Search Results for: hermeneutics
Literature Review – What is the Future of Work in the Age of Superintelligence?
Fewer employers are hiring recent graduates, and entry-level white-collar roles are disappearing as AGI (artificial general intelligence) and ASI (artificial superintelligence) begin to automate knowledge work (Ellis & Bindley, 2025; McKinsey & Company, 2023; World Economic Forum, 2025). This assignment teaches you to evaluate those forecasts and respond strategically. You’ll write a literature review synthesizing expert predictions about what AGI and ASI are, when they may arrive, and how they are expected to transform skills, restructure organizations, and redefine what entry-level employment means. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your ability to assess source credibility, understand citation as rhetorical positioning, and use GenAI to support synthesis and revision. By engaging with industry research (e.g., Microsoft, LinkedIn, McKinsey, BCG, Goldman Sachs) and scholarly analyses (e.g., Aschenbrenner, AI Futures), you will practice researching, synthesizing, and clearly communicating complex, evolving issues for an academic audience.
How to Effectively Share Your Research Findings
This is the final creative challenge that undergraduate students complete for Research Methods in Professional and Technical Communication. For this assignment, students report on the research they promised to conduct in the fourth creative challenge -- the research proposal. There are three major deliverables for this project: (1) a report on their research findings in a genre that is appropriate for their audience, research question, and topic; (2) a presentation to their peers on their research results; (3) a reflection on how their study contributes to ongoing conversations in the methodological community they are addressing and how they used AI to manage the research process and prepare results.
Mapping Ways of Knowing Across Research Communities
In the last two modules you began learning the dialects of research — the genres, citation practices, and stylistic habits that distinguish one community from another. This module asks a harder question: not how these communities speak, but why they see differently. As Bruffee (1984) argues, we don't just learn to talk differently when we enter a new community — we learn to think differently. A scientist and an interpreter looking at the same interview transcript aren't simply using different tools; they are perceiving different objects. The scientist sees data points to be aggregated toward a generalizable claim. The interpreter sees a singular act of meaning-making that resists aggregation. They aren't disagreeing about the answer — they're inhabiting different epistemological worlds. Mapping those worlds doesn't resolve the differences, but it does something equally valuable: it makes the differences visible, nameable, and available for analysis. That is what this module asks you to build.
In this module, you'll build a visual map of six major methodological communities — Creatives, Designers, Interpreters, Scientists, Synthesizers, and Scholars — and use it to argue why those communities would investigate the same question about generative AI and labor in fundamentally different ways. The map isn't decoration; it's the thinking. Behind every methodological choice is a set of beliefs about what knowledge is, how it should be tested, and who gets to decide — and this assignment makes those beliefs visible. This module develops two skills that will serve you throughout the course and beyond. The first is epistemological awareness: the ability to recognize how assumptions about knowledge shape what researchers study, what counts as evidence, and how authority is established. The second is information visualization: learning to represent complex relationships spatially so that connections and tensions become visible in ways that prose alone cannot capture.
Research Methods – Introduction to the Course
Kenneth Bruffee (1984), drawing on philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s (1962) concept of "the conversation of mankind," now “humankind,” likens learning the languages of academic and professional research to being a traveler dropped into a foreign land, surrounded by unfamiliar dialects and customs. In this metaphor, the dialects represent the distinct ways scholars and professionals speak, reason, and collaborate, while the customs reflect the ideologies and values that guide their work. For both Oakeshott and Bruffee, knowledge is not produced in isolation but created and tested through dialogue — an ongoing exchange among researchers, past and present, whose studies, theories, and critiques form the archival record of human inquiry. To learn a discipline, then, is not merely to master its vocabulary but to join a community that shares habits of mind, standards of evidence, and ways of justifying belief. Professional and technical communication makes this especially vivid: because the field draws on humanistic, social scientific, and technical traditions, its researchers operate from different — and sometimes competing — assumptions about what counts as evidence and what research is ultimately for. This course helps students enter that conversation equipped not just to read and cite PTC scholarship, but to understand why researchers make the methodological choices they do, and what those choices reveal about the values embedded in the research itself.
Citation Conventions – What is the Role of Citation in Academic & Professional Writing?
Explore the role of citation in academic and professional writing. Understand how citations establish trust, establish a professional tone, validate the authenticity of claims, and uphold ethical standards.
Rhetoric & Apparatus Theory
Rhetoric is the study and practice of persuasion, communication, and identity. Apparatus theory investigates how the communication technologies we use shape how we think, communicate, and inhabit the world. Apparatus theory suggests that each of these goals receives different emphasis depending on an era’s dominant communicative technology.
