Weather and visual displays of technical information

One of the objectives of our courses in technical communication is to get our students to think about the effective and appropriate visual displays of information. The purpose of the following four weather sites is to give the viewer a snapshot of important weather information. They use visual language (color, images, textual design) as well as textual language to deliver the message to the viewer of the site. Some of the displays use redundancy (they offer the information in both visual and textual form). How effective are these four contrasting displays of weather information for you?

If you need to convert between Celsius and Fahrenheit: http://www.calculateme.com/cTemperature/CelsiusToFahrenheit.htm

Yesterday as I drove to my university office in Mankato, the thermometer in my car read -22 Fahrenheit the entire way. Mankato is located 200 miles north of my home. Today when I awoke at home, the Accuweather (www.accuweather.com) site indicated the following:











By contrast, my next destination, Karlsruhe, Germany, has the following current weather conditions (www.wetter.de):




After that I go to Bengalooru (Bangalore), India where today's weather (www.wunderground.com) is the following:











And finally, on to Jerusalem, where the weather (www.bbc.co.uk/weather) looks like this:

On the road again...

On my way to Jerusalem (al-Quds in Arabic and Yerushalayim in Hebrew) I plan to make two stops. First, I will visit the technical communication program at Hochschule Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany. At the University of Applied Sciences, Karlsruhe, I will be particularly interested to find out how our universities' curricula compare, what sorts of jobs their graduates find after graduation, and the relationships they have built with industry. I hope to further an already strong relationship with their program so that our students can continue to collaborate on assignments online and perhaps enter into exchanges in the future.

Second, I will fly on to Bengalooru (Bangalore), India, where I want to visit with technical communication professionals and students and learn about the IT industry there. Some of the jobs that get "out sourced" from the United States end up in Bengalooru. There is a robust domestic software industry there as well. I have bought a copy of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat whose thesis I intend to investigate while in India. He discusses his trips to Bengalooru in the New York Times: read It's a Flat World, After All (April 3, 2005) and read as well Bangalore: Hot and Hotter (June 8, 2005) for his observations on Bengalooru and its role in the world IT economy.

Topics I'd like to explore on my sabbatical

I plan to connect my Fulbright work with technical communication, of course, since that is my field; my Fulbright research award is specifically for the purpose of researching online teaching and learning. Curriculum design, exploiting technology for use in online learning, designing short courses on specific technical communication subjects, and writing the materials for a course in proposal writing, are some of the projects that I may be working on. I also hope to incubate ideas on this blog for further academic writing, research, and teaching. These ideas may start from daily observations at work, walking around Jerusalem, working with my colleagues at Birzeit University, or from other experiences.