Students wrote documents about computer technologies using computer technology. The computer classroom is a truly active learning environment. Students engage in writing and revising their documents and in the critical reading of their own drafts as well as the drafts of their classmates. In addition, a primary goal for 2309 is to help students develop the rhetorical skills that translate into effective writing in a variety of situations and media. Simply teaching students the proper format for letters, memos, or instructions fails to provide them with the real skills of technical writing.
Students learn to consider audience and context in preparing their writing.
Another important element of technical writing is document design. A computer classroom allows students not only to view and analyze different documents in terms of their layout and design but also to take an online document and actually change the design. This hands-on document design gives students the practical ability to design a document as well as the rhetorical ability to make effective design decisions. In addition, the computer classroom facilitates discussion of how design decisions change for essentially the same document when it moves from hardcopy to on-screen to online. In this section, I will discuss first course success followed by computer-related frustrations for the semester.