Technical communication and usability (user experience, or UX) have a long, intertwined history, dating back at least to the 1970s. The author, who has been active in both fields for the last three decades, gives many examples of how technical communicators have influenced UX practice and how usability specialists have influenced technical communication. The author also explores how technical communicators can continue to contribute to future UX theory, research, and practice through collaboration, through their communication skills, dealing with the reality of ever-increasing complexity in products and processes and dealing with the need to adapt to more rapid change.

Distributed work is an increasingly common phenomenon in a number of technical and professional settings, and the complexity of this work requires high degrees of knowledge sharing and integration that move beyond assembly-line approaches to collaboration. Since participants in distributed-work settings rely almost exclusively on written and spoken language to mediate their collaborative relationships, professional communication faculty need educational approaches that empower students with language practices designed specifically to support effective teaming in these complex environments. To address this need, we employ discourse analysis and Speech Act Theory to identify these language practices in a case study of two cohorts of distributed, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural student teams. The findings show correlations between language practices and successful collaboration. These correlations have significant implications for teaching and practice.

This article describes a beginning research partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and two Mexican universities, the Universidad de Quintana Roo (UQROO) and Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, that has developed and implemented an environment merging the pedagogies of English as a foreign language (EFL) and writing across the curriculum (WAC). The article presents a theoretical background for this partnership based on the research on globally networked learning environments (GNLEs) and then focuses on the early stages of the project as the research teams define their objectives, research methods, and teaching approaches.

In a globally networked learning environment (GNLE), 16 students at a university in Sweden and 17 students at a university in the United States exchanged peer-review comments on drafts of assignments they prepared in English for their technical communication classes. The instructors of both sets of students had assigned the same projects and taught their courses in the same way that they had in the previous year, which contrasts with the common practice of having students in partnering courses work on the same assignment or on linked assignments created specifically for the GNLE. The authors coded the students’ 816 comments according to their focus and orientation in order to investigate the possible differences between the comments made by the L2 students in Sweden and those made by the L1 (English as a second language) students in the United States, the possible impact of peer reviewing online, and the influence of the instructors’ directions on the students’ peer-reviewing behavior.

This article draws on activity theory, politics of the artifact, and speech act theory to analyze how language practices and technology interplay in establishing the social relationships necessary for globally networked teams. Specifically, it uses activity theory to examine how linguistic infelicities and the politics of communication technologies interplay in virtual meetings, thereby demonstrating the importance of grounding professional communication instruction in social as well as technical effectiveness. That is, students must learn not only how to communicate technical concepts clearly and concisely and recognize cultural differences but also how to use language and choose media in ways that produce the social conditions necessary for effective collaboration in globally networked environments. The article analyzes two case studies—a workplace and a classroom—that illustrate how the mediating functions of language and the politics of technology intersect as mediating tools in globally networked activity systems. It then traces the implications of that intersection for professional communication theory and pedagogy.

Abstract In this article, I argue that to understand technical communication instruction in non-Western countries, one has to pay close attention to the impacts of local cultural, educational, political, and economic contexts on technical communication practices. I identify two localized programs that share features of technical communication in China and review their programmatic positioning at national and local levels. I also suggest ways for U.S. technical communicators to start cross-cultural collaboration with local programs.

Some scholars trace the start of writing across the curriculum to the 1970s. However, in 1929, when appointed president of the National Council of Teachers of English, Ruth Mary Weeks initiated A Correlated Curriculum (1936), a significant interdisciplinary project that specifically viewed English as the mechanism for achieving an integrated curriculum. Although her goal was not fully realized, Weeks's efforts are important in their attempts to open education to broader classes of students, to promote learning as a collaborative process, to prepare all students to meet the demands of transforming social and industrial circumstances, and, ultimately, to restructure industrial America.

Writing courses increasingly incorporate Internet and online learning activities as part of the syllabus and teaching materials. How does this change our teaching practices, and which free and collaborative online tools can be most appropriately applied in online and blended writing courses? This is the first part of a two-part article focused on freely available Web 2.0 tools and how they can promote collaboration in the context of social networking. Part I places writing in the context of new views of literacy due in part to revolutionary changes since the turn of the century in how content finds its way to the Internet. Web 2.0 and cloud computing have made it possible for writers to publish not only prose but a range of other media online without having to pass through traditional gate-keepers, and tools and mechanisms have evolved for networking communities of like-minded writers online. Among the many impacts of this development is the possibility now for student writers to write purposefully for worldwide audiences. Part I examines the production side of this dynamic, while Part II (to appear in the first issue of this journal in 2011) explains how the Internet resolves the marketing side of the role once played by traditional publishing and how writers and audiences can navigate the seemingly chaotic preponderance of content available online to find one another’s material and carry on conversations about it, thus providing truly authentic motivation for their writing.

Global virtual teams provide numerous benefits for corporations employing virtual organizational forms and for individual teams and team members. However, virtual collaboration also presents some well-recognized challenges. A growing body of research has examined the process of virtual teaming and the challenges inherent in that process. This study seeks to address some of the gaps in the existing literature. Specifically, it examines leadership roles, socioemotional communication strategies, and the use of technology to establish relational links among team members. The study focuses on virtual-team collaboration among technical communication students at the University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland, and at the University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida.

Talking to the media often becomes part of the job description for subject matter experts (SMEs) who can discuss an organization's research or new products. Media training can prepare SMEs for media interviews by helping them identify major points to discuss and showing them how to present that information to the reporter. Prior research in professional communication supports the need for media training for scientific or engineering SMEs based on the public's increased interest in these areas. As part of this media training tutorial, I introduce eight guidelines based on my own experience as a public relations counselor and on research conducted in an organizational setting with SMEs in health information technology.

This article argues small departments are ideal laboratories for innovative structures of collaboration. Beginning with the smallest nit—an individual teacher “collaborating with herself” to mine good ideas from one course to another, and graduating to larger and more ambitious structures of collaboration—team- teaching, service- learning, performance and interdisciplinary syllabi, and courses taught between campuses and across the globe—Moffat shows how deliberate collaboration can yield more from less. Using examples from colleagues' work in small departments at Dickinson College, Moffat suggests how creative collaboration can expand pedagogical methods, increase student diversity and demand for a range of courses, establish interdisciplinary communities, and widen the curriculum.

This forum essay explores a collaboration between a teacher and a book. Combining autobiography with teaching notes about a variety of colleges (the writer held adjunct appointments in six colleges in fifteen years before joining the Keene State College faculty), the article claims Scholes, Comley, and Ulmer successfully show how to teach college students difficult texts and critical thinking through imitating language and forms drawn from wide-ranging models. In so doing, students realize how ideas circulate between popular and high culture, and how literary texts inform one another. Though some deem writing by Erving Goffman, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida, however important for understanding current critical debates, too difficult for entering students, let alone their instructors, Dizard says Text Book “teaches well.” Quoting from student papers for proof, Dizard shows that advanced as well as uncertain students can and will master difficult material, provided the teacher is willing—-and brave enough—to learn anew.

Four service-learning projects were conducted in technical communication courses using wikis. Results confirm previous findings that wikis improve collaboration, help develop student expertise, and enact a “writing with the community” service-learning paradigm. However, wikis did not decenter the writing classroom as predicted by previous work. Instructors using wikis to scaffold client projects should calibrate standards for evaluation with students and client, and they may need to encourage clients to stay active on the wiki.

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> A major challenge in engineering education is to prepare professionals for communicating well in writing and speaking, using appropriate technologies, within professional contexts. Communication in the global engineering world includes collaboration on cross-functional teams, virtual-project team management, and writing for multiple, complex audiences. This tutorial discusses how one small engineering school has integrated technical communication teaching and assessment throughout the curriculum with demonstrated success. The integrated curriculum, formative and summative assessments, and real-world contexts offer one model to address growing communication challenges. </para>

In her essay "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center," Andrea Lunsford offers a much-needed critique of the traditional "garret" and "storehouse" models for writing center instruction, and she argues for a collaborative model in which students work together in groups to discuss, question, write, and revise.In contrast to the storehouse and garret models that reinscribe rigidly authoritarian or naively libertarian beliefs about language use, this collaborative model dramatizes the "triangulation" or "dialogism" that theorists such as Donald Davidson, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Ann Berthoff place at the heart of composing: as students seek to join in a conversation that precedes and takes place around them, as they seek to understand, complicate, and communicate their perceptions with and through others.In the collaborative writing center, Lunsford writes, students learn how knowledge and reality are "mediated by or constructed through language in social use . . . the product of collaboration" (4).Through collaboration, Kenneth Bruffee writes, students come to internalize those social conversations; they develop "reflective thought" and learn to play "silently, in imagination, the parts of all the participants in the conversation" as they write and reflect (5).While these aims of collaborative learning are ones I enthusiastically support, I find myself resisting jumping on the "collaboration bandwagon" (Lunsford 4) if by collaboration we mean only and always peer-group writing and response or conversation with another person.Peer groups can produce discussion, negotiation,

Writing centers are sites around which folklore circulates.Staff meetings, classrooms, newsletters, and journals are filled with tales of individual and collective actualization, celebrating one-to-one teaching as deeply social, collaborative, and empowering.Legends from the writing center also speak to the tensions inherent in the spaces, reflecting divisions of tutoring as prescriptive versus directive, banking versus dialogic, and peer-driven versus expertowned.Following their review of writing center theory, history, and practice, Paula Gillespie and Neal Lerner advise, "What is most important is to understand where our practices come from and to unravel the various influences on those practices" (154).Knowing these conditions of possibility makes for more effective tutoring, and this awareness also speaks to a politics about learning and the production of writers.Gillespie and Lerner describe commonplace mindsets about writing centers as garrets for skills -building and testing, as generative spaces for confidence and collaboration, and as critical arenas in which to problem-pose institutional and social discursive practices (147-50).For each domain, the tutorial and the social actors in and surrounding it are implicated in a certain identity politics.In the storehouse writing center, skill-building and knowledge transmission posit the writer as a vessel in need of filling, and identity becomes conferred as a sort of membership card or rite of passage.In the generative writing center, the writer emerges from social interaction, and identity becomes a negotiation of assimilation, separation, and subversion.In the critical/activist writing center, consciousness-raising produces writers aware of the constellation

Based on a study of observable changes author-users made to three Wikipedia articles, this article contends that Wikipedia supports notions of revision, collaboration, and authority that writing studies purports to value, while also extending our understanding of the production of knowledge in public spaces. It argues that Wikipedia asks us to reexamine our expectations for the stability of research materials and who should participate in public knowledge making.

Creating a group paper has always made unusual demands on students as they figure out their role in the process of collaborative authorship. Inviting writers to work with newer technologies, such as online word processors and wikis, can provide opportunities to make the process and outcomes of collaboration more transparent. In this article, collaborative writing approaches that use a number of Web-based tools are discussed, including cooperative synchronous writing with Google Docs, inquiry-based writing with wikis, multigenre writing in response to literature, and collaboratively constructed study guides.

Technical and professional writing pedagogies have traditionally understood collaborative writing as an aggregate, cooperative venture between writers and subject matter experts. In contrast, this tutorial argues that Web 2.0 technologies offer technical and professional communication pedagogies more advantageous conceptions and practices of collaborative writing. The tutorial analyzes how new media technologies create a different collaborative writing environment and then discusses how these environments help collaborative writing methods create an alternative writing situation. The study concludes by examining the outcomes of student Web 2.0 research projects and by offering technical and professional writing instructors new pedagogical strategies for teaching collaborative writing.

With the “counterhegemonic figured communities” of HBCUs as our lens, our idea(l)s are shaped within specific rewritings of race, access, and education that move us toward a new framework. Alongside teaching narratives, we foreground collaborative revisions of identity, critical mentoring, and coalition-work as an alternative theory of pedagogy and composition.

This article examines the characteristics of collaborative work and overlapping activity systems in the popular online game World of Warcraft. Using genre theory and activity theory as frames to work out the genre ecology of gameplay, the article focuses on how players coordinate ad hoc grouping activity across and through genres. It articulates the related development of open systems in online gaming in a discussion of interface modifications (AddOns) and online information databases that players generate, drawing on De Certeau's formulation of strategies and tactics and Warner's discussion of publics and counterpublics. The article concludes by discussing implications of online gaming for an open-systems approach to information design in professional communication and for professional communication in general.

Genred documents facilitate collaboration and workplace practices in many ways—particularly in the medical workplace. This article represents a portion of a larger grounded investigation of how medical professionals invoke a wide range of rhetorical strategies when deliberating about complex patient cases during weekly, multidisciplinary deliberations called Tumor Board meetings. Specifically, the author explores the role of one key document in oncological practice, the Standard of Care document. Each Standard of Care document (one for every known cancer) presents a set of national guidelines intended to standardize the treatment of cancer. Tumor Board participants invoke these guidelines as evidence for or against particular future action. In order to better understand how genred, generalizable guidelines like Standard of Care documents afford decision making amid uncertainty, the author conducts a temporal and contextual analysis of the document's use during deliberations as well as a modified Toulminian analysis of a representative sample. Results suggest that, while on its own the document achieves an authoritative, charter-like purpose, it fails to make explicit a link between individual patients' experiences and the profession's expectations for how to act. Implications for how genred, generalizable guidelines—given the way they encourage certain ways of seeing over others—organize and authorize work are discussed, and a modified Toulminian approach to understanding the relationship between claim and evidence in multimodal texts is modeled.

Attention to the similarities between an academic class and a magazine illuminates how periodicity affects the reading and learning experience. Focusing on the subscribers' power in shaping the continuing life of a periodical, the teaching methodology presented here also underscores the collaborative nature of all teaching.

Fueled by disciplinary disagreements and resource fights, comp/lit conflicts continue. However, productive collaboration is possible and an opportunity remains in developing general education writing courses. A general education course in teaching writing through literature is argued for on the grounds that English studies has been positively transformed by the mainstreaming of composition, pedagogy, and cultural studies.

This article makes a case for using MySpace as a pedagogical tool in the survey course. MySpace can draw attention to the kinds of restrictions the collaboration between “literary” and “history” places on how the survey course interprets the past. The article gives detailed accounts of how students uploaded MySpace sites for a cross section of literary figures on the Brit Lit II survey syllabus in Spring 2007. Placing figures from the syllabus on MySpace got students to rethink the past as a series of interconnected networks of complicated and evolving conversations throughout the century. Students used the kinds of communication that MySpace makes possible for their personal lives and used it as a way to manage speculative and informed conversations between literary figures on the course syllabus. Excerpts from student essays suggest that transplanting figures like William Blake, Robert Burns, John Keats, Mary Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf onto MySpace impacts how we understand the kinds of conversations the nineteenth century has with itself, and what this tells us about their literary and historical legacy.

A recent British national intelligence-based Assessment (2002) illustrates how one government agency communicated science to serve its policy goals. This article analyzes some of the values that drive science, public policy, and national intelligence, and traces how those values affected the Assessment writers' goals and communication strategies. Through close reading of the Assessment's foreword and first section, this study shows how the writers shaped scientific and technical information to satisfy their disciplines' values and to naturalize their “proper perspective” on the policy case. Further analysis of similar documents will extend current research on scientific rhetoric, multidisciplinary collaborative writing, and public communication.

Larry Sanger, a Ph.D. philosopher (The Ohio State University, 2000), was, along with Jimmy Wales, a co-founder of Wikipedia. Sanger is currently the Editor-in-Chief of a new wiki encyclopedia project called Citizendium. He has written and spoken extensively on the subjects of online knowledge communities and what he calls "the new politics of knowledge" in the age of the Internet. He also offers consulting services on the design of online collaborative communities for Internet businesses

Joanna Wolfe is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville where she teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, human-computer interaction, and research methods. She is author of the forthcoming textbook Team Writing from Bedford-St. Martin's, a guide to writing collaboratively and working on a team. Her previous scholarly work has appeared in journals such as Written Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning.

Writing faculty, tutors, and librarians at West Virginia University took a team-approach to teaching research, reading, and writing as intertwined processes. This collaborative project encouraged each member of the team to re-examine professional and disciplinary boundaries, and resulted in new assignments and activities that successfully engage students in researched writing.

Abstract As the City of Houston's Bureau of Air Quality Control embraced new policies, technologies, and rhetorical strategies, they simultaneously moved through Lukensmeyer and Torres's "four levels of public involvement," which include the information, consultation, engagement, and collaboration levels (Lukensmeyer & Torres, 2006 Lukensmeyer, C. J., & Torres, L. H. (2006). Public deliberation: A manager's guide to citizen engagement. IBM Center for the Business of Government Collaboration Series. Retrieved November 2007 from http://www.businessofgovernment.org/pdfs/LukensmeyerReport.pdf [Google Scholar]). Because of the technical and scientific nature of air quality inspections, increasing public involvement, especially the involvement of those in a predominantly African American and a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, has been a challenge. This article describes the Bureau's journey through the information level, where the Bureau opens public access and participation in the investigation and reporting process; the consultation level, where Bureau staff go door-to-door in poor and minority neighborhoods collecting citizen feedback regarding perceived environmental hazards; the engagement level, where the Bureau conducts monthly environmental meetings with neighborhood residents; and the collaboration level, where citizens are taught to collect evidence of environmental violations.

Instant messaging (IM) has the potential to be a powerful collaborative workplace communication tool. As this information and communication technology (ICT) becomes more diffused at work, it is important to consider how the workers will cope with yet another communication option. Using a cost-minimization perspective, this proposition-building piece links three types of costs associated with IM use, delay, access, and error, with two salient workplace concerns, productivity and communication overload. The delay costs associated with IM use are considerably lower than with other ICTs. While increased use of IM can enhance productivity, it might also lead to perceptions of overload. IM access costs include organizational access, interruptions, user experiences, user differences, and generational differences-variables that influence one another and can lead to either outcome. Error costs come in two forms: single-channel factors and message quality issues. These likely lead to increased communication overload and decreased productivity. Combining IM with other ICTs is a likely moderator in this relationship and might help overcome the single-channel factors. The resulting eight propositions and theoretical model provide a predictive framework to focus future workplace IM use studies.

The field of adult literacy is complex. This complexity poses many challenges for literacy programs. This paper addresses the challenges of collaboration, diversity, attendance, assessment and professional development as they apply to adult literacy programs. Recommendations for increasing the success of literacy programs are provided.

The books under review here envision models of professional development not as episodes of developing skills or training faculty to conform to changing laws, rules, and pet projects of administrators, but rather as collaborative processes of education and reflection that encourage faculty to rethink their practices. They draw on research in composition theory and pedagogy, suggesting that more effective learning takes place when teachers trust learners to consider their own need for knowledge, invite learners to devise variations and applications of received knowledge, and resist keeping things simple to be sure they are correct. Applying different focuses, these books consider how to put teacher-learners at the center of the process of their own professional development. Jeffrey Jablonski argues that the expertise developed in composition studies needs to be recognized and respected in initiatives to implement Cross-Curricular Literacy programs. The writers of The Everyday Writing Center consider how, in the midst of increased professionalization, to maintain the serendipitous—even carnivalesque, at times—learning and teaching that the intimate and nonhierarchical space of a writing center can foster. And the collective wisdom in The Writing Center Director's Resource Book surveys the current state of writing center theory and practice, providing a reflective guide for developing the expertise of writing center administrators, who are (or could be) leaders in campus faculty development efforts.

The author considers faculty development and its potential relationship to the ethos of collaborative practice modeled both by critical (Freirean) pedagogy and by interdisciplinary research. As a primary concern for any academic administrator, faculty development is not only a teaching moment but also an opportunity for reciprocal exchange, learning, and knowledge production, allowing participants to challenge the received wisdom of their fields and to come to a more rhetorical understanding of their identities. The collaborative construction of new knowledge and an emerging understanding of identities are examined in the context of two professional development and administrative contexts: the assessment by faculty of the writing of entering, first-year students and a collegewide, first-year experience (learning-community) initiative.

It has become increasingly clear that U.S. faculty cannot afford to remain insular about global issues in teaching and the forces that are shaping them. At the same time, our desire to address or resist those issues, to join in or to find alternatives, needs to be contextualized. The three edited collections reviewed here address globalization of higher education in Australia, writing instruction in higher education in the United Kingdom, and interdisciplinary collaboration in U.S. higher education. The three bring different perspectives to current U.S. discussions of internationalization and interdisciplinary work in higher education and allow us to better understand issues in other cultures and disciplines while critically examining our own through new lenses.

Pedagogical and scholarly representations of collaborative writing and knowledge construction in technical communication have traditionally recognized consensus as the logical outcome of collaborative work, even as scholars and teachers have acknowledged the value of conflict and “dissensus” in the process of collaborative knowledge building. However, the conflict-laden work product of a Denver task force charged with recommending changes to the city police department's use-of-force policy and proposing a process for police oversight retains the collaborative group's dissensus and in doing so, illustrates an alternative method of collaborative reporting that challenges convention. Such an approach demonstrates a dissensus-based method of reporting that has the potential to open new rhetorical spaces for collaborative stakeholders by gainfully extending collaborative conversations and creating new opportunities for ethos development, thus offering scholars, teachers, and practitioners a way of reimagining the trajectory and outcome of collaborative work.

As is true for engineering communication programs nationwide, at MIT curricular and pedagogical reforms have been driven by changes in the kinds of problems that engineers solve and the associated skill sets that engineers must now have in communication and teamwork. This article presents three case studies from communication-intensive classes at MIT that intend to help students develop the advanced communication skills required of professional engineers today. Highlighting classes in biological engineering, aeronautics/astronautics engineering, and biomedical engineering, we explore the following questions: What does it mean for educational practice if professional communication competencies and tasks are the goals? How can students and technical faculty best create the conditions for students to learn to be skilled team members? How can engineering students move from mere display of data to making skilled visual arguments based on those data? The importance of helping students meet the target competencies of professional practice, of teaching effective teamwork and collaboration, and of teaching students to understand and argue with visual data are recognized as widespread needs, and these case studies attest to the possibilities and challenges in meeting those needs.

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> This paper describes a new cross-curricular design for an engineering communication course based on four themes: (1) ethics, accountability, and professionalism; (2) intellectual property; (3) design, creativity, and invention; and (4) globalization. It is believed that the thematic structure creates both dynamic and contemporary contexts for writing and research along with enough freedom to pursue individual student interests. The result is a higher degree of intrinsic motivation for the assignments. The course is a collaborative effort between an English department and a school of engineering designed to both improve curriculum and provide more assessment data for engineering accreditation. Among the criteria from the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) is the “ability to communicate effectively.” Along with satisfying this criterion, the course discussed in this paper details how to capture data in support of an additional four of ABET's criteria known as “a–k.” After highlighting these ABET criteria and giving an overview of the structure of the course, the paper details each theme, including their respective readings and assignments. This new course was taught for the first time in the 2006–2007 academic year, and the paper closes by weighing the outcomes and implications of adopting a similar format. The current version of the syllabus and reading list for this course are included in this paper. </para>

Through interviews and courtroom observations in a case study done in collaboration with a community partner in two judicial districts in Minnesota, the authors extend the scholarly conversation about critical, activist research in business and technical communication and make pedagogical suggestions by studying two groups who contribute to the discourse about victim rights: judges who accept plea negotiations and make sentencing decisions and advocates who help victims contribute, through victim impact statements, their reactions as crime victims and their requests for certain punishments and conditions for the crime perpetrators. The authors identify the technologies of power used by each group to assert their disciplinary authority and trace how these assertions play out in the courtroom. They conclude that by capitalizing on the normative structures of impact statements, advocates may actually give victims more power. Such activist research might benefit research participants and enhance research methods.

Availability of online Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations is contributing to a shift in medical writers' organizational role from a peripheral to a central role where their responsibilities for the persuasiveness of documents and compliance with evolving regulations have increased dramatically. Therefore, curricula for medical writers should include instruction in persuasion, collaboration, strategic and project management, the drug development process, and the location and interpretation of FDA regulations.

Based on a case study of a global training team, this article focuses on an important ability for professional communicators: collaborating with translators. The study confirms the value of approaching translation as a collaborative recreation rather than mere information transfer and suggests the need to integrate translation with localization and to develop team rapport. Relevant abilities include understanding cultural and professional context, using bicultural vision, and building team relationships. Pursuit of these abilities should draw from translation studies and intercultural communication literature and be informed by diverse rhetorical traditions. Global educational and research partnerships are an ideal way to pursue these goals. Such collaboration can improve research methodology and challenge culturally based assumptions about translation-related communication roles and competencies.

This essay explores the intersection between writing studies and civic engagement through the action projects developed in E465: Prison Literature and Writing. Such literacy activism creates immediate opportunities for advanced undergraduates to more fully understand the work of literacy in contested spaces like jail and extends a call to action for writing teachers to acknowledge the possibility of community-based writing collaborations.

After the controversial police shooting of a developmentally-disabled African-American teenager in July 2003, the new mayor of Denver, CO, appointed a politically diverse task force to revise the police department's use-of-force policy and propose a new model for police oversight. This teaching case is based on the task force's deliberations and collaborative efforts to build policy consensus in a sometimes rancorous, high-stakes environment. In it, I reconstruct the story of the shooting that gave rise to the task force, trace the arc of the task force's 104-day existence, and analyze the letter and final report submitted by the task force's co-chairs to (1) demonstrate the highly-pressurized nature of policy language invention and the crucial impact of word choice in such policy, and (2) illustrate the difficulty the task force encountered in attempting to secure consensus and the manner in which the final work product acknowledges, rather than obscures, this struggle. Finally, the case includes recommended readings and a guide for individual and group activities for implementation in either an undergraduate- or graduate-level technical communication course.

New forms of computer-mediated, online learning can benefit from new forms of assessment that fit the medium and the pedagogical style of the online environment. This paper investigates students' learning styles and learning strategies in taking online collaborative exams. Applying constructivist and collaborative learning theories, the collaborative examination features students' active participation in various phases of the exam process through small group activities online. Students' learning strategies, including deep learning and collaborative learning, are investigated using a 1 3 field quasi-experiment to compare the team-based collaborative online exam with the traditional in-class exam and with the participatory exam, where students participate in the online exam processes individually. Data analysis using results from 485 students indicates that collaborative examinations significantly reduced surface learning in exam study, enhanced interactions and the sense of an online learning community, and increased perceived learning. The results also suggest learning predispositions were significantly correlated with exam study strategies, and provide indications of their effects on learning strategies.

This article explains the rules for playing the “Interpretation Game” in a literature-based first-year writing class, describes the resulting class discussion, and reflects on the ways that rules and games can promote rich collaboration.

This article shows how digital archives can enrich the humanities classroom; I trace the collaborative creation of “I Remain”: A Digital Archive of Letters, Manuscripts, and Ephemera at Lehigh University, demonstrating how the archive engaged students' different learning styles, causing them to interrogate the way history is represented and processed.

This essay explores the potential for wikis in English classrooms and writing pedagogy through discussion of a class project involving Wikitravel. Topics include the influence that wikis have on collaboration, an example of networked writing, and the role of writing with technology in knowledge creation.

This study reports about a yearlong study of the initiation of novice grant writers to the activity system of National Institutes of Health grant applications. It investigates the use of cognitive apprenticeship within writing classrooms and that of social apprenticeship in laboratories, programs, departments, and universities, which introduced students to the genre system of National Institutes of Health grant proposals and helped them in moving from peripheral participation to more central participation. While cognitive apprenticeship employs devices such as modeling, scaffolding, coaching, and collaboration to enhance learning in formal settings, social apprenticeship requires socialization, interaction, and collaboration with experts, colleagues, and peers in informal settings to acquire disciplinary knowledge and experiences. The study suggests that writing instructors should acknowledge and incorporate resources in other activity systems in which students participate, i.e., their laboratories and home departments, and teach genre systems rather than specific genres to better facilitate students' enculturation to activity systems of disciplinary discourse communities.