Riley IIT homepage

Of interest to

Kathryn Riley
Professor of English and Chair
Lewis Department of Humanities
Editor, BCQ
Email: riley@iit.edu
Voice: 312.567.3566
Fax: 312.567.5187

Siegel Hall, Suite 218
3301 South Dearborn
Illinois Institute of Technology
Chicago, IL 60616 USA

Office hours: M 5-6 p.m., T 2-3 p.m., & by appointment

Kathy Riley, 2006

• Vita (PDF) • Resources Recent and upcoming activities: • Session on "Publishing in Business Communication Journals," with Margaret Graham (editor, Journal of Business Communication) and David Russell (editor, Journal of Business and Technical Communication), for Assn. for Business Communication, Lake Tahoe, NV, Oct. 2008. • Co-supervisor, with Matt Bauer (Humanities) of a CSL Undergraduate Summer Research Award received by Susan Mallgrave. Susan is a student in the Humanities Department's Professional & Technical Communication program and studied attitudes about variation in English and their effects of language perception, with special attention to machine-mediated communication.. • Co-PI, NSF Grant, "Ethics in the Details." • Co-author, with Frank Parker, 5th edition of Linguistics for Non-Linguists: A Primer with Exercises (Allyn & Bacon, in press). • Co-author, with Jo Mackiewicz, Visual Composing (Prentice-Hall, in preparation).

NSF Grant: "Ethics in the Details"
Work continues on "Ethics in the Details," a 3-year project supported by a National Science Foundation grant for $238,663 and administered through the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Profession (CSEP) by PI Michael Davis (Humanities/CSEP), with co-PIs Kathryn Riley (Chair, Humanities) and Vivian Weil (CSEP/Humanities).

"Ethics in the Details" involves collaboration with engineering faculty and engineering graduate students at the IIT, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Howard University in Washington, DC. The grant funds workshops that teach faculty and students to develop "micro-insertions"––small ways to add ethical issues to problems in the graduate engineering curricula. The grant team is also assessing this method in graduate courses and in a nanotechnology research lab at UIC. Examples of ethical issues covered include whistleblowing, national security concerns, conflicts of interest, and cross-cultural differences in ethics.

In addition, the grant supports development of a Web-based "Ethics In-Basket," an archive of ethics problems that can be accessed from anywhere, to disseminate ethics problems to engineering faculty worldwide. Graduate students in IIT’s Technical Communication program are helping to develop the Website and edit the problems. The site itself will be tested for usability at IIT’s Usability Testing and Evaluation (UTEC) with assistance from UTEC director Susan Feinberg.

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