Assistant Professor of Technical Communication, Illinois Institute of Technology
One of the strangest bits of cognitive dissonance I’ve experienced lately is being unable to genuinely use the first-person singular pronoun “I” on a course website that’s a wiki. It just doesn’t make any sense to...and I’m probably the last person to recognize this w/r/t wikis.
My course wikis are almost set up. And it occurs to me that the Wikka Wiki software’s support for Geshi is going to make sharing in-class code examples a snap.
Moving sites around from server to server is enough to help anyone see more clearly how and why Web sites can always stand to be built in an ever-more portable fashion.
Suddenly it occurs to me that so-called “div-itis"--where web writers use tons of div tags instead of structural header or list tags--is probably caused, in part, by the fact that web browsers apply no default styling to those blocks. That, in turn, takes the guesswork out of styling. Of course, a reset CSS file is a much better option all around.
I’m an assistant professor of technical communication at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, IL. I completed my PhD in rhetoric and composition at Purdue University in 2007.
This fall, I am teaching graduate seminars in Information Structure and Retrieval, and Open Source in Technical Communication.
On Twitter: Drinking tea and watching the Always Sunny season finale while Stewie preens himself.