Advice

The advice I have to give to technical communicators in the HR field would be to have continuing education in our field. The advice that I have to give students entering this class would be to try very hard to make it to all classes. You miss a lot if you don’t. I also believe that in technical communication common sense goes a long way.

Service Learning Project

I have done projects very similar to this one in the past therefore I didn’t really learn any new skills. However, I believe I always have room for improvement. I was better at asking more questions upfront in the initial needs assessment meeting. The more questions you ask upfront the less you have to attempt to get a hold of them in the future.

I will saw a new skill I learned from this project is knowing what makes a flyer effective.

I don’t like speaking for anyone else but it appeared some students were less than thrilled about reaching out to our community of people that they don’t know and asking if they needed help. I think some were presently surprised to hear that organizations were thrilled that the students’ services were being offered. I can’t imagine a nonprofit that would turn down free university students help.

My service learning experience relates to almost all the learning objectives in this course. I had to create and present an effective professional document including graphics and presentational media. I had to revise documents and presentations to improve clarity and conform to standard English language. Apply communication skills in planning and conducting my SLP meetings with my partner.

Through my service learning project I have learned that no matter how big or small a community is there is always organizations that can benefit from a person’s generosity and volunteerism. I also learned that when I’m done with college and have a little less on my plate it’s a long term goal of mine that I want to do more community service projects like this one. Maybe even open my own non-profit that works to meet the need of professional document creation for other non-profits.

Group Projects - Collaboration

In my recent group assignment my group functioned well together. We had a natural leader emerge and he immediately took charge. He came up with who and what our company was and the rest of the group agreed. Our no nonsense personalities fit well together. We immediately started collaborating and figured out who was going to do what part of the assignment. The only weakness I think we had was that only half the group took advantage of the group page on blackboard. We did well collaborating in the classroom but could have done better at virtually collaborating.


The best practices I can suggest in terms of workplace collaboration are:
Be flexible and let people use their strengths. If there is a natural (good) leader let them lead. If someone is clearly uncomfortable leading a group let them play off their strengths and don’t force them into a role they aren’t going to excel at.

If you are virtually collaborating on something make sure you are checking the means in which that collaborating is taking place (email, client relationship databases, blogs, IM, etc.)

Respect your collaboration group

Always keep an open mind. If someone else’s idea prevails over yours make sure to keep a smile on your face and figure out how to add value to the group.