TC Talk

For this episode of TC Talk: A Tech Comm Podcast , Abi and Benton interview Dr. Rollag Yoon, a professor of English Education and curriculum editor for the Journal of Climate Literacy in Education . We talk about definitions of climate literacy, how to communicate about climate to young people, and why hope needs to be part of the message. Check out ClimateLit.org , which features tons of teaching...

Benton and Abi agree to disagree about how to disagree. In our "polarized" political climate, what value is there in a rhetoric that doesn't aim to change minds? Is it possible to embody empathetic listening while protecting ourselves from harmful views? They discuss their not-especially-successful attempts to converse with undecided voters as the election nears, and how presidential debates aren'...

Recycling or trash? It's a question you may have asked yourself when faced with a gross can, a heavily-stickered art project, or some weird plastic thing. Benton hijacks the podcast to teach Abi the behind-the-scenes of the recycling process: How it works, how effective it is, the consequences of "wish-cycling," and why plastic sucks so much. He addresses what steps you can take to m...

Benton and Abi feel bad about climate change. As they should. They talk about how to channel negative emotions into productive action, as recommended in the book Facing the Climate Emergency by Margaret Klein Salamon. Transcript and sources can be found at http://faculty.mnsu.edu/tctalk/

An interview with Dr. Dawn Armfield of Minnesota State, Mankato about how accessibility intersects with artificial intelligence. She shares about AI in teaching, visual AI, inclusivity, ethics, classroom technology, and her current research on virtual reality for young adults with cognitive disabilities. Find Dawn at her faculty bio or her Instagram @dawn_armfield. Plus, what does AI have to do wi...

How to turn off your inner literature professor and create a habit of reading for enjoyment. For transcripts and sources, visit  https://faculty.mnsu.edu/tctalk/

This is part 2 of 2 about the book IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. In Part 1, we described how IBM, through its German subsidiary Dehomag, supported the mass extermination of the Jewish people. How do we know IBM's involvement made a difference in the scope of the mass murders? One clue comes from comparing how things went down in the Netherlands vs. France. We also talk about surveillan...

Nazi Germany systematically identified, relocated, and murdered millions of Jewish people during the Holocaust. But how were they able to kill so many so efficiently? IBM equipment played a key role. Meanwhile, IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson got rich off of Nazi Germany and strategically escaped scrutiny for his collaboration. In this episode, drawing on Edwin Black's book IBM and the Holocaust , Ab...

More jokes, ChatGPT-generated and otherwise, cut from the recording for the "AI is a joke" episode

We reflect on AI text generators, creativity, technical communication, writing instruction, algorithmic literacy, magic, and more. Importantly, we reveal the results of our Twitter experiment: Are we funnier than a robot? (Results were mixed.) Also, find out what happens when we drink an AI-generated cocktail recipe and ask ChatGPT to write a stand-up routine about the ethics of artificial intelli...

This is the last of our 3-part series in which we discuss The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disaster , by Juliette Kayyem. In this episode, we talk about the importance of continually examining your systems, and learning from mini disasters instead of brushing them off.  Finally, we put our newfound knowledge to the test when a baking attempt goes awry. Content warning: Gu...

This is part 2 of our 3-part series on disaster communication, where we are discussing the book The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disaster , by Juliette Kayyem. Last time, we talked about the barriers that make comprehending and communicating about crisis challenging. This time, using cases such as Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon explosion, we address how to overcom...

Many organizations focus on preventing disaster from happening, but don't have plans in place for when disaster inevitably does happen. And as climate change worsens, we need to buckle up for living in an age of disaster. What does this mean for communicating about risk, crisis, and disaster? To answer this question, Benton shares insights from the book The Devil Never Sleeps by Juliette Kayyem. B...

We spoke with Dr. Joseph Robertshaw about his show, The Podcast of Podcasts , and the potential that podcasting holds for everyday technical communicators: students, professionals, educators, and even homesteading enthusiasts. For transcripts and sources, visit https://faculty.mnsu.edu/tctalk/

We sat down with our friends Lindsey and David to talk about medical misinformation and its effects on relationships, the challenge of choosing what to trust in the swirl of constantly changing pandemic info, and the role that communication can play in increasing access to vaccines and clinical trials.  Lindsey and David also tell the story of their family's participation in clinical trials f...

TC Talk opens its 2nd season with a special episode for the Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival 2022 . We took our own (very literal) spin on the Carnival theme "Rhetoric: Spaces and Places in and Beyond the Academy" and discuss the epic communication challenge of alien-to-human contact, as portrayed in film. From Arrival to Close Encounters of the Third Kind , sci-fi movies have a lot to teach us abo...

In this final part of the UX series, we share some ways instructors can help students to see user experience and usability as the rhetorical, human, and messy processes that they are. We also celebrate the season finale of TC Talk with a game show, Wheel of Exigencies, during which you will meet the new celebrity spokesperson for Course Hero!

What if User Experience professionals, instead of designing for a "universal" user, put their most marginalized audiences first? In this episode, we share how you can invite audiences into classic UX processes including personas, localization, visual methods, and usability. We also discuss the challenges that come with participatory design, and how technical communicators must step into their advo...

Last episode, we focused on UX (user experience) and usability as a discipline; in this episode, we focus on UX as a practice. We discuss various stages of the UX process,  from "empathize" to "ideate" to "prototype." Abi describes typical methods in UX research and testing and when to use them. To demonstrate, she springs a (poorly conducted) usability test on Benton.  Finally, they dis...

Abi and Benton explore the differences between usability and UX (User Experience) through the extended example of a toaster (and share their secret for extra delicious pop-tarts). They discuss the origin of the field of usability and its overlap with technical communication. For transcripts and sources, visit https://faculty.mnsu.edu/tctalk/

Audience is arguably the most central concept in the fields of rhetoric and tech comm. What have theorists been asking about audience from centuries ago up until the modern day, when social media has exploded the reach and interactivity of audiences? What does the evolution of audience mean for technical and professional communicators? And what is the best episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 ?...

Part 1 established how social justice is relevant to technical communication; Part 2 follows up with a parade of social-justice-oriented projects from technical communication scholars. We draw specifically from the edited collections Citizenship and Advocacy in Technical Communication by Agboka and Matveeva, and Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work by Walton and Agboka. In dis...

Tech comm may have a reputation for being "objective" and "neutral," but that reputation has made it too easy for the field to distance itself from the real injustices it has perpetuated.  In their important book Technical Communication After the Social Justice Turn , Walton, Moore, and Jones show how social justice is integral to technical communication and explain foundational concepts such...

What comes to mind when you think of racist medical experimentation in the United States? For most people, it's the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis study, during which doctors allowed Black men to die from syphilis in order to study "the natural progression of the disease," even though effective treatment existed. In her book Medical Apartheid , medical journalist Harriet Washington argues that this is...

Old prejudices are often coded into new technologies, even those technologies that claim to enhance diversity and fairness. We break down the metaphors of the New Jim Code (from Ruha Benjamin) and the Digital Poorhouse (from Virginia Eubanks) to show how modern technological "fixes" discriminate against Black people and poor people, respectively. Even the best-intentioned algorithms can have disas...