Bee-com a 21st century communicator. A didactic toolkit for user-centered communication design in higher education

摘要

What higher education is still primarily concerned with when it comes to teaching communication skills, is the teaching of cognitive-academic language and related textual genres. In society and the workplace, however, these genres have limited relevance. Teachers, for example, primarily communicate with people outside of the professional in-crowd: they communicate with pupils and also parents, often with various ethnic backgrounds, and they make use of new media and technologies in order to do so. In a two-year project, funded by the KU Leuven Association, a multidisciplinary team is developing a toolkit to help all teachers and students in higher education with conceptualizing and developing strategic, multimodal communication designs for real-world situations. The project aims at bringing together relevant insights from the fields of ICT, graphical design and communication,and making these insights available for teachers and students. In this paper, the results of several pilot projects and testing sessions are discussed. In general,the toolkit seems promising in helping teachers to create an educational environment in which students are offered opportunities to prepare themselves for communicativelife outside the walls of higher education.