Notes on India and Tech Writing

I've been fascinated with everything I've heard about technical writing in India, that there's so much outsourcing to Indian firms (or American firms operating in India), and that there seems to be so little speculation on how this will affect American technical communication programs. According to the STC, there's only two universities that offer technical writing degrees in all of India, and a few of their engineering schools offer courses in technical writing. So. . .what does this bode for the future? Will American programs be inundated with applications from Indian students? Will up-and-coming tech comm graduates be recruited to teach in India?

Week 13

Have you recently visited one of the organizations for whom you are writing? If not, please do. Visiting the organization at this point may shake loose a fresh idea or new energy renewal to see the importance of your work. If there is no "organization," which is the case for some of you, visit with the person or a person or someone who you know with the "organization." What did you find?

Actually, I’ve spent quite a bit of time at our church this semester. And there’s been a great deal of what I expected: some general dissatisfaction with the current playground, and a widespread acknowledgement that we just don’t have the money to fix it. At least not all the money. But I’ve also learned (and included in my proposal) that we have a new design that’s been done by one of our members. He’s an engineer, and apparently has considerable experience with designing and building playgrounds. I shouldn’t be surprised by this: our church has a large congregation, and we’re in a college town which also has some surprising industry resources. The end result is that you never who you’ll meet, and this guy not only has experience but he seems to be willing to donate his time and knowledge. Very, very cool.

Week 12

What is one proposal one of your task force group members is working on? Describe it in a few sentences, and then point out one strength so far of what you seen and one thing that can be improved upon. You might include a hyperlink to your peer's specific proposal.

I’ve tried to familiarize myself with Lennie’s first proposal: providing documentation for the latest version (ver 5) of the encore learning environment. EnCore is a MOO, which means it’s an object-oriented software bundle for real-time communication. It is an open-source, volunteer project, and various implementations of the encore MOO are used by universities, schools, and other educational entitities.

Lennie’s strength is his dedication and wide breadth of knowledge concerning this software. He’s been using it for year—literally years—and knows about others who use it and want to develop it. I know Lennie personally, and he’s always looking for ways to promote and improve the MOO.

Weaknesses: I don’t know if this qualifies as a weakness, but this project strikes me as having two distinct difficulties: the MOO is open-source and developed by volunteers. This means that developing good documentation will be subject to the whims of individual timelines and the vagaries of a changing software package. In other words, version 5 may not be the same from one installation to the next, which means the documentation may need to be modified from one installation to the next. Hard to handle.

The other difficult I foresee here has to do with managing a project over multiple organizations, including volunteers from TTU, nationwide, and even in Europe. To me, this spells Organizational Trouble in terms of keeping people up-to-date and working on the right things at the right time.

I have to admit that I’ve seen Lennie (face-to-face and online) work as an administrator and I think he’s up to the task.

Week 11

No MOOting again this week. Many professors are at 4C's this week. But, please spend a lot of time really digging into the rhetorical aspects of budgets, which you read about last week and some this week. The numbers you relate are very telling. Think carefully about what in-kind is. What is in-kind, exactly, and what in-kind sources for your two projects are you thinking about relaying in your budget and why?

I have to admit that I’ve have to spend time considering what I think “in-kind” means. For the most part, I’ve been thinking of it in terms of payment. Can I pay so-and-so for services by a return in services? But, truthfully, I’ve had to also begin considering “in-kind” in terms of what church members can do for the project. This can include services that they may perform as a professional, but often provide for free with regard to friends or the church. My mother is a music teacher and has offered her talents, but musical and pedagogical, on many occasions. I have quite a few friends my age who do construction of various sorts, and they often build/fix/improve things for the church.
What are the in-kind aspects of the playground project? Well, we’ll have to have the existing gravel hauled off, that’s for sure. And we’ll need to do the same with the existing playground equipment. None of that work takes trained professionals, so I may be able to get a group of college students to perform it as a service project, so long as I can round up some trucks and a place to take these things. Installing the new equipment is something which can be done by volunteers so long as we have a supervisor. And the design itself is being taken care of by one of our members already!
So I guess that means the only part of the project which cannot be handled by in-kind sources is the placement of the shredded rubber pour-n-play surfacing. Hmmm.

Week 9

Okay, we're in the nineth week.
This is now, officially, the half-way point to the course. Think about all
you've learned. We've made it through more than half of the book. There is still
much to learn, of course, and then we need to keep putting our learning into
practice. For this blog entry, please list out the seven steps on page 278 and
point out how you are following (or plan to follow) those steps with one of your
projects.

1. Begin by restating each objective as an outcome. The more SMARTE criteria (specific, measurable, agreed upon, realistic, time-bound, evaluable) that you have built into your
   objectives, the easier they will be to restate as outcomes.
   


1. Reach more international
   parents by providing a safe, fun place for their kids to play.


2. Increase safety for
   children using the playground.


3. Bring the church playground
   into compliance with suggested guidelines.



2. Look at each outcome to see if
   it answers the “So what?” question. Just because you have some quantifiable
   data does not necessarily mean you have evidence that you achieved your
   goal.
   
   
   
   1. The children’s ministry
      keeps count of numbers (attendance, a rough estimate of
      ethnicity/nationality, male/female children). So we should know within
      a year whether we’re increasing our international contact.
   
   
   2. Safety is a rough goal to
      measure. Perhaps fewer injuries in a given year? I’m not sure the
      church keeps records. Will have to look into that.
   
   
   3. Bringing the playground
      into compliance with suggested guidelines should be easy to measure.


3. For each outcome that does not
   answer the “So what?” question, identify secondary outcomes that would
   provide satisfactory evidence that you have achieved your goal.


4. If the secondary outcomes are
   quantifiable, determine what or how much you would need to attain to
   consider them successful.
   


1. I would think that a 10%
   increase in international children using the playground would be a
   pretty good goal, but I’ll have to ask Lisa how much growth there’s been
   in the last five years so we have something to compare.



5. Determine what kinds of
   monitoring or reporting you will have to do to collect evidence supporting
   the achievement of your primary and secondary outcomes.
   
   
   
   1. The children’s ministry
      keeps records, so that part’s taken care of.
   
   
   2. Compliance with suggested
      playground guidelines won’t have to be monitored except for once, I
      suspect. We will need a maintenance schedule, though.


6. Describe both your primary and
   secondary outcomes, and write a paragraph or two explaining how you will
   monitor and report on them for the Evaluation section.
   


1. The primary outcomes are
   increasing international student visitors to our church. We aim to do
   this via increased children’s facilities, of which playground
   improvement is a major part. The secondary outcome here is increased
   numbers of children being able to use the playground.


2. I think that monitoring and
   reporting will be taken care of as I mentioned above, but we may have to
   increase playground reporting in order to satisfy our funding
   organization. If so, the playground usage would only have to be
   monitored periodically, and might be done by a single person once per
   month. The count could include total number of children, ratio of male
   to female, and an approximation of nationalities represented.


3. Actually, recording the
   nationalities of our visitors would be a sticky problem anyhow, given
   that many are not fluent in English. How do I prepare a survey that is
   universal in nature while still reporting information in such a way as
   to be useful to English speakers?



7. Identify any tasks or
   activities that you would have to perform to monitor or report on your
   secondary outcomes. You can list these tasks in one of two places, either
   under the tasks related to that particular objective or establish a new
   objective dealing specifically with evaluation and list the tasks under the
   new objective.
   
   
   
   1. I thought that I already
      answered this by suggesting a monthly survey of playground activity. In
      retrospect, however, I’ve only begun the process of thinking about it.
      Which days will I survey? Sunday, of course, but there’s a great deal
      of playground activity during the week. And, while I know that the
      children’s ministry keeps track of numbers, I doubt that we have stats
      on past playground usage.
   
   
   2. If I had been really
      ambitious, I might have suggested a grant to simply expand our
      international outreach via parents of children. This “expansion” might
      take the form of having volunteers of various nationalities available
      for watching kids, such that a Chinese mom could know that on certain
      days her children could play with other Chinese children and have a
      volunteer on hand who speaks Chinese (I wonder if our labor is so large
      as to accommodate Mandarin and Cantonese? I doubt it.).
   
   
   
   

Week 8 - Makin' it Hap'n, Cap'n!

Okay, time to make it happen. By now you need to have both of your projects in mind. Please send me both of your preproposals if you haven't already. For your blog post, please detail your timeline for the completion of your projects. I need to know when you plan to complete your grant proposals, but also an estimated timeline for your project completion.

This is my timeline for the playground project.

Preliminary Design - May 1
Finalized Design - June 1
Request for Bids - June 8
Acceptance of Winning Bid - June 15
Removal of Old Equipment and Gravel - June 16 (performed by church volunteers)
Resurfacing (needs at least one week to cure) - July 3
Installation of New Equipment - July 17
Safety Testing - July 24
Open to Public - August 14

The timeline for the CPR Equipment project is somewhat different:


Research on costs - April 1
Meeting with church staff (Brian and Lisa) to finalize equipment decisions - April 17
Proposal letter to Mustard Seed Foundation - April 18
Proposal, with budget and timeline - April 24
Receipt of funds - Depends upon MSFDN
Equipment purchase - Depends upon MSFDN (as soon as funds received)

Week Seven - Words to Live By

For your blog this week, I'd like you to read others' blogs. Find one direct quote that someone else has written that is particularly telling (perhaps over a post on Chapter 7), and write in your blog why it was useful to either/or that person or you.

“Grant writing is really refreshing for me because you get to see more tangibly whether you have been persuasive or not. If you get the grant, you know you were persuasive. Not many writing situations have that clear a yard stick to measure one's rhetorical performance.”
Lennie Irvin, EnCore Wizard Extraordinaire

You know, Lennie’s comment really brought home how invested he is in his project and how invested I’m not, at least not yet, or at least not at the moment. I’ve suffered some communication setbacks and it’s really cooled my enthusiasm. That’s OK – I’m visiting my contact person in her office today and I’ll be getting back on track.

I have to admit to some admiration (just some—not a lot ; )) for Lennie. He’s been on the EnCore train for years now, and he hasn’t given up. I have a short attention span, and whether I’m being brilliant or dull, I have difficult sticking with the same project for a long time. Lennie, though—he’s like a bulldog with the MOO project as a way to benefit writing instruction. I know it sounds cheesy, but he does set a good example for the rest of us.

Week Six - Advance Planning

Buy-in from the organization
This is the part where I’m having problems. I seem to be talking to the wrong folks, or just not using the right contact methods. I’m a pretty high-tech kind of guy, and email works wonders in my world. But it doesn’t seem to be getting much of a response from my audience, and I’m going to have to break down and start the in-person assault. While this may sound logical and simple, it’s not: the church staff are, like other staff people, quite busy, and I never know when someone will be in a meeting. Additionally, church staff are typically WAY underpaid, so it’s difficult to blame someone for taking an unexpected vacation day.

What kinds of people or resources will you need if your project is funded?
I think we’ll just need someone to buy the equipment.

Is my idea unique?
Yes and no. It’s unique in that I’m a regular church member who’s pursuing a grant for the church. It’s not unique in that the Children’s Ministry staff tried, and failed, to get some grant money a few years ago.

Is my idea timely?
Definitely. The children’s program is growing, and they’re hiring more and more teachers and teaching assistants.

Is my idea urgent?
I’m not sure how to answer that. I know that the church might be able to get CPR training through one of the local hospitals, but I suspect it’ll be far more costly in the long run. Something to look into.
Is my idea compelling?
It is if you have children.

If my idea is funded and the project implemented, will this project capitalize on my organization’s strengths?
Yes, because this particular church is dedicated to children and their safety. It will also play to another of our strengths: organization and training. We’re good at that.

If my idea is funded and the project implemented, will this project help overcome some of my organization’s weaknesses?
Um, not sure. In my opinion, it will just add strength to a stable area.

If my idea is funded and the project implemented, will this project significantly help the target audience?
Yes, because (as I stated above) our children’s ministry is growing quickly, more quickly than our church’s building can accommodate in fact. This will help add to our target audience while making a compelling argument for increasing funds towards a new education building.

Week Five Post

CPR Supplies for Grace Bible Church
--Problem
Grace Bible Church in College Station, Texas, offers a mothers’ day out program. This program is similar to regular child care, but the children are only at the church for five hours at a time, twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9 a.m. – 2 p.m.). Because of the number of children involved, which is roughly one hundred, all staff members are required to take CPR training. There are other medical guidelines as well, but the CPR training is the most expensive component of the staff training.

The church’s CPR equipment is in need of replacement, and the church just cut back on its budget for 2006. Because the church serves such a wide swath of our community and does such a good job in offering affordable, educational, and safe child care (mothers’ day out, technically), the community benefits from any additional funds or training the church and its staff receive.

--Solution
Find a grant that will allow the church to purchase a new set of CPR equipment. I do not yet know precisely which components are needed, and there is a wealth of equipment to choose from. I am anxiously awaiting a response to a few emails. Fortunately, the folks I’m working with are people I usually see in person at least once per week, so ongoing contact isn’t too much of a problem.

--Who will carry out the solution
My role in this project is simply to write the grant. The church has its own coordinator for the CPR training, so I can rely on her to use the funds once they are procured.


Funding for Playground Re-Surfacing Project
--Problem
This is similar to the previous problem: Grace Bible Church has a solid, active connection to our community, and one of the facets of that connection is through children. There are two playgrounds behind the church, both nicely fenced in and with pretty good equipment. What they don’t have is the protective, composite surface which is now standard on so many playgrounds. They currently have gravel poured into place. While traditional, this surface isn’t very safe. It’s also difficult to maintain in that it holds water after rains and gets spread around outside the playground.

--Solution
Find someone who can replace it for us. The hard part for this one is that the current surface is neither decrepit nor so dangerous as to warrant immediate removal. It is unsatisfactory and could be much, much improved, but it’s not a total loss. Therefore, I’m not sure how I’ll get folks on board.


--Who will carry out the solution
That’s the hard part here. Finding contractors for this sort of material is very much a word-of-mouth operation, and apparently there are various standards bodies (like OSHA, but for playgrounds). These bodies are difficult to find, and can be local or state run.

Week Four---is this is the right match?

So I've been working with my church to get some new CPR equipment for childcare instructor training. It's such a worthy cause, and such a small amount that I'm looking for (no more than $1,000 total) that you'd think things would be going smoothly. But I've hit some snags.

1. While I did do some asking around about what the church needs, I didn't do a thorough search.
2. The foundation I've found (Mustard Seed Foundation) is a good one, but they only supply matching funds (less than %50). This means the church, or someone else, will need to pony up the rest of the money prior to MSF providing funds.
3. I haven't yet been able to secure budget info from my church contact, which means I don't know two things:
• Is the church behind this project?
• Can the church be behind this project?

I looked at the FDN short course, and to tell the truth, the part I genuinely enjoyed was the diagram of the parts of a proposal: that really helps in terms of perspective.

5377 - Week Three Already?

Think about the problem you're going to try to solve with a successful grant proposal, and the organization you want to write for. What are types of restrictions on RFPs that you want to steer away from? Also, what are some key strategies to avoiding getting your app tossed into the "not a chance" file right off the top? Here's a list of reasons why apps are rejected from the NEC Foundation of America.


For my organization, I think that one of the biggest problems I'll face is that I'm writing for a church. While churches do indeed have many sources of funding, as well as tax breaks and other benefits, many companies that choose to give will not give to a religious institution. This, of course, includes the federal government in many cases. I just looked into Adobe Software, for instance, and they will not give to a religiously-affiliated institution of any kind. If you look at that link, you'll see it's hosted by Gifts in Kind. Which leads me to my next consideration.

Gifts in Kind is an organization I hadn't heard of until today. Their purpose is to serve as a clearinghouse for discount-priced products for deserving organizations. Generally, this means non-profit and educational organizations. They list clothing, software, toys, and some other stuff in their winder catalog (a 480 kb Adobe file, which is a delightful little treat compared to some of the cumbersome academic files I've been accessing lately. Just goes to show that scanners and webservers aren't for amateurs.). Unfortunately, Gifts in Kind doesn't have any of the kinds of products I'm looking for to be used at my church's CPR training.

Other problems: I'm learning that some granting institutions give only to children in the K - 12 age range. Seems odd, but that may be part of their criteria that they only give to public institutions like schools. You know, this grant class could easily be combined with Sam Dragga's class on ethics in order to generate a meta-discussion on how granting puts our values on display. So many companies shy away from giving to private organizations because they don't want to be viewed as anything but uber-democratic.

Scope: my church's childcare program serves our community, but doesn't garner any nation-wide, state-wide, or even county-wide attention. So granting organizations interested in combining philanthropy with PR aren't likely to want to give.

Demographic: I don't yet know if this will be a problem, but our church's childcare program (while quite large--I think it serves just over one hundred children) is populated almost entirely by children from white, middle-class families. I'm not at all suggesting that folks out there only want to donate to minorities, but our church does not have the appearance of needing aid. However, there are other things to consider, such as the fact that almost all churches run in the red. More later.

Key strategies for not failing: Well, there's always the tried-and-true method of audience analysis and proper paperwork. This comes up time and again with regard to writing, whether for literary publications, self-help books, grants, classwork, memos, or even love letters. Think about your audience, read the instructions, and submit on time. There you have it. The secret to published writing. Maybe not fine writing. . .but published.

5377 - Week Two

For what organization will you be writing with your first grant for the course? What are some of the problems, difficulties, and or obstacles that this organization has? What are some plausible activities that would help overcome these weaknesses?

I think I'll be trying to find, and apply for, a small grant for my church. It's a non-denominational church (Grace Bible Church), and technically I guess it's on the small side. We only have about 400 members. On the other hand, we have something like 3,500 regular attendees, so it's also a large church. One the most impressive things is our education program, which includes twice-a-week schooling for children 12 months through 4 years. For five hours per day, twice a week, parents can drop their kids off for "school." While the church curriculum is heavily Christian, it is also quite good in other respects.

The children have music, movement, reading, memorization, and various other activities. Really good stuff, and people from all over town, many of whom are not members of the church, use it. In fact, the program fills up rapidly each year.

Here's the skinny: each of the workers, of whom there are roughly 20, needs to have Infant CPR certification. The church keeps it own certification personnel and equipment, and the equipment needs to be replaced due to age, wear, and tear. I've been thinking that this will be an interesting project for finding a grant. Surely there's some agency out there willing to donate money to update CPR learning tools so that nursery workers can continue to be certified. Surely. The training also includes some information and training on infection control, which is always a BIG issue with little ones running around.

Our two kids are, near as I can tell, generally covered with filth from about 30 seconds after exiting the bath.

The need for CPR training materials includes: videos, training material, supplies, Purell for each room, Clorox wipes, etc.

There are one or two other things the church needs: nursery-wide curriculum plan and materials, TV/VCR/DVD setups, organization stuff like bins, shelving units, and a new storage shed. Of these, I think money to help with curriculum development or multi-media equipment is probably the most likely. Bear in mind that I don't have enough experience to know this for sure--I'm just fakin' it.

5377 - Week One

Questions: What are the six stages of grant seeking? What, exactly, is a needs statement? And which online resource linked through the syllabus have I found to be most useful and why?

The six stages, as listed on our course website, are as follows:

1. Identify a problem;
2. Generate an idea to solve it;
3. Figure out if the solution furthers the mission of the organization;
4. Research sponsors that match missions;
5. Write proposal;
6. Get funded.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do to identify a problem. It's true that I've wanted to visit the Faber pencil factory in Germany for a while now. I understand they have quite the archive on pencil-related history. Perhaps what I need is a grant to fund a brief visit. Say, two or three months.

The link which was the most interesting, though I'm not sure whether it was the most useful, was the one for the National Science Foundation. The link itself actually wasn't right, but I got to the right one from there. I'm always interested in what qualifies as "science" and what doesn't. C.P. Snow's book, The Two Cultures, comes to mind. I haven't read it, but I've read quite a bit about it, and of course almost anyone in academia has spent time wondering why (for instance) the folks in Chemical Engineering don't hang out with the specialists in Medieval French Teacups.

One of the grant opportunities I looked at was called CyberTrust. Most of the funded projects were pretty heavily engineering oriented, but some had to do with studying social trends in communication. I find that intriguing.

Motorcycles and Emissions

For years I've said, and heard it said, that one of the ways in which we gas-thirsty Americans can help the environment is to start using motorcycles instead of cars. Let's face it: many of us drive a car that can hold (at least) four people, but most of the time it's just you and your briefcase, laptop, or groceries. Or DVDs. Why not use a two-wheeled version of the same thing? Easier parking, better gas mileage, and the wind in your hair, dudes and ladies. What could be better? Oh, yeah--most motorcycles cost WAY less than cars.

No, I don't own a motorcycle. Anymore. I had a Honda Rebel 250 in college, and it was great for all of the above reasons. No kidding. In fact, you'd think that motorcycles would be all over the air waves (and cable, and billboards, and text messages, etc.) in terms of advertising their fuel efficiency. Compared to the rest of the country, gas prices are pretty low in our area. They're hovering around $2.25 per gallon of super, if I'm not mistaken. That's still pretty steep compared to just a few years ago, so why aren't we drowning in motorcycle advertising?

But I noticed the other day that there's a discrepancy in the way motorcycles and cars are advertised. Gas mileage and emissions information is inevitably included in car advertising, but it virtually never appears for motorcycles. Hmmm. Is it that "everybody knows" motorcycles are more efficient and better for the environment? I understand that fuel efficiency and emissions are two different things, but bear with me.

It was just a hunch, so I used Honda (www.honda.com and powersports.honda.com) and BMW (www.bmwusa.com and www.bmwmotorcycles.com) as a test. They were the two manufacturers of both cars and motorcycles I could think of off the top of my head. Here's what I found: both manufacturers provide clear and easy-to-find information about auto gas mileage and emissions information. NEITHER provides anything of the sort regarding motorcycles. I have to admit that I didn't check every single car and motorcycle model offered by both Honda and BMW--I just skipped around. But it quickly became clear that both BMW and Honda do NOT provide this information for motorcycles. At least not online.

Honda at least gives us this much: for each bike listed, they provide the statement "California version differs slightly due to emissions equipment" under the "specifications" link. Oh, okay. I'll just call Schwartzenegger and get some rough figures on his hog. That'll clear things up.

I'm surprised at what my research turned up, and wonder if anyone else has any thoughts or comments on it. Is it that motorcycle gas mileage is simply an urban myth? Or is it so fantastic that it goes without saying? Are purchasers of motorcycles generally not concerned with the environment?

If I'm not mistaken (and I plan to do some research along these lines), car manufacturers are required by law to provide consumers with environmental information for each auto model produced. Is it not the same for motorcycles? Should it be?

Time of Sense

When I was younger, the Christmas holidays lasted forever and I had day after day of play time and lassitude. Now, though--I just finished a frenetic semester at home, we got Charlotte's (our two year-old) birthday, Christmas, New Years, and a couple of colds out of the way, and now the Spring semester's about to explode onto the scene. Ahh, the holiday season.

But I've been spending all my spare time (practically none, but there have been some moments washing dishes) thinking about writing, writing practice, and possible dissertation topics. I started off my phd program thinking I wanted to write on the effect computers have on writing. No, not spell check and IM lingo and that kind of thing. What I mean is that writing is inherently technological, and therefore every writing situation demands a choice in technology. So how does computer technology, and the choices we have to make regarding that technology when we choose to write, affect our writing. That better? Maybe.

But now I'm thinking that the real contributions that technical communication researchers can make is in the field of information architecture. I've begun to wonder if it's possible to design a graphical system for understanding types and amounts of information. The medieval mystics believed you could improve your memory by visualizing a house (mansion, castle, etc.) wherein certain memories, or types of information, belonged exclusively to certain rooms. Then you would simply visualize going into that house and choosing which room you needed, then locating the information you needed. So far, so good. But my question is can we come up with visual metaphors whereby we can conceptualize great chunks of, say, business, historical, or philosophical data? Something to work on, no doubt. For some reason, "phlogiston" comes to mind.