On June 9, 10, and 11, 2008, CMU held the third in an ongoing series of communication symposia. As its Web site indicates, the symposium is an "annual meeting of faculty and staff from both the Pittsburgh and Qatar campuses of Carnegie Mellon University. The two departments sponsoring this event are the Department of English and the Department of Modern Languages. The overall goal of the symposium is to build one intellectual community that aims toward developing effective approaches for assisting students to develop the professional and technical English communication skills that they will need to function effectively in the emerging global knowledge economy."

As a guest plenary speaker, I had the chance to join the well-coordinated event, which also featured a keynote by Dr. Fredricka Stolle, Professor of Applied Linguistics at Northern Arizona University, who spoke on “Developing Disciplinary Literacy Through Interdisciplinary Collaboration, and Dr. Richard Young, a founder of our profession and longtime CMU faculty member, who addressed the issue of "Experts and Explorers in Writing in the Disciplines." My own talk, "Disciplinary Conventions and Learning in the Disciplines: The Question of Genre," considered how learning-based communication assignments can free us from the constraints of form, or canonical disciplinary genres, in those contexts where learning to work in, through, and with challenging subject matter is as important as being able to write typical kinds of texts found in those disciplines.

Hats off to David Kaufer and his colleagues for organizing a terrific event, which featured live videoconferencing with some faculty and administrators at the CMU installation at Education City, in Doha, Qatar. It was a great experience being able to compare notes from my work at the national university there (Qatar University) with faculty who have been working at CMU-Doha.

Additional information and the full schedule of the event can be found at: http://english.cmu.edu/research/symposium/

A Part of the beautiful CMU campus in Pittsburgh

CMU Campus at Education City, Doha, Qatar