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Advanced Technical Communication

<Note: Classes start in Week 1. There is a Study Direct page for this course in Spring 2010.>

Introduction

This is a 'core skills' course and what you learn here will stand you in good stead for any area of academic research, and also for any professional role, where you have to communicate technical ideas clearly and effectively.

Rationale

In order to be effective as a researcher, and a practitioner, in the 21st Century you will need to be able to communicate technical information in a wide variety of media and to diverse audiences. This course is designed to introduce and give practical experience in some of the skills involved in this process. These skills include: creating posters, giving oral presentations, writing effective titles and abstracts for an academic audience, writing for a non-academic audience, and peer reviewing. The topic that you write about/present is entirely up to you and can reflect your own technical interests and/or interests you want to pursue in your thesis work i.e., this is a good opportunity to develop content for other courses while learning the practical communication skills around this content in this course!

It is important to remember that these are craft skills which means that however good or bad you are, you can always get better.  It also means that most of the learning comes from doing. This is a 'how-to' 'hands-on' course. The Advanced Technical Communication course is primarily about students doing things in interactive workshop sessions to explore and develop the skills, and in a 'conference' to demonstrate the skills. This is not a lecture-based course. I will do all I can to help but this course is all about what you do.

Teaching and Assessment Methods

The heart of this course is the things done by students - the oral presentations, the peer reviewing, the web page, and so forth. In order to make the course more realistic and relevant we will 'put on' a conference so the various assessed exercises will be based around what you could normally do in terms of submitting, reviewing and presenting at a conference.

Technical communication in the wild is almost always accompanied by real-world constraints that make it difficult and sometimes stressful. Deadlines are ubiquitous, and they are often absolute (there is no point at all in sending an abstract in to IJCAI late with a note about how you had flu and your partner has just moved in with your best friend). Most of what you do is evaluated by your peers, either informally (when they make jokes about your talk to each other at the conference bar), or formally (as when they rate your research-grant application beta-plus); and this constant peer evaluation does much to determine your status in your field.

This course has been designed to be a realistic introduction to technical communication in the wild. Deadlines, therefore, will be absolute. Your oral presentation will be given at an open conference and will be to a timed. That presentation will be anonymously peer-reviewed.

Lastly, and most importantly, learning, and this course in particular, can be a great deal of fun.  The conference we end up attending this term will not be as stressful as the first 'real' conference you present at. If everybody (including me) puts in the necessary work, we will have a very enjoyable as well as instructive experience.

Course Organization

The course will meet on Mondays starting in Week 1.

  Each student will have to do various tasks for the conference, each of which will be assessed:

As said above, the course will aim to reproduce as far as practical conditions in the real world, where e.g. deadlines are absolute, those who fail to show up fail to get any credit, etc. If you fail to produce some assessable output - for instance you do not attend an oral presentation session and hence do not review that day's presentations - then, if you have a (very) good reason and wish the exam board to take it into account, you must produce appropriate documentary evidence, such as a medical certificate.

Defining the assessable tasks

The various tasks students are required to do for assessment, listed above, are defined in detail on the StudyDirect pages.


Convenor: Blay Whitby