On Conferences in Academia and the Tech Industry

On stage at the Container Power Hour session at the 2018 AWS re:Invent conference. The session agenda is projected on a screen to the left; the session presenters are seated on stage to the right.

This is the third part in a series on the intersections of technical communication in the tech industry and the academy. Read the series introduction here. For me, January 2019 was bookended with conferences. I started the month (and year) with a trip to Chicago for the 2019 Modern Language… Continue reading

16 Brittain Fellows Write About the Archives They Love

Archives, research libraries, and special collections are the crucial spaces where study begins. While public and school libraries hold a space in the popular imagination as a catalyzing site of intellectual curiosity—as seen in the recent piece “12 Authors Write about the Libraries They Love” in The New York Times—archives are… Continue reading

Intersections of Tech Comm in the Tech Industry and Classroom

An intersection at night. Exposure techniques render passing cars as streams of light.

I was a Brittain Fellow at Georgia Tech from Fall 2016 until this past August, when I accepted a full time job at RedMonk, a developer-focused tech industry analyst firm. Because the job offer came in days before the Fall 2018 semester started, I had concerns about the timing: I… Continue reading

The Office Hour, Chapter 25: “Alt-Ac”

In The Office Hour‘s 25th episode, Dr. Ruthie Yow––former Brittain Fellow (2015-17), current Service Learning and Partnerships Specialist for Serve Learn Sustain at Georgia Tech, regular TECHStyle guest, and author of Students of the Dream: Resegregation in a Southern City, just out from Harvard University Press––returns to the podcast to talk to Andrew and… Continue reading

Flash Readings, Episode 5: “The Moment John Roberts’s Words Cease to Matter”

In Flash Reading 5, former Brittain Fellow Ruthie Yow (2015-17) takes Chief Justice John Roberts to task for his majority opinion in the landmark Supreme Court case of 2007, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. According to Yow, the Court’s decision indexes “the impoverished state of integration strategies” in public… Continue reading

TECHStyle 2017-18: An Experiment, an Infrastructure

“It’s an exciting time for online infrastructure building,”  writes Wai Chee Dimock, in the current issue of PMLA, about the changing nature of scholarship in the digital age. In her editor’s note, Dimock identifies an experimental ethos in the humanities, characterized most by new public forums for humanities research and… Continue reading

The Office Hour, Chapter 21: “Britt History III (The Past)”

Part three of our series on the history of the Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship (the finale of The Office Hour‘s first season), finds Toby and I talking to Lisa Yaszek, Professor and outgoing Associate Chair of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication; co-editor of Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women… Continue reading

Strategies for Teaching Non-Native English Speakers: A Roundtable Review

On March 30, 2017, the Writing and Communication Program’s World Englishes Committee hosted the faculty roundtable “Instructing Non-Native English Speakers: Practical Tools.” This event drew Georgia Tech teaching faculty and staff interested in sharing ideas and learning new strategies for better serving the needs of the diverse population of English… Continue reading

Brittain Fellows Celebrate Teaching with Posters about Pedagogy

 On March 14, 2017, the Georgia Tech teaching community gathered for Celebrating Teaching Day, a demonstration of the innovative pedagogies that feature in courses across Tech, put on by the Center for Teaching and Learning. The inventive work of Brittain Fellows was on prominent display during the day’s events via a series… Continue reading

Collision Course: Using Visual Art and Poetry as Composition Pedagogy

Last fall, I led students through a writing and communication course titled “One World is Not Enough.” This class investigated cultural values and ideologies as exhibited in the narratives that societies construct and consume. The course focused on two contemporary novels, Stephen Graham Jones’s Ledfeather and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on… Continue reading

The Office Hour, Chapter 6: Academic Dad

In this brief episode, Toby attempts to comment on academic parenting (and fatherhood in particular) . . . while academic parenting. His comments are drawn from Aviva Shen’s article on student perception and gender bias, Apoorva Mandavilli’s New York Times piece on representation in academia, Dale Edwin Murray’s Times Higher Education essay on the impossibility… Continue reading

4.33@Tech, Episode 2: “#justanotherday”

The second episode of 4.33@Tech is “justanotherday.” It features the interview Lauren Neefe and student producer Prachi Sahoo did with Radiolab‘s Jad Abumrad before his talk at Georgia Tech’s Ferst Center for the Arts in October 2015. They talk about telling stories with sound, how Jad imagines his radio audience, a Big Bang moment… Continue reading

Student View 2016

A signature event for the Writing and Communication Program, Student View once again featured outstanding student work from English 1101 and 1102, as well as various Literature, Media, and Communication courses. For the first time ever, the exhibit was hosted in the Stephen C. Hall Building, home of the Writing and Communication… Continue reading

Becoming a Guide to Knowledge: The World of Academic Librarianship

In a previous article, I described practical but also subjective reasons I switched from the traditional professor route to the library field. I also pointed out facts and figures related to job placement rates for tenure-track positions and alternatives to academic careers. I don’t quite fit the mold of leaving… Continue reading

Reframing Multilingualism in the Classroom: A Poetic Celebration of Diversity

The World Englishes Committee invites you to a poetic celebration of diversity at Georgia Tech. Sponsored by Georgia Tech’s Writing and Communication Program, the event will feature international Georgia Tech students reading poetry from their home countries, both in the original language and in English, and conclude with a question and answer… Continue reading

STUDENT VIEW opens Wednesday, 2/26*

Each year, more than 6,000 Georgia Tech undergraduates enroll in courses offered by the Writing and Communication Program (WCP), whose home is in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. These multimodal courses are designed and taught by Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellows. To showcase students’ artistic work created in… Continue reading

“The Language of Tech Comm: Teaching Technical Communication From a Humanities Perspective.”

On Tuesday, February 18, from 11-12 PM in Hall 102, the Communication Colloquium presents “The Language of Tech Comm: Teaching Technical Communication From a Humanities Perspective.” LMC 3403: Technical Communication is a course that places an emphasis on workplace communication and that helps third- and fourth-year undergraduates learn strategies necessary for creating… Continue reading