Students to Showcase Technical and Professional Writing, Digital Technology Skills

Students from UNC Charlotte’s programs in technical professional writing and English majors with a concentration in language and digital technology will showcase their work on Tuesday, April 28 at 6:30 p.m. in the foyer of the Fretwell Building.

Graduate and undergraduate students will display websites, reports, instructions and research papers. Program faculty will be on hand to discuss courses, internships and projects. Many of the student projects come out of course work conducted directly with clients from outside the classroom in courses including Information Design and Digital Publishing and Editing with Digital Technologies. Area professionals also will discuss writing, editing and technology.

All UNC Charlotte undergraduate and graduate students are welcome to attend and bring examples of their technical writing projects or papers that explore the intersections between language and digital technologies, event organizers said. Sponsors of the event are the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and The Society for Technical Communication.

The event will allow undergraduate and graduate students in UNC Charlotte’s programs in technical and professional writing to speak with prospective employers, demonstrating they understand how to meet client needs because they have done that in their courses, event organizers said.

As examples of the type of work the students do, the students in Greg Wickliff’s Writing User Documents class have worked this spring in small groups to conduct website usability studies for the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Office of Academic Technologies, and for the J. Murrey Atkins Library.

For the College, students are working with faculty, staff, and students to test the quality and ease of use of specific web pages, including CLAS Connections, Thinking Matters, and Exchange Online. These sites help faculty publicize their research, locate colleagues with similar interests, distribute posts from their blogs and submit news items to the College’s online magazine, Exchange.  The project began with a conversation between Wickliff and Ceily Hamilton, director of Information Technologies for the College. He met with Hamilton and Alex Chapin, executive director of Academic Technologies, and outlined the project scope.

The students sat down with a total of 28 individual participants, and using software, captured video of participants talking about the design and use of each site. From the videos, students identified trends, measured task times, and pulled out specific statements about preferences and problems. They have written reports with specific suggestions for the next round of updates to the websites.

The second project for the same course this semester was a “persona study” conducted for Atkins Library. This project is actually a follow-up to a study of the Library’s basic search interface, WorldCat Local, conducted last spring. A graduate student who worked with last year’s project, Rachael Winterling, was hired as Usability Specialist by the library last summer, and with the library’s digital scholarship librarian Somaly Kim Wu worked with a group of students in the class this semester.

The project focused on the production of reports for the incoming new Dean of the Library, documenting the needs and preferences of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students. For this project, the students used the library’s usability lab to conduct interviews, task analyses, and focus group discussions with 30 participants. Students reviewed the web-based services of other university libraries and designed research questions for each group of participants. They recorded the sessions to capture detailed information about how participants use the current website and their preferences and needs.

As another example of the type of work students do, students in Meg Morgan’s class have edited articles for the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences print magazine, Exchange.

Products from these projects and other projects will be on display at the gathering on April 28. Refreshments will be served.