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Welcome! You are in the right place if you are
enrolled
in Medaille College's WRT 250 in Fall
2005
interested in business
communications
interested in
Medaille's curriculum
A history of the course at Medaille by Walt Kolt (with thanks to Doug Anderson)
In 1978, the computers were in a whole separate building and took up entire rooms. CD players did not exist, much less MP3's. College graduates had secretaries and telephones (not cell phones). "I have some writing to do" meant longhand on a yellow legal pad. The almost obsolete fax machine was still just a concept. Technology is moving so fast that some products will become obsolete or go to market during this course.
Many things have changed since then. To write the above paragraph for 2006 takes words that weren't even in the dictionary in 1978.
Some things haven't changed. You have to find information, evaluate it, think clearly about it, and be able to communicate your ideas in words and graphics to a reader. You have to be able to stand in front of a group and make a persuasive case. These traditional liberal arts skills are in this course. This course will exercise your writing skills and stretch what you think are your own limitations. Our intention is to take the writing skills you have developed up to this point and demonstrate how we can use them in the 21st Century
The question remains: how geeky will you have to be to communicate professionally in tomorrow's business organization? We'll wrestle with computers less and less as they become, like motors, embedded in our tools rather than the other way around, as they are now. Meanwhile, the more you know about computers and the more you can make them do your bidding, the more employable you are.
I'm not sure at all, however, that you're better off in any other sense.
I am always doing what I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it. -- Pablo Picasso
What's old: WRT 250 is a writing course, so you will write a lot. What's new: 1) WRT 250 will be as paperless as possible. 2) The definition of writing includes visual information and web page coding.
Find out all the official stuff. How is this course described in the college catalog? What are you going to know more about and know how to do better? What's the self-assessment all about?
This is the page to bookmark. It will change often and be the place to learn what we're going to do in class and what you should do before class. Be careful to bookmark the correct version of the syllabus, one for the Day class and the other for the Evening Class.
In this course, you'll learn by doing. We're going to pretend that you work for New Media Ventures, LLP, and that I'm your boss. If the course were Mission Impossible, this page would be the tape-recorded message at the beginning, except that it wouldn't self-destruct. "If you choose to accept this mission, ... ."
TALK about it. The best place to ask questions and get answers.
The proposal, research, and final reports. What are the other students doing? When are they due? How will they be evaluated?
Printer-friendly version of the Course Disclosure Statement
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