[ATTW-L] Resources for teaching white papers?

[Michael Trice]

  Hi Cagle,

For the list, I thought I'd summarize the Twitter thread. I'm going to hit
on sample papers, activities, and concepts I rely upon for this area. FYI,
I mostly teach white papers in two classes, a MechE system design course
and an information policy class in computer science. I say this because I
find the white paper genre extremely unstable and highly contextual.

I have three samples I tend to fall back on for white paper examples. Two
are longer examples that summarize concepts for the public or a customer,
while the third is a more traditionally short broadsheet that's public
facing.

MAPP from Lincoln Lab--
https://www.ll.mit.edu/r-d/publications/modular-aid-and-power-pallet-mapp-fy18-energy-technical-investment-program
Robust project overview paper, though written customer-facing more than
engineer-facing.

Algorithmic Accountability: A Primer--
https://datasociety.net/library/algorithmic-accountability-a-primer/
Policy white paper. This paper has a public-facing feel to it, but it's
definitely largely targeting teachers and journalists.

Hart InterCivic's Verity--
https://www.hartintercivic.com/voting-solutions/verityoverview/
More traditional broadsheet complete with bulleted lists. I like this one
because of the interest in electronic voting and because I worked for Hart
way back in the day during HAVA.

As for activities, the two keys for me are capturing the fluidity of the
genre and conveying the central challenge of distilling complex information
into core concepts for a non-technical or less technical audience. I have
two go-to activities for this lesson.

Board Game Activity: I have students look at a board game's full rules
versus its player cards or one-pager. Catan is my go-to example, but there
are many, many examples in modern board games that make this move. Then I
ask students to create "player cards" for the project they're working on.

Research Broadsheet: I ask students to pick a paper from Disney Research.
They then annotate for stases and core moves. I ask them to create
an overview and broadhseet from the research paper annotations. For a long
assignment, you could also have them re-write the research paper into
something resembling MAPP.




On Sun, Nov 29, 2020 at 10:44 AM Cagle, Lauren E. <lauren.cagle at uky.edu>
wrote:

> Hi all!
>
> A colleaguehere at UK is looking for resources on teaching white papers,
> which I haven't explicitly taught before.
>
> Do y'all have any resources you're willing to share, such as:
>
> * Assignment sheets?
> * Readings?
> * Lesson plans?
> * Models?
> * Hand-outs?
>
> Thank you!
> Cagle
>
> Get Outlook for Android <https://aka.ms/ghei36>
> _______________________________________________
> ATTW-L mailing list
> ATTW-L at attw.org
> http://attw.org/mailman/listinfo/attw-l_attw.org
>


-- 
-- 
Lecturer in Writing and Communication at MIT
Phone: 806.392.7016
Twitter: mikertrice
Skype: mrtrice1
Email: propeliea at gmail.com
“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research,
would it?” - Albert Einstein
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://attw.org/pipermail/attw-l_attw.org/attachments/20201129/a89a352a/attachment-0002.htm>