A Collaborative Practicum Targeting Communication Skills for Computer Science Researchers

Computer science researchers spend significant time writing and presenting their research ideas to conference audiences, reviewers, funding agencies, collaborators, and other technical and general audiences. Good communication skills can increase a researcher's effectiveness and efficiency, while currently most students rely on their PhD mentor, technical writing courses, tutors, or self-teaching to improve their communication skills. This paper details a graduate level course to provide graduate students with a collaborative practicum in building strong communication skills for a technical research career in computer science. Each class meeting is activity-based, using collaborative small-group analysis of writing and presentation samples and peer reviewing with rubrics created by the students and refined by the instructor. Assignments require students to stretch their thinking and practice their communication skills. Students write weekly reflect blog entries guided by prompts to promote reflection about their communication experiences, challenges and successes. We summarize and reflect on initial outcomes from two instantiations of the course.