Spring 2003

Upcoming Skills Workshops

Leadership Perspectives

Letters from the President

Director-Sponsor's Corner

Feature Articles

Insights from Industry: Intranet Usability Best Practices

Find out what designers at Razorfish San Francisco have to say about designing intranet sites for efficiency and maximum use.

Designing Written Drafts for Communication across Cross-Functional Teams

Apply the concept of prototype fidelity to written documents in order to better meet your team's goals.

Meet Our Officers!

The Spring semester marks the beginning of our new Jay R. Gould Student Chapter Officers' posts. We'll be working hard all semester to bring you workshops, seminars and meetings to benefit your career!

Spring 2003 Officers At-a-Glance:

Ashley Williams, President, is a third year doctoral candidate in Communication and Rhetoric who was first inspired to pursue a degree in technical communication after a traumatizing experience with instructions for assembling a computer. After five years of schooling and work in tech comm, she's now working, under the guidance of Cheryl Geisler, on a dissertation that examines texts' roles in the software development process.

Huatong Sun, VP of Administration, is a third year doctoral student in Communication and Rhetoric. In her undergraduate years she was unsatisfied with her "pure" literature course work and had been looking for a field combining humanities and technology. A one-week experience at a Technical Communication Conference led her into this fascinating field. At this stage, she is working on her dissertation project, a localization case study of mobile text messaging. She still holds her ambitious hope of developing a synthetic perspective of human-centeredness and technology through her research.

Shaun Slattery, VP of Publicity, is a second year Ph.D. student in Communication and Rhetoric who intends to teach and study technical communication. Shaun has taught a variety of writing courses, and is planning dissertation research on the influence of technology on collaborative writing and design.

Binod Sundararajan, Treasurer, is a first year doctoral student in Communication and Rhetoric. Having just finished his MS in Electrical Engineering at RPI, he decided to pursue his doctoral studies in CMRT as it was more meaningful to him. His research interests are in understanding the role of computer mediated communication and human-computer interaction in an organizational setting, with a social network analysis approach. His other interests are in graphical or iconographic languages as assistive technology tools for people with learning disabilities.

Carrie Clegg, Secretary, is a first year Master's student in Technical Communication, pursuing a concentration in Human-Computer Interaction. Originally hailing from California, she received her undergraduate degree from San Jose State University in Digital Fine Art. Her research interests include organizational communication via intranets and educational interface design for young children.

Announcements

2003 STC Conference

Like everything else in Texas, this year's STC conference in Dallas is sure to be big. More than 2,200 technical communicators are expected to convene there from May 18-21. You can join them by registering online. Register by May 2 to get the discounted student rate of $100.

Special Needs SIG Seeks Support

STC's newest SIG, the Special Needs SIG, is still looking for new members to support them in their twin mission to assist technical communicators with disabilities in the practice of our profession and to provide all technical communicators with information that will help them make our communication products more accessible to users with disabilities. Find out more at the new Special Needs SIG Website.