One participant who abandoned the sorting exercise responded at length inthis vein:You need to spend time with some designers in an office or out in nature.Design just does not work this way. You are attempting to force a hypothesisand its [sic] just not going to work. People will try but this is missing the point.Imagine applying this to a piece of art for example. Art is no different thandesign in fact its the same thing just with a different outcome. You will thensee the absurdity of this process you are trying to force. Visual designcomes[sic] from seeing or rather observing and feeling how a form, colur [sic],texture peaks [sic] your senses and it is then further developed throughrepetative [sic] experimentation. this [sic] process of understanding takesyears to develop and you cannot just formulate rules—there are none. Iwould suggest you personally do something that removes you from theacademic world for a moment and gets you out into the world where youcan use your hands and mind and experience this for yourself. Take a potterycourse or a wood working course, or an elementarygraphic [sic] design course

Two respondents specifically distinguished between “guideline” and“rule,” both saying that situation has an impact on how a design principle shouldbe applied. One elaborated by saying that “Principles are contingent general-izations;. . . their application depends on the particulars of a given situation.” Thissuggests that designers believe design principles should not fully determinespecific design decisions, but can provide a systematic way of thinking aboutthose decisions.

hough a minority, some participants used these questions to express thatthey did not think that design principles are useful or desirable in educationor practice. Most strongly, one design educator said, “You only have to look atsome of the best designs to see that design prescriptions are for fools.” Othersstressed the importance of a good eye. For example, a design educator said, “Itis imperative for designers to trust their eye and design sense over the influ-ences provided by precise measurement, well-meaning computer algorithms and‘hard-n-fast’ rules.”

In addition, I removed one participant from the cluster analysis who sorted allthe cards, but in such a way as to skew the results. With a sharp wit, this participantcreated only two categories: “Byproducts of nuclear decay,” which containedonly one card,radiation; and “What an academic thinks of when he or shemisinterprets design as the synthesis of a set of design principles,” which con-tained all of the remaining cards. I did, however, include this participant’ssurvey responses, as they reflected an attitude toward design that favored artisticsensibility over using more formal methods such as design principles or designresearch. I address this attitude more fully in the conclusion to this article

Specifically, before the exercise I asked some basic questions about partici-pants’current design activities and roles. I also asked—before showing them the38 principles in the exercise, which might bias their responses—what designprinciples they had learned about in their schooling, training, or reading; whatdesign principles they use in practice; and how they would define what a designprinciple is. I worded these questionsto allow a participant to respond that heor she does not know about or has not used design principles. After the exercisegave participants an opportunity to think about design principles, I asked somequestions about when and how we should use design principles, particularlyin relation to the empirical methods of design research.In introducing these survey questions, I asked participants to focus specificallyon visual design principles. All of the questions asked for text responses exceptfor the first pre-survey question, which gave several options of positions fromwhich to choose. I did not require responses to any question except question 1.

If I had used a traditional face-to-face card sorting exercise, however, thenumber of participants would be lower, and they would be less likely to be part ofthe group I wished to study: designers, design educators, and design students.Also, because I have authored a book on document design that includes designprinciples, drawing from my local population might give biased results becausemy colleagues and students have read my book. I also hoped that the surveyquestions would give some qualitative feedback to substitute for the talk-aloudprotocol. Finally, given the exploratory nature of my study, it seemed reasonableto use this online tool to gather information from a broader pool

The primary advantage of this online approach was quick and efficient accessto participants. However, there were two disadvantages. First, in a face-to-facecard sorting exercise, the researcher often observes the participant as he or shesorts the cards and uses the talk-aloud protocol to gather further informationabout participants’ thinking during the exercise. Because I would not attend thecard sorting, this kind of observation was not possible. Second, I would havelittle control over who agreed to participate. The possibility for spam is alwayspresent with online media.

To expand the reach of my study, I used an onlinecard sorting tool, Optimal Sort (http://www.optimalworkshop.com). Instead ofindex cards, this online tool displays digital shapes that participants can dragand drop on screen to create groups, which they can then label (see Figure 2).This tool also allowed participants to provide feedback through before and aftersurvey questions.

Card sorting is typically conducted in one of two ways: closed sort or opensort. In a closed sort, participants sort the cards into predefined categories.In an open sort, participants sort the cards into categories they create themselves.Due to the exploratory nature of my study, I used an open sort so designerscould group the design principles as they saw fit. I also did not require partici-pants to sort all of the cards, but restricted my analysis to those who sorted atleast 75% of the cards

Having determined which design principles are mentioned most commonlyin literature on design, the next question is, how do these design principlesrelate to one another? Rather than arranging the design principles accordingmy own sensibilities or some separate theory (Ahmed [12], Park [13]), Idecided that it would be more interesting to ask practicing designers, designeducators, and design students how they think these 38 visual principles shouldbe grouped.

These results offer some interesting opportunities for reflection. For example,balance, which I have always denigrated to my students as the most vague anddifficult of design principles, actually turns out as the most common, with 27texts (58.7%) listing it. Gestalt itself, despite the very strong influence of thisschool of psychology on two-dimensional design, appeared in only three texts(6.52%), although principles based on the Gestalt laws, includingalignment,proximity,grouping,closure,continuation, andfigure/ground, appeared as wellat a variety of frequencies.

This quantitative review produced a raw list of 198 design principles. Thisnumber might seem discouragingly high except for two outlying works: Leborg[54], which lists 41 principles, 33 of which are unique, and Lidwell et al. [58],which lists 100 principles, 87 of which are unique. Lidwell et al.’s broader focuson “universal principles of design” rather than visual design principles meansthat many of their principles fall outside of the scope of my study. (Some evenstretch the concept of design principle—for example, “uncertainty principle”and “normal distribution.”) If we were to exclude Leborg’s and Lidwell et al.’sunique principles, the list of design principles contracts from 198 to 77—stillhigh, but more reasonable. However, because I included unique principles fromother texts, I retained all of Leborg’s and Lidwell et al.’s principles in the raw list.As might be expected, some of these principles are considerably more commonthan most. Overall, of the 198 principles in the raw list, 160 were mentioned inonly one work. The 198 design principles were listed cumulatively 420 timesin the 46 texts; 61.9% of these listings referred to principles used in at leasttwo works. Despite the large number of unique principles, they were used onlyin 38.1% of texts.

This study took the form of two stages: a quantitative literature review thatcatalogued and analyzed visual design principles mentioned in books and web-sites on design; and a card sorting exercise with survey questions (Texas TechUniversity IRB 100407). The first stage investigated what visual design principlespublished experts recommend most often. The second stage asked designers,design educators, and design students what they thought about design principlesand how they thought design principles related to one another.

So at best, design principles are a kind of lore. Lore is a kind of contingentknowledge based in practice, and as North has argued for composition studies, ithas a value that is often overlooked. However, lore being what it is—anecdotal,implicit, and often idiosyncratic—I think there is good justification to bringresearch to bear on it. Accordingly, in this article I apply empirical techniques tounderstand the lore of design principles more fully.

A few,such as Williams and Stimatz [8] or Blair-Early and Zender [9] generally refer todesign principles as “rules of thumb”; as such, principles are heuristic methodsthat help us make design decisions quickly. But these rules of thumb can be vari-able and ambiguous, because they are based on individual designers’experienceand on the advice they absorb from their training and reading. Depending on thesituation, designers may employ different design principles at different levelsof consistency.

This persistence invokes some questions:•What is a design principle?•How do design principles relate to each other?•How and when do designers use design principles, particularly in these daysof user-centered, research-driven design?

One would think from this narrative that we have progressed from the murkydays of the craft tradition to the more enlightened and progressive landscape ofempiricism. But, in fact, design training still typically involves an introductionto visual design principles, which persist as criteria for judging designs andas heuristics for making design decisions.

n the 1990sour attention shifted to usability and usability testing, such as popularized byNielsen [2], Barnum [3], and many others. User-centered design, championed byscholars such as Johnson [4], became the watchword in fields including graphicdesign, product design, and technical communication. Today, design research hasdesigners involved throughout product development in an iterative design cyclethat applies research to successive prototypes, continually improving usability.The state-of-the-art of user research includes systems that continuously monitoruser interaction, gathering data for designers to use to make further improve-ments to websites, software, and hardware (see for example Johnson [5]).

Finally, the use of scale can be a very effective method for achieving a good visual balance in your layout. By making some elements larger than others, a sense of order and hierarchy will emerge. This helps create a comfortable layout because the viewer will automatically look at the larger elements within the layout first, progressing through to the smaller elements as they read.

One of the key approaches to achieving layout nirvana is a clear sense of structure and hierarchy. We've already touched on structure, but it's important to also convey the relative importance of different pieces of content on your page. A headline, for example, should almost always be more visually important than paragraph content.

In the printed medium, the most common way to make use of white space is by enlarging the page margins and gutters. On the web, simply providing plenty of breathing room around elements can help make the layout feel composed and balanced. Using negative space works best when you have a clear structure that anchors content together (such as that provided by a grid), as the risk of white space can be a sense of disconnection between page elements if introduced haphazardly.

It's common for novice designers to make use of every single bit of space on a page, stuffing in content until every gap has been filled. The more experienced know that sometimes the best bit of design involves leaving elements out, rather than shoehorning them in.

A good page composition should be both pleasing to the eye, but also communicate those key messages clearly to the intended audience.

In itself the rule of thirds won't magically provide your layout with balance, but by extending the principle it's easy to use this tendency towards a natural focal point to help inform the balance of your layout. A common approach is to place the most important elements of your page in the upper (or lower) third of the page, with the primary focal point aligned to match one of the intersections.

By using a grid to inform the position of different elements on a page, you'll create a connection between the different elements that make up your page. This can help provide a sense of order to your layout, providing the reader with a clear structural reference to fall back on. This is important because when all your page elements have a feeling of connectivity with each other, the overall effect feels more comfortable to the reader, helping to put them at ease, and facilitating their access to the important stuff: the content!

A strong visual can provide a powerful way to lead the reader into your page, and also supplies a useful structural element around which to arrange the remaining content in your layout.

One of the easiest ways to ensure your page has a degree of balance is to use a grid system. Grids used to be the sole preserve of the printed page, but much work has been completed online in the past few years to help migrate the concept of the grid across to the digital medium.

Page layout typically involves a lot of placement, rearranging and formatting of elements. Many designers approach this process organically, feeling their way to a pleasing end result. While this can lead to some excellent happy accidents, there is a risk that using a free-form methodology can result in a lack of visual balance on the page.

The primary objective of any page you design, whether it's for a printed brochure or the latest web app, is to communicate information clearly and effectively to the reader. One of the best ways to ensure that the key messages are delivered to the reader is to create a balanced layout.

Whether you’re designing a page for print, or a website, there are some common principles you can apply to ensure balance.

Designersused a finely honed instinct to fashion objects that were useful and beautiful.In discussing and promoting their craft, they developed sometimes codifiedand sometimes implicit design principles to guide new designers. Accordingly,training in design often involved learning these principles, as we can see inJackson’s popular 1891 textbookLessons on Decorative Design, which discussedand gave examples of principles such as repetition, variety, contrast, radiation,and symmetry [1].

All of these articles effectively and critically shed light on issues of race,ethnicity, and multiculturalism in technical communication. While theseissues often are overlooked, go unnoticed, or are silenced, the articlesincluded in this special issue ofJBTCdemonstrate the prominence, andmuch-needed analysis, of race, ethnicity, and multiculturalism in technicalcommunication. As guest editors, we look forward to the intellectual discus-sions and writings that respond to these articles

With this research, these and other scholars move beyond argumentsabout the importance of multicultural issues in the United States and in tech-nical communication to highlight the unique ways that people of color in theUnited States use or invent technical communication.

In 1994, Limaye editeda special issue ofJBTCon workforce diversity that was an effort towardembracing discussions of multiculturalism and technical communicationin the United States. Since then, we have seen an encouraging number ofacademic articles that discuss gender and international technical communi-cation; still, few discuss technical communication as it relates to race andethnicity within the United States

The first article, ‘‘Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: A Case Studyof Decolonial Technical Communication Theory, Methodology, and Peda-gogy,’’ by Angela M. Haas, is a case study that examines the place of race,ethnicity, rhetoric, and technology in a graduate-level technical communi-cation classroom. This study demonstrates the importance of race and eth-nicity in the technical communication curriculum design and pedagogy.

Thrush (1997) made this case 15 years ago in her seminal article ‘‘Multi-cultural Issues in Technical Communication.’’ She pointed out that ‘‘as lit-tle as we know about technical communication in other countries, it isstartling how little research has been done on subcultures within the

Thus, it is not surprising to find this same reticence to discuss such topicsin technical communication research and literature. In 1994, Limaye editeda special issue ofJBTCon workforce diversity that was an effort towardembracing discussions of multiculturalism and technical communicationin the United States. Since then, we have seen an encouraging number ofacademic articles that discuss gender and international technical communi-cation; still, few discuss technical communication as it relates to race andethnicity within the United States.

Thus, despite electing its first African-American president and having agrowing Hispanic population, the United States is not a postracial society.Unfortunately, we still live in a society that produces racial constructs andwhere people live out racialized lives as part of their everyday experiences.Even though (or quite possibly because) race as a concept and therebyracism still exist, many people, if not color-blind, avoid topics of race, eth-nicity, and culture in their daily conversations.

We acknowledge, though, that many, inside and outside of our field,believe that race is not a relevant concept in our society or field. Some arguethat we live in a nonracist society, and thus the need to acknowledge colorno longer exists. Gordon (2005) explained that color blindness ‘‘maintainsthat race does not exist as a meaningful category and posits that the benefitsaccrued to White people are earned by (gifted) individuals rather than sys-temically conferred’’ (p. 281). For example, in some technical communica-tion classes, as in most classes, instructors adopt a color-blind perspective,reiterating the sentiment that race has no place in the classroom (Hairston,1992). According to this perspective, to see or speak of race is to give life toa racist social system that has historically marginalized people of color andgiven unfair advantages to white European Americans (WEAs)

While thenation has shown progress by electing its first African-American president,the education, employment, income, and health disparities between WhiteAmericans and historically marginalized groups still exist.

An irony of our focus on workplace writing is that it comes at a time when the "workplace" itself is disappearing. To define technical writing by placing it strictly within the workplace denies the historical contributions of women, but in doing so it also denies a larger past—and future—where the household is a primary location for the economically productive activities of women and men. According to Shoshana Zuboff, "home and workshop continued to be the prin­cipal centers of production as late as 1850" (227); with the increase in computer technologies, the prevalence of two-income households, and the rise of an information economy, the separation of home space and work space blurs, and as Joan Greenbaum asserts, "the office of the future may be the home" (117). Many people (myself included) spend many of their productive hours working in a home office, connected to clients and coworkers by computer networks, fax, and phone.

I believe there are significant instances of technical writing and the use of technical documentation that occur within the household. Many of the tech­nologies produced by industry are targeted for home use; the associated doc­umentation is used primarily within the household (by women and by men). Examples include instructions for computer hardware and software, but also those for vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, blenders, and even coffee mills (note that Dobrin finds instructions for the coffee mill worthy of analysis; see "Do Not Grind"). Further examples of other types of technical communica­tion that enter and are "consumed" within the household include credit card agreements, billing statements, and tax and insurance forms and documents. Daily life is not devoid of instances in which individuals might produce arti­facts we would find worthy of study if they had originated within the "work­place" : there are any number of situations in which private individuals must interact by text with organizations. Surely correspondence challenging billing errors or notifying insurance carriers of changes to personal information are as "significant" as intercompany correspondence and job postings.

Historical studies find women are excluded from technology as a consequence of the gender division of labor (see Rothschild, Cockburn, and Wajcman). Men remain predominantly the makers, repairers, designers, and users of what we typically consider technology. Wajcman observes that "tech­nical competence is central to the dominant cultural ideal of masculinity and its absence a key feature of stereotyped femininity" (159) and that "the work of women is often deemed inferior simply because it is women who do it" (37). Hence the remarks of anthropologist George Murdock:

The industrial revolution brought with it not only great technological innovation, but increasing differentiation between appropriate work roles for men and for women (see Kerber; Oakley). "One of the most profound effects of industrialization was, and is, the separation of 'work places' from 'home places' —and the attendant designation of the former as the 'place' for men and the latter as the 'domain' of women," asserts Cowan (More 18). During the rise of industrial society and capitalism, "the modern concept of work, as the expenditure of energy for financial gain" (Oakley 4) came to further dis­tinguish the stereotyped expectations of productive activity done by men and women.

Judy Wajcman, like Stanley, observes that "we tend to think about tech­nology in terms of industrial machinery and cars .. . ignoring other technolo­gies that affect most aspects of everyday life" (137). Ruth Schwartz Cowan notes in More Work for Mother, her history of household technology, that we "do not ordinarily associate 'tools' with 'women's w ork'—but household tools there nonetheless are and always have been" (9). Stoves and spinning wheels are two such examples; the sewing machine is one such tool used in the household and in industry.

Overcoming the assumption of agency first involves identifying women who have contributed significantly to science, technology, and medicine, then fit­ting their written works into our history: "gathering] evidence about women to demonstrate their essential likeness as historical subjects to men . . . [and] attem pting] to fit a new subject—w om en—into received historical cate­gories" (Scott 18-19). The main difficulty facing the historian is the apparent lack of women's contribution to these fields. From the dawn of humanity, women, like men, have undoubtedly sought means for improving their work processes, yet we rarely conceive of women as technological innovators. Why is this the case?

As Joan Wallach Scott (Gender) and Autumn Stanley (Mothers and "Women") each point out, history in general, and the history of technology in particular have tended to omit the activities of women in part by locating significance primarily in public and political activities and innovations, the very "realm[s] of social, political, and economic interaction" of such great int

Including women and women's work in a history of technical writing requires that we contest two assumptions that lead to their exclusion from our disciplinary story: First, (the assumption of agency) that women are not sig­nificant originators of technical, scientific, or medical achievement; and sec­ond, (the assumption of technological significance) that women's tools are not sufficiently technical, nor their work sufficiently important, to warrant study of their supporting texts

The problem with regard to adding women to our disciplinary history lies in the assumption that technology, work, and workplace are gender-neutral terms, and that addressing gender and the history of technical communica­tion is a simple matter of searching the annals of science and industry and tacking on articles about a few women who have distinguished themselves in scientific, medical, and technical fields. But as the work of feminist historians and scholars demonstrate, such terms represent contested ground, and such a simplistic view may be inadequate to fully address the elusive —and, as I suspect, frequently unintentional—biases that both define our past and gov­ern our future.

Yet another possible reason why the history of technical communication is so barren of women is that (as feminist scholars have noted about histories of technology) "the absence of a female perspective . . . was a function of the his­torians who wrote them and not of historical reality" (Cowan, "From Virginia Dare" 248).

One possibility is that women have con­tributed only very rarely to technical and scientific work (and, consequently, to technical and scientific communication). Indeed, Elizabeth Wayland Barber suggests that women's contributions to technological innovation have been hampered by their own productive (and reproductive) responsibilities:

Both Cockburn and Wajcman observe technological competence is involved in establishing masculine and feminine difference. According to Wajcman, "skilled status has . . . been traditionally identified with masculini­ty and as work that women don't do, while women's skills have been defined as non-technical and undervalued" (38). She illustrates her point with the example of sewing: "It is not possible for anybody to sit down at sewing machine and sew a garment without previous experience.. . . Although this is one area where women are at ease with machines, this is seen as women's sup­posed natural aptitude for sewing and thus this technical skill is devalued and underpaid" (49). Women are accepted as users of machines, particularly those, that are used for housework, but such knowledge is not considered as compe­tence with technology

Furthermore, technologies that pertain specifically to women's biological functions and social roles have been essentially ignored by historians of tech­nology.

Stanley contends that women's technological achievements have been rou­tinely under-reported, at least in part, because "our sex-role stereotypes seek to confine that [feminine] creativity to such 'acceptable' areas as art, music, dance, writing, and cooking, whereas 'real' invention and technology have to do with weapons and machines and chemical compounds created in laboratories" (Mothers xx). Even when well-known women patent such "real" inventions of significance, they may not receive credit: screen actress Hedy Lamarr invented a secret communications system during World War II (and patented it, with com­poser George Antheil) yet "has never received either recompense . . . or due recognition," even though one of its key features — frequency hopping—"is the main anti-jamming technology used in today's billion-dollar defense systems" (Stanley, Mothers 383). Lamarr is far from the only woman to demonstrate that beauty and brains are not antithetical, but despite the fact that women have been receiving U.S. patents since 1809, as late as the 1970s librarians "did not even use Women inventors as a category for filing information" (Stanley, Mothers xviii)

Women's work has long escaped the notice of historians, leading feminist critics to assert that his-story itself is "deeply gendered" and "presented as a universal human story exemplified by the lives of men" (Scott 18; see Barber, Cowan, and Stanley as well). Most histories, including the history of techni­cal communication thus far, focus primarily on the works of great men —Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Albert Einstein—and the great works of men —space travel, nuclear power, medical miracles, and the computer rev­olution.

Because there are almost no cultures in which men bear the primary responsibility for child care, this task typically has fallen to women and influenced the variety and type of work they do (Brown 1075). We might agree then, that as scientific inquiry and technological innovation have been primarily the work of men, the contribu­tions of women have consequently been subsumed, lost, or overlooked

Pointing toward cultural biases that have not valued thehousehold, and by extension, women's tools, she points out the "cultural blinders"that have made it difficult to see women's contributions in the past.

More important,she points out that, with the gradual disappearance of the "workplace, " it is quite pos­sible that the home and workshop, what Zuboff calls “principal centers of productionas late as 1850" (p. 106), will again become such centers of production in the nearfuture.

Clark argues that, while the separation of form fromcontent is not a new concept, “no content is [truly] free of presentation” and that“[c]ontent and presentation are never separated.” Within the content managementcontext, therefore, Clark suggests understanding this separation in two ways: (a) ascontent being complete texts, and presentation being output structure, navigation,and visual style; and (b) as content being content modules, and presentation beingoutput structure, navigation, visual style, and genre definition. This separation,dictated by the nature of structured writing and single sourcing and by the techno-logical nature of content management systems, is perceived in different ways interms of its affordances by different participant groups involved in the contentmanagement process.

No longer can writers think in terms of texts or even publications. They haveto start thinking in terms of asset management: the strict separation of form andcontent to allow for seamless repurposing of content, data mining, reduplication ofeffort control mechanisms, and writing in a collaborative environment with multi-ple authors and multiple purposes feeding off of and contributing to a conglomera-tion of assets that collectively make up a content archive.

For a content management system to be successful, Hall (2001) argues, two im-portant factors must be emphasized: end users (documentation specialists) anduser needs.

To makeourselves a force to reckon with in the content management discourse, arguesAndersen, we need to raise the visibility and accessibility of our scholarship in thisarea, go beyond our focus on end users and rhetorical problems, and make strongbusiness arguments for rhetorical work so that those making critical business solu-tions will stop “view[ing] ECM as a technical solution to the sociotechnical andrhetorical challenges of empowerment, collaboration, quality, usability, and tech-nology adoption.”

Nevertheless, the authors see promising implications ofcontent management for technical communication: how workplace writing re-search may help transform organizational cultures and how technical communica-tors are in a capacity to provide expertise and critical services in helping smallbusinesses and nonprofit organizations in their transition to a new infrastructure.

In addition, as far as we know, books on content manage-ment systems have almost exclusively approached the topic from the practical per-spective. In other words, they teach you how to design and/or use such systemswithout critical examinations of why such systems should be used in the first placeand why they succeed or fail. Nor do they consider what effect working in such en-vironments has on writing as a practice.

The most important part ofthis whole puzzle—the end user, i.e., technical communicator—is often left out ofthe process. The very expressioncontent managementexcludes any idea of writingor communicating and focuses on information independently of the people whoproduce or consume it.

The effect of writing in these electronic environments hasbeen profound for technical communicators. Rather than thinking of the end productof their work as tangible products or even documents, they are beginning to see theirefforts as part of an endless flow of information.

A content management system, then, is any systematic method designed to organizeand distribute information, while content management system software automatesthe system, typically providing “a platform for managing the creation, review, filing,updating, distribution, and storage of structured and unstructured content”

Wehope, with the assembly of this special issue, not so much to offer definitive an-swers on these issues as to open up discussions for a better understanding of thephenomenon and its implications for technical communication.

Pedagogy is a teaching and learning relationship that creates the potential for building learning conditions leading to full and equitable social participation.

As soon as our sights are set on the objective of creating the learning conditions for full social participation, the issue of differences becomes critically important. How do we ensure that differences of culture, language, and gender are not barriers to educational success? And what are the implications of these differences for literacy pedagogy?

The changing technological and organizational shape of working life provides some with access to lifestyles of unprecedented affluence, while excluding others in ways that are increasingly related to the outcomes of education and training. It may well be that we have to rethink what we are teaching, and, in particular, what new learning needs literacy pedagogy might now address.

The article is a theoretical overview of the current social context of learning and the consequences of social changes for the content (the "what") and the form (the "how") of literacy pedagogy. We hope that this article might form the basis for open-ended dialogue with fellow educators around the world; that it might spark ideas for possible new research areas; and that it might help frame curriculum experimentation that attempts to come to grips with our changing educational environment.

The first relates to the increasing multiplicity and integration of significant modes of meaning-making, where the textual is also related to the visual, the audio, the spatial, the behavioral, and so on.

Second, we decided to use the term "multiliteracies" as a way to focus on the realities of increasing local diversity and global connectedness. Dealing with linguistic differences and cultural differences has now become central to the pragmatics of our working, civic, and private lives. Effective citizenship and productive work now require that we interact effectively using multiple languages, multiple Englishes, and communication patterns that more frequently cross cultural, community, and national boundaries.

The new fast capitalist literature stresses adaptation to constant change through thinking and speaking for oneself, critique and empowerment, innovation and creativity, technical and systems thinking, and learning how to learn. All of these ways of thinking and acting are carried by new and emerging discourses. These new workplace discourses can be taken in two very different ways - as opening new educational and social possibilities, or as new systems of mind control or exploitation.

To achieve this, we need to engage in a critical dialogue with the core concepts of fast capitalism, of emerging pluralistic forms of citizenship, and of different lifeworlds. This is the basis for a new social contract, a new commonwealth.

It is not enough to be able to articulate one's understanding of intra-systematic relations or to critique extra-systematic relations. We need always to return to where we began, to Situated Practice, but now a re-practice, where theory becomes reflective practice.

PostFordism replaces the old hierarchical command structures epitomized in Henry Ford's development of mass production techniques and represented in caricature by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times - an image of mindless, repetitive unskilled work on the industrial production line. Instead, with the development of postFordism or fast capitalism, more and more workplaces are opting for a flattened hierarchy. Commitment, responsibility, and motivation are won by developing a workplace culture in which the members of an organization identify with its vision, mission, and corporate values. The old vertical chains of command are replaced by the horizontal relationships of teamwork. A division of labor into its minute, deskilled components is replaced by "multiskilled," well-rounded workers who are flexible enough to be able to do complex and integrated work (Cope & Kalantzis, 1995). Indeed, in the most advanced of postFordist, fast capitalist workplaces, traditional structures of command and control are being replaced by relationships of pedagogy: mentoring, training, and the learning organization

This question of differences has become a main one that we must now address as educators. And although numerous theories and practices have been developed as possible responses, at the moment there seems to be particular anxiety about how to proceed.