Long manuals are outdated, ineffective ways to teach people software.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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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

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

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/

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.

This session will cover the latest thinking from published articles and from feedback the presenter has received after presenting this material in several venues. It will describe changes that are affecting the way documentation projects are managed, with an emphasis on the resulting challenges and ways that people in our profession are meeting those challenges. Learn how to identify new best practices for managing editing, reviewing, legacy documentation, and localization, with Larry Kunz and STC!

Original link: http://notebook.stc.org/upcoming-webinar-on-26-october-documentation-in-a-collaborative-world/

PWAC Quebec will hold a draw for a free Student Membership, so if you know any university types that are considering a career by the word, please pass this message along.

The Habs vs Flyers game will probably be on RDS, but don’t let that stop you. The pen is mightier than the puck, you know.

PWAC Quebec chapter
pwacquebec [at] gmail [dot] com

Liven up your PDFs with FrameMaker-to-Acrobat TimeSavers/Assistants
Tuesday, October 25

https://student.gototraining.com/34gl0/register/2519604899837708032

Liven up static documentation (software/hardware) and engage readers through multimedia (such as video simulations and demonstrations of software processes and functions), interactive 3D, information displayed on demand (popups/rollovers/layers) and more. All features demonstrated in the webinar are specified in FrameMaker and are present automatically in the resulting PDFs, with no post-creation actions in Acrobat.

Better PDFs with FrameMaker-to-Acrobat TimeSavers
Thursday, October 27
https://student.gototraining.com/34gl0/register/8555732421304807936

Demonstration/discussion of techniques for improving and enriching PDFs authored in FrameMaker, and how to achieve these goals automatically and consistently, using TimeSavers general settings and/or TimeSavers hypertext markers placed in individual FrameMaker files.

(Webinars are not FM/Acrobat version-specific)