10 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2016
    1. What I fear is thattechnology will be dumped on us without our input and thatwe will shoulder the blame when that technology fails toperform as expected.

      I completely agree with Albers here. The future of technology is bright, but it also can be quite scary. Some fear that we are growing too dependent on technology. I would agree to an extent, I just don't like it when people (particularly elder generations) make technology out to be this villain. It has created jobs, brought people together in unimaginable ways, and made the world better. However, I fear relying too much on it will cripple us to where we cannot survive without it and the thought of that is really scary.

    2. "One of the most crucial tasks of the technical commu-nicator is to provide information that users need by carefullyselecting the right mix of content and then developing, ar-ranging, and presenting it effectively for the audience"

      Albers quotes Hayhoe here, and I think this is a very good point to put in his argument. This definitely will ties into our class when we address our clients and cater to their needs.

    3. No technology is neutral. People handle technologyand address its problems and solutions with respect to theircurrent knowledge space.

      I agree with Albers's point here. Technology, now matter how beautiful, will always be biased.

    4. We need to define the rela-tionships between the technology, the social aspects, andthe business needs.

      As this article is eleven years old, I feel like in this age, we are defining the relationships between technology, social aspects, and business needs via social media. As companies and people are able to use it to tell their stories.

    5. Twenty years after the introduction of desktop pub-lishing, we are in the midst of a new shift—driven by Webwriting, content management and single sourcing—in howdocuments are perceived, viewed, and created. G

      Indeed we are, as the Internet is growing everyday, created greater and deeper access to new information, software, and tools to connect us with one another.

    6. I am willing to claim that many of our current writingprocesses using new technologies are not unlike the earlyonline writing days when we clung to the book model andcreated pages that users needed to click through one at atime and that contained navigation cues such as "3 of 5."

      I think this relates back to what we discussed in class regarding how the old Nokia phones had user manuals that were as thick as phonebooks, and how no one would read these enormous works of boring text. Now, people look to the Internet to solve their problems, or even better, like to troubleshoot on the device they are attempting to get help for.

    7. Rather than the more common articles focused on asingle technology, I wanted to feature articles with a moreintegrated view that would address the interconnectionsand skill sets in an explicit manner.

      I liked how Albers said that he wanted to find connections between points of communication and how the can be beneficial to one another. This is very important and I think Albers, quite suitably defines what technical communication is right here. It is about finding connections and patterns in writing.

    8. However, inrecent years, technical communicators have beenwidening their scope and expanding into areassuch as interface and interaction design, information archi-tecture, information design, and usability.

      This sentence right here already tells me I'm in for something good, as the writer acknowledges the ever growing changes of technical communication merging with technology.

    9. lish-ing packages support them is understanding a technolog

      NOTE: Since I highlighted the sentence before it, I was not able to include it in the annotation. This annotation should start with the word How and end in Publishing.

      Albers established a very concrete difference between tools, styles, and the comprehension of technology itself.

    10. Simply attempt to integrate new technologies into ourcurrent practices. This period of integration is followedby a developing awareness of transition from old skillsand concepts to new ones and by an evolving redefini-tion of the roles of the technical communicator in rela-tion to technology. These events expand the field itself bycreating accepted new roles within it. (quoted in Carter2003, p. 371

      In this part, I believe that Shirk is discussing how technology has integrated into society, and how we as a whole change dramatically as a result of incorporating this into our world. I like how she also points out how it has created new opportunities. One of the many upsides to technology is that it has created millions of new jobs that were not even imaginable 20 years ago.