As digital technologies rapidly evolve, updating and enhancing models of digital literacy pedagogy in technical and professional communication (TPC) becomes more urgent. In this article, we use "digital life" to conceptualize the ever-changing ways of knowing and being in postinternet society. Using collaborative autoethnography, we investigate features of threshold concepts in TPC pedagogy that may support models of digital literacy that are resistant to tools-based definitions, foster student agency, and facilitate accessibility, equity, and justice.

This article builds upon the exigence highlighted in recent scholarship on preparing technical and professional communication (TPC) graduate students for collaborative research and professionalization. Using collaborative autoethnography as a self-study methodology, the authors offer authentic graduate research and mentorship experiences in a collaborative research incubator, the Wearables Research Collaboratory, at a midwestern research university.

Abstract Technical communication practices have been changed dramatically by the increasingly ubiquitous nature of digital technologies. Yet, while those who work in the profession have been living through this dramatic change, our academic discipline has been moving at a slower pace, at times appearing quite unsure about how to proceed. This article focuses on the following three areas of opportunity for change in our discipline in relation to digital technologies: access and expectations, scholarship and community building, and accountability and partnering.

As society increasingly inhabits digital spaces in addition to physical places, the environment in which professional communication programs function undergoes fundamental change. The specific dynamics of these digital spaces have resulted in the emergence of learning marketspaces and present a program with three choices for positioning itself: (1) staying at its homestead, its own individual home page; (2) paying rent for a space in someone else's learning marketspace; or (3) partnering to build a learning marketspace. This article addresses the third choice and suggests how programs may go about partnering to build a learning marketspace. The authors examine the following questions: Why partner to develop a learning marketspace? What are critical components of a learning marketspace for professional communication? and How might we assess a program's readiness for partnering in the learning marketspace?

This essay details the experience of designing, implementing, and evaluating an online course in audience analysis at the graduate level. Through a discussion of the culture of this online course, I describe how the educational culture of the Land Grant Mission flowed into our efforts to create a quality learning experience, and how the Web modules and asynchronous (listserv) and synchronous (MOO) conversations influenced communication and learning.

The goal of this study was to expand our understanding of mentoring situated within electronic exchanges. Focusing on three graduate and five undergraduate mentors’ responses via telecommunications, we explored the strategies mentors used to make their reading and understanding of the texts explicit to their students, the responses mentors provided to demonstrate how students might revise, and mentors’ perceptions toward mentoring. Mentors responded to eight drafts from 24 ninth-grade students over an eight-week period, generating an average of 20 comments per student draft. Data collected included response grids of each mentor’s comments to students, interviews with mentors midway and at the end of the study, and journals kept by the mentors. Results showed that mentor pre-project expectations about responses they might make to students did not correspond to their actual responses, and that as the project progressed, mentor responses formed patterns corresponding to the draft of the students’ writing assignment. Additional differences were found based on mentors’ previous teaching experience, gender, and requests for feedback. Mentors expressed as their greatest difficulty not knowing which comments were perceived by students as most helpful

Although collaboration in technical communication is not a recent phenomenon, the attention it is receiving is new. This recent attention has generated an increasing number of well‐designed and provocative studies that are concerned with collaboration in technical communication contexts as well as with the processes of collaboratively conceptualizing, creating, and producing technical texts. Much of this research, which is forcing a reexamination of theories that affect the pedagogy and practice of collaboration, draws on a broad interdisciplinary foundation and utilizes an array of multi‐methodological approaches, both quantitative and qualitative.

With the advent of electronic networking, writing pedagogy has moved into the arena of computer-supported collaborative writing, using collaborative writing as an instructional means to promote a more social view of the writing process. Therefore, as business and technical communication researchers and instructors, we need to ask the following questions: What kinds of software have been developed to aid computer-supported collaborative writing in the workplace and in the writing classroom? What benefits and problems have resulted from the design and use of this software? What research issues should be addressed as we approach the next decade of computer-supported collaborative writing? In this article the author explores these questions, highlighting five computer-supported collaborative writing systems from the workplace and five such systems from the writing classroom.