Abstract
Business communication evolves and adapts to suit the times, and today’s workplace documents are increasingly multimodal. Therefore, business and professional communication specialists need to adapt to a new media workplace ecology—one that requires proficiencies with technologies such as video production, digital animation, and sound. Business and professional writing teachers, in turn, need to adopt teaching methods that include working with evolving technologies and be willing to teach multimodal skills to students. In this article I offer a case study of a flipped learning pedagogy to teach multimodal skills in the professional writing classroom.
As writing and reading practices in the workplace change, business and professional communicators, like technical communicators, benefit from being “multi-literate, possessing a variety of literacies that encompass the multiple ways people use language in producing information, solving problems, and critiquing practice” (Cook, 2002, pp. 5-6). Today the layered literaciesCook (2002)described include new media literacies, which involve the ability to remix content (as well as consume and produce it) and the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a way to problem-solve (Jenkins, Purushotma, Clinton, Weigel, & Robison, 2006).New media, multimodal, multimedia, andsocial mediaare terms that tend to be used interchangeably, but according toSocha and Eber-Schmid (n.d.)of the New Media Institute,new mediais a term used to define all media forms related to the Internet and the interplay between technology, text, images, and sound. Companies like Cisco and IBM have jumped into the deep end of the new media pool, with Cisco hosting a new media summit (Earnhardt, 2007) and IBM spearheading a social media initiative to connect its global workforce (Geyer, DiMicco, Brownholtz, Dugan, & Millen, 2015). And while not all job advertisements include qualifications of new media skills, many jobs that were traditionally associated with producing texts are incorporating these skills, as the following examples from a search of the keyword “Communications” onindeed.comin 2015 illustrate.
Marketing Manager: Wordpress and Adobe products
Communications Assistant: Videography (shooting, editing, posting), photography, social media, and website maintenance
Manager of Internal Communications: Experience using a variety of internal media, social media, and research tools
Our own survey of alumni of the Master of Arts (MA) degree in Professional Writing at the University of Cincinnati (UC) suggests that graduates are clearly using the writing, editing, and project management skills we teach. Some students are also using new media technologies at their jobs (seeFigure 1).
Survey responses (n= 28) for skills alumni use in their jobs.
Some scholars have argued that these skills should be integrated into business and professional communication curriculums and instructors should be willing to teach multimodal skills (Jennings, 2010;Reinsch & Turner, 2006). Both theoretical and pragmatic discussions of professional writing pedagogy have emphasized the need for multimodal literacy (Kress, 2003;Stroupe, 2000) as well as a pedagogy that provides students in technical (and professional) writing programs with the visual literacy and technological fluency they will need for the 21st-century workplace (Brumberger, 2007;Brumberger, Lauer, & Northcut, 2013). The shift of attention to multimodal forms of communication has been apparent in both presentations at the Association for Business Communication conference, which continue to include presentations on social networking, blogs, wikis, and various other Web 2.0 technologies (Cardon & Okoro, 2010) and articles in our scholarly journals, like those in the 2010 Focus on Teaching column inBusiness Communication Quarterly(Buechler, 2010;Cardon & Okoro, 2010;Carmichael, Feltmate, & Campbell, 2010;Clark & Stewart, 2010;Decarie, 2010;Jennings, 2010;Lehman, DuFrene, & Lehman, 2010;Veltsos & Veltsos, 2010;Worley, 2010).Meredith’s (2012)call for coursework in social media, which I classify as a form of new media, provides additional proof of the increased attention devoted to multimodal communication.
Given these indications that new media skills are a rising skill set in the workplace, it makes sense for business, professional, and technical communication programs to teach these competencies as a part of their curricula. Currently, however, programmatic research on professional and technical degree programs (L. Meloncon, personal communication, May 10, 2015) suggests these skills are not integrated into existing classes. Meloncon stated that there is no required course in any MA program in the nation with the words “new media” in its title. Of all the courses students can select from (n= 852 courses) as electives, two courses in MA programs (n= 99) have new media in their titles:
Writing for New Media
Special Topics in Documentation, Training, and New Media
Another 25 courses have names that use the alternative termmultimedia, such as the following:
Multimedia Design in Professional Writing
Multimedia Design and Analysis
Multimedia in the Professional Workplace
Digital Media and the Web
Studies in Digital Media
Communication Strategies for Emerging Media
Why, as Meloncon’s research suggests, are there so few professional writing programs that incorporate new media literacies into their curriculum if these are skills many of our students will use in the workplace?Takayoshi and Selfe (2007)have suggested that one reason new media classes may be absent from our curricula is that many instructors have worked and taught in a more writing-centric world, and, therefore, today’s business and professional writing instructors may be “hesitant about the task of designing, implementing, and evaluating assignments that call for multimodal texts” (pp. 2-3). Time to execute complex, multimodal projects is also a factor, but perhaps just as daunting is the perceived need for instructors to master all of the technologies used in a new media class, including Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premier, Moviemaker, Audacity, Sigil, and iMovie.
Still, we do feel an obligation, and rightly so, to prepare students for their future workplaces. One way to balance our “anxiety, almost panic” (Cardon & Okoro, 2010, p. 435) to meet the need for our students to acquire skills with new media technologies is to adopt a flipped pedagogy for these courses. To illustrate how a flipped pedagogy can be of value in teaching new media, in this article I discuss a case study of a class developed for the UC’s Professional Writing program that uses such a pedagogy to address the following questions:
How can a flipped pedagogy help teach new media technologies and a new media ethos?
What is the impact of a flipped pedagogy on our classroom practices as communication teachers?
I begin with the context for developing a class on new media. I move on to examine the benefits of a flipped learning approach specifically for developing a new media ethos. Finally, I offer some thoughts for other instructors interested in developing flipped new media pedagogies.
The Context for a New Media Flipped Pedagogy
“Publishing and New Media” is part of the MA in Professional Writing at UC, a public, urban, research university enrolling more than 43,000 students. Having started the first co-op program in the United States in 1906, the university has a strong tradition of offering professional and experiential programs of study (UC, n.d.). The university offers both an MA and a graduate certificate in professional writing. Because we intentionally keep the program small, we can work with individual students on their interests that lead them to jobs in a variety of areas, including professional writing, technical writing, business communication, scientific communication, journalism, public relations, advertising, and book and magazine publishing (Rentz, Debs, & Meloncon, 2010). According to a survey conducted with our alumni, our students go on to work in the health care industry, education, corporations, government, and nonprofits (seeFigure 2).
Survey responses (n = 28) for industries alumni are employed in
Our faculty members have expertise in publishing, web design, professional writing and rhetorical theory, business writing, and medical writing. Our required classes include “Introduction to Professional Writing,” “Web Design,” an internship, and a capstone class. Students are also required to take one theory course, two technology courses, two genre courses that focus on writing, and two electives. The “Publishing and New Media” class is one of the options for a technology course.
Recognizing that rushing to prioritize Web 2.0 technologies may be premature for undergraduate business communication courses (Cardon & Okoro, 2010), “Publishing and New Media” was designed as a dual-level class that enrolls both graduate students and upper level undergraduate students. Students learn to explore multiple approaches to creating, managing, distributing, and marketing content across multiple platforms. By the end of this course, students are able to do the following:
Demonstrate basic competence in new media technologies
Demonstrate critical and applied understanding of contemporary multimodal writing practices
Practice writing and editing skills
The class includes a number of assignments that culminate in an epublication project (Table 1). Like other web-mediated documents, epublications are complex, and as with the multimodal messagesPlanken and Kreps (2006)described, The multimodal writer must not only create effective messages that fulfill readers’ information needs and realize the intended communicative goal but also must provide an information structure that is usable, meeting readers’ expectations regarding user-friendly design, hypertext navigability, skimmable content, and so on. (p. 422)
Student Assignments.
We start the class by spending some time developing a common vocabulary. Most students are familiar with social media, and some may have an understanding of new media, but most have not read new media theory. Understanding the theoretical underpinnings for the work we will do in class is important in helping the students develop a new media ethos. I discuss a new media ethos later, but suffice it to say here that such an ethos embraces risk, failure, and innovation.
We begin by defining new media to ground our hands-on work with the technologies we worked with over the rest of the term. Because most of the class time is designed to be a lab, these conversations extend outside of the classroom through student blog entries and responses such as the following examples:
Is the medium really the message? I don’t think so. The Internet is probably the single most useful medium in our society since the printing press. It allows us to express ourselves, interact with people across the globe, and buy pretty much whatever we want. However, if by some catastrophic event all the content on the Internet was deleted (yes, I do realize this isn’t likely), the Internet would lose its value as a medium.
Television, radio, the printing press—all of these affected the ways in which we think, not just what we think about (indeed, affected how our brains physically function). RevisitingMcLuhan (1994), the variety of examples he provides for mediums (firearms, small pox, apple pie) illustrate how widespread the applications are for this discussion. The medium, however, is not the message; the two are separate entities. They are certainly intertwined with one another, but the degree of connectivity between the two varies tremendously. To use one of McLuhan’s examples that is currently in the news today: Firearms are neither good nor bad, it is how they are used that determines their value.
McLuhan (1994)discusses how any communication medium has the power to impose its own assumptions “upon the unwary”. This is true whether we are considering the political bent of a newspaper, television station, or Facebook. Media developers/creators force content and structure upon those who use it and expect them to conform to its conventions. As McLuhan says, “The content of the medium blinds us to the character of the medium” (p. 9). We are attached to the words, sounds, or visuals that come at us rather than paying attention to the how those messages actually reach us.
These examples illustrate how the students begin to take steps toward ownership of their knowledge in the class, which is an important step to build the confidence needed to wrangle with multiple unfamiliar technologies later in the class.
We continue to work on building an understanding of new media through lab exercises in the first weeks of class. For example, in one class we employedMcLuhan’s (1994)“hot” and “cool” media descriptions. These descriptions are similar to the scale of media richness theory, which ranks traditional media such as letters, email, and face-to-face communication along a continuum of richness that helps determine the fit between a task and the richness of a communication channel. The continuum defines highly rich channels as those channels that can handle multiple inherent cues simultaneously. McLuhan similarly argued that the medium of a message affects its content, more specifically hot media and cool media affect content differently. Hot media enhance a single sense. A radio, for example, enhances the sense of hearing. Cool media, on the other hand, requires more effort on the part of the viewer to determine the content’s meaning.McLuhan (1994)used the television as an example of a cool medium. Using a modified scale that included warm and cold as well as hot and cool, students in “Publishing and New Media” work in teams to assess and argue for the “temperature” of movie posters, the app MapMyRide, Skype, YouTube, a rotary phone, a website, 3-D movies, and radios. Once we complete these introductory activities that help the students become aware of how complicated this new landscape is, the students spend the rest of the term working in teams, experimenting with a variety of technologies they use in their final projects for the class, a team-produced epublication.
Pedagogy and a New Media Ethos
Because I felt that teaching an approach to these technologies (what I call a new media ethos) is more useful than teaching specific technologies that will change with time and context, I designed the course as a flipped class. As such, my pedagogical goals included both building new media literacies and a new media ethos. These literacies and traits help students learn to negotiate workplaces that are complex and often characterized as distributed (Mark, Gonzalez, & Harris, 2005;O’Leary, Orlikowski, & Yates, 2002;Paretti, McNair, & Holloway-Attaway, 2007;Slattery, 2007;Spinuzzi, 2007;Walther, 2002) as well as execute complex, multimodal, team communication projects. And while it is important to embed these literacies in particular assignments, as many authors inBusiness and Professional Communication Quarterlyhave discussed (seeDing & Ding, 2013;Hentz, 2006;Planken & Kreps, 2006), it is just as important to embed them in the course strategy because doing so allows instructors to simulate a new media workplace ethos that emphasizes flexibility, innovation, and creativity.
The general concept of ethos builds on Aristotle’s definition of that which makes a speaker “worthy of belief” (as cited inHalloran, 1982). AsHalloran (1982)explained, ethos “is what we might call the argument from authority, the argument that says in effect, Believe me because I am the sort of person whose word you can believe” (p. 60). As such, ethos is intertwined with the ethical action of an individual. Business communication scholars have most often addressed this aspect of ethos through error studies that focus on how poor writing impacts ethos (Beason, 2001;Brandenburg, 2015;Hairston, 1981;Leonard & Gilsdorf, 1990). Other studies reflect another aspect of ethos: the character of an age, era, society, or culture. These studies typically discuss ethos in terms of how various types of business communication project a company’s ethos (Beason, 1991;Griffin, 2009;Isaksson & Jørgensen, 2010;Kallendorf & Kallendorf, 1985;Kenton, 1989;Mason & Mason, 2012;Williams, 2008).
Ethos, therefore, is “a complex set of characteristics constructed by a group, sanctioned by that group, and more readily recognizable to others who belong or who share similar values or experiences” (Reynolds, 1993, p. 327). As explained in theNicomachean Ethics(Aristotle, 350 BC/1999, as cited inHalloran, 1982) a person acquires ethos through a process of habitation—a concept that resonates with place or location. Drawing on the social and spatial nature of ethos,Halloran (1982)noted that this process occurs in “a public, habitual gathering place where people gather to share experiences and ideas” (p. 60). In other words, one of the gathering places ethos can be developed is in a classroom, but such a gathering place needs to emphasize the collective sharing of experiences and ideas. This is where a flipped pedagogy comes into play.
A Flipped Pedagogy
The concept of flipped learning originates out of the flipped classroom model of teaching, which has generally been described as one in which students do preparatory work, read, watch recorded lectures, write blog posts, and/or take quizzes, outside of class (seeCreelman, 2008;Gueldenzoph, 2007;Newman, 2007;Smart & Csapo, 2007). In class, students work with one another on a project or problem while the teacher moves among the students answering questions and facilitating. Flipped learning is a pedagogical approach in which direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual learning space, and the resulting group space is transformed into a dynamic, interactive learning environment where the educator guides students as they apply concepts and engage creatively in the subject matter. (Flipped Learning Network, 2014)
This design relies on an instructional approach that “de-centers” both the teacher as sole expert and the classroom as a space in which an expert agent can transfer knowledge to a novice audience. As such, the model has much in common with problem-centered learning and other active learning pedagogies.
The idea of a flipped classroom is not new, but the model has received renewed attention in education and the popular press (seeKinsey, 2014;Lipinski, 2014;Schencker, 2014). Teachers are experimenting with flipping their classrooms in elementary schools, law schools, and everything in between. This approach has been widely used in K-12, online learning, and one-on-one tutoring (Keengwe, Onchwari, & Oigara, 2014). Traditional college classrooms have been flipped in English literature courses (Moran & Young, 2014), history (Kotlik, 2014), teacher education (Dickenson, 2014), math (Yuen, 2014), and the biology lab (Gallo, 2014). Scholars and practitioners in a variety of fields have reported on the benefits of the flipped classroom (Baker, 2000;Barseghian, 2011;Bates & Galloway, 2012;Butt, 2012;Lage, Platt, & Treglia, 2000;Pearson, 2012), which include assisting busy students since content is not missed if a student is not in class, helping students who struggle by devoting time to them during class, allowing students with varying ability levels to master material, permitting rewinding of video and podcasts to reinforce concepts, expanding the interaction between students and teachers, and boosting the interaction between peers (Bergmann & Sams, 2012a).
One particular type of flipped classroom, the flipped mastery model of education (Bergmann & Sams, 2013/2014), also promotes students’ mastery of content at their own pace. All the students work toward objectives and master them in a specific sequence, each building on the previous objective (Bergmann & Sams, 2012b). The model enables students to complete content requirements flexibly with the mastery of learning objectives demonstrated through testing, writing, speaking, or debating before students proceed to the next unit. Advanced students work on independent projects while slower learners get more personalized instruction (Rosenberg, 2013).
A flipped learning pedagogy, as opposed to a flipped classroom, moves beyond the more simplified idea of doing “school work at home and home work at school” (Flipped Learning Network, 2014, p. 1). It links the approach to pedagogical concerns. Flipped learning is based on four pillars (Flipped Learning Network, 2014):
An adaptable environment in which instructors create flexible spaces for learning
Intentional content instructors create for students to explore on their own
Instructors who observe students during class, provide in-the-moment feedback, and are able to “tolerate controlled chaos” (“Four Pillars”) in their classrooms
A learner-centered culture that actively involves students in knowledge construction
This flipped learning design is particularly beneficial for teaching business and professional writing students how to develop new media products, which involve a “dynamic, creative, intuitive, nonlinear (and sometimes childlike) process” (Graham & Whalen, 2008, p. 66), but to do so requires us to demonstrate a new media ethos as instructors as well because new media classes do not fit the mold so many of us are comfortable teaching in. Many of us use active learning and problem-solving–based approaches as ways to engage and teach students, but a flipped pedagogy is just as, if not more, productive for teaching in new media classes because such a pedagogy embraces experimentation, failure, and chaos. This triad makes many of us uneasy. We were not taught to let students learn to fail. Experiments are for science and chaos is just something that should not be tolerated. In the following I show how the four pillars of a flipped pedagogy manage these risks and encourage student innovation, creativity, and flexibility.
Principle 1: Setting the Stage for a Flexible Environment
“Publishing and New Media” is taught in our program’s computer classroom, which is anything but flexible. The 22 computers sit on stationary tables in five rows with an aisle in the middle of each row, which separates the room roughly in half. The rows face the front of the room where a teacher’s station includes a computer and overhead, a large dry erase board, and a screen for projection. The first challenge for implementing a flipped pedagogy in the class, therefore, was to find ways to get the students to move around. When I taught the class, I did this in two ways. First, I tried to model a “nomadic” teaching style. I rarely stood at the front of the room. More typically, I would walk to the center or back. I would take a seat among the students and wheel my chair back and forth between student groups to answer questions as the term progressed. The second approach I took to making this environment more flexible was to have the students come to the front. We did this through student presentations and students working through difficult concepts, like our definition of new media, in groups in the front of the room. As students ran to the front whiteboard for this first group exercise, I would hand them different colored dry erase markers to add their thoughts. We then took a picture of the process and used it to discuss integrating text and images.
Principle 2: Intentional Content
I approached this pillar of flipped learning in two ways. First, I asked the students to develop short tutorials of technologies they explored to share with each other. This way, students, rather than the instructor, were generating their own content to explore on their own as the term progressed. I also provided a wealth of material on our course website that included examples, a glossary, and RSS feeds to relevant content on other websites.
Principle 3: Chaos, Experimentation, and Failure
The flipped learning pillar that encourages controlled chaos, what I refer to as an environment of experimentation, was particularly important for my class because business and professional writing students often find themselves in jobs in which they are required to acquire content knowledge of a subject they are unfamiliar with. Learning to learn (or experiment), therefore, is advantageous for our students not only in new media classes but in other classes as well. Think, for example, of how we learn to fix computer problems today. When I bought my Apple laptop last year, it did not come with instructions. When I encountered problems with my email, I did not look at my user manual. Instead, I went online to community forums and tried different fixes. Today’s students learn technologies in much the same way: by trial and error. Therefore, it is important to find ways for students to succeed in their learning and fail when appropriate.
To accomplish this in “Publishing and New Media,” I asked the students to experiment with three technologies they are unfamiliar with for our “Chops” assignments. The word, which originally referred to horn players’ ability to use their mouths and lips (chops) to keep blowing through an entire performance, is also more generally used to talk about technical ability. As the name suggests, the assignments were designed to help students develop technology skills. Students had three Chops exercises over the first part of the term. They first sent me a proposal for the three technologies they wanted to experiment with. Both outside and inside the class, we would work with these technologies to produce a short vlog (video blog) entry or a brief annotated YouTube video, for example. The students would briefly present their Chops work to the class and discuss barriers, issues, and interesting things they learned how to do. In this way, the entire class became a community of practice and students were able to draw on not only their teammates but other classmates as well. Some of the technologies the students used included audio and video recording, animation, social media, and audio and video editing software.
Principle 4: Learning Cultures—Communities of Practice and Collaboration
Forming learning cultures, or what I call communities of practice, was also a critical flipped learning principle for my class. Most of us assign a collaborative assignment in our courses. Typically these are done at the end of the term with students spending anywhere from 3 to 6 weeks as part of a team. In “Publishing and New Media,” however, I put the students into three-person teams in the third week of a 14-week semester. This early identification of small communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), a group of people who share a concern for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly, instilled trust, which is important when you are encouraging students to fail in the classroom. These teams spent the majority of the term on their final project, an interactive epublication. One group designed an epublication about John Cage’s time as a composer-in-residence at UC’s College-Conservatory of Music during the 1960s. The book included items from UC’s Archives and Rare Book Library and a video of a College-Conservatory of Music student performing a John Cage composition. Another team developed an epublication for UC’s Center for Service-Learning and Civic Engagement. A third group worked on the English department’s course catalog, and components of this group’s work were rolled into the department’s new website.
We also developed a larger community of practice by using class time to have students share their knowledge from the Chops exercises by presenting their work and discussing the risks and benefits associated with the technology. Such a community of practice can help students overcome anxieties about learning technology and giving themselves permission to fail in a classroom setting. Outside of the classroom, as in other flipped classroom designs, students would post questions and responses to each other through blog entries to continue the learning process. One student posted these questions to other students on her blog, for example:
So I read your paper and watched your Chops 1 and I don’t know if I have it down. So YouTube lets you put in pop-up things, and I have seen ones that just have a few words and if you click it takes you somewhere. But if you are not linking to YouTube you can only put in the whole physical link of the webpage in order for it to link? If this is the case that is RIDICULOUS! I would say if you ever need to do it in the future to use something like bit.ly to shorten the links. Do they just give you a box to put the link in and no, like, “Show as” box?! I have to say I am wanting to test this out now.
Your video was awesome! I love the layering of videos and audio. I remember when you talked about it in class but I cannot remember what program you used to do it. Was it hard to do so much layering? I can’t seem to wrap my head around having a video on top of a video. I also listened to your podcast and I am forever grateful for your mention of Zillow, I just added it to my favorites bar for future reference!
Sustaining a Flipped Pedagogy to Teach New Media Literacies and Ethos
To conclude, I would like to offer other instructors some specific strategies to help apply the principles of a flipped pedagogy to a new media course. First, because new media is broad and includes many different tools and technologies, it is important to give students plenty of class time to work with multiple tools and draw on each other’s knowledge and experience with other technologies. Most, if not all, professional writing instructors incorporate group projects into their classes, but when teaching new media skills it is useful to apply a community of practice approach.Wenger (1998)defined a community of practice as a group of people sharing a concern or interest for something they do and learning how to do it better as they interact. Communities of practice share three characteristics according toWenger (1998): (1) the group has an identity that is defined by a shared domain of interest and membership implies a commitment to that interest as well as a shared competence; (2) members of the community help each other, learn from each other, and share information; and (3) members of the community develop a repertoire of resources and experiences or a shared practice. Sharing these practices can help build strong project management skills and mitigate technology frustrations students are inevitably going to encounter.
Another strategy to help students move past frustration to competence and build a shared community is to include a number of projects or topics groups can choose from for their final project. When students are vested in the topic they are more likely to be willing to “do the hard work” in order to make the project succeed. One of my students, for example, was a musician. His team worked on the epublication about John Cage. Another was an employee at the company for which she helped design an ebook. Scaffolding assignments can also help to alleviate technology frustration or fear. Consider starting slow. Have students bring in a paper they wrote for another class and remix it as video or audio. A student could, for example, read and record a poem he or she wrote for a creative writing class. The student might then create a website or blog and embed the audio or make a short video that corresponded to the theme of the poem and integrate the audio.
It is also important to give students the opportunity to fail. Applying this strategy requires readjusting both our expectations as instructors and student expectations of “class.” As instructors it can be useful (and uncomfortable) to ignore typical writing instruction practices that involve drafting, editing, and revising each assignment. These practices set up each assignment as individual, disconnected containers and student expectations about these “containers” often revolve around individual grades that add up for a final grade. In other words, everything counts and everything is graded. An alternative strategy for teaching new media skills is to encourage play and experimentation by using low-risk assignments (e.g., my Chops exercises).
Other strategies that can help shift expectations challenge instructors to embrace new media in course delivery. One way is to use an ebook for a textbook. Some textbook options centered on ebook use includeEPUB Straight to the Point: Creating eBooks for the Apple iPad and Other eReaders(Elizabeth Castro),The Lost Sigil eBook Editor Manual for Epub and Mobi Formatting(Suzanne Fyhrie Parrott),The eBook Design and Development Guide(Paul Salvette), andWhat is EPUB 3?(Matt Garrish). Another option is to have occasional online meetings. Both of these technological additions to a new media class have the benefit of letting instructors model a new media ethos for students.
Together, using a flipped pedagogy that draws on a community of practice and inhabiting our own new media ethos can help students learn multiple technologies, navigate complicated group work, and overcome trepidation about working with visual and auditory “documents.” When coupled with sustained attention to good writing and rhetorical and design principles, these efforts will help prepare students for the 21st-century workplace.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Kara Sorrell and Stephanie Hendrixson for their help with obtaining the survey data for this project.
Author’s Note
This study was considered exempt from review by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Cincinnati. Student blogs are reproduced by permission.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The project was partially funded by the University of Cincinnati’s Taft Research Center.
Author Biography