Over the past two decades, studies have examined how social contexts influence the composition and production of workplace documents. But much remains to be known about what happens when writers move from one social context to another—from the academy to the workplace, for instance. This article demonstrates that students in scientific and technical communication classrooms learn what they are taught about composing. They take this knowledge with them to the workplace, where they apply it, practically and theoretically, and improve their understanding of it with repeated use.

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This paper confronts the local dimension of a U.S. scientific and technical communication program with the new challenges globalization raises, and shows how an assignment sequence implemented in an advanced technical communication course has enacted and nurtured new "communities of practice" (Wenger 1998) that cross institutional borders and favor a social orientation to learning. This paper argues that writing for and collaborating with an international audience helps students to develop a more sophisticated knowledge of their own communication practices, and to perceive the movement from local to global as a transition enabling the creation of knowledge and of new learning processes.

Failure in communication between software developers and other stakeholders is a common cause of requirements deficiencies, cost overruns, and delays. It is difficult to present in a classroom setting the complexities that can cause such failures. To address this need, we have developed instructional case study material in software communication. We demonstrate how our cases expose students to situations they will confront outside the classroom, and how they provide opportunities for critiquing and devising communication strategies. We also describe our use of the cases, in a software engineering course and a technical communication course. We give initial results of an ongoing evaluation of the material's effectiveness in the software engineering curriculum.