Working Session

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Roundtable on Document Engineering Education
Ethan Munson -- University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
e-mail:munson@cs.uwm.edu

Motivation
Any academic research domain that wishes to sustain itself over a long period of time must connect its research agenda with an education agenda. As research discovers new facts and develops new technology, courses and curricula must change to reflect the most important and useful elements of this new knowledge. Furthermore, effective research requires graduate students whose education provides a good foundation for success.

Our field of document engineering is small, but its ideas and technology are widely used. The document engineering domain will benefit if we can articulate an education agenda at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Session Activities
This first working session on document engineering education is designed to facilitate communication and sharing among educators teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Because this working session is only the starting point for discussions on the topic, it will be relatively unstructured. Rather than being a sequence of paper presentations, it will emphasize sharing of ideas, approaches and resources. The following schedule is a tentative agenda for the working session. It may change as feedback comes in from the workshop participants (see below):

Participant Contributions
Working session participants are asked to contribute useful information and materials about their document engineering education activities. Contributions should be submitted via e-mail to the working session's chair Ethan Munson.

At the start of the working session, participants will receive copies of contributed materials from all participants. During the working session, participants will briefly summarize their contributions, especially elaborating on the strengths and weaknesses of courses they have delivered or on their concerns as they plan new courses.

Those who are already teaching courses in the area of document engineering are asked to send the following information for each course:

• Course name and level (year or graduate/undergraduate)
• Course outline
• Course reading list
• Brief description of course activities (lecture, programming assignments, exams, papers, etc.)
• A summary of positive and negative aspects of the course

Those who are planning new courses, but have not yet taught them are asked to send the following information for each course:

• Course name and level
• Topics to be covered
• Likely readings
• Activities that will probably be used

Further Information

Participants are also asked to send suggestions for additional topics or for changes to the working session agenda to the working session's chair Ethan Munson.