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Danielle M. Villegas‘s insight:
I saw this advertised on my Facebook feed, and found it rather clever. I think this is a cool step in integrating educational games for kids while blending virtual reality and reality together. It’s a different concept that I hadn’t seen in quite the same way before.
This appears to be a Kickstarter-type project, so check out the page, and see if it’s something that you think will be good. My son is a little too old for this sort of thing, but I can see how in time, some of the games could be extended for older kids and teens, as well as adults.
This is a cool way to use an iPad or mobile device for educational purposes.
Amtrak announced plans to launch a high-speed Wi-Fi network to serve passengers on its Northeast Corridor.
Danielle M. Villegas‘s insight:
Hooray! This is the train line that goes through my neighborhood (the trains run behind the yards of my neighbors across the street, about 100 yards away). I also know a lot of commuters on these Northeast Corridor lines, so I’m sure they’ll love it. If I ever end up as one of those commuters, I will be very happy for this as well.
This is a great infographic brought to my attention by Christopher Pappas. I can vouch for many of the results of some of these results from personal experience, being that I earned my Masters degree from an online program. I hope that I’ll be able to do another online program in the future–that’s how much I believe in online learning!
The Turing test has been passed by a robot named Eugene. So, asks Alex Hern, is it time to pledge fealty to the machines?
Danielle M. Villegas‘s insight:
I find this story interesting. While we talk a lot about content localization and translation, as well as about content in and of itself, this is interesting to see how content is being used for artificial intelligence. Part-way through reading the transcript, I think I might have picked up that this was not a human. I’ve spoken/written with enough people whose written language skills weren’t good to know. Still, it’s a pretty close attempt and worth noting.
It makes me wonder if in time, technical communicators will be responsible for writing the content for artificial intelligence. Maybe. Time will tell, so it’s important to take note of this milestone.
An ENIGMA coding machine, found at the Computer History Museum (photo credit: TechCommGeekMom)
Technical communicators truly do have skills that most others don’t have, and it’s a simple set of skills. We take for granted that we can display writing and documentation clearly.
What brought this to my attention most recently–as if I didn’t know this fact already–was dealing with emails from work. I was trying to interpret emails from several educated, fairly influential people from the company, and I didn’t have the faintest idea what they wanted because of unclear directions. Granted, it didn’t help that the email system that we are forced to use at the moment (Lotus Notes) is not exactly user-friendly when it comes to formatting content within an email. Even when I could wade through the quagmire of formatting fogginess, what was being requested of me was not completely clear, and I had to send emails back clarifying the requests.
Although we are often required to work on reducing the number of words used to relay our messages and act as translators of content, it shouldn’t be at the cost of miscommunication. Sometimes having more is less, because more detailed directions can provide less back-and-forth of emails, thus more efficiency in getting the work or task done. From a customer perspective, having accurate documentation–even if it’s long–can reduce call centers help requests significantly.
A great example of making sure that content–whether it’s an email or any other documentation–is efficient is when I worked at the Princeton University Press. The CMS I had to use was an in-house Frankenstein monster of an application, but it worked for better or worse. There was no printed documentation, so when I first started working for the company, I took lots of detailed notes to make sure I understood how to do tasks on the system. I left the company after a few months, but left my notes for my successor. About two years later, my successor left, and my former manager asked me back to fill in temporarily, since she knew my contract had ended, and my ramp-up time wouldn’t be the same as if a new person was coming in during the pinch of getting the new fall catalog posted online. Sure enough, the two-year-old notes were still at the desk, and I could still follow them clearly. (This was when I knew that techcomm was truly my calling!) This reduced the number of times I had to ask my manager to refresh my memory on how to do certain tasks. As a result, the fall catalog information went up quickly, and everyone was happy. Mind you, the documentation I had was pages and pages long–all handwritten, no less, but it was accurate enough that I didn’t need much help in re-learning the system. My second successor was able to use these notes as well, since they were so accurate.
As I said, we take for granted that we have the ability to write cogently and clearly since we all do it on a regular basis. It’d be nice if more people can get the basics of this skill down so that we technical communicators can do our jobs more efficiently. The fact that we can decipher and clarify messages better than anyone should put us in the same ranks of ENIGMA coders, in my mind!
TechCommGeekMom 
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