This article describes an interdisciplinary, partially online honors course entitled Video Game Theory and Design. The article reviews the literature surrounding video games and technical communication and then outlines the learning objectives for the course. The authors describe individual and team-produced assignments and suggest game design…

We evaluate the use of a Virtual Exchange (VE) writing task, Stimulus Writing, which we assigned to groups of UK and Finnish business students. There were two learner cohorts in the study: one in the UK (mainly Chinese students), the other in Finland (mainly Finns). The Finnish students wrote authentic case studies about Nordic businesses, while…

Using a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) model of education, an English composition instructor designed an honors section of first-year composition to evaluate current best practices in the field of teaching writing to STEM undergraduates. The students, all first-year engineering majors, conducted guided research on best…

Responding to the call for the contemplative teaching of writing initiated by O'Reilley (1993) and extended by Kirsch (2008; 2009), Kroll (2013), Kroll (2008), Wenger (2015), and Harrison (2012), among others, this article explores the theoretical considerations, practical components, challenges, and adaptability involved in teaching a…

This article reports on a qualitative study of strategies and competencies used by technical communication and translation students to address challenges inherent in global virtual team collaboration. The study involved students from three universities collaborating in virtual teams to write and translate instructional documents. Qualitative…

An approach is described that gradually transitions second-year organic chemistry students to writing full "The Journal of Organic Chemistry" ("JOC") style lab reports. The primary goal was to introduce students to and build rhetorical skills in scientific and technical writing. This was accomplished by focusing on four main…

To investigate how college students understand and use cloud technology for collaborative writing, the authors studied two asynchronous online courses, on science communication and on technical communication. Students worked on a group assignment (3-4 per group) using Google Docs and individually reflected on their experience writing…

Peer review is applied as a powerful tool to enhance student collaboration online writing. The purpose of this paper is to analyse learners' mechanisms of peer reviewing in the nature of student interventions and interactions in written online peer reviewing and how categorization of student comments can be used as a means for analysing student…

ETC 408/508: Technical Editing is a cross-listed undergraduate and graduate course at Missouri Western State University, an open admissions public university with approximately 6,000 students. 508 is an elective course for students in the Master of Applied Arts in Written Communication degree and highly recommended for those in the Technical…

Given the rapid advances in information communication technology (ICT) and the ever-increasing likelihood that students will be collaborating on cross-cultural teams in their future careers, creating opportunities to engage in collaborative writing projects across borders and then observing the dynamics of international virtual online…

This study explored approaches to collaborative grant proposal writing to gain a comprehensive understanding of the details and range of variation in the processes that are currently employed by professionals in pursuit of Federal grant funding. Findings were used to identify and suggest practical strategies for organizing and managing group…

The objective of this study was to develop an online report writing activity that was a constructive and cooperative learning process for a course on traditional general physics experiments. Wiki, a CMC authoring tool, was used to construct the writing platform. Fifty-eight undergraduate students (33 men and 25 women), working in randomly assigned…

This work demonstrates how a Wiki can be mapped into different learning stages during group-based lab reporting via an adequate scaffolding structure. The scaffolding structure of the Wiki-based group report is comprised of six constructs in sequence: Appendix, Methods, Results, Analysis, Introduction and Conclusion. The scaffolding structure was…

This paper describes how an intelligent chip architecture has allowed a large cohort of undergraduate (UG) students to be given effective practical insight into integrated circuit (IC) design by designing and manufacturing their own ICs. To achieve this, an efficient chip architecture, the "Superchip," was developed, which allows multiple student…

This study analyzes the collaborative writing sessions of two groups of advanced diploma economics students with mixed proficiency. Although studies in collaborative writing usually highlight the mixed results of students' collaboration ranging from promoting peer learning to having unresolved conflict, the findings of this paper only provide the…