IX Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2017

The field of technical communication is going through a period of significant change. The emergence of the knowledge-based economy is forcing the organizations to revaluate their resources where knowledge is increasingly perceived as the most critical factor. Engineers may be often challenged by the way they need to communicate. They face challenges in communicating technical knowledge clearly and effectively.

Online technical and science communication has come a long way from the early days of LiveJournal and Usenet. Now, more than ever, science and techniques are fundamentally intertwined with national and international political issues. Our climate is changing. Animals and plants are going extinct at an alarming rate. Life-saving technologies like vaccines are denigrated and misrepresented. Every day technologies advance in ways that are rarely explained well to the rest of society. To make informed decisions on a wide range of political issues, the people of the world need to understand the science behind the most hotly debated topics. But to do that, they need interpreters who speak the lingo, who can take jargon-filled research and put it into terms that anyone can understand.

Technical writing involves two key competencies. The first is the ability to understand technical language; the second is being able to communicate complex, nuanced ideas in more accessible ways. Engineers often find it difficult to communicate their technical knowledge to audiences that have less technical backgrounds. And, they deliver information in eBooks, in apps, and via the social web.

Technical knowledge can be explicit and tacit. Explicit knowledge is searchable information that can be easily found. Users can collaborate on the value and use of the knowledge. On the other hand, tacit knowledge is knowledge found in people’s heads and is often difficult to share with another person by writing it down or verbalizing it. Web-technologies can help people better articulate their tacit knowledge. Knowledge communities are only just starting to facilitate the exchange of tacit knowledge.

In relation to tacit knowledge, the required technologies are those which can support, capture and enhance activities such as group work, guided experiments, simulations, meetings, mentoring, apprenticeship and online and offline socialization. Importance should be given to have these activities captured in multimedia and other repositories.

Blogging is still one of the most accessible ways to continually publish new content online at little to no financial cost. If nothing else, blogging helps develop essential skills.

Technical and scientific blogging is truly a noble pursuit because it seeks to inform and excite others. A side effect is that the overall quality of the work will also increase, as the researcher becomes a better writer, and conveyer of complex ideas.

Conventional peer review is still an important mechanism for ensuring that the science that gets published in academic journals is coherent and accurate, but it is not perfect. No longer will journalists from traditional media outlets be the only ones writing about the work. Instead, bloggers—some of them engineers themselves—will be writing about the research on their own blogs. Even if the researcher doesn’t intend to become a prolific blogger himself, understanding more about the culture of technical blogging will allow responding appropriately when the work is either praised or criticized. Having an own blog will also, of course, give a platform for technical communicating.

Science and technical blogging take on a whole new dimension when it’s done from inside a conference. Conference blogging refers to the use of any online media to share information from an academic conference or presentation with the rest of the world. The point is to use social media to disseminate information beyond those physically present at a conference.

Technical writing is not just about language skills—it’s also about how people think. Good technical communicators are detail-oriented, bright, demanding, and not intimidated by levels of technicality. Technical communication is essential for career advancement for all technical professionals.

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