Literacy Project Resource Sharing

by T.R. Girill
STC Fellow

T. R. currently manages the East Bay STC’s Technical Literacy Project.

Inward Links

The guidelines, strategies, and exercises used by East Bay STC's literacy outreach project are collected and annotated on a branch of the chapter's public website. This not only allows local high-school teachers to borrow and revisit those materials whenever they want, but it also opens the exercises to the larger world. Search engines, of course, sometimes lead curious readers from everywhere to these pages. In addition, diverse educational websites link to and endorse the resources that we share. Here is a sample:

• High Schools
  The website of Newington (CT) High School, much revised in early 2007, continues its long tradition of including a link to our instruction-writing material on its "Reading and Writing in the Content Areas" page.
  

• Colleges
  Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL) is often cited by librarians and other college English departments. The OWL website itself includes a link to our project among the recommendations on its "Internet Resources for Teachers" page.
  

• Vocational Programs
  Missouri citizens looking for job-oriented writing help will find an enthusiastic endorsement of our exercises at the top of the "Technical Literacy" page on the Missouri Center for Career Education website.
  

• Professional Libraries
  The EServer TC Library is a "free, open-access, human-edited" directory of reputable online resources in technical communication, hosted by "a nonprofit publishing cooperative." A search of this site by publisher reveals five items (with links) credited to EBSTC, of which four involve technical literacy. Readers rate all of these items as at least "good" and two of them as "great."

Enriched Exercise

In recent weeks we have refined our shared online collection in both content and format. Strategic note taking on a complex process and informed revision of draft instructions for that process are two key underlying skills that students need if they are ever to create their own useful instructions from scratch. One of our exercises that builds these two skills is Fact Checking on the Internet.

The California State Library provides an encyclopedia-like public website called Librarians' Internet Index (LII at lii.org), whose goal is to acquaint students with reliable online reference material. Part of our skill-building exercise involves using LII to check popular science claims (for example, about E. coli contamination in fast food). LII has changed its look and its hierarchy of search headings, so we needed to revise the exercise to take advantage of LII's current arrangement.

Furthermore, some underperforming students really don't know how to take notes (on a process, such as using LII). So I wanted to introduce those students to a basic but very helpful way to start. Text linguist Michael Hoey explains just such a note-taking technique in his clever book on Textual Interaction (it involves making a simple matrix of actions and items observed). The new version of our exercise now overtly deploys and practices Hoey's technique.

Finally, the revised fact-checking exercise now appears in a slightly different format to make life easier for interested teachers. A slim left-hand column now parallels the main text at the right. In this "context" column we itemize the prerequisites for using this exercise in class, its cognitive apprenticeship features, and the supporting references (with links) otherwise spread throughout the text.

An Invitation

To learn more about the literacy outreach project, to suggest a teacher who might want to host future technical writing workshops for their classes, or to participate yourself, please contact T.R.Girill (trgirill@acm.org).