: This paper examines the role of elaborations in learning a procedural skill (viz. using a personal computer) from and instructional text. Experiment 1 compared two sources of elaborations; those provided by the author and those generated by learners while reading. In the latter condition, subjects were given advance information about the tasks they were to perform so that they would generate more specific, task-related elaborations while reading. Each source of elaborations facilitated skill performance. This result contrasts with past experiments testing declarative knowledge in which author-provided elaborations were found to hurt performance. In Experiment 2, the author-provided elaborations were classified into those illustrating the syntax of the operating system commands and those explaining basic concepts and their applicability. Syntax elaborations produced significant facilitation for experienced and novice computer users. Concept elaborations produced no reliable improvement.

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The Role of Elaborations in Learning a Skill from an Instructional Text: Further Findings.

The Rhetoric of Risk: Technical Documentation in Hazardous Environments

Given the barriers for transgender people to access affordable gender-transition care, online environments have witnessed a rise in user-generated instruction sets providing direction on the self-a...

Queering Tactical Technical Communication: DIY HRT

A literature review on cross-cultural personas reveals both, a trend in projects lacking accomplishment and personas reinforcing previous biases. We first suggest why failures or incompleteness may have ensued, while then we entice a thoughtful alteration of the design process by creating and validating personas together with those that they embody. Personas created in people's own terms support the design of technologies by truly satisfying users' needs and drives. Examining the experiences of those working "out there", and our practises, we conclude persona is a vital designerly artefact to empowering people in representing themselves. A persona-based study on User-Created Persona in Namibia contrasts the current persona status-quo via an ongoing co-design effort with urban and rural non-designers. However we argue persona as a design device must ease its implicit colonial tendency to and impulses in depicting "the other". Instead we endorse serenity, mindfulness and local enabling in design at large and in the African context in particular.

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A Critique of Personas as representations of "the other" in Cross-Cultural Technology Design

Persona is a tool broadly used in technology design to support communicational interactions between designers and users. Different Persona types and methods have evolved mostly in the Global North, and been partially deployed in the Global South every so often in its original User-Centred Design methodology. We postulate persona conceptualizations are expected to differ across cultures. We demonstrate this with an exploratory-case study on user-created persona co-designed with four Namibian ethnic groups: ovaHerero, Ovambo, ovaHimba and Khoisan. We follow a hermeneutic inquiry approach to discern cultural nuances from diverse human conducts. Findings reveal diverse self-representations whereby for each ethnic group results emerge in unalike fashions, viewpoints, recounts and storylines. This paper ultimately argues User-Created Persona as a potentially valid approach for pursuing cross-cultural depictions of personas that communicate cultural features and user experiences paramount to designing acceptable and gratifying technologies in dissimilar locales.

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A hermeneutic inquiry into user-created personas in different Namibian locales

Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Jihadist organizations such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) have focused increasingly on motivating unaffiliated individuals in the United States and Western countries to carry out lone-wolf attacks in their home countries. To this end, many Jihadist organizations produce what is known as tactical technical communication. Jihadist tactical technical communication persuades individuals to act by creating identification between individuals and audiences, and by associating terrorist tactics with everyday practices such as cooking.

“Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom”: Jihadist Tactical Technical Communication and the Everyday Practice of Cooking

Research in the ICT4D field implicates lack of user-centered design in the high rate of ICTD project failure. The field of user experience UX offers potentially fruitful approaches for user-centered design. In the ICTD context, these principles and methods clash with the triple constraints of project management time, scope and funding. This paper introduces the user persona from UX design as a powerful tool for considering the user's perspective within resource-constrained ICTD projects. Although personas appear simple, they introduce complex communicative affordances, pragmatic benefits, and risks to ICTD projects. A brief conclusion revisits the larger problem of ICTD project failure, and considers the potential role of personas in addressing this problem.

Communicating User Experience: Wicked Problems, Patchwork Personas, and the ICTD Project Lifecycle

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User-Generated Content and Its Effect on Technical Communication

Journalists, politicians, and law enforcement professionals have linked anarchist cookbooks to various crimes including bank robberies, hijackings, terrorist attacks, and mass shootings. By braidin...

“Figure 4, Peyote”: Comics and Graphic Narrative in Anarchist Cookbooks, 1971-Present

Global migration to ISIL-controlled territories has persisted despite ISIL’s well-documented repressive tactics, multinational efforts to stop the migration, and the difficulties facing disillusioned recruits who wish to return to their home countries. This article asks what motivates some individuals to emigrate from countries that rank high on the UN’s Human Development Index to ISIL-controlled territories in Iraq and Syria. To address this question, I examine ISIL’s official online magazine, Dabiq , as a rhetorical artifact designed to persuade and motivate readers. Dabiq ’s recruitment strategy consists of three key terms arranged as a jeremiad that guide readers through a redemptive drama of guilt and purification. The article discusses implications for rhetoric and professional communication, terrorism studies, and counterterrorism strategy.

Hilary A. Sarat-St. Peter

Papers

“Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom”: Jihadist Tactical Technical Communication and the Everyday Practice of Cooking

Communicating User Experience: Wicked Problems, Patchwork Personas, and the ICTD Project Lifecycle

User-Generated Content and Its Effect on Technical Communication

“Figure 4, Peyote”: Comics and Graphic Narrative in Anarchist Cookbooks, 1971-Present

From Hijrah to Khilafah : Rhetoric, Redemption, and ISIL's Recruitment Strategy