Technical Communication Pedagogy Research Articles

On the Current Moment in AI: Introduction to Special Issue on Effects of Artificial Intelligence Tools in Technical Communication Pedagogy, Practice, and Research, Part 1

On the Current Moment in AI: Introduction to Special Issue on Effects of Artificial Intelligence Tools in Technical Communication Pedagogy, Practice, and Research, Part 1

Implementing Technical Communication Instruction in a Civil Engineering Course: The Value of Knowledge Surveys and Peer Review

Implementing Technical Communication Instruction in a Civil Engineering Course: The Value of Knowledge Surveys and Peer Review

A Maturity Model for Content Strategy Development and Technical Communicator Leadership

While technical communication consultants and researchers agree that content strategy requires attention to both customer needs and business goals, we found no evidence that technical communication educators promote an accurate understanding of business goals among their content strategy students. Through industry–academia collaboration, we integrate two existing models, using content tactics within organizational characteristics that define the maturity level of an organization's content operations. Analyzing the current state of maturity for each characteristic highlights gaps that can define a content strategy with prioritized tactics and, ultimately, encourages the growth of technical communicator leadership and the empowerment of our profession.

Challenges Faced by Technical Communication Educators in the Field of ICT- A Systemic Study

The article examines ways and means of using computers in technical communication classrooms, including the ways in which we address literacy and humanistic issues through our current instruction. Over the next decade and through the next century, we will face three pedagogical challenges as we use computer technology to support our teaching initiatives.
 A knowledge-based and globalized society would not be possible without ICTs (Information and Communications Technologies). The 21st century workforce and the institutions that prepare them for it must adapt to as much change as there is in ICT itself. As a global phenomenon, ICT is posed as a major challenge and an opportunity for television education. As well as the issues and potential solutions to their effective integration in TVET, the chapter describes TVET's meaning, philosophy, objectives, types of ICT, and role in TVET.

Designing Interculturally: Adopting a Social Justice Research Framework for “Seeing Difference”

This paper suggests adding a social justice framework to the questions that Kostelnick suggests to help students investigate culture in “Seeing Difference.” Using visual rhetoric to teach technical communication is beneficial for students; however, problematic representations of culture may unintentionally appear in visual design and are easy to overlook. Using a social justice framework that promotes a contextual study of culture should allow technical communication instructors to prepare students to investigate the social and political aspects of culture. This paper, therefore, revisits “Seeing Difference” and asks that technical communication instructors guide students to research sociopolitical aspects of culture and visuals to develop designs that are interculturally appropriate.

Mapping the Evolutionary Characteristics of Global Research Related to Technical Communication: A Scientometric Review

Purpose: Technical communication (TC) is an emerging topic which has received attention in both the field of language studies and among the technical profession in the last few decades. In this article, a scientometric review of academic publications to explore the intellectual landscape and evolutionary characteristics of TC research worldwide between 2001 and 2020 is conducted. Methods: Visualization software was employed to analyze co-citation and co-word networks from 2,183 articles published in Web of Science and Scopus databases from 2001 to 2020. Results: The findings indicate that TC research has increased in recent years and has been done in the English language departments and technology departments in recent years. Then, five clusters form the intellectual structure of TC research: translation training, methodologies in TC, composition studies, rhetorical action, and the industry's needs. Finally, the findings indicated there were paradigm shifts in the field of TC. Further, the evolution analysis has shown that the current trends of TC research is now focused on TC pedagogy, a global TC, human-computer interaction, and language learning and training. Conclusion: This review provides reliable information for academics and practitioners to identify the knowledge base, the evolutionary process, and the emerging trends in the TC field from visualized maps. This review can serve as a prelude for future TC research and can provide a guide for the TC skills required among professionals in the future.

Slack, Social Justice, and Online Technical Communication Pedagogy

ABSTRACT This Methodologies and Approaches piece interfaces conversations about social justice pedagogies in technical and professional communication (TPC), Black TPC, and online TPC instruction to discuss the social justice affordances of Slack in online instruction. Drawing on our experiences using Slack within an online graduate course during the COVID-19 pandemic, we consider how Slack supports pedagogical community building and accessibility in online instruction before presenting a framework for assessing instructional technologies in terms of social justice.

Technical communication for civil engineering: academia-industry interdisciplinary needs

ABSTRACT The prevailing civil engineering graduates’ technical writing and oral presentation-related drawbacks have necessitated the design and implementation of demand-driven courses applying interdisciplinary pedagogy. This study investigates civil engineering academia-industry interdisciplinary contents, methods, and situations needed to design technical communication course. The analysis which engaged students, instructors, and professionals from industries employed sequential mixed methods design which grounds the quantitative analysis with exploratory detailed interviews. This revealed that classroom, internship, and industry contexts are essential foundations of interaction for stakeholders. Oral presentation, writing, reading, and evaluating technical documents infused with engineering design processes of initiating, designing, managing, and evaluating civil engineering projects were the contents selected from the needs analyses. Basic skills, rhetoric analysis, ethical and critical issues, and teamwork were the precedence pedagogical frames preferred to establish the methods of technical communication instruction. These interdisciplinary needs analyses imply how technical communication-related courses should be designed to enhance students’ multiple competencies better than solely addressing instrumentally codified skills that deny the author and the discourse community.

Digital humanities and technical communication pedagogy

Technical communication instructors, especially those with expertise in visual rhetoric, information design, or multimedia writing are well-suited to teach an introductory Digital Humanities (DH) course. Offering a DH course provides an opportunity to reach extrafield audiences and work with students from a variety of humanities disciplines who may not have the option of taking such a course in their home department. The article advocates for a DH course that offers a methods-driven pedagogy that engages students with active learning by requiring them to research, dissect, and report on existing DH projects, as well as work with existing datasets and methods from prior student research projects or existing DH tools. The sample student project reviewed here uses the data visualization software ImagePlot, and discussion includes how the student used the tool to examine changes in brightness, hue, and color saturation, as well as calculate the total number of distinct shapes from 397 comic book covers. Ultimately, the students are tasked with developing a research question and moving to an articulated methods-driven approach for exploring the question. The student project along with the tools and sample datasets available with them are treated as a module that may be included in an introductory DH course syllabus or training session.

Extending Design Thinking, Content Strategy, and Artificial Intelligence into Technical Communication and User Experience Design Programs: Further Pedagogical Implications

This article follows up on the conversation about new streams of approaches in technical communication and user experience (UX) design, i.e., design thinking, content strategy, and artificial intelligence (AI), which afford implications for professional practice. By extending such implications to technical communication pedagogy, we aim to demonstrate the importance of paying attention to these streams in our programmatic development and provide strategies for doing so.

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

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).

Design Thinking in Technical Communication: Solving Problems Through Making and Collaboration: Jason C. K. Tham: [Book Review

The book targets two main audiences. It primarily addresses students and instructors of technical communication, and also addresses industry practitioners. The book provides practical and theoretical examples that both the primary and secondary audiences can incorporate in their pedagogy and industry practices. The author includes learning activities at the end of each chapter that teachers/instructors can emulate in the technical communication classroom. The approaches in the book make it a significant contribution for the teaching and practice of technical communication. The author admonishes students, instructors, professionals, and industry practitioners to change technical communication by paving the way for design thinking and making. He summarizes the need to adopt design thinking as a methodology in technical communication to make designs user- and human-centered, and to advocate for social justice in our approaches to teaching, learning, and practice in the field. Thus, he calls for a rethinking of technical communication pedagogy “to focus less on genres.". The author also argues that design thinking is a necessary component of technical communication and shows how it can be incorporated into technical communication practice and pedagogy. The examples and learning activities presented in the book make it a valuable guide for students, teachers, and practitioners of technical communication. Instructors of technical communication will find the learning activities presented throughout each chapter of the book particularly useful.

Hybrid Model for Multidisciplinary Collaborations for Technical Communication Education in Engineering

Introduction: Engineering programs must take creative approaches to ensure that their students receive needed communication instruction in curricula constantly experiencing pressures of accreditation, state, and industry requirements: expectations for students' knowledge and skills increase although curricula are compressed. Situating the case: Technical communication and engineering education scholarship describe multiple models for integrating writing instruction into engineering curricula: 1. writing across the curriculum, 2. partnership models, 3. embedded models, and 4. support models. About the case: Technical and professional writing and engineering faculty collaborated to develop a hybrid model, which borrows from multiple existing models for integrating technical writing education throughout the engineering curriculum, both in and outside of courses, including collaborative workshops, specialized writing center support, and other interventions. Methods/approach: Survey research was conducted with students on the effectiveness of multiple writing interventions. Results/discussion: The hybrid model enables students to experience a variety of writing interventions; students perceived them as beneficial. Students found most effective writing interventions occurred in the context of their engineering coursework. Faculty and administrators found the approach beneficial because of its collaborative nature and because it balanced instructional time with external support methods. Conclusions: Local solutions to universal problems must take many variables into consideration: people and programmatic cultures, disciplinary and institutional contexts, and curricular, regulatory, and funding constraints. The authors' hybrid model for integrating technical writing into the engineering curriculum represents a flexible, sustainable approach adaptable to meet specific needs in specific environments at different institutions.

Strange Days: Creating Flexible Pedagogies for Technical Communication

The COVID-19 pandemic created major disruptions in technical communication classrooms everywhere. Although technical communication instructors are used to teaching in a variety of contexts and settings, adopting a flexible approach in the first place will allow them to be better prepared for the changing dynamics of an unpredictable world. The authors present an approach that constructs pedagogical scaffolding to emphasize outcomes, interactions, relationships, and projects. These interrelated aspects form a coherent vision that can support both pedagogical planning and real-time decision making in specific instructional situations.

Digital Humanities in Professional and Technical Communication: Results of a Pedagogical Pilot Study

ABSTRACT This article examines pedagogical results from an IRB-approved study that used the Omeka platform in two sections of technical writing classes. The research question explored how a digital humanities (DH) project can be an opportunity for students to learn concepts and take ownership of publicly facing content. The method used is qualitative, and findings indicated that students embraced an open-source and collaborative project. Results also demonstrated how technical and professional communication (TPC) instructors might find DH tools well suited to TPC competencies.

Framework for analyzing placement of and identifying opportunities for improving technical communication in a chemical engineering curriculum

Technical communication is an extremely important soft skill for young engineers entering the workplace. Undergraduate engineering programs normally address technical communications, but many do not provide intentionally placed discipline-specific technical communication experiences designed to progressively increase technical communication skills. This study presents an analysis of the technical skill requirement by international accrediting organizations for communication literacy, as well as an analysis of some technical communication education approaches within chemical engineering curricula. This study also presents methods for conducting a crosswalk of graded events with a technical communication component across a curriculum, which can help a program understand the placement of technical communication graded events and identify opportunities for reallocation or scaffolding. This study employs a survey-based approach for gathering information about all technical communication graded events within a chemical engineering curriculum and a method for assessing placement and scaffolding opportunities using a longitudinal crosswalk of all applicable courses from freshman to senior year. Results from this study suggest that the U.S. Military Academy (West Point)’s chemical engineering program has 74 technical communication graded events, which were highly concentrated in the junior year. Most events were lab reports (55 %) assessed for content only or team events (78 %). Opportunities for scaffolding across courses were identified and the content for a 1.0-credit seminar course are presented. The methods presented in this study can be used by other engineering programs to identify gaps in technical communication education and methods for improvement within their curriculum.

Playable Case Studies: A New Educational Genre for Technical Writing Instruction

ABSTRACTA Playable Case Study (PCS) is a hybrid learning experience where students (1) participate in a fictional narrative that unfolds through an immersive, simulated environment and (2) engage in classroom activities and lessons that provide educational scaffolding and promote metacognition through in-game and out-of-game experiences. We present the Microcore PCS to illustrate the potential of this new type of experiential simulation that incorporates aspects of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) to increase immersion and teach workplace literacies in the technical communication classroom. We explore results from a pilot test of Microcore with an undergraduate technical communication course, identifying design strategies that worked well and others that led to improvements that are currently being incorporated. We also provide questions to prompt future research of playable case studies and discuss our findings in a broader context of technical communication pedagogy.

Responsive curriculum change

This experience report highlights one program's approach to curriculum revision as the program moved from being an emphasis within a literature degree to a B.A. degree in technical communication. The major curriculum was designed by researching state and regional needs for technical communication education in addition to using research already conducted and published in the field. Through an examination of the skills technical communicators needed to be successful in the workplace and how those skills transfer to other related occupations, we were able to build a successful major. The revised curriculum used an interdisciplinary approach to include courses in technical communication, visual design, and public relations. Further, this report discusses the iterative programmatic changes necessary to keep the major current. From alumni interviews and secondary research on changes in technical communication, we continue to reassess the skills students need. As a result our program continues to evolve to equip students with technical communication skills that apply to various, related occupations.

From Big Ag to Campus Cafeterias: Intersections of Food-Supply Networks as Technical Communication Pedagogy

This article presents a pedagogical approach to teaching technical and professional writing with an eye toward cultivating awareness and generating informed research among undergraduate students about food production and its various, intricate networks between Big Ag and campus cafeterias. Our pedagogy, influenced by interdisciplinary content, is designed to teach students to differentiate between food processes—such as production versus distribution and consumption—by viewing these networks as communicative practices rather than as inevitable chains or simple functions of one another. Our approach encourages students to locate and analyze differences between interdependent, but seemingly disparate pathways and to make visible communicative intersections that are often rendered invisible and inevitable when not given conscious attention. We base our approach on best teaching practices in technical communication and current literature about food sourcing, sustainability, and ethical food production practices. By focusing on food pathways as a means of teaching technical communications, we are helping students become more adept writers while also educating them about the processes that contribute to what they put into their bodies and how those choices resonate throughout the public sphere. A chief contribution of this article is a description of how students populate a Food Pathways Matrix, which informs their writing and research as they revisit it throughout the semester.

Cultivating a Sense of Belonging: Using Twitter to Establish a Community in an Introductory Technical Communication Classroom

ABSTRACTThe introductory technical communication class serves many purposes, but perhaps an understudied purpose is the class’s role in university retention and persistence. In this study, students used Twitter to complete biweekly assignments as a way to develop a sense of belonging, which is an important component to retention and persistence. Authors explore how this Twitter intervention affected students’ sense of belonging, their creation of an online community, and their continued pursuit of a technical communication education.