Chautauqua announcement

Teaching Communication Skills
in the Software Engineering Curriculum:
A Forum for Professionals and Educators

Supported by NSF Award #0722231

Miami University — Oxford, Ohio  USA
June 9-11, 2008

The Chautauqua will explore ways of creating a new curriculum for software engineering students
that better equips them with the communications skills they will need in their careers.

Motivation • Stakeholders • Issues • Participation • Costs & Support
Schedule • Location • Chautauqua Tradition • Organization

Motivation

Communication — between humans — remains at the heart of software development. Software engineers must constantly engage with a wide range of stakeholders who have very different perspectives and goals. Problems in communication between software engineers and other stakeholders are a common cause of requirements deficiencies, cost overruns, and delays. Yet software engineering students typically get little exposure to the communication challenges in the workplace.

We have a vision of a new curriculum where communication is a core skill, tightly integrated with the other aspects of software engineering, rather than a stand-alone topic taught outside of software engineering. With such a curriculum, software engineering students will become not only creative designers and thoughtful analysts but also effective communicators.

The Chautauqua is a loosely structured, interdisciplinary forum for those invested in this topic — software engineering educators, technical communication educators, and industrial partners — to articulate challenges and solutions, and to build links for further work. Following the historical precedent of the Chautauqua, we seek a wide range of activities: reports, demonstrations, tutorials, and panel discussions.

Stakeholders

We invite participation from:

• Software engineering educators: The recent proliferation of degree programs in software engineering has generated a great deal of activity in curriculum and instruction design, with an emphasis on experiential and problem-based learning. These developments present new opportunities for training in effective communication.
• Technical communication educators: Specialists in technical communication are prepared to address many of the communication challenges faced by software engineers. Indeed, they have been involved in software engineering education for some time, but usually in an ancillary role. At the Chautauqua, we will explore ways that technical communication can play a central role in software engineering education.
• Industrial partners: Those involved in real software development have a great deal of knowledge about how communication is managed and practiced in the workplace. Unfortunately, there are often barriers, such as “trade secret” concerns, that prevent transfer of this information to the classroom. We hope to find ways to overcome these barriers at the Chautauqua.

Issues

Here are some questions that we wish to explore at the Chautauqua. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

• What are the core communication skills for software engineering students?
• What practices in software engineering and technical communication education have proved successful in preparing software engineers?
• What are current best practices in communication in the software workplace? What particular skills are most needed for new software engineering graduates?
• New technology and economic trends have made distributed or virtual development more common. How can we prepare students for the different types of communication that this requires?
• Communicating with customers requires sensitivity to their knowledge, experience, and needs, which are typically quite different from those of the students. How can we impart this sensitivity to our students?
• What communication challenges do software engineering students wrestle with in capstone projects? How can students be trained in communication skills before their capstone projects?
• How can we get the word out to prospective students (many of whom may be turned off by the prospect of doing nothing but “programming” for a living) that real software development is rooted in communication and human interaction?
• How can we break down institutional walls between software engineers and technical communicators, and between academia and industry?

Participation

If you are interested in contributing to this important discussion, we ask you to submit a one-page position paper — in which you describe your experience in software engineering and/or technical communication, and the issues that you would most like to see addressed at the Chautauqua. This will help us to plan activities according to participant preferences.

We also strongly encourage you to propose (in a separate document) an activity for the Chautauqua, in which you share your experiences with other participants, or provide a forum to discuss questions that you find particularly significant. We use the term “activity” in a broad sense — We want you to use the format that best suits your background and topic. Activities may include (but are not restricted to):

• a standard academic paper presentation;
• a demonstration of a case study or of a software tool;
• an interactive tutorial session, in which you demonstrate educational materials with participants as the “students”;
• a panel discussion, in which you invite participants to discuss a set of selected questions.

Please send your submissions to wallace@mtu.edu.

There will be two reviews of activity proposals: the first will cover all submissions received by March 20, and the second will cover all submissions received by April 25. (The second review will reconsider submissions that were not accepted in the first review.)

Costs and Support

We will support travel, food, lodging, and registration costs for 30 participants. Preference for support will be given to participants who have proposed activities that have been accepted. For those not receiving support, there is a fee of $150 to cover food and registration costs (this fee will not cover lodging or travel).

Schedule

• March 20: Deadline for first review of activity proposals.
• April 25: Deadline for all submissions.

Location

The Chautauqua will be held at Miami University in Oxford Ohio, located about 35 miles north of Cincinnati. The Miami University campus is considered one of the most beautiful in the country. Conference sessions will be held at the newly renovated Benton Hall, home of the Computer Science and Systems Analysis Department, and accommodations will be at the Miami Inn.

Chautauqua Tradition

The Chautauqua movement in the United States was a phenomenon of great educational significance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Theodore Roosevelt called it “the most American thing in America”. Chautauquas, loosely defined, were educational summer camps. While some were permanent (indeed, a few remain today), most were itinerant, presented under tents that were set up for several days and then moved to the next location. A Chautauqua consisted of a variety of entertainments, with the emphasis on lectures or sermons, but with other diversions on the side, including theater, storytelling, and music. For many years, the NSF has had a Chautauqua program of short courses in scientific topics for college instructors.

Organization

Steering committee

• Paul Anderson, Miami University
• Janet Burge, Miami University
• Yifei Dong, University of Oklahoma
• Chad Esselink, Ford Information Technology
• Kathleen Fox, Deloitte Consulting
• Jordynn Jack, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
• Marika Seigel, Michigan Technological University
• Brian VanVoorst, Honeywell
• James Vallino, Rochester Institute of Technology
• Charles Wallace, Michigan Technological University