Wondermark 626, In Which Paul Catches Up, cartoon by David Malki. See the original at Wondermark.com

Since 1997 I’ve held jobs that were focused on publishing and comunication, particularly on developing and managing content-rich web sites. By reading, doing, conversing and participating in assorted communities of practice I developed substantial knowledge about the web industry — trends, history, techniques and theories. Occasionally I posted something on my blog before BoingBoing mentioned it.

In the last two years I’ve held three different professional roles, each requiring different realms of knowledge — and none of those areas are primarily focused on web.

The current role looks as though it will last at least another couple of years, so now I’m in an odd state of transition. Like Paul in the Wondermark cartoon (above), I’m trying madly to catch up with what’s been happening in a range of fields whilst my attention was elsewhere.

You might also be interested in...

• Thriving in tough times: start with what you know (0)
• The ups and downs of search behavior (0)
• Survey: understanding the web professions (0)
• Oz-IA: earlybird registrations extended (1)

Portrait of Violet McKenzie in military uniform (Australian War Memorial, collection record PO1262.001)

The program is about Florence Violet McKenzie (nee Wallace), Australia’s first female electrical engineer and a driving force in establishing the Women’s Royal Australian Navy Service (WRANS).

Violet had a particular interest in signalling, and in the 1930s and during World War II her training school taught thousands of women — and Australian and US servicemen — how to use Morse code for emergency and routine communications. In the radio program, a couple of her former students recall Violet’s teaching method: the students learned by rhythmically chanting the da-da-dits of Morse code. Almost a modern version of Gregorian chant!

The radio program’s synopsis says:

“Florence Violet McKenzie was born in the years which gave rise to the first wave of feminism, apt timing for a woman who, during her long life, distinguished herself in technical fields and opened doors for countless other women to join her.

“But Florence Violet McKenzie’s quiet and independent manner has meant that her remarkable story has slipped through the cracks of history. Apart from a couple of brief biographical references, the name Florence Violet McKenzie is hardly familiar in Australia. This program pays some overdue historical attention to a pioneer in technical education for women.

“Florence Violet McKenzie OBE (nee Wallace), aka ‘Mrs Mac’ (1890-1982) was Australia’s first female electrical engineer, first female amateur radio operator, and founder of the Electrical Association for Women. She is best known for her work during the Second World War. Having founded the Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps in 1939, she campaigned successfully to have some of her female trainees accepted into the Royal Australian Navy, thereby originating the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service.

“During the war some 12,000 servicemen passed through her Morse code training school, and after the war her school was a major civilian airline and nautical signal instructional centre. The armed forces and civilian airlines relied on her services right up to the mid-50s. Apart from her successful electrical contracting and wireless supplies business between 1918 and 1934, all her work was voluntary.”

Not mentioned in the synopsis:

• she corresponded with Albert Einstein
• her free school trained more than 10,000 military personnel and civilians
• to become eligible to study electrical engineering, she needed to have a job in a relevant industry — so she set up her own business and got a contract to rewire an acquaintance’s house

My mother’s family probably owes an indirect debt of gratitude to Violet. My aunt Shirley served as a signaller in the Royal Australian Navy during the 1950s, and her brother Keith is a Colonel Commandant in the Australian Army’s Signals Corps.

.

References

“Signals, Currents and Wires: the untold story of Florence Violet McKenzie”. This program in the Hindsight series was researched, produced and presented by Catherine Freyne. First broadcast by ABC Radio National on 16 March 2008. When I drafted this post in late January 2009, the program’s web page had a downloadable MP3 audio file. It also provides three photos and a short list of reference books about the WRANS, women and technology.

Florence Violet McKenzie OBE (1892-1982): biography in the Australian Women’s Register, with links and bibliography.

Peter Dunn (2006): Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps in Australia During WWII. Article on Oz At War web site, describing Mrs McKenzie’s involvement in the WESC and the WRANS.

The Australian War Memorial has two photographs:

• Portrait of Violet McKenzie in WESC uniform, undated (1940s or 1950s?) (AWM collection record P01262.001)
• Violet McKenzie aged nearly 90, at a plaque dedication ceremony in her honour, circa 1980 (AWM collection record P02722.003)

Violet is mentioned in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, in an entry about Frances Betty Provan, the first enlisted member of the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service. However, there is no ADB entry for Violet McKenzie herself.

.

[This post is written especially for Ada Lovelace Day, a PledgeBank initiative by Suw Charman-Anderson. Tip o' the hat to David Weinberger for mentioning the pledge in his JOHO blog.]

You might also be interested in...

• Allow me to introduce you (0)

This means the employees should be paid any salary and allowances owed to them, and they should have access to fully paid-up superannuation accounts. These payments are a normal part of the contract between an employer and an employee.

The trouble with entitlements is that they don’t inspire loyalty to the organisation or dedication to doing brilliant work. You do a fair day’s work and you’re entitled to expect a fair day’s pay. If the pay’s not there, you’ll take your talent elsewhere.

Retaining great staff requires extra effort by the employer. To attract the best, some organisations offer incentives like bonuses and access to training or travel; others provide facilities like a gym or childcare. These options cost money, and in a challenging economic climate it’s tempting to cut back on such non-core expenses.

Like many others, my employer is wrestling with reduced income and leaner operating budgets. It’s quite possible we’ll have to reduce spending on some employee benefits in the next few years.

However, there’s one benefit that’s likely to stay for many years and I reckon it provides a good model for other employers.

Edward Stevens, merchant and late of Malvern, Victoria, was a member of our Council (equivalent to the board of directors). He bequeathed half of his estate to my employer. The money formed the basis of a trust fund which now earns income via investments.

Once some capital works had been completed, if there was any money left over from the bequest Stevens wanted it “to augment the wages or salaries of the staff of the University beginning with the lowest paid employees.”

These days the Edward Stevens Trust provides financial help to staff or their dependents in ’special need’ circumstances such as:

• lengthy absence from work due to illness, after paid leave has run out
• needing to maintain superannuation contributions during extended sick leave
• support for dependents following the death of a staff member
• other situations, at the discretion of the head of Human Resources

The trust fund is not enormous by today’s standards; its total capital seems to be roughly equivalent to the salary of a senior manager. The trust is pooled with our various other trust funds and savings, so the  cost of investing the fund and managing the income is relatively low.

How do you measure the return on this kind of investment?

Most of our staff will never need to ask for help from the Edward Stevens Trust. Whether we use it or not, just knowing that there’s help available turns a sense of entitlement into a sense of privilege. I could find work at a higher salary elsewhere — but I’d rather work for an organisation that genuinely cares about its employees’ welfare.

You might also be interested in...

• Where performance funding goes wrong (0)
• SCOAP3: a viable business model for academic publishing? (0)
• Noted 1 (0)

Given an essay topic, for example, you start with optimism, confident that some useful information will emerge from your initial search. As you acquire facts about the topic you start to feel swamped, faced with too much information and uncertain about how to make sense of it all. Then you start to analyse, joining pieces of information together and forming your own ideas about the relevance and value of the data, perhaps drawing some conclusions. At this stage, your confidence returns and you feel relief at having found a viable way to tackle the topic.

Kuhlthau illustrates the parallel emotional and cognitive changes that occur during the search process: she calls this the Information Search Process model.

Kuhlthau et al (2008) have reviewed more than 30 studies relating to some aspect of the Information Search Process model, and themselves conducted a new study with 574 school students. They conclude that the Information Search Process is generally sound as a theoretical model and as a practical framework for identifying when to intervene in a student’s learning process.

Other observations from their literature review:

• boys tend to gather and complete, while girls prefer to investigate and formulate
• girls tend to start with optimism and end with doubt; whereas boys tend to be more confident as they complete the research process
• in a digital environment, students tend to assume information will be readily available; the search process tends to end because of deadlines rather than because the original question has been answered satisfactorily, and students’ sense of relief is related more to task completion than to a successful learning outcome
• in educational settings, and particularly when online resources are involved, people tend to skip the early stages of planning their research; however, time spent on refining the topic and developing a research strategy has been shown to produce less frustration and a smoother transition from information-gathering to synthesis and acquisition of knowledge
• “When the model is used as a framework for guiding inquiry, students move away from simply collecting and compiling information to please teachers; rather, they become involved in thinking processes that require extensive exploration of ideas and formulation of thoughts before developing their own deep understanding of their topics and presenting it. By allowing time for reflecting and formulating while they are exploring and collecting information, they avoid missing the critical stages of learning.”
• “If students are aware that increased frustration and anxiety is to be expected mid-way through the construction process they become less discouraged when it happens… Teachers and librarians who guide students through inquiry projects can emphasize this for students and be ready to intervene in helpful ways.”

Except for the last two points, which are quotes from the article, the note above are my interpretation of the article’s findings. What catches your eye in the original paper?

.

Reference

Kuhlthau, CC, HeinstrÖm, J and Todd, RJ (2008). “The ‘information search process’ revisited: is the model still useful?” Information Research, 13(4) paper 355. Available at InformationR.net/ir/13-4/paper355.html

You might also be interested in...

• Web search usage trends (0)
• Toolkit: Xobni plugin for Outlook (0)
• Thriving in tough times: start with what you know (0)
• Sincerity, gravity - and don’t forget the levity (1)

These days we face a skills shortage, an uncertain economic environment and a general reluctance to take risks. The HR priority for employers, argues Matt Moore in a recent article for Human Capital, must “shift from attraction and retention to include productivity — a rewnewed focus on what people do and how they do it.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean reaching for a copy of Getting Things Done, or starting to track the time employees spend on personal phone calls or Facebooking. Nor does it mean spending thousands on training courses or conferences of dubious value.

Rather, Moore suggests five tactics for staff development that can build upon the knowledge and skills that already exist within the organisation. These tactics aren’t  expensive to implement; they do require commitment and participation from senior managers, if the program is to work across the whole organisation.

It is possible to apply some of these tactics, to start from the ground up, without a formal mandate from management. This is often a good way to demonstrate the value of what you’re doing, so that dubious executives are more likely to suport your more radical ideas.

Here are a couple of examples from my own experiences.

To start a community of practice all you need is two or three interested colleagues. Arrange to meet regularly for coffee or lunch — same place, same time, same day of the month — and talk about your common interests and challenges. Keep it informal.

Encourage attendees to tell their colleagues. Let word get around. As you discover others with similar interests, invite them to join the group. After a while, once you’ve established a small group of regulars, you might start an email discussion list or other online forum to continue the conversation between meetings.

Eventually the community becomes largely self-sustaining, with a larger number of ‘lurkers’ surrounding the core group of regulars. The individual members learn from each other, help each other to solve problems, undertake projects and improve their own daily work practices. Collect these stories and document them as evidence that the community has benefits for the organisation. Then you can ask the HR department to recognise participation as a factor in the individuals’ performance evaluations and professional development plans.

Similarly you might take on the role of mentor or teacher for a colleague who wants to develop her own knowledge or skills. This can be an immensely rewarding relationship for both sides, provided you establish some ground rules early.

Think about what each person wants out of the relationship, agree on some goals and a time limit. An early clear understanding about expectations can help to prevent misunderstandings arising later. Again, if you think your manager will be amenable to it, ask for the mentoring or teaching to be recognised in your annual performance review. When others notice your learning partner’s new skills or knowledge, encourage them to send a brief email to your partner’s manager: peer recognition is a wonderful incentive.

In implementing any of these knowledge-sharing tactics, there are no simple formulas for success. There are no ‘quick wins’ to be had; the benefits will emerge over time. Your experience will differ from mine or from Matt Moore’s. Given the current social and economic situation, and weighing the potential gains, there’s no harm in at least making a start on the journey.

Further reading:

• Matt Moore (2008) “Talent Management in a Down Economy” in Human Capital, volume 6 number 11, pp 38-41.
• Matt Moore’s Innotecture consultancy and blog
• Jürgen Kluge, Wolfram, Stein and Thomas Licht (2001) Knowledge Unplugged: the McKinsey & Company global survey on knowledge management. Palgrave.

You might also be interested in...

• Survey: understanding the web professions (0)
• Oz-IA: earlybird registrations extended (1)
• Forthcoming (0)
• For better web sites, support your local web worker (0)

You might also be interested in...

• See you at Oz-IA? (1)
• Oz-IA: earlybird registrations extended (1)
• Oz-IA, only a month away (1)
• Oz-IA program announced (0)

Earlybird registrations are open now, and close next Tuesday 9 September.

Earlybird registrations are A$660, or A$550 if you quote the discount code MR0243. Register online at the conference web site.

The conference will be held in Sydney, on the weekend of 20-21 September.

Who should attend?

• Designers of navigation, organisation, labelling and search systems that help people find and manage information more successfully,
• Librarians, webmasters, and content owners responsible for creating taxonomies and information architectures,
• Application developers who design web and software solutions and select the technologies and staff to support them,
• Project and business managers needing to understand the benefits and challenges of information architectures in electronic information spaces.

[cross-posted at SneedleflipsockTheBlog]

You might also be interested in...

• Forthcoming (0)
• Thriving in tough times: start with what you know (0)
• Oz-IA, only a month away (1)
• Old tricks, new dog: applying IA techniques to a non-IA project (0)

Here’s a bit of the ALA blurb about why the survey is important:

“Possibly the most important invention of the past century, the web is undeniably one of the most robust engines of knowledge transfer, political and social change, artistic endeavor, and economic growth the world has seen.

“Remove the web, and billions in trade disappear. Websites enable people who can’t walk to run to the store. They bring knowledge and freedom of thought to places where such things are scarce; make every person with a connection a citizen of the world; and allow every citizen to be heard.

“Yet nobody bothered to conduct a serious inquiry into the working conditions of people who make websites until A List Apart launched its first survey in 2007…

“The responses to last year’s survey began teaching the world about the previously invisible profession powering its information economy.”

The results of last year’s survey are freely available, as are the original datasets of 33,000 responses.

It only takes about five minutes to complete the 2008 survey. If nothing else, it’s an opportunity to reflect on your current situation. Are you happy in your role? What are your professional goals for the next 12 months? Are you valued by your employer/clients? How do they show it?

You might also be interested in...

• For better web sites, support your local web worker (0)
• Thriving in tough times: start with what you know (0)
• Oz-IA: earlybird registrations extended (1)
• Forthcoming (0)

Usability Guy commented on an internal discussion list:

We… spend much money on technology, hardware, processes, buildings etc. but how much time and money do we spend on the people who use them?

That has been a long-standing question at this university. It was one of the drivers behind a bunch of senior executives allocating the resources to establish the University Web Centre in 2001. Our initial budget was three salaries plus A$65,000 operational costs — not huge, but a significant investment for a university that previously relied largely on the good will of enthusiastic individuals to run its web sites.

In its six-year lifespan, the Web Centre developed and delivered a comprehensive training program for more than 350 staff — people who did any kind of web work, plus their supervisors/managers. The training program consisted of self-contained, related modules:

• Web Management Principles (for supervisors/managers of web staff)
• Web Development Framework
• Usability: user research and usability testing techniques
• Content Mapping for Web Redevelopment
• Information Architecture for University Web Sites
• Writing for the Web
• Introduction to Accessibility
• Introduction to Dreamweaver
• Web Templates for Maintainers (how to use the university’s web design templates)
• Web Templates for Developers (how to customise or adapt the university’s design templates for special subsites, or for web applications)
• Creating Accessible Sites with Dreamweaver and the University Web Templates
• Quality Assurance for University Web Sites

We organised and hosted monthly brownbag lunch seminars (2002 to 2006), where university staff could present their own work — projects, ideas or recent learnings from research or conferences. Occasionally we invited an external guest to give a presentation: the head of ABC Digital Media (talking about podcasting) and the chief researcher in CSIRO’s spinoff company Funnelback (talking about the future of search engine technology) were particularly popular.

Every fortnight we hosted informal ‘web cuppa’ gatherings: an opportunity for web staff to sneak out of the office for an hour and share a coffee with like-minded peers.

An email discussion list, called Web Forum, provided an online supplement to the brownbags and cuppas. Through these communication channels, a university-wide ‘community of practice’ gradually emerged.

Many web staff have expressed appreciation for the Web Forum activities, because they enable people (who are often isolated in small departments and misunderstood by their local colleagues) to meet their peers, swap ideas and help solve common problems.

Even the people who did not participate in Web Forum activities appreciated the opportunity — I’ve often been told by a web worker that she felt better just knowing those resources and opportunities were available, even if she didn’t use them regularly.

Complementing the training and networking activities, Web Centre staff provided a free consultation and advisory service for University departments. Web staff from anywhere in the university were also able to borrow web-related books and reports from the Web Centre — practical, useful stuff that’s not available from the university library.

In addition, the Web Centre provided opportunities for web staff to attend events that brought together people from several different universities. We hosted a full-day meeting of the Victorian Tertiary Web Managers’ Forum and a Web Accessibility Network for Australian Universities (WANAU) forum. In 2002-03 we also sponsored quite a few people to attend the annual OzEWAI accessibility conference.

What was the result of all this activity? Most importantly, the overall quality of the University’s public web sites has improved greatly. We know this from the results of independent usability studies and from our own web users’ feedback.

I’m not simply blowing horns on behalf of the manyseveral fab folks who’ve worked in the Web Centre since 2001. (But “Yay, team!” anyway :-) The improvement happened because the university has developed a reasonably large cohort of well-informed, skilled, passionate and experienced web workers who understand that “web” is more than “IT” or “design”.

For six years, the university invested time, energy and money in providing its hundreds of web staff with wide range of high-quality, free opportunities for professional development. Both the university and the individuals have benefited from this, as have the tens of thousands of people who visit our web sites each day. The investment would not have happened unless there was demonstrable need for it — and one way we demonstrated that need was by running surveys to find out who ‘does web’ and how they do it.

Now that the Web Centre no longer exists, professional development and support for web staff will have to come from elsewhere. Surveys like the current one will help the new service-providers to understand what the university — and its people — need in order to continue producing awesomely useful, accessible and stylish web sites.

You might also be interested in...

• Survey: understanding the web professions (0)
• Thriving in tough times: start with what you know (0)
• Web search usage trends (0)
• Oz-IA: earlybird registrations extended (1)