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Business And Professional Writing ENG 260 - Medaille College - Fall 2008 other pages The Course | The Case The Syllabus | The Reports | The Tools Printer-friendly version of the Course Disclosure Statement this page the hype new media communication skills the reality ENG 260: The Course The ENG 260 Course Web

The Hype

In economic terms, the PC is the dominant means of production in our economy. It was twenty-five years ago that the number of knowledge workers exceeded the number of production workers. Since 1980, more US workers have processed information about things than have made the things themselves. Now most of these knowledge workers have a networked computer on their desks, in their briefcases, and in their pockets. Globally networked devices (the Internet) are a new medium.

Our economy was once based on manufacturing things. Now that the manufacturing is in China and the customer service is in India, our economy is based on managing manufacturing assets.

Of course, all those US manufacturing jobs have been going to China, right? Wrong. Just because the manufacturing went doesn't mean the jobs went. Stop thinking so 20th century. China is losing more jobs than we are because of robots. Talk about cheap labor!

China Losing More Manufacturing Jobs Than U.S. But Adding Service Jobs at a Rapid Pace
The Conference Board, July 8, 2004

China is losing more manufacturing jobs than the United States. For the entire economy between 1995 and 2002, China lost 15 million manufacturing jobs, compared with 2 million in the U.S.

Why? Employment is down but productivity is up because of "improved technologies", that is, robots like our friend on the left used for welding, painting and handling materials. That's where the jobs went. Not to a Chinese peasant. To a Chinese robot!

China’s industrial labor productivity growth exploded at a 17% annual rate between 1995 and 2002. As in the more developed countries, this rise in productivity comes from improved technologies and the reallocation of resources from lower to higher value activities.

Moral of this story:

The new tools of production are not the torch or hammer or shovel. They are the Internet and the devices, like robots, that you use to access it.

Example

Writers used to hand their manuscripts and copyrights to a publishing company, which owned the editorial, printing, and distribution processes. Within an organization, that publishing function was performed by secretaries.

Now the writers' desktops have the tools, the means of production: the printing press, so to speak, as well as the paper factory, the bindery, the warehouse, and the truck that distributes the books. Micropayments and merchant accounts at the online bank let the writers run their own bookstores. They can keep their copyrights. Watch this transformation happening in the music industry. It's about to happen to movies and TV. Book publishing, especially textbooks, and magazine publishing are right behind.

New media technology -- the Internet --
provides an interesting challenge:
who's in charge?

New Media Communication Skills

aka e-Skills for Management

If your company needs a new storefront, the marketing department is not expected to hammer the dry wall and paint the signage. They call in another department or they outsource to experts. Clearly, carpentry and sign painting are not in the marketers' job descriptions. Their supervisor would not want them using a hammer any more than the VP of Finance would want the accountants to write the corporate press releases.

It is true that outside sales staff are expected to operate heavy machinery (the company car) and perform routine maintenance such as pumping gas, changing a flat tire, and scraping a frosty window. Other than those exceptions, unless you're self-employed and running a one-person business, your organization has a variety of professionals who specialize in various tasks.

Information technology has created a challenge. Marketers would never think of letting their secretaries deliver their sales presentations. But until twenty years ago, they thought nothing of having those secretaries write their letters and reports. Back then, the professional managers were expected to hand off their written communication to an expert, the secretary, who took notes and then transcribed them at a typewriter. To type their own would have been a waste of the managers' valuable time.

from "what if" to "good enough"

Most computers snuck into offices on the secretaries' desks. They were fancy typewriters. What started the change was the first what-if software, the spreadsheet, specifically Dan Bricklin's VisiCalc (below) in the early 1980's.

Instead of guess-timating or asking the secretary or mainframe programmer to "run these numbers", managers could answer their own what-if questions. "What would happen to our break-even date if we cut the cost of this part 10%?" "What if we went with this new distributor's offer?" As aids to decision-making, spreadsheets raised the stakes.

The sharpest managers could do their own; soon everyone was expected to.

Also during the 1980's, many information workers, that is, most organizations' professionals, started doing their own typing. They may not have formatted and printed the final draft of their letters. They may not have copied, collated, and bound their own reports. But they moved from a dictaphone and longhand to their own keyboards. They printed out their own rough drafts.

From then on, the slope got more slippery. Although the sequence varied depending on organization, individual, and vendor, the software that often followed the spreadsheet and the word processor was the presentation program. By the late 80's, Microsoft made it easy for marketing and finance executives to add text and clip art to a PowerPoint template and quickly make a reasonable-looking presentation.

For a major presentation, the PowerPoint slides were polished by a graphics expert and sometimes the text was polished by an in-house editor. For routine and low-stakes presentations, however, managers found that they could use templates or make their own good-enough PowerPoints. By the early 1990's, it became common.

Next came email. Many managers still have their secretaries screen and print out their email, which they scribble on so that the secretaries can type the responses. Most managers, however, do their own email, especially routine, in-house email. Now it's instant messaging and texting. Soon it will be video-conferencing.

How do you come across in a three-inch video window on a computer monitor? What about when that tiny video projected four feet high onto the wall at a meeting?

the end of the civilization as we knew it

Then came the World Wide Web. As one of my colleagues asked in 1996, "When is all this online stuff going to end? Haven't we gone far enough?"

While I heartily sympathized, I hesitated to inform her at the time that I could see no sign of an end. She was really asking, "What's my job?" For what it's worth, in 2008, she is no longer teaching. I don't know what she's doing, but I'll bet it's low-tech.

The Web has dramatically raised the stakes. Facebook and YouTube. According to a recent Wired feature, you, if you are in your late teens, were born digital:

We learned to crawl alongside the PC. We came of age with the Internet. Early-adopting, hyperconnected, always on: Call us Children of the Revolution, the first teens and tweens to grow up with the network. It takes a generation to unlock the potential of a transformative technology – we are that generation. From IM to MP3 to P2P, we lab-test tomorrow’s culture. While others marvel at the digital future, we take it for granted. Think of it as the difference between a second language and a first. And imagine the impact when full fluency hits the workplace, the shopping mall, the living room. In the past, you put away childish things when you grew up. But our tools are taking over the adult world. Check it out: The technology is trickling up.

We aren't even sure what to call these things. What used to be a "phone" as in short for telephone is now a videophone or a "communicator" -- a cellphone with built-in camera, thumb keyboards, Web browsing. For example, the Apple things on the right and the left. Yes, it's a "pocket PC PDA phone", a handheld computer that also works as a cell phone and can tap into the Internet using high-speed wireless hotspots. The Toyota Prius (photo below) has a microphone built into the rear-view mirror, a "Make a call" button on the steering wheel, and Bluetooth circuitry so that you can make calls without even removing the cellphone from your pocket or purse. Want the Internet in your car? Try DashPC (uses frames; click on Pictures).

Tools that used to be expensive and belong to an elite are now cheap and in your pocket.

What will be hot in 2009? Will US cell phones catch up to the rest of the world? Will US bandwidth (Internet "speed") catch up to the rest of the world? WiMax will let your wireless devices work at a distance measured in miles not feet, as the current WiFi. VoIP -- voice over Internet Protocol -- will take off with new WiFi phones that will let any hotspot turn into a phone booth. Skype is the most popular free phone service -- never pay long distance charges again!

Mobile phone TV begins in Japan BBC News, April 1, 2006 Mobile phone users in Japanese cities can now watch digital TV on compatible mobile phones for the first time.

My new Sony Handycam on the right has Internet access. I can take a video and send it to you right from the camera. A student said to me the other day, "I need to email that picture to my cell phone so I can take it with me." Yikes!

The Reality

In mid-2007, the US was 25th in household broadband penetration. Not only that, but what we call broadband is anything faster than a 56K modem. Let's compare the US with other countries:

(sources: Verizon Online Packages and Prices;
Teletruth's Comparison Verizon’s FIOS;
Adelphia High-Speed Internet)

While it seems as though we are awash in a sea of luscious choice, you can see from the above chart that another C-word is even more important.

A useful term to characterize the overall situation is the most important C-word: CONTROL. Who has it? Who's getting it? Some of what companies used to control, they don't anymore. The process of transferring and transforming that control can be messy. Jobs will be lost. Companies will fail. Industries will wither. Skills will be obsolete.

To whom is control passing? Let's look at one example, the pop music industry. Download completed, as the book cover on the right says. You don't need a German weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blowing. Das Ende der Musikindustrie.

Rip, Mix, Burn

The Future of Ideas
Lawrence Lessig

Rip. Mix. Burn. Apple, of course, wants to sell computers. Yet its ad (left) touches an ideal that runs very deep in our history. For the technology that they (and of course others) sell could enable this generation to do with our culture what generations have done from the very beginning of human society: to take what is our culture; to "rip" it -- meaning to copy it; to "mix" it -- meaning to reform it however the user wants; and finally, and most important, "burn" it -- to publish it in a way that others can see and hear. Digital technology could enable an extraordinary range of ordinary people to become part of a creative process.

Control is passing to you.

If you don't already, you will soon have a home network. Right now, you have more multimedia and raw computing power on your laptop than all but a dozen rich and powerful Western New York organizations had in their whole organizations twenty-five years ago. That much power will soon be in your belt buckle and collar button. It will be powered by your walking.

Are you going to be mired in the old world of your education and experiences so far? Then you will marginalized in this new world. As Time magazine said in January 2007 in making you their Person of the Year, "Welcome to your world."

In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
-- Eric Hoffer

Are you going to learn new skills? HTML. NLE. VoIP. CRMS. That sounds confusing, but they're all tools for you to capture and design design things, especially visual things: images, movies, web pages, presentations, prototypes. These skills will profit both your employers -- the actuaries expect you to have half a dozen in your adult working life -- and yourselves.

While I don't expect e-commerce, especially retail, ever to dominate, I do expect e-business to be business before too long.

The always-on networked world is where you will spend the rest of your working lives. You will compete with and manage today's children, who don't know a world without the World Wide Web.

ENG 260 will give you a fighting chance.

ENG 260: The Course

Up until now, this welcome page has explained what ENG 260 will do for you. Now, we can ask, "What will you do for it?"

This course is about packaging your work in an attractive, accessible manner. There is no one correct way to do that, so we will practice multiple ways.

If you think about any piece of writing in terms of content, structure, and presentation, then your other college courses prepare you for the content, how to research, organize, think about, and write the sentences and paragraphs. Presentation is important and often specified in great detail ("8 1/2 by 11 double-spaced with one-inch margins"), but it is clearly -- and appropriately -- less important than the content. ENG 260 is not that kind of writing course.

ENG 260 is the one course that will emphasize the presentation. In it, you will practice packaging and re-packaging the same content in a variety of common media and formats for a variety of audiences.

ENG 260 is about looking good at work. When you get a real job with your college degree, I know that you are going to look good. But what about your work?

Our parents and grandparents may have worked with their body muscles, but you're getting a college degree in part so that you won't have to work with those muscles. You will work with your brain.

With your college degree, you're likely to get what we used to call a "desk job", as opposed to a "factory job". You're going to be what we used to call a "paper pusher", but in a world increasingly without paper, we need a better phrase. Your desk will have a computer on it, that's for sure. It will have three or four computerized, networked devices. Perhaps "file pusher" is a better phrase for what you will be.

Instead of adding value to things on the factory floor, you're going to get paid for adding value to ideas on the corporate computer network. Where the tools of production were the shovel, hammer, and wrench, now you use software and the Internet.

Some factory workers are better than others at using a hammer and wrench. We might say that they have a firmer grip on their tools. What is the equivalent for knowledge workers?

Think about the expert in that mechanical world of hammers and knives and steam engines. Blacksmiths, butchers, and coal shovelers. What about the expert in the electronic world of wikis and video streaming and search engines?

The ENG 260 Course Web

Since the Web is so new, it's even more important that we use the same vocabulary and begin to develop shared values. Thus, I would like you to actively participate in a collaborative online environment that we will use for learning and that will increasingly be used for business. As the instructor, I will be modeling leadership and project management by my participation in this online environment to supplement the traditional classroom. A virtual classroom to simulate a virtual office, if you will.

The Course

Find out all the official stuff. How is this course described in the college catalog? What are you going to know more about? What are you going to know how to do better? What's the self-assessment all about?

The Case

In this course, you'll learn by doing. We're going to pick up where the section above on the end of civilization leaves off.

If the course were Mission Impossible, the Case page would be the tape-recorded message at the beginning, except that it wouldn't self-destruct until the course is over. "If you choose to accept this mission, ... ."

The Syllabus

This is the page to bookmark. It will change often, get very long, and be the place to learn what we're going to do in class and what you should do before class.

The Reports

You will demonstrate your learning in an oral presentation as well as in the portfolio of reports and style sheets on your portable office (USB drive). What are the other students doing? When are you scheduled to make your presentations? How will it all be evaluated?

The Tools

This section of the course web is by far the most extensive. It has about a dozen pages with instructions and specifications for how to successfully complete the course assignments. During class, these are the pages that will be on the screen most of the time and that will guide our hours together.

As you can see on the site map below, as of September 2, 2008, when the course started, the tools section has nine pages. That could change by the time the course is over.

Site Map of the Course Web

Printer-friendly version of the Course Disclosure Statement