Enhancing Technical Communication: Contemporary Applications for Advance Organizers

The basic principles of advance organizers set down by David Ausubel have become among the most widely used methods of instruction in schools today, but this approach has been limited for the most part to classroom instruction in primary and secondary schools and has not seen widespread discussion and application in technical communication theory and practice. This presentation examines the concept of advance organizers, categorizes the different types of advance organizers - textual, oral, and graphical - then illustrates how professional communicators may use rich media product simulation software to expand these categories with second-generation advance organizers that provide multimodality, interactivity, and feedback to technical documents.