Collaborative problem-solving with listservs in a long-distance engineering classroom

This paper discusses a collaborative classroom effort between Arizona State University and Temple University in which two groups of engineering and technology students used listservs and other communications technology to work long-distance to solve an engineering problem. The paper is focused on the students’ use of listservs, including audience- and writing-related issues that we observed, and how one team’s better collaboration on the listserv may have helped it produce a better final product. While the underlying causes as to why one team performed better are unclear, we did observe that the more successful team employed certain rhetorical and collaborative strategies in its use of the technology, strategies that we feel contributed to this success

Role Perception among Faculty Members at Teacher Education Colleges

The goal of this study was to examine how faculty members at academic colleges of education perceive their role and to consider elements of their work that need to be included in a professional profile definition. All faculty of one college of education were asked: What are the tasks/obligations of a faculty member at a college of education? Please list the ones important to you. Content analysis yielded eight themes which were used for construction of a closed questionnaire containing 61 items describing teacher educator tasks. This questionnaire was distributed to all teacher-training colleges nationwide. The faculty members were found to perceive their role as composed of four major components: member of an organization; researcher; teacher; person. The findings will help formulate a clear role definition that will enable faculty members to understand the scope of their work at colleges of education and develop a professional profile definition

Stylistic Guidelines for E-Mail

Abstract-E-mail style has received little attention from corporations and other institutions. The absence of stylistic guidelines may create problems: communicating inappropriately with some audiences, losing sight of the message purpose, or wasting company resources in other ways. To solve such problems, technical communicators can use their unique abilities to promote e-mail formats that consider the strengths and limitations of the medium in addition to the traditional concerns with audience, purpose, and content of messages. HEN business and industry address e-mail concerns