The Role of Authorship in the Practice and Teaching of Technical Communication

Abstract

You have been invited to participate on a college-wide committee to examine work-for-hire policies at your institution. During your first meeting, a committee member boldly claims that all work faculty and students create during their tenure at the institution should rightly be the property of the institution-especially considering the economic hardship and budget cuts facing most institutions of higher education. What is your response to this claim?An undergraduate student has accepted work doing freelance web authoring and design. She comes to you to ask what materials produced in a freelance capacity can be included in her professional portfolio. As both professor and professional mentor to this student, how might you advise her? You serve on an advisory committee for your college's library. A library representative and faculty member co-present their proposal to adopt a college-wide media use policy. The policy includes requirements such as " faculty can use 30 seconds of a 5-minute song" in their teaching, or " faculty can post 10 minutes of a 90-minute film on the college's streaming server" for class use. How might you advise in this situation?While working with a departmental curriculum committee, a committee member claims that there is no need to revise a writing course to include copyright and fair use because "there's not enough time to teach that, too." What might your response be? xviii to assist learning, he noted, "and we, as educators, have failed in our obligation to embed this simple fact in the public's consciousness" (p. 1). To address this problem, Logie urged us to include a focus on copyright within our pedagogy.Steve Westbrook ( 2006) made an important move by connecting visual rhetoric and copyright in a very pragmatic context-a student's multimedia piece, which was unable to be published because the requisite permissions were denied by the copyright holder. Pointing to the missing student piece in his article, Westbrook wrote that copyright affects composition teachers and students "on the level of daily practice" and threatens to silence both teachers and students. The author suggested using Lessig's Creative Commons licensing as an immediate practical solution to the copyright problem. Westbrook's 2009 collection includes a chapter where he continues this discussion, pushing further at issues of visual rhetoric and copyright in the context of writing pedagogy.Jessica Reyman ( 2006) championed teacher awareness and activism, noting that the Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act of 2002 was developed to update copyright law to accommodate the uses of copyrighted materials in distance-education environments. And, yet, pursuant to her analysis of the TEACH Act and its implications for teaching writing, the act fails to offer the same protections for online teaching as it offers in face-to-face environments. Reyman argued that the TEACH Act provides an opportunity for faculty and their institutions to become more involved in the conversations about copyright and to ...

“I Don’t Feel Like It Is ‘Mine’ at All”: Assessing Wikipedia Editors’ Sense of Individual and Community Ownership

“…The traditional perception of the author as a solitary originator, a necessary condition for ownership, began to shift with the advent of desktop computers and accessible broadband, as the social author reemerged as a relevant concept. Kennedy's treatment resonates with work by Reyman (2011), who explores the notion of authorship in the context of professional writing. Emphasizing that technical communication is not typically regarded as an individualized activity, Reyman proposes a new conception of the author that goes beyond legal ownership and that underscores the rhetorical impact of technical communicators' work on their workplaces, their company's culture, and the broader discourses of science and technology (p. 361).…”

“…While scholars in writing studies and technical and professional communication have drawn boundaries between authorship, as pertaining to creative and intellectual originality, and ownership, as pertaining to copyright and intellectual property, they have also recognized how changing conceptions of the former impact writers' understanding of the latter (Kennedy, 2016;Ray & Graeff, 2008;Reyman, 2011). Kennedy (2016) explores the transformation of authorial identity in the realm of print texts and emerging digital media.…”

“…Once ridiculed by both academics and the general public, the encyclopedia has matured into what some have called "the Internet's good grown-up" (Harrison, 2019) or "the last best place on the Internet" (Cooke, 2020). This study seeks to build understanding regarding Wikipedia editors as writers, looking specifically at these individuals' sense of a significant construct relevant to writing metacognition (Driscoll & Jin, 2018;Kennedy, 2016;Reyman, 2011): that is, their perception of textual ownership.…”