Teaching technical writing for computer engineers using the Web

Technical communication is extremely important for engineering education (ABET) requirements, but limited resources make it challenging to offer writing-intensive classes in a growing engineering school. Use of online technologies can help writing-intensive classes to scale. The authors describe their experiences using a variety of Web-based functions to teach and administrate CMPE185, Technical Writing for Computer Engineers, at UCSC. Their major contribution is an online peer editing system for document markup that uses Adobe Acrobat(g) or Microsoft Word(g) for annotations. The peer editing software comes with a manual for both students and instructors and is available at http://www.collage.soe.ucsc.edu.