Go west, technical communicator, go west

Well, the time has come to hop on a flying metal tube with wings and travel to the other side of the world (almost literally!) to hear what’s hot and what’s not in technical communication.

I’ve been to the WritersUA conference twice and both times have enjoyed it thoroughly. This time I’m bringing friends with me, as my co-blogger TanjaK and two other colleagues are coming with me.

Let’s see if we can blog from Portland – expect to see at least one tiny blog entry. If we’re too jet-lagged to correctly write difficult words such as “web  2.0″ or “component content management”, we won’t be here before week 13.

 Hope to see you in Portland!

The all-knowing technical writer

What does writing for reuse mean to a technical writer? I have lately been thinking about this, and it has also been discussed in the Writing for reuse forum in The Content Wrangler Community.

Well, it means a lot of things, but one implication is that you need to think outside the box. You need to become all-knowing, all-powerful.

Emerging technologies and human nature

The WritersUA annual conference is quickly approaching. One of its tracks is Emerging technologies, and this year six of its ten sessions have a web 2.0 theme. (You’ll be seeing me in most of these sessions.)

In one year, web 2.0 has moved to mainstream. I heard my first web 2.0 & technical communication presentations in the IEEE PCS conference in Seattle in 2007. There have been others before that but these were the “firsts” for me.

I’ve been teaching a web design course at the University of Tampere for several years, so moving from web 1.0 (HTML + people as readers) to web 1.5 (XHTML + people as contributors) to web 2.0 (people as content creators) has all been part of a natural growth process for me. Because of my background, it feels very natural for me to upgrade technical communication to technical communication 2.0 as well.

This may not be the case for all technical communicators. Web 2.0 applied to technical communication may make technical communicators fear of losing control – something very natural for us humans (just think how people behave on the web and how hypertext works). If technical communicators have spent their career hunting bits and pieces of information from specifications, software, hardware and various reluctant SMEs and putting that together as a complete information product, relinquishing that control to someone else may be hard.

Should we fear the users taking over our jobs? Are we all becoming editors and moderators of user-generated content? Who are really the experts, technical communicators or the users ? (For an interesting discussion on this matter, see the User-Generated Content vs Experts thread at Slashdot.)

Advance personalised learning

The National Academy of Engineering has listed the grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century. One item on the list is advance personalised learning.

The current situation is described this way:

“teaching has traditionally followed a one-size-fits-all approach to learning, with a single set of instructions provided identically to everybody in a given class, regardless of differences in aptitude or interest.”

The same is true with the static documentation provided by companies – our teaching of how to use the product or service.

How to provide a more flexible, beneficial learning experience? The solution is seen in “‘personalized learning,’ in which instruction is tailored to a student’s individual needs”. Sound familiar? In technical communication, it is already possible to take the first steps towards dynamic content delivery, or providing dynamic, personalised configurations of (static) content.

Are you already doing this? How can we improve the personalisation further, and take into account aspects such as different learning styles?

How to achieve reuse?

Some time ago, the Rockley Blog talked about identical vs derivative reuse.

“When content is reused identically, it is reused without change. Derivative content is reused with change, content stays related to the original component.”

Often content cannot be used for multiple purposes directly as such. In her article, Rockley focused on two issues, the channel and the audience, and how addressing these issues does not mean content could not be reused.

To reuse content effectively, as much as possible of your content should be global and generic. Global content can be published in different contexts as-is, without changes (either identically or through filtered reuse like conditional text). Differentiate only where you must. These must-haves depend a lot on the item you are documenting, the environment for which the content is created, and also on the legacy practices in your organisation.

There are certain methods you can use to achieve reuse, and I’ll discuss two of those briefly here: information design (info architecture of your content) and conditional text.