Designing an online course that focuses on multimodality and community building—where community encompasses the online space and the larger society and can be uniquely fostered by metacognitive engagements—can promote student success as literate citizens within and beyond academia. Metacognitive reflection, in our case linked to the canon of Memory, can guide students to reconsider how elements of the course can affect their learning and their work in their future careers.

This article takes a historical view of Dawes Era medical communication, focusing on National Archives Record Group 75 (the Bureau of Indian Affairs papers). Examinations of reports from the Pine Ridge and Nett Lake Agencies focus readers’ scrutiny on prevalent formal codes and paracolonial conventions of Indian Bureau medical reports. This article challenges writing studies scholars to forthrightly concern themselves with the ways in which discourses of power are encoded in document structures and designs.

As usability research and user-centered design become more prevalent areas of study within technical and professional communication (TPC), it has become important to examine the best practices in designing courses and programs that help students better understand these concepts. This article reports on a case study about how usability research and user-centered design were introduced to TPC students. The article examines how students responded to and articulated new concepts and looks forward to ways TPC programs can develop comprehensive curricula that introduces students to these topics.

This article reports on an effort by the authors to use usability testing as a component of online teacher training for their multimajor technical communication course. The article further explains the ways in which program administrators at other institutions can create their own usability testing protocols for formative online teacher training in course design and in principles of user-centered design.

To prepare students for careers postgraduation, many academic programs have added components, such as service-learning projects (civic oriented, real-audience tasks) and client projects (real-audience corporate or nonprofit tasks), which aim to acclimate students to the expectations of “real world” clients while they are still in the relatively “safe” domain of the classroom. The two studies reported in this paper examine whether participating in client projects as part of regular technical communication classes aids students in internships and later on the job. Research questions: Overall question: How does legitimate peripheral participation in client projects give students opportunities for learning beyond the end of the client project? Literature review: Service-learning and client projects are intended to benefit students by offering real-world audiences and complex experiences with professional practitioners. Client projects help students face these challenges when moving from school to work, such as acculturating into the organization or completing tasks designed for purposes other than the learner's development. Methodology: To evaluate experiences on a particular client project, study one surveyed six students with open-ended questions about their experiences on it. To explore how the client project prepared them for internships, study two used semistructured interviews with interns and supervisors, observations of interns at work, and documents that interns created. Results and conclusions: Through recursive analysis, client projects emerged as being important in students' internship experiences. Students participate in client projects in ways that support their learning and development as members of a community of practice in internships and on the job. This learning is gradual and varied. One particular finding for teachers is that rather than shield students from client interactions, it may be helpful to promote frequent, structured interactions with clients to better prepare students for the workplace.

This website is the creation of a student of mine, Jacoby Boles, who is the Editorial Assistant for the e-journal Xchanges, of which I am editor. Jacoby reflects, via this site, on his experiences as a member of the Technical Communication 371 "Publications Management" course at New Mexico Tech. TC 371, in Fall 2010, was a course explicitly designed to engage students with a unique "client project," the production of an issue of the online journal Xchanges.

This article presents follow-up information to a previous publication regarding ways to increase emphasis on research skills in undergraduate Technical Communication curricula. We detail the ways our undergraduate program highlights research by requiring majors to complete senior thesis projects that culminate in submission to an online peer-reviewed journal housed at our institution. This article also describes the roles our undergraduate students play in helping to manage the publication of that academic journal, an activity that further increases students' awareness of the research process and the value of writing for an academic audience beyond the classroom.