Developing an online learning environment for international technical communication

As technical communication scholars (Maylath, 1997; Weiss, 1999) have recently pointed out, the increasing need for international technical communication in the Information Age requires new resources for technical communicators. Growing demands for improved quality and faster simultaneous release of information products in the global market also call for new forms of collaboration in order to overcome the current gulf among the professional groups involved in international technical communication projects, such as technical communicators, translators, and localization engineers. Currently, these professional groups work on the same projects for the same international users, but often know very little about each other's work. To alleviate this situation, this paper describes the potential and the ongoing design of an online learning environment that serves both as a resource and as a network for connecting communities of practitioners in international technical communication.