Now that my first semester in Arizona State University’s Technical Communication program is over, I have a moment to take a breather and assess.
Before the semester started, I traveled to Halifax to present my paper “Working outside: a problems-based approach for studying musicians and other extra-institutional individuals” at SIGDOC 2017. The paper was the first of the articles that I will be publishing from the data I collected for my dissertation. The article focused on a methodology for studying extra-institutional individuals: I suggest grouping extra-institutional individuals by the communication problems they face rather than by the name of their field (such as “musician”). You can read more at this link. Outside of my presentation, the conference was a blast, and Halifax was beautiful.
A short two months later, I took a second international trip to Dun Laoghaire, Ireland to attend the Association for Business Communication’s first transatlantic international conference. I presented on “Artists are Business Communicators, Too!: Teaching a Course on Business Communication for Professional Artists,” which was a pedagogy-focused talk outlining an elective course that I taught while at NC State. I’ve turned that conference presentation into a paper, which is currently under review at a journal.
Turning from travel to teaching, I taught “Fundamentals of Technical Communication” and “Social Media in the Workplace” this semester. I will be teaching two sections of “Social Media in the Workplace” in Spring–one online and one on-ground. I’ll mention next semester’s teaching in a future post.
On that note, I should mention that I plan to post more often on this blog in 2018. Instead of using this just as a “major announcements” blog, I hope to write more often between those big announcements about pedagogy, methodology, and in-process research. I hope to contribute to ongoing conversations (writ large; this will not be a current events blog) and use the space to ponder ideas that aren’t directly making their way into publications.
From this professional blog to you, here’s to a productive 2018!