ETD Guide/Introduction/Helping students be better prepared as knowledge workers
Most documents created today are prepared with the aid of computers. Many universities have "writing across the curriculum" programs, to ensure that students can create electronic documents that convey their knowledge and understanding, and demonstrate their ability to participate in the scholarly communication process. To function as effective knowledge workers, students must go beyond word processing skills that lead only to paper documents. They must learn to work with others, to share their findings by transmitting their results to others. This teamwork makes it feasible to collaborate, to co-author works, and thus to participate in research groups or teams, which are common throughout the research world (at the very least involving a faculty advisor and graduate student author). It also makes it pertinent for students to participate in common activities of modern researchers. Thus, they can be trained to submit a proposal electronically (e.g., as is required by the US's National Science Foundation) and to submit a paper to a conference (where papers are uploaded by authors, and downloaded by editors/reviewers, as part of the collection and selection activities).
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