Chapter 3 explores how teams create documents, work together during meetings, and use social media to stay connected. You have surely worked as a team member on projects either for other classes or in a job or internship, so you are probably familiar with these ideas. While you will not write collaborative documents in this course (because our time is so short), you will work together during peer review and in discussion of the course readings and activities.

Using Digital Tools to Collaborate

Chapter 3 of Practical Strategies for Technical Communication discusses how social media and other electronic tools such as messaging technologies, wikis, and shared document workspaces can be useful for collaboration in the workplace. As a technical writer, you should learn how to use the comment, revision, and highlighting features of their word-processing software so that you can email files back and forth among team members.

For this course, you will use at least three different tools to collaborate with me and your classmates:

• Email to communicate with me.
• Google Drive to comment and revise your course projects.
• Online Forums to share your documents and discuss readings.

As you read Chapter 3, pay particular attention to the section on Discussion Boards (pp. 48–49). The tools discussed on those pages are similar to the online forums we will use in class, and you should follow the Guidelines in the textbook as well as those in the Forum Posts & Participation page when you write on the forums.

Reading Quiz

After reading the chapter, complete the reading quiz in Scholar for Chapter 3.

Photo: Wendt WisCEL: students collaborating by college.library, on Flickr