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This article reports on the results of a research study supported by a CPTSC research grant that analyzed programmatic use of social media in professional, technical, and scientific communication programs (TPCs). This mixed-methods study included a survey of TPC program administrators (n = 29), an inventory of TPCs' social media account use (n = 70), and an inventory of TPCs' course offerings that included social media (n = 27). Results showed that programmatic use of social media requires strategic consideration, particularly in order to generate two-way communication, a goal of many of the TPCs studied. To that end, our article generates questions and guiding suggestions (drawn from our three-part study) to guide administrators who wish to include social media in their TPC.

This article explores how universal design for learning (UDL) principles can be used to effectively scaffold social media in online writing courses. It offers proposed best practices for user-centered design in online environments when using social media. These include offering alternative assignments, using accessible social media technologies, and encouraging students to critique social media’s affordances and constraints. Thus, readers may take away from this article some practical suggested approaches that can help support technologically enhanced classroom environments involving social media.

In this afterword, I tie together the manuscripts collected as part of this special issue, noting the threads that are woven through them: action, engagement, activism, and pedagogical innovation. Framing this within the larger scope of research on privacy and the ethics of data collection in computers and composition, I work to place these ongoing conversations within our field's history, and I call for further action that takes these discussions out past our field and into the broader halls of academia.

The author reports on social media research in technical and professional communication (TPC) training through a national survey of 30 professional and technical communication programs asking about...

In the game industry, community managers engage in social and emotional labor as they split their loyalties between game communities and game companies. Community managers do not fully represent the interests of one group, and their intermediary role puts particular stresses on the types of emotional labor that they are called upon to enact. Further, community managers must also participate in social labor---work that builds and exploits social connections for monetary gain. Most of this labor, however, is undervalued and in some instances is simply uncompensated "free" labor carried out by members of a fan community. Ultimately, we argue, casting the role of the community manager as a social and emotional laborer feminizes this work, monetarily devaluing it while isolating workers in these roles from the communities that they ostensibly serve.

In this article, I share a case study illustrating potentials and pitfalls of social media technologies in writing pedagogy to network students and disciplinary stakeholders. It is drawn from a larger dataset, a mixed-methods study exploring social media in pedagogy and professional contexts by writing studies faculty. The case study emerged from a graduate-level course I taught that used Twitter as a digital bridge to build community among students, faculty, and professional organizations. Through the case study, I offer a deeper dive into issues that can arise regarding invisible, uncompensated digital labor when teaching with social media. To offer faculty and administrators pedagogical takeaways connected to this case study, I provide a heuristic (a table with guiding questions and further readings) for conscientious consideration and use of pedagogical social media—an attempt to make visible some of these labor and ethical concerns.

Recently, research into the intersection of computer games and technical writing has been increasing, with more conference presentations and publications interrogating communication within the comp...

Digital badges are studied and implemented for a variety of purposes. Regardless of the specific application, all badges have one thing in common: they contain explicitly designed information meant to motivate users. This information is created by the badge's developer, transferred using the badge as a vessel, and assimilated by the user. In other words, badges are devices for communication. This article examines this communication process within social environments from three different perspectives---badges as rewards, feedback mechanisms, and narrative. For each of these perspectives, this article provides examples and discusses the type of information that can be communicated as well as the design considerations required for successful communication.

The Digital Media and Composition Institute (DMAC) offers professional development opportunities through its diverse perspectives, experiences, lessons, tools, and resources. In short, the culture of DMAC is rich and prolific. We find it difficult, then, to settle on any one characteristic that best represents what DMAC affords concerning professional development and scholarly methods. DMAC's values are skills, knowledges, and capacities that work together to form a complex exchange of professional possibilities. It is a complex endeavor. With this complexity in mind, our article explores the culture of DMAC as a circulating culture of diversity. Our multivocal essay traces keywords we associate with DMAC and its capacities for professional development. Our keywords include access, assemblage, assets, community, conversations, intensity, novice, and participation.

This article interrogates the use of plagiarism detection devices from a critical and rhetorical standpoint, using both plagiarism detection technologies as well as essay mills as sites for analysis and subversion. My goal is to argue for a pedagogy of resistance to plagiarism detection technologies. Both plagiarism detection sites and online paper mills play into the very issue we as rhetoricians and compositionists should be resisting; that is, by upholding the singular notion of authorship as something individualistic, commercialized, and commodified, these sites reinforce individual authorship to the detriment of more communal forms of writing that are prized in online environments such as social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and so on. If we are forced into the circular logic of avoiding plagiarism/catching plagiarists/punishing plagiarism and prizing singular authorship above all other forms, then we risk failing to find the ability to break free and move beyond to more challenging modes of writing that rely on community. The potential time-saving benefits of plagiarism detection services—that is, the ease of discovering potential plagiarism—may unfortunately lull us into compliance and cause us to forget that there are larger issues regarding copyright law and ownership of ideas still up for debate.

By examining three major digital activist events—the Arab Spring, the indignados movement, and Occupy Wall Street—the authors illustrate that digital activism motivates and facilitates real offline behaviors beyond slacktivism by reviewing successful strategies and outcomes that were part of each movement. Moreover, in examining the issue of slacktivism, the authors demonstrate that slacktivism is not always digital, and that the power of weak ties has demonstrable effects in protester behavior and coordination. Finally, the rhetorical situations and exigencies of these major digital activist events are examined; this is an area ripe for more direct analysis and commentary. Understanding the rhetorical situations and exigencies involved in successful digital activist events allows researchers and practitioners a better understanding of integrated approaches to public involvement using social media.

In this review essay I examine four technologies which, as a result of their integration into American society, have changed scholars’ views of the nature of writing, the nature of authorship, and the nature of writing instruction. Throughout, I call upon the three texts under review to show how they join in the conversation regarding the ethical, moral, and economic impact of these four technologies—the World Wide Web, peer-to-peer networks, plagiarism detection services, and video games—upon our society. The authors showcased here shed new light on technologies many of us take for granted; the questions they raise are ones academics should continue to consider as we grapple with the impact of computerized technologies on our moral lives.

The digital divide has been largely theorized as a problem of access. Compositionists have attempted to move beyond a binary view of technology access in examining the digital divide and in doing so have raised important questions about the larger societal issues connected to issues of technological literacy and access. While much attention has been paid to students at risk of growing up without access to, and experience with, computers, attention also needs to be paid to students’ critical digital literacies. Additionally, we now face a new instantiation of the digital divide where students are often more technologically adept than their instructors. The problem is not so much providing access for Generation M students surrounded by technology but rather to effectively integrate technological literacy instruction into the composition classroom in meaningful ways. Compositionists should focus on incorporating into their pedagogy technologies that students are familiar with but do not think critically about: online social networking sites, podcasts, audio mash-ups, blogs, and wikis. To do so, however, instructors first need to familiarize themselves with these technologies. In essence, compositionists must catch up with the Generation M students who have left them behind.

This article examines the common genre of the usability study in technical communication courses and proposes the incorporation of computer and video games to ensure a rhetorical focus to this genre. As games are both entertaining and educational, their use in the technical communication classroom provides a new perspective on multimodal literacies that is appropriate to meet the needs of twenty-first-century learners. This article both describes a theoretical rationale for the inclusion of video and computer games in the classroom and also offers suggestions for their practical pedagogical incorporation.

Online simulated environments directly affect the formation of individual subjectivities through the creation of player avatars. Thus, the power relationships that affect subjectivity formation need to be carefully examined by player-participants as belonging to a system with sometimes homologous, sometimes radically different actions and consequences. In this article, we argue that students need to develop critical awareness of their own subject formation and their positions in new media environments. Such awareness is a necessary component of new media literacy. We further contend that composition instructors can look to Second Life , a popular online simulated environment, as a dynamic text to engage students in questions regarding power, ethics, intellectual property, and community.

Over the past two decades, social media has transformed personal and professional communication. The distributed nature of social media has contributed to its widespread dissemination, enabling individuals to discover, share, and comment on social issues and events happening around the world. In particular, the affordances of micro-blogging have enabled frequent and accessible communication between corporations and their consumers; thus, crisis response is an especially important use of micro-blogging sites such as Twitter for corporations. This chapter explores ways micro-blogging can be used to respond to corporate controversies and the public outrage brought on by such controversy as expressed through social media. Using the official Twitter accounts of corporations dealing with controversy as sites of analysis, the authors analyze how these corporations use their official Twitter accounts to respond to controversy and provide insight into the roles micro-blogging can play in responding to corporate crisis.