Graduate students writing on their own often struggle with knowledge production and identity conflicts. Conversely, writing with others presents its own set of challenges, as collaborators struggle to define roles and expectations. To systematically foster and teach collaborative writing practices for graduate students, we performed a self study…

All content to Wikipedia is added and edited in a crowdsourced model, wherein nearly anyone can click the "edit" button and change content on Wikipedia. An active community of dedicated volunteers is what keeps Wikipedia as reliable as it is today--good, but not complete. More diverse contributors are needed to add more content to…

This Quick Fix describes how the emerging "writing for Wikipedia" activity allows replacing a traditional written paper with a more motivating, digital assignment that also allows students to contribute to society. It presents the most efficient ways to incorporate Wikipedia into one's teaching curriculum, while also discussing best…

University students can become overwhelmed and hopeless as they pursue their final capstone writing projects. They are also navigating trying times of overlapping crises such as poverty, environmental decay, and war. To address these challenges, our Capstone Writing Groups (CWG) are designed to develop students' writerly competence and enhance…

In the Winter of 2020, my introductory Canadian politics class started to develop its own online, collaboratively-built, open-access, introductory "textbook" on Canadian politics. Drawing on the principles of critical pedagogy, the assignment engages students in group work to generate plain-language primers that can connect with an…

Despite strong support for integrating reading and writing instruction, writing practice is often crowded out of the schedule in elementary classrooms. To promote increased emphasis on writing, a working group of literacy researchers highlights three writing goals and six research-based reading-to-writing practices to enliven instruction with more…

Courses: Business and Professional Communication, Persuasion. Objectives: Students demonstrate application of rhetorical invention and improved persuasive writing style through a brief, multi-draft writing activity.

The academic world initially regarded Wikipedia with misgivings for a number of reasons, including the uncertainty concerning the reliability of its content, its anonymous authorship and the fact that students often use it as an easy way to cut and paste material for their coursework. In recent years, however, university instructors' perception of…

An approach is described that gradually transitions second-year organic chemistry students to writing full "The Journal of Organic Chemistry" ("JOC") style lab reports. The primary goal was to introduce students to and build rhetorical skills in scientific and technical writing. This was accomplished by focusing on four main…

Translation Studies MSc students at the University of Edinburgh take part in a Wikipedia translation assignment as part of their independent study component. The students make use of the free and open encyclopaedia's Content Translation tool which enables them to create translations side-by-side to the original article and automates the process of…

Organizing writing instruction around genres rather than rhetorical modes can be a highly effective and engaging preparation for students' academic and professional writing needs. The teaching/learning cycle (TLC) is a highly scaffolded curriculum model for teaching target written genres. In the TLC, the organization of and linguistic choices in a…

This paper explores the potential for students to engage in social constructivist (Vygotsky, 1978) learning through the development of a course wiki. As a requirement of the Principles of Learning (PoL) course, at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, students are tasked with building a collection of online, student-authored learning…

Readers can explore 13 teaching innovations presented at the 2019 Association for Business Communication annual international conference in Detroit, Michigan. These assignments are designed to add fuel to oral and written persuasion, including the practical use of rhetorical tools. Ideas to advance learners' professional development are presented.…

Whether novice or experienced, writers must come to terms with the daunting task of filling up a blank page, or screen, in an effort to produce writing. Student writers are no different. They enter teachers' classes having confronted similar difficulties with discovering what it is they want to say. In seeking to help students, they devote…

The "art of nursing" was the culminating assignment for student group reflection and gained insight about their assigned vulnerable population as represented in a quilt block created. To learn about their assigned vulnerable population, the students begin with a windshield survey. The windshield survey results were recorded in a blog…