Ars Communica

The Landscape of Canadian Language: Word Nerds Gone Wild (Le paysage langagier du Canada: les mordus des mots se défoulent) Join language lovers from across Canada in Ottawa June 1 to 3 at EAC / ACR Conference 2012, taking place at the beautiful new Ottawa Convention Centre just steps from Parliament Hill.

Four pre-conference workshops and an evening reception with live entertainment kick off activities on June 1. Opening keynote speaker and award-winning author Charlotte Gray provides an invigorating start on June 2, where 35 varied sessions unfurl over two full days—including everything from editing e-books and mastering plain language, to learning how the brain processes language and discovering the importance of marketing. Most sessions are in English, but some are offered in French.

Saturday evening features the Awards Banquet at the nearby Lord Elgin Hotel, featuring a look at the lighter side of language with the Oops Awards.

On June 3, the conference wraps up with the reflections of a man who truly knows how to bring Canadians together—Canada’s longest-serving Speaker of the House of Commons, Peter Milliken.

Members of the Indexing Society of Canada / Société canadienne d’indexation are eligible for EAC member rates to Conference 2012. An early bird discount of $350 is available until April 11 ($290 for student members). After April
11, the prices go up to $430, or $370 for student members. Banquet tickets are $75. Register online at www.editors.ca (the ACR site is www.reviseurs.ca). The conference section provides many more details, including tips on where to eat while in the Ottawa-Gatineau region, where to shop, what sites to see and suggested accommodations.

Discover more at www.editors.ca (www.reviseurs.ca), and on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter (@eac_acr), where the hashtag #eac2012 has the latest on Conference 2012.

Pointing to the Future: Indexing in the Digital Age

Wondering about the impact of e-books on your indexing future? We are pleased to announce that Jan Wright will give the keynote address “E-book Indexes: The Devil Is in the Details.” Jan will bring you up to speed on changes in the publishing industry and the important work of the International Digital Publishing Forum.

During the two-day conference, held on campus at the historic University of Ottawa, visit with friends and widen your network. Speakers include Noeline Bridge on names, Cheryl Landes on the future of indexing, Max McMaster on indexing a new edition of a work, and Marion Soublière on winning Government of Canada contracts. Other speakers offer insights into thesaurus standards, indexing images, and indexing awards.

A banquet and reception will be held in the historic Munross Mansion, home to two organizations, Le Cordon Bleu Ottawa Culinary Arts Institute and the restaurant Le Cordon Bleu Signatures. The restaurant’s famous chefs will cater a private four-course dinner. The reception, which celebrates the release of Noeline Bridge’s book on indexing names, is included with the
conference registration; banquet tickets are available for $75. Only 70 tickets are available, so if you plan to attend, register early.

Reasonably priced accommodations are available in residences on campus, including two-bedroom air-conditioned suites for $120 per night, with breakfast. Share with a friend and enjoy a stay for $65 a night, plus taxes.

The full conference fee for ISC/SCI members is $275 before April 11. Members of affiliated indexing organizations, such as ASI, may register at members’ rates. Registration is now open.

Ottawa is a metropolitan destination with a bilingual population that exceeds one million. On the border between Ontario and Quebec, the Capital Region offers historical and national monuments and treasures. See the Van Gogh exhibit at the National Gallery of Canada, or visit one of the more than 30 museums in the area, including the Canadian Museum of Civilization.
If you enjoy outdoor recreation, plan to spend time by the Rideau Canal and the Ottawa River, and in nearby Gatineau Park.

For more information, go to www.indexers.ca. Follow us on Twitter @IndexersCanada. Conference hashtag is #iscconf

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Condensing a manual into an attractive quick reference guide requires a poet’s precision with language, but it also requires you to exercise skill with visual design and page layout. These short guides blend marketing with instruction, allowing you to combine text with images to pull readers into the content. Join Tom Johnson for the live Web seminar Designing Quick Reference Guides on Wednesday, 25 January, from 1:00-2:00 PM EST (GMT-5) to get started on creating them.

Long manuals are outdated, ineffective ways to teach people software. The quick reference guide (usually 2 to 6 pages), with strong visuals and a magazine-like layout, is something that end-users, project managers, and just about everyone absolutely loves. Quick reference guides should be a standard deliverable that technical communicators emphasize and prioritize in their work.

Why don’t they? Technical communicators often overlook quick reference guides because these guides require skill with layout and design, as well as talent with illustration to make them appealing. Layout, design, and illustration are often beyond the comfort level of most technical communicators.

This session will provide users with principles of design, some sample layouts they can use, and it will explain how to handle other tricky aspects of quick reference guides, such as translation, content reuse, and interactivity. The webinar will also motivate attendees to jump into this appealing format and start producing these guides with enthusiasm.

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Like any new technology, mobile has its share of confusing new jargon and concepts. Getting them wrong may be harmless … or it might lead to buying the wrong tool, hiring the wrong person, or going off in the wrong strategic direction. Get the introduction you need with the live Web seminar Introduction to the Mobile Ecology, presented by Neil Perlin on Tuesday, 24 January, from 9:00-10:00 PM EST (GMT-5).

This webinar provides an overview of the main concepts and terms in the mobile world. First, it discusses rationales for going mobile at all. It then discusses the types of mobile outputs—native apps, web apps, and ebooks—and pros and cons of each type, and then explains what an “app” is. The webinar then discusses authoring tools, focusing on those familiar to technical communicators but introducing some useful ones from outside the tech comm world. Finally, the presenter discusses design, planning, and management issues for mobile on its own and integrated into a larger tech comm environment.

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Join STC on Tuesday, 17 January, for The Art of the Demo, presented by Robert Rhyne Armstrong from 9:00-10:00 PM EST (GMT-5). Did you know that the success of your demonstration can be determined in the first minute? This webinar walks you through how to prepare software, your system, and yourself to give the best possible demonstration for your audience. After this webinar, you’ll know how to prepare for, organize, and deliver a demonstration, including how to take into account audience-based factors in your planning. Tell the story the right way!

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Wish you had more time to deeply understand customer reasoning? Join Indi Young and STC for the live Web seminar Mental Model Diagrams: Supportive Content for Specific Folks and get the understanding you need.

Mental model diagrams provide a clear roadmap of where to invest your energies and where you shouldn’t. Derive information architecture, head off arguments, and get everyone on the same page. Stretch your limited resources by building the diagram over time, depending on core behaviors that will last decades.

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Every few years, new computer interaction paradigms are introduced. Mediated communication networks have become mainstream. Moving from the human-computer interaction to the human-network interaction, socio-technical design looks at the exchange of information within mediated communication networks, and sets the groundwork for group interaction within these environments. Join Phylise Banner in examining this, with the live Web seminar Socio-Technical Design: The Future of the Online Community, taking place on Wednesday, 14 December from 1:00-2:00 PM EST (GMT-5).

Socio-technical design research comes from the early 1990s, when computer networking became widely possible. Researchers are now looking to the principles of socio-technical design to explore relationships in human networks which rely on technology. These principles are critical to the development of viable online communities, especially with the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, which have shifted content creation to the user community. Learn about the field of socio-technical design and how to incorporate these design principles into the design and development of online technical communication user communities.

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Tom Johnson tackles help content with Organizing Help Content: Breaking Out of Topic-Based Hierarchies on Thursday, 1 December, from 4:00-5:00 PM EST (GMT-5). Organizing help content so that users can both find and learn information often requires technical writers to break out of the traditional topic-based folders and move toward faceted navigation, search engine optimization, interface text, level-based help, and other methods for organizing content.

Organizing content is the heart what technical writers do. In organizing content, technical writers often have two competing questions: how can I help users find the information? And how can I help users learn the information? Complete answers to these questions pull the technical writer in two different directions: information architecture and instructional design. Regardless of these different directions, a good technical writer has to consider and account for these two purposes and organize the help accordingly. Maintaining the status quo of topic-based hierarchical folders often fails to achieve either purpose. This webinar will present a variety of alternative methods of organization that technical writers can implement to break out of topic-based hierarchies and create more usable help.

Original link: http://notebook.stc.org/upcoming-webinar-on-1-december-organizing-help-content-breaking-out-of-topic-based-hierarchies

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The field of business process management, or business process modeling, is becoming more prevalent. A business process analyst must be able to analyze, compare, and simulate existing (“as-is”) processes with future (“to-be”) processes that helps in identifying areas of improvement for the product, business, or enterprise.

Join Jackie Damrau for the live Web seminar Technical Communicator in a BPM World on Wednesday, 30 November, from 1:00-2:00 PM EST (GMT-5), for a session that shares the experience of a technical communicator’s transition to a business process analyst. Damrau will share the similarities between each position, show samples from a business process modeling (BPM) tool for visually documenting business processes, and provide a resource list for use in expanding your BPM awareness.

Original link: http://notebook.stc.org/upcoming-webinar-on-30-november-technical-communicator-in-a-bpm-world

A raven is like a writing desk because they both have inky quills…. but a radio documentary is not a news report. In this exclusive workshop, David Gutnick will talk about what makes a good documentary idea – and how he goes from that initial idea to collecting the material, to the writing, recording and mixing that produces the final documentary that we hear on the radio or podcast.

Is radio documentary an under-appreciated art form? Are iPads and Twitter pushing radio docs into obsolescence? Or does digital technology breathe new life into this thought-provoking art from? Bring your ideas, your enthusiasm and your questions and prepare to be inspired!

David Gutnick has been making radio documentaries for CBC radio for over 25 years…..He’s travelled to China to meet underground dissidents, to India with a Canadian medical tourist, and to Haiti where he lived with a family after the earthquake.

This event is free for PWAC members, $5 for the general public, and $3 for students with valid ID.

The Where & When

Tuesday, December 6, 2011, 7-9 PM
Atwater Library, 1200 Atwater Avenue, Westmount
This event is free for PWAC members, $5 for the general public, and $3 for students with valid ID

Professional Writers Association of Canada
www.pwac.ca

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On Thursday, 3 November, join Neil Perlin from 4:00-5:00 PM EDT (GMT-4) for Mobile Content: Single-Sourcing to the Max. Mobile information is becoming more common and companies are starting to look at it for their own specific needs.

We usually think of app development in regard to mobile, but much of a company’s information does not require an app; just reformatting and recoding to run efficiently on mobile devices. This can be done now using common help authoring tools, specifically Flare and RoboHelp. This session discusses how those tools support output to mobile, and what controls have to be applied to the content, and how, to ensure flexible content.

Original link: http://notebook.stc.org/upcoming-webinar-on-3-november-mobile-content-single-sourcing-to-the-max/

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The rapid rise of collaboration has changed the way technical communicators develop documentation. Find out how, with Larry Kunz and the live Web seminar Documentation in a Collaborative World on Wednesday, 26 October, from 1:00-2:00 PM EDT (GMT-4). With this webinar, you’ll learn new best practices for editing, reviewing, legacy documentation, and localization.

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PWAC Quebec would like to invite you to their Pub Night on Wednesday, October 26, 2011, at the Irish Embassy Pub from 7-9 pm.

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FrameMaker guru Sholo Perets is offering two free Framemaker & Acrobat workshops on October 25 and 27, 2011.

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As a technical communicator, you should be on top of current trends, especially those that have made real impacts on your culture, like social media and social networking. You should be able to know it, own it, and make it work for you. Find out how with the live Web seminar Don’t Suck at Social Media, presented by Robert Rhyne Armstrong on 13 October from 4:00-5:00 PM EDT (GMT-4). The name may be silly, but the content is real! He’ll show you:

• Why social media and networking should be important to all technical communicators
• How to identify what sucks and doesn’t suck in social media
• How you can use social media and social networking in the workplace
• How you can leverage social media to help you advance your career

Join Armstrong to be entertained, enlightened, and equipped with what you’ll need to stop sucking at social media.

Original link: http://notebook.stc.org/upcoming-webinar-on-13-october-dont-suck-at-social-media/

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We often hear that it is critical that we speak the language of our executives, focusing on the dollars and cents of the projects that we engage in. Pair that goal with the fact that technical communication is often under-valued in organizations that focus more on R&D and technology. Learn how to plan for and measure against metrics with Vic Passion and the live Web seminar Metrics that Demonstrate the Value of Technical Communication, Wednesday, 12 October from 1:00-2:00 PM EDT (GMT-4).

Before you pitch your exciting new proposal to senior leadership, have you calculated the projected return on investment (ROI)? Do you have a “before” picture so that you can point to a successful ROI after project completion? This webinar introduces the benefits of measuring the return on investment (ROI) for technical communication projects. Through scenarios, participants will plan for ways to measure the ROI of fictional projects.

In taking this webinar, you will learn how to define return on investment (ROI) and metrics, describe the benefits of metrics, and describe Kirkpatricks levels of evaluation. You’ll also learn how to choose the proper metric to use and calculate ROI. Learn how to demonstrate the value of your contributions to senior management and executives with Vic Passion and STC.

Original link: http://notebook.stc.org/upcoming-webinar-on-12-october-metrics-that-demonstrate-the-value-of-technical-communication/

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What is knowledge transfer? Who is involved? What roles and activities are currently prominent in the field? What theories and research findings are currently dominating the field? How might technical communicators become involved and make a contribution? What roles might they fill and what activities might they engage in?

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Join highly rated 2011 Summit presenter Marta Rauch to learn proven strategies for continuous improvement to products and processes, with Successful Strategies for Continuous Improvement, presented on Wednesday, 14 September from 1:00-2:00 PM EDT (GMT-4).

Gain valuable tips, practical insights, and best practices for increasing customer satisfaction and raising your department’s value to the corporation. Whether you need to reduce time and costs, improve quality, or increase your team’s contribution to the bottom line, you’ll come away with effective strategies for implementing key improvements to your documentation projects.

Original link: http://notebook.stc.org/upcoming-webinar-on-14-september-successful-strategies-for-continuous-improvement/

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A major factor in a technical communication professional’s success is asking questions—the right questions. Most professions learn oral-questioning skills by practicing, defining, and developing questions that will elicit the right information they need to do their jobs. Join Elizabeth (Bette) Frick for Oral Questioning Skills for the Technical Communicator, Thursday, 8 September from 4:00-5:00 PM for this lively and interactive webinar on learning to ask the right questions.

If you’ve ever suffered expensive consequences because you didn’t ask the right question or you framed your question poorly, this webinar is for you!

Original link: http://notebook.stc.org/upcoming-webinar-on-8-september-oral-questioning-skills-for-the-technical-communicator/

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So many companies create training and then wonder why it doesn’t stick. One reason is that the Web has changed how we acquire information. We expect it faster and training is no exception. Join Donte Ormsby Wednesday, 7 September from 1:00-2:00 PM EDT (GMT-4) for the live Web seminar Make It Snappy—Web-Based Reference Guides and learn simple principles you can follow to create fast, on-demand Web-based Quick Reference Guides.

With Donte, you’ll identify traditional methods of training and instances where on-demand Quick Reference Guides may better achieve the operational objectives, identify the basic elements of a successful Web-based on-demand eLearning interface, and learn techniques for breaking down large amounts of information into “bite-sized” pieces suitable for eLearning. Learn how to make training that sticks with Donte Ormsby and STC.

Original link: http://notebook.stc.org/upcoming-webinar-on-7-september-make-it-snappy%E2%80%94web-based-reference-guides/