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The Course
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In economic terms, the PC is the dominant
means of production
in our economy. It was thirty 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. In the mid-1990's, corporate spending on
information technology
finally surpassed corporate expenditures on manufacturing technology.
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
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Our economy was once based on
manufacturing things, on making 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!
Moral of this story:
The old tools of production are the
torch and hammer and shovel. The new tools of production are the
Internet and the devices, from cell phones to robots, that you use to
access it.
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.
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.
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 computer 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?
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, by 2006, she was no longer teaching. I don't know what she's doing, but I suspect that 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:
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 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, e-business now in 2011 is business.
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 texting and Twitter.
ENG 260 will give you a fighting chance.
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.
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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 personally are going to look good, your clothes, hair, etc. But what about your work? Will you put as much effort into your writing as you do your wardrobe?
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?
Since the Internet 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.
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?
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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, ... ."
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.
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?
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 7, 2011, when the course started, the tools section has nine pages. That could change by the time the course is over.
Printer-friendly version of the Course Disclosure Statement
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I've
been teaching this type of course since 1978, when the computers were
in a whole separate building and took up entire rooms. College
graduates had secretaries
and telephones. "I have some writing to do" meant longhand on a yellow
legal
pad. Design was like, uh, art and you had to be talented to do that.
You were pretty geeky
if you had replaced your record player with an 8-track sound system
that displayed rows of
buttons and sliders and green blinking lights. (That's an 8-track tape
in the image below, in case you've never seen one.) The out-and-out
wireheads were replacing
their slide rules with 
electronic
calculators.
do it.