I’m still unpacking and unwinding from all the travel and excitement that’s been going on in the past week from Adobe Day and the 2014 STC Summit. It was a great time, and in some ways, I wish it could’ve been longer. Technical communicators are awesome people!
I was thrilled that I had a great showing of people who came to my first Summit presentation, and I got good feedback from it as well. The presentation initiated a conversation, which is what I wanted to happen, so that was good. I just posted my slides on Slideshare, but in case you are someone who attended and are reading my blog first, the slides are below as well! Since the Prezi link won’t work directly in the slides, I included the link to the Prezi section of the presentation in the appropriate slide, so you could copy and paste to it.
Doc Brown and Marty McFly can’t believe the fabulous information they got at Adobe Day at the STC Summit 2014. (They already went, and said it was fantastic–not to be missed!)
With each big conference that I attend, I always look forward to Adobe Day, and Adobe Day at the 2014 STC Summit is no exception. You’ve probably read my past posts about Adobe Day from other conferences, so you know how rich in information they are. I’ve learned an enormous amount of information FOR FREE that would otherwise cost thousands of dollars from the leading experts in the field. It’s hard to find that anywhere else.
On Sunday morning, May 18th, 2014, Adobe is once again putting together a stellar group of technical communications luminaries to set our imaginations on fire! This year’s theme appears to be, “Vision 2020: The Demanding Job of a Technical Communicator.” Based on the descriptions of each speaker’s talk during this morning session, each will be providing advice and tools–free of any product promotion–that can help make our demanding jobs easier and more productive. I’ve heard all the speakers before in one way or another, and I can tell you that all of them are top rate. Most of them have spoken at previous Adobe Day events, and they are invited back time and time again because they have valuable information to share.
Kapil Verma of Adobe will be speaking about who he thinks are today’s technical communicators (hint: there’s more than one type!). Marcia Riefer Johnston will be talking about single-sourcing techniques she used to save her company USD$16,000! I’ve taken Marcia’s writing workshop and read her book, so I can tell you she have some marvelous tips. Kevin Siegel will be talking about how to combine something I love–e-learning–with technical documentation to make the documentation more dynamic and valuable! I’m looking forward to that. Bernard Aschwanden–the STC’s newly elected vice-president–will be speaking about using content strategy to help promote revenue growth. And last, but not least, a panel including all the speakers plus Tom Aldous of Acrolinx, moderated by Matt Sullivan, looks like it will be quite the lively talk.
Did I mention that breakfast, snacks, and lunch are included, too? And it’s FREE?
I know–you are saying, “Great! I want to go! I don’t want to miss out on this!” Great! But you do have to register so that Adobe knows you are coming! Make sure you register by 11:59 PM PDT on May 16th, because you don’t want to miss out!
After a few years of talking through social media alone, I had the pleasure of meeting Neil Perlin in person at the STC-PMC conference a couple weeks ago. I attended one of his presentations as well at the conference, and throughly enjoyed listening to him talk about mobile and other emerging technologies. I also enjoyed talking with him directly about these topics as well. He gave me some great personal advice along the way, and look forward to receiving more of his advice as time goes on. I’ve been a fan of his work, and I can understand why he’s a very popular speaker.
Neil gave a great presentation online through the TC Dojo by Single-Sourcing Solutions about writing for mobile, and it ties in very nicely with the presentation that I gave at the eLearning Conference 3.0 at Drexel University last week as a follow-up. Here’s Neil’s presentation–I highly recommend watching it to get some great ideas about how to approach writing for mobile, whether it’s for technical communication or m-learning:
I broke out of the tech comm mold a little bit, and actually did an e-learning, or more specifically, an m-learning presentation today at the e-Learning Conference 3.0 at Drexel University in Philadelphia today. I was totally out of my comfort zone, because while I love to talk about and share what I know about m-learning, I’m not an m-learning professional, meaning this is not something I do everyday like the rest of the attendees. I also had never been in front of such a large group (there were 50+ people in the room! New record for me!), and among those who DO use e-Learning everyday. I was grateful that I had people come up to me and tell me they liked my presentation. I was glad that at the end of my presentation, I was able to get a conversation going in the room about m-learning practices.
Not bad for a content strategist, eh? 😉
Due to popular demand (okay, some attendees asked for it), here are the slides that I used. If they don’t make sense for some reason, feel free to ask questions in the comments, or email me directly.
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