2014 IEEE Professional Communication Society Annual Conference, Oct 13-15

CMU English Professors Suguru Ishizaki and Necia Werner are co-chairing this year's annual conference of the IEEE Professional Communication Society [IPCC] at Carnegie Mellon, October 13-15. IPCC provides a home for professional engineers, technical communicators and academics to meet, share ideas, and be inspired by one another. The result is a cross pollination between industry and academy that conference attendees consistently find energizing. This year’s conference theme, “Meeting Grounds: Lifelong Learning from Classroom to Workplace,” emphasizes this cross pollination of ideas.

Highlights include:

• An opening plenary by Dr. Marsha Lovett, Teaching Professor of Psychology and Director of Carnegie Mellon’s Eberly Center for Teaching and Learning, who will talk about recent developments in learning science that are relevant to technical communication.
• A keynote address by Dr. Doug Reeve, Professor of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry at the University of Toronto and a leader in both industry and education, who will share communication and leadership strategies in the field s of science and engineering.
• Innovative “learning lunches” that combine networking with talks on presentation, and ideas for getting your articles published.
• A series of hand-on workshops on how to improve your presentation skills, how to write for plain language, and how to create bridges between research and professional practice.

Interested in Engineering Communication? 
Consider a Ph.D. in Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University

One of the many options available to Ph.D. students in Rhetoric at CMU is a research specialization in engineering communication.  Students interested in engineering communication would have the opportunity to work with faculty with have a broad range of expertise and interest in: engineering writing and pedagogy, visual communication, scientific publishing and peer review, designing instructional texts, rhetoric of science, team writing processes, and international communication.  

Current research projects our faculty are involved in include developing “just in time” online communication instruction for engineers; investigating gender and interpersonal communication in engineering; studying expertise in collaborative writing; and developing software for collaborative annotation and analysis of texts.

Potential areas for inquiry include

·       What types of communication competencies do engineers need to perform successfully in the workplace and communicate their ideas to a range of stakeholders?  How are these competencies changing in response to an increasingly international, visual, and technological world?

·       How can we best teach communication to engineering students?  What technological innovations are effective in supporting “just-in-time” learning about engineering communication?

·       How are intercultural collaborations changing engineering communication and the profession as whole?  What intercultural communication skills do engineers need to develop to prosper in an interconnected world?

·       How do we design technical or instructional documents to more effectively achieve their intended rhetorical purposes?

·       How are changes to publishing practices affecting the engineering community?  

·       What do we need to understand about communication styles and practices to make engineering more open to female or under-represented minority engineers?