Peter Eliot Weiss

Branding, defining and belonging: Creating an identity for the Engineering Communication Program

In 2010, the Engineering Communication Program (ECP) teamed up with Engineering Strategic Communication to find a visual way to resolve ECPs identity issues. Not only was the program a kind of outsider to the world of math, hard science and research which were identified with University of Toronto Engineering, but the instructors themselves had a difficult time differentiating themselves from Teaching Assistants. Students did not have a conventional way to identify instructors who taught interactively in small classes scheduled during tutoring times or who tutored in one-on-one or one-on-team settings. The situation was further complicated by the fact that the university had recently completed a branding exercise and was centrally determining what kinds of symbolic representations or typefaces could be used. We wanted to utilize the university new “brand” as well as our own facultys in order to represent ourselves visibly as part of the engineering world. Our answer, within what was currently permitted by the university, had two components: a type treatment of our name, matching the type treatments used by engineering departments, and an insignia that introduced an acronym for communication instructors - MyCI. In future, we will be conducting a study to determine the associations the insignia evokes for students.

Online Evolution: Advantages and Challenges of Online Course Components

“For a Copernican revolution to take place it does not matter what means are used provided this goal is achieved: a shift in what counts as centre and what counts as periphery.” – Bruno Latour [1] As Michael Wesch pointed out in his 2008 talk at the University of Manitoba, “A Portal to Media Literacy,” the conventional lecture hall set-up reinforces an authoritarian view of education as the passive reception of scarce and valuable bits of information. [2] This is the opposite of the exploratory, questioning discovery we would like our students to has as their learning experience. The problem of the conventional lecture hall is, as well, exacerbated in large classes of 800 or more students. However, the evolution of media, from television through to online media of today, has created opportunities, challenges and obstacles that lecturers today continue to experiment with to create relevant, interactive classes of whatever size. At the same time, the numbers of students who can be reached with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) dwarfs even our largest lecture courses and there are definite advantages that can be gained through online learning reaching people in remote areas, enabling working people to take courses, providing credible, university-level information to any curious person who wants to learn. And while so far MOOCs may not have been uniformly living up to their promise, we do have evidence that students are using them to augment their lecture experience. This teaching case will investigate how one large first year design/communication course has slowly incorporated online elements to shift the power dynamic from the instructor as centre of focus to the student and their learning experience as central. Begun simply, in the beginning, with audio capture of lectures, we have moved on to video lecture capture, live and recorded online help session, and supplementary videos. This last, importantly, are developed not only by the lecturers, but by interested Teaching Assistants (TA) and even students still in the course. We are, step-by-step, finding the components that will best allow students to be able to construct their own learning experience.

An ethnographic study of a workplace through a communication lens

Our work proposes that the understanding of the relationship between communication and power structures is fundamental in teaching, learning and improving communication skills and, conversely, learning and improving communication skills enables people to become more aware of how power is operating in a given environment. Using situated observation in the workplace, our study investigates how pieces of information are communicated and accumulated in order to establish and reinforce power structures in a specific corporate culture. Our research questions are: how are patterns of power communicated verbally or non-verbally? How are they discerned, mobilised and combined? How does an individual, in such situations, negotiate their position?

Impact of critical thinking instruction on first year engineering students

The advancement of student ability to think critically is a learning outcome shared across a wide range of fields. We are instructors in a first year engineering design and communication course containing critical thinking interventions. We constantly struggle to determine the effectiveness of those interventions. This study is a work-in-progress report on one component of a large multi-institutional study on teaching and evaluating critical thinking in first year engineering students. In this study we describe the pitfalls encountered in the initial iteration of this study, such as difficulty in finding a standard test for critical thinking relevant to engineering students and in securing student participation. We describe the second iteration of the study, designed to avoid these initial pitfalls, and give details about our methodology and the conclusions we hope to draw upon analysis of the data. Finally, and perhaps most importantly for a work-in-progress report is plan for future expansion of data collection and analysis.

MyCI: Crossing the Border of student and communication instructor relationships

In 2010, the Engineering Communication Program (ECP) teamed up with Engineering Strategic Communication to find a visual way to resolve ECPs identity issues. We wanted to integrate the university and our Facultys recently developed “brand” in order to represent ourselves visibly as part of the engineering world, and so developed a type treatment of our name, and an insignia that introduced an acronym for communication instructors - MyCI. It was intended to resolve the confusion between TAs and Communication Instructors by introducing a mnemonic, an easy to say, easy to remember counterpart to the acronym for Teaching Assistant, while reinforcing the idea that developing a relationship with a Communication Instructor helps the learning process. We are investigating student response to the insignia before beginning work with their CIs, and as they become more familiar with the program. Our study consists of a survey administered at three points in first year, as well as focused interviews. Results will provide information about the degree to which students can identify and differentiate Communication Instructors and instruction from other parts of their academic experience, and the effectiveness of the MyCI insignia in transmitting accurate information about ECP and its instructors.