Spring 2009
W421 Technical Writing Projects:
English W421 has both long-term and short term goals. The long-term goal is to help students develop and practice types of communication skills they will use during their careers in technical fields. In this way, W421 plays an important part of their technology education as defined by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). The short-term goal is to help them produce the types of texts required during a significant design project to be undertaken during the current semester. For many of them, this will be their engineering senior design project or a work-related project for their current employer.
W462 & C682 Topics: Literacy and Family History:
In this course students will be doing research and writing of their own family histories, using various field work guidelines and methodologies for archival research. We meet weekly as a class at the Allen County Public Genealogy Library (ACPL) to use the vast resources available to us there. Students will explore not just their family history, but various issues and methods for composing that history (i.e. the mode and audience of their history is open ended. So they might opt to write a digital video, website, print booklet, or something else).
Moreover, the class will have a service learning component as we work with the Lake James History Project (LJHP) in writing a history of the lake’s inhabitants from the early 1900s to the present. Members of LJHP have interviewed and collected data from families in residence and elderly members of the lake. They are working to organize their collected data and create a publishable manuscript to be submitted to various oral history archives in the NE Indiana area, including ACPL.
Fall 2008
W234 Technical Report Writing:
English W234, Technical Report Writing, has two purposes: (1) to help students develop communication skills they will use in the future, and (2) to enrich their understanding of the roles that writing and reading play in activities outside school. In other words, W234 is a course to help students write in a variety of situations – especially the workplace – and to a variety of readers. This course is also an imperative part of engineering and technology education as defined by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology.
