Vereinbarung zwischen unseren Universitäten

On January 22, yesterday, I walked with my colleague Juergen Muthig to the Rektorat(administration building) at Hochschule Karlsruhe to visit the Vice President of Academic Affairs, Dr. Dieter Hoepfel, and Dr. Joachim Lembach, the director of the international office at the university. We signed an agreement between our technische redaktion (technical communication) programs to the effect that we agree to develop our virtual collaboration and look at the possibility of developing further joint programs like internships for technical communication students, double degrees for our students, and student exchanges.


The internship idea was particularly intriguing to me because, as I learned during my time here speaking to industry representatives, there are internship positions available for speakers of English who know only English. I had not thought of that possibility. Such firms as Siemens, Porsche, Haefele, Comet Communication, and SAP would welcome interns who can write in English. I am told that there is a raft of small high-tech companies in Karlsruhe, some of which would be willing to do the same thing. As for online collaborations between our students, Herr Muthig and I hope to continue that work in the fall semester 2009. I believe that we will continue our conversations about working together, and will certainly, at Mankato, work with Tom Gjersvig and Caryn Lindsay at the International Student and Scholar Services (ISSS) to facilitate our planning.

From 8:45 to 1 p.m. I observed 3rd semester (Gruppe B) students present their final team projects (Praesentationstermine). The computer lab is located on the 3rd floor of the building (Gebaude F). Their presentations included detailed information about their team time management and decision making. Again, my German gets me some purchase and the context does as well, but I still miss some meaning because of my lack of vocabulary. Lunch was at our favorite sushi bar (second time already) and then off to to meet the administrators (see above).

I set up a Connect virtual meeting for 5 p.m. Karlsruhe time on January 23 during which we hope to learn how well we can use this tool to bring Karlsruhe and Mankato faculty and students together virtually.

This morning I returned to my favorite Karlsruhe running route in Gunter Klotz Anlage for my 4.8km run.

Hochschule Karlsruhe and TEKOM

January 20, 2009

Today I started off in the cool morning with a 4.9 km run in the Gunther Klotz Anlage in Karlsruhe city. I started out down the dark streets and tried to follow the path that my host and his sons had taken me on yesterday. I was close enough that I did not get lost, but I am sure that I did not take the exact same path. My Garmin GPS unit found the required satellites quickly this morning so that I was able to accurately measure my distance.

From 8:30 am to 1 pm I attended the final presentations of the third semester students at the Hochschule Karlsruhe (University of Applied Science) where my host is on the faculty. This week is their final week of the semester. The student teams (which varied in number from two to five students) reported on their documentation projects for the semester. The subjects of their documentation ranged from technology that adds functionality to credit cards allowing the user to use the card as a security device to writing the documentation for a device that measures stress and the documentation for a small pedal-powered vehicle that runs on rails. The teams were comprehensive in their reports and seemed to have completed their work accurately. My German language comprehension was severely tested, but given the familiar context (technical communication themes) I was able to understand much of the reports. I tried to ask questions in English in the Q&A periods following the team presentations and discovered that the students’ English language skills are quite good.

One very pleasant surprise was to meet some of the students who had been partners of my students in Minnesota last year in a small collaborative project carried out online. I thanked the Karlsruhe students for their willingness to participate in that pilot.

In the afternoon we traveled by DB (Deutsche Bahn) to Stuttgart to meet with Dr. Michael Fritz, executive director of Tekom, the main professional organization for technical communicators in Europe. Tekom has 6500 members in Germany alone. Professor Jurgen Muthig, my colleague at Hochschule Karlsruhe, is currently serving a three-year term as president.
Dr. Fritz gave us an overview of Tekom’s activities, we met some of the Tekom employees, and the we continued our discussion over dinner in Stuttgart. We took time before dinner to watch Barack Obama’s inauguration live from Washington, D.C.

To the left, Dr. Michael Fritz, executive director of TEKOM, in his Stuttgart office, with me and Professor Jurgen Muthig.

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.

Getting ready to go

I am a faculty member at Minnesota State University, Mankato on sabbatical for spring semester 2009. Here you can see what I do at work.

Fulbright has generously agreed to award me a research scholarship to work at my host university of Birzeit, in Birzeit, Palestine. The university is located in a town by the same name just northwest of Jerusalem. My award allows me to work with the Center for Continuing Education there on the topic of online learning (also known as distance learning or e-learning). I plan to arrive in Jerusalem at the end of January and work until the end of May. I am looking forward to my sabbatical adventure.