from blacklily8 to mbarton?

Well, the thing is, I'm on the job market now, and want to look as professional as possible. Besides, the band Black Lily is beyond defunct, so no need to advertise anymore.

any references to blacklily8 in any other post will now be confusing, whether it be here or on any other site. might it not work better to create a new username and keep the original?

Just for fun, I googled for blacklily8. Over 9,000 hits if you include the kairosnews domain, close to 600 without. Suppose a lot are you?

It may be confusing at first, but certainly won't be for long. Besides, I would really like to disassociate myself from the name. It's not even very reliable, because there are apparently lots of blacklily8s running around out there. I was looking at google and noticed that it's a very popular name, but few of them are actually me. The reason there is an 8 in the first place is because so many blacklilys. So, you get the idea. Besides, I don't want to be responsible for what every blacklily has to say. I should probably come up with something even more unique than mbarton. Maybe mbarton6743.

"Makes sense to me," says cel4145, who has over 20,000 Google hits for his unique username ;)

I'm not sure what your ethical concerns are, so I won't try to address that, but I can offer some suggestions about your concerns relevant to learning about the software.

Writing software documentation I would reserve for those students with technical backgrounds. By this I mean that at Purdue, there are two classes: Business Writing (ENGL 420) and Technical Writing (ENGL 421). 420 is predominately composed of business majors and has a focus on business writing. 421 is predominantly composed of technical and science majors. In 421, most are juniors and seniors. Many are computer science or related technology majors; others, engineers. So we teach documentation writing in 421 along with usability testing, but not in 420. It's appropriate for those disciplines. Learning about software applications I would also class as a technical skill, one that 421 students are predominantly more comfortable with. And know that I would not attempt to do this with a first year composition class.

Technical writing often involves research. Learning to use an application is part of the research component of the project. Much like in doing any other research project, the teacher should plan time for research, and have students use the software, examine available documentation for it, look at documentation standards for the open source development community for which they are writing, and look at documentation for similar projects. Note that the latter three also offer opportunities for discussing documentation as a genre; students can discuss different documentation styles and reference specific examples from their research in deciding how best to approach their documentation writing. During their research they can also do audience analysis based on their conclusions about the types of users who use the application.

A class shouldn't just jump in and begin writing any documentation. The documentation project should be constructed around awareness of existing documentation. Our 421 class is working on Drupal end user documentation because the documentation for entry level users is pretty sparse; there's much more for administering a Drupal site. So we start at the beginning with what any student group would need to know to write Drupal documentation. In a subsequent semester, a technical writing class would then be able to use the end user documentation we are creating this semester in order to learn about Drupal, thus enabling them to become more advanced Drupal users in less time. The new class would then be able to extend the existing entry level documentation to the next level. It could be that the documentation produced this semester would be enough for next semester's class to begin rewriting existing Drupal documentation for administering a site, but there wasn't the documenatation to support that step this semester.

Well, this question is also on the minds of Slashdotters today, apparently. Some of the commentators ask the same questions I would have...Funny stuff, particularly this remark about Lessig and Stallman and this comment about Wikipedia.

Hey, Charlie, it's good to see some of your work finally getting on /. :-P

I love it!!! That and Cicero are my favorite Knews usernames now.

CultureCat

8-)

I like it, too. I feel like one of the programs in Tron.

Thanks!

And while I wish I had the time to inform the Slashdotters about the project in more detail to answer their concerns, can't get to that now becaue it would involve some heavy explanation :)

For instance, two of the reasons for the project are that OSS communities conduct their work online through electronic communication and they have a peer review process in place for dicussion of submissions. These two characteristics make them a good client. And there are others, but it will have to wait. We've submitted on OSDDP for ATTW. If accepted to the conference, we'll be preparing more in depth discussion of the pedagogical premises for OSDDP.

In the future, we'll all be RDF urirefs.