• Program Objectives: To prepare future faculty, researchers, and professionals to optimize the uses and applications and understand the effects of new communication technologies, in which the spoken and written word and visual images are combined in unprecedented ways. By integrating the traditionally separate disciplines of written, oral, and visual communication within the context of changing technologies and cultural relations, this innovative program will provide students with new theoretical tools, multiple research methods, and experience in practical problem-solving relevant to the communication practices and problems of the digital age.

• Need for Program: Information technology is recognized as the driver for economic growth, globalization of markets, and continuing technological innovation. The report by the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee identified ten "Grand Challenge Transformations," the first three of which are transformations in the way we communicate, the way we deal with information, and the way we learn. These challenges will require research, theory, and the training of new specialists in the social and human sciences to complement the technical developments in materials, network engineering, and programming. Without attention to the human dimensions of information technology, these transformations will not be complete or effective.

• Demand for Graduates: In higher education, graduates of the program will contribute to undergraduate instruction in the communication arts, being particularly qualified to help adapt such instruction to information and communication technologies, changing demographics, and shifting articulations between secondary education, higher education and the workplace. Graduates will also be prepared to carry out scholarship that works at the intersections of traditional disciplines. The program can be justified on the basis of the need for faculty with this type of integrated training in the coming decades–the number of such positions has blossomed in the past three years, yet there are only a handful of doctoral programs that offer any kind of preparation in these areas. There is additional demand from industry, government, and nonprofits, where graduates will contribute to the research and policy development necessary for understanding and accommodating the human dimensions of information and communication technologies.

• Enrollment: Students will be admitted from master’s programs in Communication, English, Rhetoric, or other relevant fields.

• Curriculum: The program curriculum will provide a core grounding in traditional and emerging theories of communication in all its modes and media; it will also offer flexible elective options to permit students to develop specializations in areas such as computer mediated communication, technology and gender, technologies in organizations, literacy for the information age, human-computer interaction, instructional design, visual communication, and writing and speaking across the curriculum. The program will draw on faculty expertise in the Departments of English and Communication, specifically faculty in media studies, technical communication, rhetorical studies, organizational communication, written composition, and film studies. Teaching assistants will contribute to the teaching mission in freshman writing, technical and scientific writing, oral communication, and to the Campus Writing and Speaking Program.

We invite your responses to just two questions about this proposal: its attractiveness as a Ph.D. program, and your potential interest in it. Responding to the questions will take 60 seconds or less.