I am happy that you can join me in the first
completely online edition of English 318 at New Mexico State.
I am excited to be teaching this course because I believe I have
created a syllabus that is well tailored to the communication
demands you are already or will soon face in your profession.
Through background reading and through speaking with Dr. Sizemore
about the unique communication contexts of nursing and health
care, this course's assignments provide an opportunity for you
to further develop the practices you use to interact with a variety
of audiences for a variety of purposes in your workplace.
The assignments in this course will give
you experience with a range of written genres. I have designed
them so as to help you become more aware and in control of the
communication in which you already engage, as well as to provide
you with additional rhetorical strategies for creating more effective
and persuasive documents. As much as possible, I like to avoid
busywork for students and so I have constructed the assignments
to have as much relevancy to your real life as possible. Throughout
the course I encourage you to apply the readings and assignments
to your workplace context and to select issues of study that relate
to your professional interests. Additionally, I am open to negotiation
on several of the major assignments if you can provide a solid
justification for modification.
Since we won't have the opportunity
to meet face-to-face during this course, I want to briefly introduce
myself. My name is Jennifer Sheppard and I recently completed
my PhD in Rhetoric and Technical Communication at Michigan Technological
University. My dissertation studied the creation of a science-based
multimedia web site for middle school students that I created
for a U.S. Forest Service research lab in Northern Michigan (if
you are interested, you can check it out at http://forest.mtu.edu/kidscorner).
I have been teaching writing, technical communication,
web design, and oral and visual communication for the past eight
years and am very happy to have landed at New Mexico State. Although
I have never taught a completely online course, I am very comfortable
using technology and working in an online environment. Through
this course, I think you will find that I enjoy teaching, that
I like to challenge students to expand their range of capabilities,
and that I think it is necessary to provide student with the support
they need to accomplish the course goals. If you have questions
about assignments at any time, please don't hesitate to contact
me.
One last note I want to make is that I am
genuinely looking forward to learning from you about communication
in your field and professional context. While I obviously don't
have a background in health care, one of my main areas of interest
is in workplace interaction and communication. I hope that through
the various assignments of the course that you will be willing
to share your knowledge and practices with me while I do the same
with you.
