An Assembly Line Approach to Technical Communication Pedagogy with Intelligent Content Design and Delivery

Abstract

Topic-based intelligent content design with a better understanding of semantic web schemas could be the new focus for technical communication (TC) pedagogy in academia - a major shift away from designing standalone static documents. A new such TC course focused on the basics of how XML, RDFS, and OWL schema contribute to the semantic web for CCMS and CDP, including the basics of how faceted search works and ontology creation happens for simple e-commerce based, tourism, healthcare, and consumer product information design. The course also attempted to expose students to a basic understanding of iiRDS – the standard that enables dynamic information request and delivery in the era of the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0; and how Microsoft HoloLens - a mixed reality platform caters to intelligent information processing in Toyota and smart city contexts, as case studies. This was an introductory course with conceptual development being the focus, and not programming skills. With this course, we wanted to introduce students to the new industry documentation standards and initiate a process in pedagogy that will ultimately lead to bridging the extreme shortage of qualified job applicants in the industry coming from content strategy as a new field of practice. This paper focused on a pilot study initiating an exercise to explore the extent to which such a course helps teach information management in an English as Foreign Language (EFL) context for computer science majors, within the scope of content language integrated learning (CLIL) and project-based language learning (PBLL).