Designing for User Engagement
This co-authored book introduces and illustrates the TMC Toolkit which includes a set of heuristics developed to guide the design of tech-mediated communication and a set of metrics for evaluating their effectiveness. Based on work supported by the Society for Technical Communication (STC), a multidisciplinary team of Rennselaer faculty and students explore a variety of tech-mediated exemplars and present an over-arching framework for usability in a tech-mediated world.
As leader of the Wikis for Collaboration team, I worked with colleagues from Engineering; Management Information Systems; and Product, Design, and Innovation to create and implement wiki-aided writing projects to enact a more collaborative approach to writing instruction across the curriculum. My team discovered that when groups are co-located, wikis might best be used to help make the writing process more transparent, and ironically, to help evaluate the overall quality of individual contributions to group-authored work. Our initial findings were published in the Fall 2009 special issue of Computers and Composition Online dedicated to Web 2.0 technologies in our article, “Collaborative Convergences in Research and Pedagogy: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Teaching Writing with Wikis.”