Rebekka Andersen

University of California, Davis | UCD · University Writing Program

Chapter Takeaways --Technical communication educators need to embrace content management as a core disciplinary competency. --The term “content management” is a small umbrella to cover all content-related work. The field of technical communication should move beyond talking about content management to talking about content operations and the disci...

We highlight preliminary results of a multi-staged, multi-year research project that examines the skills that students and early-career practitioners need to lead and innovate in the changing profession of technical communication. Strong technical writing skills are still important, but professionals in the 21st century rarely can build and sustain...

Technical communication (TC) practice is changing in significant ways, due largely to maturing technologies and increasing consumer demand for content designed for a multitude of devices and delivery channels. Whereas ten years ago technical communicators primarily produced static documents, today they primarily produce modular content components,...

This article introduces a multi-stage, multi-year research project that seeks to identify perspectives on and strategies for preparing students for roles as leaders and innovators in the field of technical communication.

We present the results of a series of interviews with practitioners who were established consultants or who were in managerial or senior positions in their organizations. To determine the extent to which these practitioners found academic research valuable, relevant, or accessible, we asked them to read 12 peer-reviewed articles and six trade artic...

Most peer-reviewed journals in the field of Technical and Professional Communication have as a goal to publish research articles on problem, trends, and practices in the field to meet the needs of readers working in industry and academia. The hope is that readers working in industry use published research results to problem solve and improve practi...

Article published in the CIDM Best Practices Newsletter. The article presents summarized results of interviews with 11 members of the field who are established consultants or who are in manager or senior positions in their organizations. To determine the extent to which these practitioners find academic research valuable, relevant, or accessible,...

Component content management (CCM) enables organizations to create, manage, and deliver content as small components rather than entire documents. As CCM methodologies, processes, and technologies are increasingly adopted, CCM is reshaping technical communication (TC), the roles of technical communicators, and the skills they need for career success...

Technical communication (TC) students who are familiar with component content management (CCM) and content strategy have better opportunities for job placement and for making carefully thought-through, rhetorically grounded choices in the workplace. In this article, we describe four ways of incorporating elements of CCM and content strategy into ex...

Presentation on practicing technical communicators' experiences with and perspectives on academic publishing (results of a survey). Given audience of managers of information development teams and consultants, focus was on how academic research adds value.

Article published in Composition Studies (volume 4, issue 2) In first-year writing (FYW), instructors want students to understand how reading texts in particular ways affects how and what they learn and, in turn, how and what they might communicate to their own readers. Because students tend to come to FYW predisposed to notice more visual aspects...

The papers in this special section focus on effective content strategies. As a unifying vision and action plan, content strategy brings together various specialized writing communities, including professional and technical communication, marketing communication, and web development, ideally breaking disciplinary silos and biases and promoting conve...

Background: A content-management project that proceeds with an incomplete understanding of the views, reservations, agendas, and attitudes held by stakeholders could likely encounter problems in implementation. The vast majority of content-management implementation projects proceed with very little visibility into the cultural dynamics that will ev...

Research problem:The widespread adoption of component content management in organizations calls for a comprehensive summary of the territory of this phenomenon. A summary provides stakeholders in component content management with a sense of how the practice has evolved and its implications to research, theory, and future practice. The last such rev...

In this special issue, we use content management to refer to a particular type of content management: component content management. Component content management is an interdisciplinary area of practice characterized by methodologies, processes, and technologies that rely on principles of reuse, granularity, and structure to allow communicators to c...

Problem: This tutorial explains how technical communication organizations can improve their chances for a successful component content-management system (CCMS) implementation if they plan for the shaping force of cultural dynamics in the technology diffusion process. Many component content -management (CCM) thought leaders have identified people fa...

In my last column, I wrote about the need for a more integrated view of the field of technical communication. I suggested that the more our field is able to collaborate and integrate with other fields that have a stake in content management (CM), the more our field's unique perspectives, knowledge, and strategies will be recognized for the value th...

Drawing on a survey of the content management (CM) discourse, the author highlights CM trends and articulates best practices in content strategy that CM thought leaders are helping organizations adopt. These trends and practices are changing the nature and location of rhetorical work in organizations that produce intelligent content. In these conte...

For the past few years, I have attended a number of industry conferences focused on content management (CM); reviewed a wealth of CM-focused publications, including trade books, white papers, newsletters, and blogs; and followed numerous CM-focused online discussions. Through these experiences and readings I have learned a great deal about the affo...

To identify some of the research questions and needs of most importance to industry professionals and academics, we conducted a Technical Communication Industry Research Survey that posed a common set of questions about research. Here we report the results, which suggest some differing priorities for academics and industry professionals, but also s...

Published in CIDM Information Management News (May 2013). This article is a follow-up to the "Results of the 2012 Best Practices Research Needs Survey" article in the April issue of the CIDM e-newsletter. Here, I discuss the value of a reciprocal relationship between research and practice and suggest that the time might be right to form a new habi...

Published in the CIDM Information Management News (April 2013). This article reports the results of the 2012 Best Practices Conference research needs survey and describes a new CIDM research initiative. You can participate in the initiative by engaging in the activities detailed below and by completing the follow-up research priorities survey ava...

Component content management (CCM) is profoundly changing technical communication (TC) work, yet TC scholars have been largely absent from the CCM discourse that is shaping that work. This article explores the notion of reciprocity as a way for scholars to gain agency in the CCM discourse. The author argues that innovation diffusion studies can pro...

Published in the CIDM Best Practices Newsletter (June 2011). Doing business in a global marketplace demands virtual collaboration. Sharing topics in a content management system requires writers to collaborate virtually. What does collaboration mean in technical writing organizations? To answer this question, we surveyed models of collaboration, es...

Article published in the CIDM Best Practices Newsletter (October 2010) Information development groups are increasingly adopting component content management (CCM) technologies to efficiently author and manage content objects. Successful adoption of these technologies, however, requires a continuous exchange of knowledge, skills, and processes acro...

This article lays out some of the key issues driving organizations' increasing interest in enterprise content management (ECM). It then problematizes both the rhetoric that technology developers are using to sell ECM technologies to business leaders and the assumptions on which business leaders are basing critical technology implementation decision...

In this paper, I argue for more integration of project management strategies in teaching team-based writing projects in business communication and writing courses. I draw from a range of academic and industry-specific literature on workplace collaboration to show deficiencies in current textbook descriptions of effective collaboration and to discus...

Descriptions of the roles of editors in their organizations have been limited and traditional in the literature on technical editing. Based on a preliminary investigation at a Midwest publishing company, the author discovered that conventional notions of the editorial process do not sufficiently characterize the extent to which organizational conte...

Technical communicators have often defined their relationship with technology using a metaphor of “technology as tool,” an outlook that reinforces perceptions of practitioners as “tool jockeys,” threatens the sustainability of the field, and isolates academics and practitioners alike from design and business decision-making and from better intellec...

Typescript. Thesis (M.A.)--Eastern Washington University, 2002. Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 122-126).