Tag: digital literacy

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Upgrade Time! PREVIEW of the NEW Adobe Technical Communications Suite 4!

Posted on by TechCommGeekMom

I’m very excited as this is my 100th post here on techcommgeekmom.com, and with this 100th post, I am able to present all of my readers with a special preview.

Adobe’s Technical Communications Suite 4.0 (TCS4) is now out!

Woo hoo! It’s great to see that along with upgrades to the Adobe Creative Suite and e-Learning Suite, now the Technical Communications Suite is getting a major update as well.

Now, you may be wondering, like most technical communicators, what changes have been made between the 3.5 version and the 4.0 version. Good question! There have been several upgrades to the software package, thank you very much. How do I know? Adobe was kind enough to invite me to a preview a little while ago, and even as a newbie to this software package, I can say that I could see that the company is trying very hard to keep up with the needs of technical communicators, and they are taking the necessary steps to embrace mobile technology, which is highly evident in this upgrade.

Now, I took as many notes as I could, considering the presentation went by faster than I could take the notes, but I know that there are a few major highlights that are important to cover.

As the speakers from Adobe started the presentation, they concentrated on identifying key trends they felt were happening in technical communications, namely a movement to structured authoring, rapid mobile growth in smartphones and tablets, the need to make content more interactive, the concern of technical communicators having to do more with less resources, and the need to provide searchable, personalized and socially enabled content. It sounded to me like they were on the right track, especially if the improvements they were about to present fulfilled these needs.

One of the main anchors of Technical Communications Suite is Framemaker, and here in the TCS 4 Suite, Framemaker has been upgraded to Framemaker 11. From what I’ve been able to gather from my observations, Framemaker had its heyday, then it lost favor, and now it’s starting to regain steam again. Framemaker (FM) 11 seems to be taking the improvements make from FM 10 another step forward. Structured authoring was the main focus of the improvements with this product, including multi-view editing environments providing WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) of XML and author sources as well as getting WYSIWYG output as well. Content creators can edit XML documents in any view, and the changes are reflected in all views without manual changes. This bodes well for working towards single-source creation! DITA and XML support has been enhanced as well, and performance using these has been enhanced as well.

A big addition to FM 11 is ability to include rich media objects like vector images with hotspots, video, and 3D modeling. One of the features I liked that was demonstrated was one where play, pause, and jump buttons were created around a video/animation presentation within the content. Nice! The 3D model imaging that can now be used will be great for how-to manuals, so there is better context at looking or training on physical objects, like looking at a machinery part from all angles. From a productivity standpoint, SmartPaste and SmartInsert features have been added to help auto-format pasted or inserted text or content into a new document, but one can still retain the old formatting as well. Another appealing feature is the ability to create your own Framemaker set-up. Adobe’s goal was to enable content creators to be able to author content faster by allowing the creators to customize navigation and workspaces. That sounds great! Of course, what got me most excited was to hear that FM 11 has been oriented to now enable mobile output, including multi-screen HTML5 content as well as ePub 3.0 and Kindle formats. That’s definitely a step in the right direction!

The second main anchor of Adobe’s Technical Communications Suite is RoboHelp (RH), now available in version 10. RH 10 works seamlessly with Framemaker, as it always has, but again Adobe has focused on streamlining the workflow process as well as improving the product’s output. That output includes new outputs for mobile devices. RH 10 can deliver content to iPad as well as other tablets, smartphones, and desktops now—there are 17 output formats now! It is set up so that authors can work in a multi-author, multi-reviewer environment, where it’s easier to personalize and optimize content relevance. Content can be rich media—again, like FM11, and includes various HTML5 outputs that include mobile apps, ePub 3.0 and Kindle now.

The HTML5 output has also been made to be modern looking, frameless and SEO-friendly. The output is responsive design that works well with fluid layouts like CSS 3 and media queries. Like FM 11, RH 10 can customize and optimize the appearance of the content on each screen as needed. Socially enable documentation can be produced using RH 10, which means that creative native and web mobile apps can now be produced from RoboHelp. This is a big boost for making apps for iOS and Android mobile apps. The workflow view is easier as multi-layout options are available, and there is a preview tool that allows the author to see how the output will look on different devices and subsequently, there is the ability to assign different styles to different devices, including the output publishing settings for each device. One of the other features that caught my attention was that now there is also out of the box integration with MS Sharepoint, so it provides end-to-end workflow. Being someone who’s used SharePoint at my last job extensively, that would make things flow really well for output, and I’m sure that would provide a better product for the end user as well!

TCS 4 has several new features about it. While it includes Framemaker 11 and RoboHelp 10 as mentioned, it will also include the updated Captivate 6, Acrobat X Pro, and now Illustrator has been added (most likely to accommodate vector images better) and Adobe Presenter. I think I’m most excited that not only the newly updated Captivate has been included, but that Presenter has been included as well. I think this is a really smart move on the part of Adobe, because between Captivate and Presenter, more interactive content can be created and put out for mobile. And yes, as I mentioned before, the big push for TCS 4 is being able to provide technical communicators with tools to produce output for mobile devices. To use their words, they are “embracing the mobile revolution” with the multi-screen outputs that are in HTML5 and other mobile formats like ePub 3.0, but also providing tools to make the content context sensitive, providing socially enabled apps, and support for optimizing indexes, glossaries, custom metadata and other content features.

Adobe even made sure that it was understood how TCS 4 would work very well for those in the e-Learning world, saying that TCS 4 provides “new workflows to bridge technical communication with e-Learning” by providing tools that can create m-Learning opportunities and rapid step-by-step authoring. Keeping up with other major trends, cloud-based computing is integrated into the product, as review workflows can now be done using the cloud with TCS 4.

One of the new pricing features also includes using the same cloud pricing model. There will be monthly rates as well as a reduced rate that monthly is cheaper than a month-to-month rate. Due to a lot of these new features–especially the ones that help enable publishing content for HTML5 and other mobile content, I would especially upgrade if I had an older version of TCS or older version of Framemaker and Robohelp. The fact that both FM 11 and RB 10 have customizable views is a big bonus, as well as having the capabilities to produce mobile-friendly content is a big boost. Having more efficient single-source authoring, and cloud capabilities—there are a lot of good things that are added to this.
Now granted, like I said, I’m still a newbie to using the product and using it, but from this reviewer’s standpoint based on the preview, it’s good to see significant upgrades to a product making a strong comeback in the technical communications field. I do hope that as time goes on, Adobe continues to keep up with updates to the product, especially considering the “Creative Cloud”-like option with obtaining the product.

It’s an exciting product, from what I can see, if you are just starting out, or need to revamp your technical communications software.

I hope this review has proven to be helpful. Have you downloaded your copy yet? If so, do you think these changes are big improvements or is there still something missing? Please leave a comment below on what you think about TCS 4 so far.

Adobe notified me just as I was writing this post (before I posted it) that I will have a chance to test-drive the product itself very shortly, and once I have it installed, I’m hoping that I can give my techcommgeekmom readers more information about this product–from my newbie perspective, and see if the preview information holds up to the real deal. Stay tuned!

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Harvard Business Review: I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why.

Posted on by TechCommGeekMom

Harvard Business Review: I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why.

An English professor friend of mine posted this on Facebook, and it struck a chord with me. While I will never claim to be an expert grammarian (even though I did very well in my Professional and Technical Editing class in grad school), I have to admit I’m a bit of a stickler for good grammar as well. I suppose because some of the basics come so easily to me, I don’t understand why they don’t for others. I’m always surprised to see people who are pursuing Master’s degrees in technical writing have such poor grammar. Okay, not everyone, but a good portion of them. How did they get through high school and college and still not have some of these basics down as described in the article above? I don’t understand that concept. The whole essence of being a technical writer, to me, is being that precise and picky when writing or editing content. If words are not crafted in a particular way, their meanings or messages are lost or misconstrued, and that can be disasterous.  I happen to know that the part-time job I have at an academic publishing house was originally gained because I was the only one who actually sent a cover letter that was written in a grammatically correct way.

This article truly speaks to me, and it’s why I try to work very hard at being as detail oriented as I can be, because it’s the difference between getting a job and keeping a job.

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e-Learning – A Growing Field For Technical Writers | Immerse CMS

Posted on by TechCommGeekMom

Read this article:
e-Learning – A Growing Field For Technical Writers | Immerse CMS.

This great little article makes a point that I’ve been trying to make on my own quest to find an e-learning positions. In no way am I putting down instructional designers, but as a trained technical communicator, I know that technical writers have the right stuff to be effective in writing for e-learning. Technical writers most often create user documentation and training manuals. With some creativity, imagination, and some quick learning of the basics of instructional design, technical writers can be quite capable of writing up e-learning content.

Now, with the advent of m-learning, the skills to be able to curate content and whittle it down to comprehensible, short yet clear information for smartphones and tablets will be vital. Technical writers are used to working with a mountain of information, and paring it down to the essential information needed to learn how to make something work or take a next step. Isn’t that a valuable skill to have as an instructional designer?

As more e-learning and especially m-learning programs expand, technical communicators are truly going to be needed to help bring things up to speed quickly to keep up with constantly emerging new mobile technologies.

So, if you are looking for a new instructional designer, think about giving a technical writer a chance. I’m sure there are plenty of them (including me especially) who would jump at the chance to write training materials in a new and exciting way, and technical writers already have most of the skills needed. The instructional design will come…most of the essential concepts aren’t that difficult. Give technical writers a chance!

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What do learners using m-learning want–what they really, really want?

Posted on by TechCommGeekMom

Today, RJ Jacquez posted the following question on his Facebook account:

“If you asked ‘Learners’ on mobile what they wanted in #mLearning would they know? I’m not convinced they would.”

My first thought was that Spice Girls song–“So tell me what you want, what you really, really, want….” 😉

When I thought about it more seriously, I deduced that I don’t think learners would know what they want either. (Or in the words of the same Spice Girls song, the response of the average learner would be “I wanna really, really, really wanna zigazig ah….”)

Like most people involved in UX and e-learning/m-learning strategy, I’ve been taught the mindset of how to anticipate the moves of the average user. Must like what I talked about in my Adobe webinar, Transition from Content Consumer to Content Creator: Dual Viewpoints, to truly be an effective technical communicator–no matter the specialization–one has to look at things both from the end user perspective as well as the creator perspective.  So, in addressing RJ’s question, unless someone is a professional student, I don’t think the average person–adult or child–thinks about how they learn, or what method works best or them, mobile or not. The average learner doesn’t know what they want or need until they don’t have a feature or do have a feature, for the most part.

I find that I think about such things because not only do I have non-verbal learning disabilities that made me more aware of what worked and what didn’t, but I also grew up having an educator dad whose hobby was reading up on learning styles and that kind of subject matter.  And just for the record, despite recent reports that said that learning styles are a bunch of hooey, from personal experience as well as being the mother of a learning disabled child, I am a firm believer in learning styles and being aware of trying to make adaptive or flexible learning possible. My son and I are visual/sensory learners. We both have sensory issues, but for a person to describe an object verbally versus presenting the object in front of me to see and touch, the latter experience will always stick with me more. (I do know other learning disabled people where the opposite situation is true– they have no problem with verbal descriptions, but have a hard time with reading or retaining information from a demonstration.) Heck, it’s been a while since I’ve said this, but I used to claim that most of what I learned was from TV, not from other sources! (I watched a LOT of TV as a kid, including educational stuff, but plenty of pop culture that has served me well over time.)

That said, it helps that there are those of us that are on top of learning presentations, and trying to find ways to make learning accessible, comprehensible, and enjoyable–an “ACE” product (I should copyright that acronym now!). Learning policies and procedures, for example, especially on a topic that perhaps one might not have anything to do with, should be done in a way that makes it “ACE,” and e-learning and m-learning specialists can work on ways to facilitate learning using new technology for better information retention.  I had that sort of experience myself. At my last consulting position at a global financial firm, I was required to take P&P courses, even though they were about financial transactions in banking, and I worked on an intranet site that had a) nothing to do with the banking end of the business, and b) I had nothing to do with any financial transactions whatsoever. But because there was online training that could be tracked, and the courses were relatively short, I got the basic foundations mastered to be compliant, and I could move on from there. I’ll admit that I even remember parts of it as well, because of the interactivity in the online course.

User strategists–whether they work in mobile worlds or not–are specialists who know from training and professional experience what works and what doesn’t work on a website, from both the front-end of a website as well as some of the back-end as well. Simple things, like evaluating typography, color schemes, and content are all part of that person’s job. The average end-user doesn’t really think about what he or she is looking at on a website that deeply. We’ve all encountered good websites and bad websites, and we put up with bad websites out of necessity sometimes, but it’s a UX specialist’s job to rid the world of as much bad design and as many bad experiences as possible, anticipating how end-users would use a website. The average Joe will understand sometimes that something isn’t good, but might not always know what it is that doesn’t work well. The average person doesn’t think about functionality of a site until it’s not functional. The average person doesn’t understand the complexities of what e-learning and m-learning specialists are trying to do to help learners attain the main goal, because it’s the end goal which is what’s most important, namely that information retention learned through a course–any course through any medium–can be used thoughtfully and effectively.  Pull any guy or gal off the street, and they wouldn’t know the first thing about it. They’ve never thought about it. It is like asking people why they like a certain ice cream flavor–they just do. (But what they don’t know is that ice cream manufacturers do a lot of testing on what are popular flavors and tastes in different areas before putting their products out on the market.) The average person just goes about his or her business, and when it comes time to be learning something, whatever means is put in front of that person is how he or she will learn it.

So, does that mean that we shouldn’t put so much time and thought into the process? Heck no! We should continue to put a LOT of time and thought into the learning process! Mobile is a big mover and shaker with this, because it is making information so accessible–even more than conventional paper books or any other media out there right now, short of in-person, one-to-one teaching. More smartphones are bought on a daily basis globally, and the tablet market is starting to catch up with that.  Even in areas like third world countries, people have smartphones. What a fantastic opportunity to reach out to help others learn and help themselves and work globally instead of in isolation! But how is that done? It’s done through careful thought about how the information is disseminated in a way that the information can be retained and used. It needs to be ACE.  We need to spend the time to make it the best learning experience possible, even if the average learner has no clue as to what they want in a learning experience. In the end, if learners are able to use the information, understand the information, and recall the learning experience as a positive one, isn’t that the measure of what they want from learning? If they don’t get anything positive out of the learning experience, then they learn they don’t want THAT.

Being a newly minted graduate school graduate who did her entire degree online, I know that my fellow students and I would quickly be able to evaluate what worked and didn’t in various courses. For example, presenting all the assignments, reading documents and forum links in the course description in Moodle instead of utilizing the weekly scheduler was BAD for learners. Having experiences both inside and outside of Moodle to do our assignments were good for learners. It really varied from course to course, and some professors learned from end-of-the-semester feedback, and others did not.  Each course and each learning experience has different requirements. It is up to those who are developing the curriculum and helping to disseminate the curriculum to decide what’s the best delivery method, especially because the learner usually doesn’t have a clue.

As m-learning and e-learning specialists–and this really applies to all technical communicators, it’s our job to provide the most concise, clear and cogent information we can to the public, and that means anticipating those average person thoughts or moves in using anything we create. To me, that’s what makes the job challenging and exciting. It’s especially fulfilling when you know that you’ve got it right, and the end user doesn’t know why it’s so great, but it just is.

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Whitepaper: The Future of Mobile Learning: Empowering Human Memory and Literacy

Posted on by TechCommGeekMom

Yes, it’s official. I’ve written a whitepaper.

Actually, I wrote it a while ago, but just haven’t gotten around to reformatting it. This is actually a paper that I wrote for one of my classes recently just before I graduated, and it was edited by Mayra Aixa Villar. When editing the paper at the time, it was she who suggested that I either present this somewhere, or post it as a whitepaper here on my blog. Since I’m not able to get to any professional meeting anytime soon, I’m taking the latter suggestion, and posting it here. So, before anything else, many thanks to my friend Mayra for not only editing and providing criticism on this paper, but for helping me feel confident to put my work out there. (Muchas gracias, mi amiga querida!)

That being said, this whitepaper is entitled, “The Future of Mobile Learning: Empowering Human Memory and Literacy.” The basic concept behind this is that many of the basic elements that humankind formulated to enable memorization and literacy throughout history are basic elements that are used and needed in formulating the foundations of creating effective m-learning.

I hope my readers like the paper and find it helpful. Please download, pass around, and/or refer to this page! (Oh, and if you’d like me to present this somewhere, let me know! ;-))

Whitepaper: The Future of Mobile Learning: Empowering Human Memory and Literacy

Edited to add July 2015: This paper has now been presented three times as of July 2015, at the 2014 e-learning 3.0 Conference at Drexel University, at the 2015 STC-PMC Conduit/Mid-Atlantic Technical Conference, and as a presentation/workshop at the 2015 IEEE ProComm.