Teaching Content Management in Technical and Professional Communication

This collection offers a comprehensive overview of approaches to teaching the complex subject of content management.

The 12 chapters define and explain content management and its accompanying competencies, providing teaching examples in areas including content strategy, topic-based writing, usability studies, and social media. The book covers tasks associated with content management such as analyzing audiences and using information architecture languages including XML and DITA. It highlights the communal aspects of content management, focusing on the work of writing stewardship and project management, and the characteristics of content management in global contexts. It concludes with a look to the future and the forces that shape content management today. The editor situates the collection within a pedagogical exigency, providing sound instructional approaches to teaching content management from a rhetorical perspective.

The book is an essential resource for both instructors new to teaching technical and professional communication, and experienced instructors who are interested in upgrading their pedagogies to include content management.

Tracy Bridgeford is a professor of technical communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where she directs the Graduate Certificate in Technical Communication. In 2018, she published Teaching Professional and Technical Communication: A Practicum in a Book. She coedited Academy-Industry Relationships: Perspectives for Technical Communicators, Sharing Our Intellectual Traces: Narrative Reflections from Administrators of Professional, Technical, and Scientific Programs, and Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication. She contributed chapters to Editing in the Modern Classroom, Resources in Technical Communication: Outcomes and Approaches, and Teaching Writing with Computers: An Introduction.