Interaction Design for Technical Communicators
Introduction
This site acts as an open educational resource (OER) for instructors and instructional designers who wish to develop technical communication assignments that empower students as both consumers and producers of "renewable" educational content. Specifically, these assignments cover a range of technical communication concepts that are missing from more foundational open textbooks like the following:
- Hamlin, A., & Rubio, C. (2016). Technical Writing. Open Oregon Educational Resources. Retrieved from https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/BookDetail.aspx?bookId=412
- Hall, L., & Wahlin, L. (2016). A Guide to Technical Communications: Strategies & Applications. Ohio State University Libraries. Retrieved from https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/BookDetail.aspx?bookId=455
While the three assignments that we outline here are not necessarily unique in how they teach interaction design concepts, they do demonstrate how the project-based work that many of us already assign may easily become extraordinary when students generate OER as part of their coursework.
About
Jonathan Lashley and Carly Finseth developed this site's content as part of a Designing with OER (DOER) Fellowship. Beyond our current work together at Boise State University, we have been colleagues since 2009, when we attended the same Masters Program in Professional Communication at Clemson University. We have taught college-level writing classes across the country and share a commitment to crafting authentic, multimodal, purposeful learning experiences for our students.
Jonathan Lashley
Senior Instructional Technologist, Office of Information Technology
Carly Finseth
Assistant Professor, Technical Communication
Special Thanks
- The Open Education Group for sponsoring this work
- Alan Levine for publishing his photograph, "Design is In the Air," under a CC 0 license so that we could use it in our site headers