Bringing an emphasis on technical writing to a freshman course in electrical engineering

Includes bibliographical references (page 41).We have recently added a strong writing component to one of our freshman courses in electrical engineering. The students prepared two kinds of reports—memoranda and formal engineering project reports. Our instructional objectives were to execute well these two forms: to write with a professional tone, and to make good choices about which technical material to include. To meet these objectives, model memos and engineering project reports were developed, lectures about these memos and reports were presented, a Web site for the course was developed, the technical aspects of the reports were graded by a student hourly grader, the writing aspects of the reports were evaluated by a professor, and followup debriefings were conducted at the lecture class meetings. We report on the development process and discuss student response to the course

Forum on Identity

The forum contributors draw on their personal experiences and insights to put forth ideas about contingent faculty\u27s relations with other faculty and with the academic institution as a whole

Joining the Conversation: The Role of Information Literacy in Public and Academic Discourse

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Network Support for Writing across the Curriculum: Developing an Online Writing Center

Recent advances in computer and computer-network technologies make it possible to consider an alternative to the indirect, top-down pedagogy used in most writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) programs (e.g., a pedagogy that views faculty as the primary audience for WAC-related training). Drawing on the results of a 4-year effort to establish a campus-wide, computer-supported writing environment, we suggest that computer networks and specifically designed instructional software (e.g., multimedia instructional materials and interactive writing exercises) can provide the basis for a network-supported, writing-center-based WAC program. Our discussion focuses on development of network communication tools and hypermedia courseware to support WAC

Open Access Book Publishing in Writing Studies: A Case Study

The publication of scholarly books has been shaped strongly in recent decades by two factors: assessments by publishers of the potential market for books and the influence of publisher's reputations on tenure and promotion decisions. This article reflects on the choices made by a group of senior scholars in the field of composition and rhetoric as they conceived of and published an open access book on activity theory and writing and, subsequently, published an open access book series in the area of rhetoric and composition. The implications of open access book publishing for access to scholarly work and tenure-and-promotion decisions are considered.Published as Bazerman, Charles, Mike Palmquist, David Blakeslee. "Open Access Book Publishing in Writing Studies: A Case Study." First Monday 13:1, 2008. http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2088/1920</p

Open access book publishing in writing studies: A case study

The publication of scholarly books has been shaped strongly in recent decades by two factors: assessments by publishers of the potential market for books and the influence of publisher's reputations on tenure and promotion decisions. This article reflects on the choices made by a group of senior scholars in the field of composition and rhetoric as they conceived of and published an open access book on activity theory and writing and, subsequently, published an open access book series in the area of rhetoric and composition. The implications of open access book publishing for access to scholarly work and tenure-and-promotion decisions are considered

2010b. “A note on using quasi-experiments to identify hedonic demand parameters,” Unpublished paper

Abstract This note presents a new solution to the classic problem with using hedonic price functions to identify demand curves. We explain how unexpected changes in the composition of a differentiated product can be exploited to recover demand parameters from data on a single geographic market. Our model adds to a growing literature on using quasi-experiments to improve hedonic modeling. It illustrates how policy changes and surprise events can generate instruments that support a simple reduced-form approach to demand estimation