The September 2016 issue of Business and Professional Communication Quarterly contains a number of articles relevant to our teaching: the use of social media in communication courses, what professional communication skills employers value, and the importance of weaning anxious students from over-dependency on PowerPoint text slides. The findings aren’t earth-shatteringly surprising, but you’re likely to find worthwhile nuggets.

The October 2016 issue of the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication focuses on human-centred design.* This subject is top-of-mind for me because I’m in the midst of marking my computer science students’ user documentation assignment. Here is the abstract for this special issue:

In this special journal issue, we explore the turn toward human-centered design (HCD) in research and higher education. We begin with a discussion of how HCD emerged in scholarly work at the edges of our field in places such as design, psychology, art, and engineering. Following this, we consider how an HCD perspective is manifesting itself in academic programs in different institutional contexts. We then discuss how this trend is further illustrated by the transformation of our department at the University of Washington, which shifted from being the Department of Technical Communication to becoming the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering. Finally, we discuss the work of a group of researchers who contributed articles to this special issue. Each of these articles offers a perspective from someone within our field about how an HCD perspective has influenced their thinking and research.

*See “Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful” for a contrarian view.