, the bottom fell out of this company.

Read the full article at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090416.wabitibicause0417/BNStory/Business.

Elements of Style Turns 50

One of the pithiest books on writing style, Strunk & White's Elements of Style, turns 50 this year. Read about the book and its impact at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/books/22elem.html?ref=arts

Skin Deep Toxicity

In his article, Managing Toxic Employees: How to Turn Such Individuals into Positive Performers, in BusinessWest (a business newspaper in Western Massachusetts), Edward R. Mitnick provides signs of toxic employees, explains how once-productive and positive workers might become toxic, and offers a step-by-step process for addressing these problems.

The problem with brief articles like this one that attempt to cover complex topics is that they oversimplify them and, in this case, barely acknowledge it. In this case, Mitnick focuses on the most obvious toxic performers—the kind of people everyone meets on the job.

The problem is, not all toxic workers are so obviously toxic at face value. But there are other means of identifying them—such as higher turnover (because people choose not to work with these toxic individuals).

Furthermore, the strategies that Mitnick suggests for addressing toxic workers are pretty standard, and look like they come straight out of a manual for managing marginal performers with a performance plan. The plan is the easy part; initiating the conversations regarding poor performance are the hard part and the article offers no advice on that.

In fact, one of the reasons that these problems arise is that managers avoided the problems when they first appeared because avoiding that unpleasant conversation was easier and quicker than having it.

(In fact, in Coaching in Challenging Times, published at the Training Zone UK, John Blakely notes that even executive coaches have been able to avoid these difficult conversations in their coaching until now but, because the clients paying coaches to addres the “‘coachee’s prejudices and shortcomings,” even executive coaches are going to have to have these “difficult conversations” and “confront” their coachees.)

To his credit, Mitnick suggests that toxic performers are often the result of bad management, rather than merely the worker’s own actions and that fixing the problem requires shared ownership.

Read Mitnick’s full article at http://www.businesswest.com/details.asp?id=1973.

Read the article on executive coaches having difficult conversations with coachees at http://www.trainingzone.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=195270&d=680&h=608&f=626&dateformat=%25e-%25h-%25y.

It’s All in the Data

In his April 17, 2009 column in the New York Times, Paul Krugman analyzes the evidence that an economic recovery might be starting, offering “four reasons to be cautious about the economic outlook.”

For students of data-based decision making, this analysis provides an insight into the role of interpretation of data provided. For example, Krugman shows how optimists might be missing some important data in their analyses or choosing to ignore it, stating that “Things are getting worse” based on the most recent reports from the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank’s many districts.

He raises similar concerns about bank profits, noting how a change in the reporting period has removed one of the most difficult months from one bank’s quarterly report and, as a result, made the performance appear significantly data.

In other words, yes—data is important in making decisions, but the data needs to be sound.

Read the full column at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/opinion/17krugman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

What Ails Higher Education?

In her April 18, 2009 column in the Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente suggests that one of the problems with university education today is that a large number of students admitted don’t really belong there and would be better served by a vocational education at a community college (Cegep).

As evidence, she cites a variety of evidence, including reports of grade inflation in Ontario schools (resulting in students who think they’re prepared for university, but are not), and polls of, and interviews with, university professors about the capabilities of their incoming students. She also notes that, once admitted, most students cannot flunk out.

Read the full column at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090417.wcowent18/BNStory/specialComment/home

And Now, for the Positive News

In contrast to the pessimism of my earlier posting about the demise of mass media and the decline of traditional media, a commentary by A. O. Scott suggests that today’s media users seek pith and character and, in response, electronic reading devices like Kindle might lead to a the resurgence of the short story, just as the iPod changed the focus from the album to the song.

In other words, despite the sadness of the loss of what we know, something good might be on the horizon.

Read Scott’s piece at
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/weekinreview/05scott.html?ref=weekinreview.