Tech Comm Seminar 11/05: Digital Literacy and Social Media

Jason W. Ellis and Olga Menagarishvili will lead a discussion on digital literacy and social media issues for technical communicators in this week’s seminar. How does digital literacy in general and social media more specifically figure into the Technical Communication classroom? Should we challenge our Technical Communication students to be more… Continue reading

Tech Comm Seminar 10/29: Single-Sourcing and User Experience Issues

Jason W. Ellis and Rachel Mahan will lead a discussion on single-sourcing and user experience issues for this week’s seminar. While technical communication often focuses on software technologies, those same technologies influence and shape what technical communication is and how technical communication is done. A specific area of pedagogical interest… Continue reading

Tech Comm Seminar 10/8: Visual Literacy, Visual and Information Design

James Gregory and Rachel Mahan will lead Monday’s Tech Comm Seminar discussion on visual literacy, visual design, and information design. We would like you to read and watch the following: “What is Information Design?” Janice C. Redish (pp. 211-17 in Teaching Technical Communication) From “The Vocabulary of Comics” Scott McCloud… Continue reading

Tech Comm Seminar 9/17: The “Soul” of Business and Technical Communication — and Academia

In this seminar session, Dr. Patrick McHenry and Dr. Andy Frazee will lead discussion on the “soul” of business and technical communication; in so doing, the seminar will also discuss the “soul” of academia. What is our responsibility as teachers and academics to the workplaces our students are going into?… Continue reading

A Letter to Students and Clients – Drawing Lessons from Failure in a Service Learning Classroom

As a client-based course, my technical communication class at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta functions like a hybrid between a college class and a consulting firm, with the students working in teams to compose websites, marketing strategies, reports, manuals, and a variety of other artifacts for local nonprofits and small businesses. Continue reading

Visual Rhetoric in Tech Com

This week we’ll cover the issue of visual rhetoric in technical communication. We begin with an article by Greenzweig  who discusses “the ways in which visual composition contributes to a user’s aesthetic experience and why such an experience is important when designing information structures.” We continue with McCloud’s chapter in… Continue reading