Dair Communications – TechCommGeekMom

This past week, I presented a workship at the IEEE ProComm Conference, which was held in Limerick, Ireland. It was a great experience, and different from other conferences I have attended thusfar (a blog post will be reflecting some observations in the near future).

In the meantime, I’ve chosen to share my slides as uploaded on Slideshare here on my workshop titled, “The Future of m-Learning: Empowering Human Memory and Literacy”. This is based on the whitepaper I self-published here a while ago. I’ve also given this talk before at two other conferences on a slightly smaller scale–there’s a little bit of additional information in this version. You’ll see towards the end, there’s an exercise. I split the entire group into three smaller groups, and gave each group a different task to start thinking about what kind of tools within the mobile realm could be used. The tasks given were instructions on how to make a sandwich, what to do if you get a flat tire, and how to obtain cash. The idea was thinking about how to use images, video, GPS, how much text and how many clicks to get through to get to an answer. My idea was to have the group do some initial wireframing, but they got into great discussions about the flexibility of mobile and the constraints instead when trying to figure out what content to include. But that’s okay–the idea was to get them thinking “mobile first”, and they did. They were seeing it from the end-user’s perspective and starting to understand how to write for that perspective, which was the whole goal.

I received positive feedback on the workshop itself, so I hope you enjoy this as well, and find it useful:

Dair Communications launched July 4, 2015.

I’ve mentioned on a few occasions that with the completion of my contract at BASF, I would have to figure out what my next move would be. Job hunting is something that I dread, especially since the region where I live doesn’t have much opportunity unless I go out of my way to travel far to the cities. I’m in a position where I can’t move due to my son’s education for now, so I had to figure out what the best move for me would be. Thanks to my husband’s support, and my mom setting the example for me when I was younger, I decided that perhaps I’d make a go of it on my own. I’m tired of working through agencies or “the man”.

So, on July 4th, 2015, I officially launched my own business. I figured that it would be appropriate to declare my status as an independent contractor on (American) Independence Day. While many of you have read on LinkedIn that I’m working as a Content Marketing Strategist for Information Development World, that is my first contract, which started a big before my official launch.

My company is called Dair Communications, and it already has a barebones website that needs a little tweaking (my husband is helping me set the website up, as he’s a developer and wanted to help, as he should). I chose “Dair” because it’s Gaelic for “Oak“, and I’ll leave it to your imagination what words are evoked when using that description. There are also sentimental reasons for the use of “dair” stemming from my heritage, so it seemed appropriate. The other connotaction is that the word “dair” sounds like the English word, “dare”, so I’d like to think that I’m doing something daring by breaking out on my own, and that I would dare to try new and creative solutions for my clients. Hence–do you DAIR? 😉

Many of my readers have asked me to blog about being an independent contractor. I will do my best! I know that I will be doing a lot to help out with The Content Wrangler blog and Information Development World for the next several months, and I will share some of those projects and observations with you. You might not see quite as many TechCommGeekMom entries as before as I transition into this new adventure, but I’m not going away anytime soon.

I hope you will support me in my new endeavour!