This study investigates the social media strategies that Chinese museums use in communicating on Weibo, focusing on the ways these museums engage with the public and the effectiveness of their online interactions. Combining grounded theory and content analysis, the authors analyze 319 posts from six major museums and 842 posts from 36 smaller museums. Their findings suggest that although museums effectively use social media for educational purposes, there is room for more interactive and diverse content to enhance public engagement. The study provides practical insights on how museums can optimize their social media strategies by emphasizing audience-centered communication and greater interactivity in order to foster deeper connections with the public.

This article analyzes the benefits of experiential learning in cross-disciplinary global learning environments by recounting work in the Global Classroom Project, which electronically links students and professors from Russia and America. The author asserts that students learn by experience what cannot be taught and claims that they benefit from synthesizing the viewpoints, ideologies, and frames of reference of diverse co-participants. In doing so, students prepare for a future in which synthetic thinking that leads to innovative, imaginative problem solving and invention will be desirable and necessary.

This article offers a retrospective case study of a service learning project in a technical writing class. For this project, students were asked to develop a communication tool with information about consent rates in organ donation to use in an academic medical center. In contrast to the service learning literature, which notes that students often resist the professionalizing move that service learning offers, this study shows that students in this project actually overprofessionalized, constituting themselves as one more party vying for control over the communication of organ donation. This embrace of professionalism via service learning raises as many issues as the resistance to professionalism that is more commonly documented.

Many technical writing programs across the country have their students go out into the community and do writing projects for local businesses, campus organizations, government agencies, or nonprofit organizations. Few, however, take advantage of the increasingly popular pedagogy known as service learning. This article describes how to set up such service-learning courses and how to anticipate certain types of problems. Also discussed are some of the many benefits, both pedagogical and civic/humanitarian, that this truly real-world approach brings to the teaching of technical writing and, potentially, to the teaching of other forms of professional writing.

Experiential learning theory provides a theoretical foundation for studying technical communication internships. This study explores, through the perspective of the experiential learning cycle model developed by David Kolb, internships in technical communication. Participants in technical communication internship experiences were asked to provide, from their different perspectives, information that described the experience. Program directors, industrial supervisors, and student interns provided different views of what they had experienced, illustrating that most had entirely different perspectives on their level of participation in creating, supervising, and evaluating this form of educational experience. Besides describing technical communication programs in the United States more comprehensively, the results of this study raise questions about how the respondents perceived their experience and how the “reality” of these perceptions often conflict. When these findings are explored within the epistemology conceptualized by Kolb's experiential learning theory, a framework is established for more systemic procedures and standards that will enhance the internship as a credible learning experience.