Tech comm MOOC by STC not happening apparently

The STC’s MOOC which I announced last month is apparently not happening. It was supposed to let participants explore the field of technical communications, and I was scheduled to teach the introductory module starting 30 September.

My assumption that the MOOC is not happening is based on the facts I have at this point:

• There has been no announcement by the STC beyond an introductory one-page article in the July/August issue of the STC’s intercom magazine.
• There is no place to sign up for the MOOC and to get specific information.
• There is no content in the MOOC’s staging area.

I’m really sorry that it’s not happening.

I think we’ve lost a great opportunity to let people know what a varied and vibrant profession technical communication is. That we are mainly about improving relationships with customers and users where people meet products and services – not about spelling and serial commas.

At a time when professions and job requirements develop rapidly around us, it is important to prove that technical communicators do add value and play important roles in defining and implementing content strategies and user experiences – and this MOOC would have been a great chance to do just that.

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Join us for a tech comm intro MOOC by STC

This fall, the STC will run a free 5-week MOOC to allow everybody online to explore the field of technical communications – and I’m excited to be teaching the introductory module!

The full syllabus

The MOOC will highlight the roles and responsibilities of technical communication professionals through 5 specializations in 5 weekly modules, starting on 30 September:

1. Introduction to technical communication, by myself
2. Content development and delivery, by Bernard Aschwanden
3. Content strategy and lifecycle, by Mollye Barrett
4. Instructional design, by Dana West and Phylise Banner
5. Usability and user assistance, by Ray Gallon and David Farbey

The introductory module

My module in the first week will serve as a general introduction to the field of technical communication.

What will you learn?

After the module, you should be able to

• Define purpose, benefits and tasks of technical communication
• Argue the value of technical communication for companies and clients
• Describe the daily job and career of a technical communicator
• Identify the elements of effective technical communication
• Describe and develop basic core skills of a technical communicator

What do you do?

Your week will start with some assigned texts and videos to introduce the topics.

You will see how all the pieces fit together in an online lesson on Wednesday afternoon (US time). The outline will be the same as for the readings; it looks something like this:

1. What is technical communication? – Definitions and trends
   • A changing definition, from technical writing to business problem-solving
   • Recent trends (mobile and embedded help, social media and user-generated content)
2. Why have technical communication? – Benefits and business cases
   • How technical communication benefits users and companies and products
   • What only technical communication can do (USPs)
3. Who is a technical communicator? – Tasks and career
   • A day in the life
   • Personality and aptitudes
   • A versatile career path
4. How does a technical communicator work? – Skills and expertise
   • Know your audience through audience analysis and personas
   • Learn from subject-matter experts by research and collaboration
   • Write task-oriented topics using task analysis and modular topic types
   • Edit modular documentation for content and language

You will have a chance to try your hand on technical communications in a couple of learning activities (a/k/a assignments) around creating and editing documentation.

Oof, that’s a lot, no?

Well, yes and no. Yes, it is a wide area, but the purpose is to give you a taste of our versatile profession! I’ll start with the larger picture to illustrate the value of tech comm and how it can be cool and profitable, before diving into a few core skills in depth. The four later modules can afford to be a little more focused.

More information

More information will be available shortly on the web sites of STC which is sponsoring this MOOC and on CourseSites which is furnishing the platform for it.

In the meantime, check out Mollye Barrett talking about the MOOC and her module in a 1:30 video.

What do you think?

Would this be interesting to participate in? What other topics would you expect to see covered in the intro module? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll see if I can address your opints, either in the comments or in the MOOC module itself!

tekom Danmark is off to a good start!

tekom Danmark, the Danish country group of Europe’s tech comm association, is off to a good start, thanks to good attendance and enthusiasm during the foundation event in Odense on 5 November.

The afternoon combined official speeches with two presentations about topic-based authoring, each followed by a lively discussion. A get-together over dinner concluded the event in high spirits (and I don’t mean alcohol).

What does tekom Danmark do?

At 15:30, Per Sørensen, head of the Initiative Committee for tekom Danmark, kicked off the event that brought together around 40 technical communicators who represented a wide variety of industries and services from all across Denmark.

Michael Fritz, CEO of tekom (the German association), presented what tekom is and what it does. Denmark is not the first country group – there are already country groups in Switzerland, Italy, Romania and Turkey.

Holger Thater, a German tekom member based in Hamburg, will act as mentor to tekom Danmark. He explained specifically what tekom Danmark will be all about:

• The general mission is what you would expect from a professional association: To provide networking opportunities, to facilitate exchange of knowledge, to offer training and qualification and to generally raise the profile of the profession.
• To ensure that a tekom country group has a chance to succeed, it takes the explicit support of 10 tekom members in that country and a so-called initiative committee who works with tekom to found the country group and get it up and running.
• tekom supports country groups by assigning a full-time employee who is the official liaison to tekom (Germany) and a country mentor who offers guidance and, let’s say: spiritual support.
• tekom also offers a nascent country group an organizational framework of a start-up timeline and some budget with which to offer 4 events per year that are open to tekom country group members.
• Interested parties are welcome to attend the events and can become a country group member for free during the first year.

After laying out the framework and procedures, Michael Fritz officially founded tekom Danmark.

Presentations and discussions

After a short break, I had the honor and pleasure to present one of the two sessions. I spoke about features and benefits of task orientation and topic-based authoring. As it turned out, aproximately half of the attendees actually use topic-based authoring, so I refocused my presentation.

Rather than going to great lengths about what topics are and how they work, I emphasised how the company I work for uses a DITA-derived information model to write topics. My presentation segued into a lively discussion about technical opportunities which our structure and our tools offer. Strategic opportunities and limitations also came up. I was glad to offer attendees a glimpse at processes and tools that work for us, and I’m happy to see that the comparison was engaging and enlightening to many.

Bo Brandt, a self-employed technical communications consultant, shared a case study where he accompanied a project from unstructured FrameMaker to Topic-based authoring with Arbortext. It was a perfect complement: His project emphasised translation more than our situation, and he had several interesting lessons and pitfalls to share. The tireless audience engaged Bo in questions about his strategy, tactics and tools.

A little before 19:00, we gathered for a group photograph, dinner and drinks. (Okay, so a little alcohol…)

What’s next?

Personally, I’m already looking forward to the next actions of tekom Danmark! Since I’m working for a Danish software company, tekom Danmark is almost like homecoming to a place I didn’t have until now. 🙂

A next event is not yet scheduled, but the idea is to move around Denmark, so look for events in København, Aalborg, Århus or the like. To keep us busy until the next event, we have already formed a tekom Danmark LinkedIn group which is moderated, but easy to join.

If you’re a technical communicator working in Denmark or if you are working with technical communicators in Denmark, I highly recommend that you join the LinkedIn group and check out tekom Danmark. It’s been great to spend an afternoon with such a diverse group of enthusiatic colleagues, and I think we’ve seen the beginning of a fruitful network!

Leah Guren’s Fish Tale at TCUK12

After opening remarks by conference organizer David Farbey, Leah Guren‘s keynote relevant and entertaining keynote address presented several lessons from the animal world:  A Fish Tale: Improve your Career by Watching Fish!

1. Take a leap of faith – like salmon. It simply takes some guts and a little bit of faith that tech comm is here to stay, else you won’t be able to make a long-term plan and get behind it.
2. Stay in school for better chances of survival – once you took that leap, keep honing your skills, keep developing. There are lots of ways and many don’t require the same amount of time and money as going to a conference, whether it’s e-zines, forums, user groups or webinars (some excellent ones are actually free!) Be sure to make your professional development part of your regular work schedule.
3. Invest in better PR – the difference between a carp and coi is mainly the prize tag – which is thanks to better PR for the coi. Communicate your value that you bring to the company and to its customers. We know how much words matter, so we can do better than calling ourselves technical writers. “Information architects”, “content strategists”, even “technical comunicators” can make more money.
4. Find the right stress – (sorry, I forgot how this related to fish… 😉 ) Tackle your fears, get a new challenge and pick the kind of stress where you’re still in control, feel stimulated and can grow.
5. Active swim in a larger pond – because like a carp you will grow (professionally) in relation to the size of your “pond”. Find opportunities for growth how you can be the expert in your environment.

I’m sure I forgot a couple of Leah’s lessons. Nevertheless, I want to add an additional lesson that I’ve found important: Know the secret of the birds. That means know how your enemies tick, so they don’t eat you. Or if they’re not threatening: Seek heroes outside of your immediate field. Sure, you won’t be able to fly like a bird, but you can still find birds inspiring.

How to disrupt techcomm in your organization?

If you need to “disrupt” your tech comm content, I believe it’s more beneficial to integrate content across the organization than just to get tech comm to become more business-oriented or more like marketing.

The idea comes out of a worthy new collaborative project Sarah O’Keefe launched last week, Content Strategy 101: Transform Technical Content into a Business Asset. (This blog post is based on a couple of comments I’ve left on the site.)

Tech comm goes to business school

A recurring discussion is that tech comm needs to be more business-like to be justifiable in the future, not only on this blog but also elsewhere. Proponents of this view definitely have a point, if only because tech comm is often seen as a cost center and finds it hard to claim a return on investment.

I think, however, that this view is detrimental to all involved parties:

• Tech comm risks to abandon its benefits to users and quality standards in an attempt to be “more like marketing”.
• Managers may risk permanent damage to the documentation of their product without solving the bigger problem.

Breaking down all silos

The bigger problem often is that most content production is inefficient – because it occurs in parallel silos. Many companies have gotten good at making their core business more efficient. But they often neglect secondary production of content which remains inefficient and fragmented.

I’ve seen several companies where marketing, technical communications and training (to name just three areas) waste time and money. Due to inefficient, silo’ed processes, tools and objectives, they create similar, overlapping content:

• Marketing and tech comm create and maintain separate content to explain the benefits of a product.
• Tech comm and training write separate instruction procedures for manuals and training materials.

Once companies wake up to these redundancies, all content-producing units will face pressure to streamline content and make it easier to produce and reuse. This will revolutionize corporate content production and publishing.

Quo vadis, technical communicators?

I think this issue raises two questions for technical communicators.

The strategic question is:

Which kind of content disruption is more beneficial for the organisation and for customers: Folding tech comm into marketing or integrating all content with a corporate content strategy?

The answer depends on several issues, among them:

• Does your content serve the product, the company or the customer?
• Is there a business case for a corporate content strategy?

The tactical question is:

What’s the role of technical communicators in this content disruption: Are they the movers or the movees? Are they shaping the strategy or following suit?

The answer again depends on several issues:

• What is your personality, clout and position in the organization?
• Which team has the most mature content and processes to be a candidate to lead any kind of strategic change in content?

I think tech comm can lead a content strategy, especially if and when the tech comm team knows more about content than marketing or training or other content producers.

So what’s it like to present a tech comm webinar?

Presenting a webinar isn’t much different from other “public” presentations, but the format has a few quirky effects and demands of its own.

On 29 February, I had the chance to present my first webinar. As with many first-time experiences, the newness of it all felt a little weird, there were some glitches, but altogether, it went alright. I think. I hope. Because I have had virtually no feedback.

Missing feedback

And that is already the most important difference to other presentations: You have next to no idea how you’re coming across. I never knew how vital even subtle cues are for presentations before a live audience. Does the audience follow along or do I need to be faster? Or slower? Frowns can signal that a point or a  joke didn’t get across. Genernal “antsiness” means I can pick up the pace a bit. Attentive smiles or chuckles indicate that I’m connecting. A webinar offers none of that.

The best I’ve seen other, better webinar presenters do is to ask at the beginning whether attendees can hear the audio and can see the slides changing. But after that, as a presenter, you’re on your own. It feels like talking into a tin-can telephone – without knowing whether the string is still taut.

Tin can phone, from http://www.wikihow.com

Fortunately, my webinar heroine Sarah O’Keefe had alerted me to this lack of immediate feedback. So I could identify it – but that didn’t make coping with it any less bewildering.

I think I forged ahead too fast and with too much urgency in the beginning, as if constantly groping for attention. Then I reminded myself to take a long, deep breath between my major sections.

The curse of convenient isolation

I think it’s also worth keeping in mind that even a live webinar catches everyone in a different time, place and context. What makes webinars so easy and convenient to attend, turns out to be a bit of a curse. I was presenting at 7 p.m. in Germany from my kitchen. Attendees in the US caught the webinar in the late morning or around noon, at the (home) office, I’m guessing.

This means you have less of a common context on which to build a dramatic arc or a feeling of community. In this regard, a webinar feels rather like broadcasting live television.

By contrast, some of the best live presentations I’ve witnessed gathered all attendees together, took them on a transformative trip and dropped them off at a different mental place. These were communal experiences which impart knowledge and change your perspective and rouse a group to action. I don’t think I’ve ever had that feeling in a webinar. And after my own experience, I don’t think it can be done, unless participants know each other better and have some way to interact with each other.

My webinar about getting ahead as a lone writer relies mainly on information sharing, but both times when I presented it at conferences, I was delighted to know that some attendees walked away with a feeling of “I’m not alone; I can do something about this, because others could, too.” Whether my webinar was successful along these lines, I don’t know.

Your turn

If you’ve considered presenting a webinar or have done so already, I’d love to hear your expectations and experiences. Feel free to leave a comment.

Beef up tech comm skills with free webinars

If one of your new year’s resolutions has been to improve your tech comm skills, here’s your chance. Industry experts offer several webinars in upcoming weeks to start you off. Many of them are free, so you really have no excuse! 🙂

Scriptorium

Scriptorium’s free webinars cover industry trends and technologies, such as:

• Content strategy in technical communication
• Trends in technical communication, 2012
• HTML5 and its impact on technical communication

I’ve attended many Scriptorium webinars and have learned a lot from them. They are substantial and presented well. If you’ve missed one, you can catch up on the canned recordings.

Oh, and Sarah O’Keefe, who does most of them, has just taken #2 on MindTouch’s list of the Most Influential in #Techcomm and #ContentStrategy.

Comtech Services

JoAnn Hackos’ free webinars (announced on the DITA Writer blog) are dedicated to moving towards DITA in a 3-part series of “Crossing the Chasm with DITA”.

Hyper/Word

Neil Perlin’s free webinars are usually more tool-oriented, so they’re hands-on training sessions on topics such as:

• MadCap Flare Mediums
• Using Help Authoring Tools as CMSs
• GUI Mobile App Authoring Tools
• Creating Mobile Apps with Viziapps
• Mobile documentation in Flare and RoboHelp

STC

STC’s webinars bring together the widest roster of industry experts, but they’re not free. They offer up to 3 webinars per week. Here are just the next six through the end of January:

• Mental Model Diagrams: Supportive Content for Specific Folks
• The Art of the Demo
• Getting Yourself Into Print
• Introduction to the Mobile Ecology
• Designing Quick Reference Guides
• Successful Strategies for Continuous Improvement

If you’re an STC member, sign up until January 31 and get $20 off on each webinar.

MadCap

MadCap’s free webinars are strong on tools and processes. Currently they only have one on offer about migration to Flare. But you can always check out the recordings for free. The tool-agnostic ones are quite valuable, even if you don’t use MadCap’s products.

Adobe

Adobe’s free webinars also mix tool-specific training with general topics. You do need an “Adobe Account” to register. Coming in January are:

• Key Trends in Software User Assistance: An Expert’s Perspective – Part 1
• Top 10 key trends shaping the Technical Communication industry of tomorrow: An industry research
• Why upgrade from older versions of RoboHelp (X5, 6, 7 or 8) to RoboHelp 9? What is the value proposition for your business?
• How to optimally leverage a Content Management System as a Technical Communicator
• What is the future of indexing for technical documentation?

If you know of additional tech comm webinars, feel free to leave a comment.