Last night, Aaron and I gave a presentation on podcasting at the monthly meeting of the Toronto chapter of the STC. Overall, it went quite well. We had an attentive and interested audience, I think we made a good connection with them, and we got some great questions.
This was the first time we tried doing a Presentation Zen-style talk, and for the most part it worked. We tried telling a story around our slides, and our back-and-forth style of delivery seemed to work quite well. Did we make any mistakes? Yes. But we know what mistakes those were and will work on correcting them and on refining our delivery in the future.
Again, the audience helped. They were attentive, and seemed to be genuinely interested in what we had to say. Plus, they were willing forgive our gaffes.
If you’re interested in the slides and notes, check out the presentations archive on our Web site, or visit our page on SlideShare.
Aaron and I will be presenting at the May meeting of the Toronto chapter of the Society for Technical Communication tonight. The presentation is titled The Ears Have It: Podcasting in the Enterprise and Out.
This presentation will:
- Outline the mechanics of podcasting.
- Look at a couple of popular training and educational podcasts on the Web. We’ll analyze why these podcasts are successful, and how you can use the same techniques with your audio materials.
- Explain how podcasts can:
- help maintain an ongoing dialogue about a particular domain or topic
- are a great way to disseminate new developments
- are available anytime, anywhere, at the user’s convenience
- make supplementary material more interesting
If you’re in the Toronto area, why not drop by? You can find out how to get to the venue here.
Another DocTrain West conference has come and gone. This year, the focus was on social media/Web 2.0 and its impact on technical communication. But don’t think that it was all Facebook all the time. There were other, more traditional topics covered, too.
(A few more posts about the sessions will be online in the next couple of days. Keep checking back.)
You may or may not be asking that question. If you are, the reasons are pretty simple: Aaron had to return to Toronto the night before. It wasn’t an emergency, just how his work schedule played out. My wife was in Vancouver with me, and I wanted to spend some extra time with her. So, we went island hopping.
On the other hand, there were some interesting post-conference sessions that day. I’m going to try to link to one or two reviews of them once I find those links. Stay tuned.
Day three was an interesting one, if only because I attended a very good session and a pair of keynotes, and missed one or two sessions that I wanted to attend in order to do a couple of podcast interviews.
Today’s keynote was done by Joseph Gollner of Stilo International. He discussed XML and content technologies, mainly by drawing parallels to the documents from antiquity and beyond.
I decided to overdose on wikis today, and there were three sessions that gave me that fix. I was able to get some interesting perspectives on wikis and how they’re being used.
Scott and I have finally worked through the technical bugaboos to get our live blogging capabilities up and running. Technology is a wonderful thing.
The first day of DocTrain West 2008 featured four 3.5 hour long pre-conference sessions.
I attended the one led by Berry Braster of Tedopres. Braster introduced the concept of Simplified Technical English (STE). One of his main points was that technical communicators are writing for a global audience — many of them non-native speakers — and not for ourselves. The keys creating documentation for this audience are:
- Be clear
- Be concise
- Use verbs and terminology consistently
- Be concise
- Be specific
When the procedures don’t quite match the product
06 May
Posted by Scott as authoring, documentation, technical communication
One of the pitfalls of being a technical communicator is that you tend to pay closer attention to the documentation that others write. Sometimes, you don’t even realize that you’re doing it. And often you find one or more flaws in the documentation. Read the rest of this entry »
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