My thanks to Douglas Robinson who brought to my attention the six rights associated in nursing with medication and for his gentle urging that I write up what follows. Thanks also to Dr. Selia Karsten whose support for my explorations of interactivity and pedagogy has been tremendous and who continues to urge me to communicate my thoughts about communication and the results of my explorations.
When presenting the subject of medication, manuals of nursing practice often list six rights. These rights are:
These rights from the practice of nursing and the administration of medication can be adopted and generalized to communication situations.
| Right Drug | Correct message |
| Right Dose | Correct number of instances of the message(s) |
| Right Resident | Correct audience |
| Right Route | Correct mode |
| Right Time | Correct time |
| Right documentation | Correct metadata |
The administration of medication is reiterative. Therapy takes time. Likewise communication situations are particulary time-sensitive and dependent upon reiterations. In both therapy and communication, there is repetition of an activity. There is is monitoring of a situation. Attention is paid to pattern.
In what follows, the analogy between drugs and communication is tested further and some exercises are proposed and outlined. These are meant to suggest activities that could be developed to enhance students' appreciation of context and the temporal dimensions of communication.
Also know in the public relations trade as "messaging". Social workers and organisational psychologists refer to those signals that my be interpreted in contradictory fashion as "mixed messages." A mixed message is like a drug with side effects.
The types of exercises that train an appreciation for clarity and ambiguity are formalist in nature: they impose limits. For example, the task of composing a verbal construction in only so many words, creating or manipulating an image within specific dimensions, working with a sound track of a determined length. The object of such exercises is to circumscribe the field of activity and induce the exploration and testing of limits.
A related set of exercises foster an appreciation of the states of composition: they focus on conversion. A grammatical example is the conversion of a passage set in the past tense to the future tense. The pixel nature of digital images offers many variations on conversion exercises both when dealing with a single image or sets of images. For example, students could be asked to change the transparency of different colours. they could be asked to produce different arrangements from a set containing both colour and black & white images. Similar exercises can be produced for sound morphing and sequencing.
These are not new pedagogical activities. The have been the stock in trade of arts training and rhetorical education. Computer-mediated communication and digital processing offer more occasions for both students and educators to play upon the preservation of states of composition. As before, drafts, mockups, works-in-progress, sites under construction, become open to comment.
And as before, time-limited activites are possible. This may seem to be in stark opposition to the "anytime, anywhere," mantra. It's worth imitating or considering adaptations of the time-limited exercises of the drawing class. Adaptations of the three-minute sketch, for example, can be initiated any time and any where but once initiated must be completed within a prescribed timeframe. Automated systems of course can keep track of a student's accessing an exercise and the time elapsed before a completed assignment is submitted (e.g. within 24 hours, three days, etc.)
Even without automation, teachers turn storage constraints to pedagogical advantage when they upload instructions and raw material for a time-limited period. Students with access to limited storage space and working on a group assignment also play the shuffle game with digital on the way to creating a completed product. Of course, this demands organisational skill in maintaining good off-line filing of the copies of the "ephemera".
The key to designing such message-centred exercises is to build them around multiplication and pruning. Copying and modification of messages depend on the users/student skill in operating the authoring software. The pruning depends upon librarian skills in naming, filing, archiving, sorting. In short, it is good practice to inculcate an appreciation not only for the doing (how to) but also for the remembering of the what was done.
A drug dose can be described as a ratio: the number of pharmaceutical units per unit of time. Various comparisons spring to mind: between overdoses and information overload, between placebos and Hawthorn effects, between regimens and campaigns. We must also note here that language has been described as a virus (William Burroughs) and semioticians often refer to "discursive contamination." In the West, the cure-poison metaphor as applied to the products of human communication is found in the ancient philospher Plato. Whether the framework of communicative action is one of disease or therapy, the vital question remains how much.
The desired outcome depends upon sensitivity to modularity. Successful communication rests upon the art of adequate redundancy: the right mix applied the correct number of times. A series of messages sets a flow of expectations. It's about parsing. Expectations adjust to interruptions of the flow or a flow that seems interminable It's about punctuation.
Bandwidth and attention span affect the frequency of iterations. Whether pedagogical situations are affected by the speed of connectivity or by the intensiveness a student can muster, chunking is crucial for success.
"How much in what period of time" is a basic question asked by all teachers. In networked envirnoments, the question leads to interesting approaches. Exercises can vary the delivery schedule of messages (either of raw materials & instructions or finished products or both). Cycles can be daily or weekly in the case of journals and logs. Time-release is also possible: the different components of an exercise get delivered successively over an interval. This can be automated by scripts (once triggered by a student beginning an exercise a server delivers on cue elements from a database) or this can be generated by participants (human or intelligent agents) exchanging partially constructed elements in a ring composition -- a popular form of entertainment and exploration in Surrealist circles. The exercises of this type need not be restricted to verbal constructions: images can be collectively quilted and sound tracks progressively layered by a group.
Consideration of modularity and dosage can lead to exercises not only built with reference to number of units per unit of time but also constructed with reference to articulations internal to an artefact or variety of pacing: variously setting the time delay between the frames of an animation can lead to effects ranging from strobic effects to long pauses where the action unfolds at a very leisurely pace; tempo can be altered throughout a sound track; progression in the length of sentences can guide a verbal composition. Other examples abound.
The key to designing such time-sensitive message-centred exercises is to incorporate acts of transmission. The human and the machine factors emerge as students test just how much can "get through" in what period of time.
Public relations experts and marketing gurus stress targeting communication. Many a rhetoric manual begins with know your audience.
Success hangs on observation and attention to detail. An instructor can design an exercise where students are to send messages to the contact "person" indicated on on a WWW site which incorporates a specific image or string of words. The execise can vary in complexity from simple search and comparison over a given corpus to an exercise where the clue is generated, placed and announced by groups of students to each other thereby involving them in the construction and play of what could be termed digital "hide and seek". Variations abound: the aim could be the locating of a specific text string in the alt attribute of an HTML img element. Time can be introduced as factor: the object of the search can be rotated between sites according to a regular schedule -- the exercise can then take on the aspect of field work: observation geared to determine the cycles of a moving target.
Peer polling is another way to cultivate appreciation for audience reaction. Students can exhibit versions of work and seek feedback. Such versions of consumer taste tests co-opt a familiar genre in the interests of building comfort with sharing work-in-progress.
Students develop their powers of observation and their ability to attend to meaningful detail. As well, the facility with which digital files are copied and transmitted raises interesting questions of authenticity, style, permissible borrowing (and modifing) that students are usually keen on tackling these issues and testing their own values and understanding.
Sounds, graphics, words.
E-mail. World Wide Web. Disk.
There is a computing text book that encourages students to rekey snippets of code and not simply copy and paste from the files supplied on disk.
Run a compostion through voice-synthesis software and compare it with recordings made by human readers.
Print versions of the same HTML document rendered with different font sizes. Compare.
The product of one group of students becomes the input of another working in a different mode.
Have students debate the pros and cons of distribution via e-mail versus diskette.
"Good Morning" read when it is evening can be disconcerting. It is worth introducing students to the possibility of customized presentation even if it may be beyond their authoring capabilities.
Invite students to consider their audience's browsing habits and what information elements get presented in what order in an HTML file. Ask them to consider direction of movement in a video clip and viewing context. Ask them to comment on the effects of scrolling. Invite them to ponder how search engines use keywords to rank hits. How would they characterize a searcher for whom it is worth waiting for information and/or wading through information?
Different audiences are also characterized by variations in connection patterns. Some people connect in short bursts regularly (for example, twenty minutes daily), others will spend a longer time per session and a longer time between sessions. Others have still other habits. Of course some audiences' habits can be affected by the pacing and scheduling of information releases -- promised updates and refreshes. As the serial nature of the relationship building is impressed upon students, they begin to make use of logs and journals as planning devices.
Exercises that position students as transactors and librarians also ask them to enhance their capacity to observe through describing what they observe and comparing those descriptions with others. Good record keeping serves the memory work involved in such activities.
Along with the usual version control info such as creation & revision dates, knowing what was sent when to whom is the kind of useful information that helps students (and teachers) stay organized (and recycle and adapt chunks of information). Instructional design sensitive to the rhetoric of communication can generate exercises that improve student ability to maintain collections and track circulation.
Exercises that enable students to conceive of themselves as creators and as custodians and as commentators flow from the observation and description of transactions. Instuctors have the dual task of fostering transactions and the constructing the space for pondering those transactions. The interactivity stems from the triangulation between the parties to the transaction and those observing it. Of course, the long tradition of the thought experiment permits the teacher to appeal to the imagination of the students to consider cases of "what if..." and encourage an opening towards diversity.