By Marcia Shannon, Membership Manager
The end of the third quarter usually brings STC several deadlines, so here’s a review to help you realize the greatest benefits of your STC and IDL memberships.
By Marcia Shannon, Membership Manager
The end of the third quarter usually brings STC several deadlines, so here’s a review to help you realize the greatest benefits of your STC and IDL memberships.
Register on Eventbrite, if you dare!
Come and talk about what scares you and how you faced it down.
When? October 21, 2023
Where? Zoom (of course)
Registration prices:
The all-day virtual MiniConference provides a variety of educational sessions related to technical communication, instructional design, and learning.
We are excited to announce that our keynote speaker will be Phylise Banner, a recognized superhero and pioneer in the LX design space. Read more about Banner on her website and share in our excitement.
Our day will be both educational and fun. Grab your Zoom-friendly Halloween costume, play a few warmup games, and maybe even win a prize. See the schedule and read more about the presentations and presenters below.
All times Eastern
We are excited to announce that our keynote speaker will be Phylise Banner, a recognized superhero and pioneer in the LX design space. Read more about Banner on her website and share in our excitement.
Cookbooks not only contain a treasure trove of not only delicious recipes and anecdotes, but also serve as prime examples of solid technical communication. After all, recipes use words and images to help explain how to prepare a specific dish.
In this presentation, we will examine several examples of effective recipe design elements from various cookbook recipes. These examples will focus on the following elements of cookbook recipes:
As we examine each design element, we will also learn how they help make instructions – the recipe –easy to understand. We will then show how to apply them in our own technical communication deliverables, including job aids and quick reference guides.
Thus, cleanly-formatted and well-worded recipes from cookbooks can serve as the recipe for success in creating clear and concise technical communication.
About the Speaker
As the Pharmacy Communication Advisor for H-E-B, Jamye helps design training programs and materials for various projects and initiatives within the pharmacy department. She also manages communications between the corporate office and the store pharmacies.
An Associate Fellow of STC, Jamye serves as the current President of the South Central Texas chapter. She also volunteers with the Instructional Design and Learning SIG as its Treasurer and Survey Manager and belongs to various SIGs. Jamye has also volunteered at the Society level in various roles, including the Community Affairs Committee, the Community Achievement Award and Pacesetter Award committees, and the Associate Fellow committee. Over the past several years, she has reviewed several publications for the Technical Communication journal.
When not making “sense out of the seemingly senseless” in the tech comm world, Jamye enjoys transforming yarn into pretty and useful objects. She lives in San Antonio, TX.
Rachel Eichen has a varied career history across multiple fields of communication, technology, and training. She has over 10 years of in-person and remote teaching experience in a variety of industries including: casinos, financial institutions, restaurants, hospitals, libraries. She even taught computer classes on a cruise ship! She has experience training all sorts of software applications including Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, and web applications such as Google Apps and Facebook. In a former life, she was a technical writer where she learned about the software lifecycle and documented instructions. She also has a variety of technical skills, including a mix of programming, networking, and web-design. Rachel holds a Master’s degree in Library & Information Science and a bachelor’s degree in Technical Writing.
Currently serving as the Robert N. Noyce Director of the Engineering Communication Program in the College of Engineering, Cornell University. Nathans-Kelly has a special interest in social justice and techquity issues, along with online teaching modalities. She interacts daily to help engineers and pre-professional engineers to hone their technical messaging, whether it be via presentations, on paper, in meetings and teams, or online channels. Read more and connect with her on LinkedIn.
IDL’s own co-manager will talk us through her latest challenge: making a recruiting video for volunteers. Sautter has been a technical writer and instructional designer in the industries of high-tech/software, health, science, transportation, education, and government (Intel, Xerox, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Cambia, Regency/Blue Cross, City of Vancouver (WA), and more). Her favorite title is educator since she was an adjunct instructor at Portland State University for over 12 years. Currently, she is the manager of the Instructional Design & Learning SIG. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
Alex Michael Hales will take us on a wild ride, using Marvel and DC characters (and their powers) as metaphors for different writing techniques and tools practitioners can use day to day. Hales is a Technical Writer based in Mesa, Arizona. He loves researching, brainstorming, conceptualizing, and drafting content.
Find out more and connect with Hales on his website.
Viqui Dill is an STC Associate Fellow who loves connecting people to communities and giving everyone a voice. Dill loves a good story. She can’t remember a time when she did not want to grab a guitar and start a sing along. As worship arts pastor for the exchange church in Winchester, VA, she gets to live the dream every other week. The Dills have a family band, the Dill Pickers, and Dill sometimes plays in a mostly girl band of mammas, Hot Flash. She describes herself as “Technical writer, wife and mom, bass player, worship leader, I’m happiest when folks sing along with me.” Connect on LinkedIn or just google her unusually spelled name to connect.
By Marcia Shannon, Membership Manager
Welcome to the last half of 2023. IDL SIG activity usually slows a little in summer, but we will host several social events. Before I discuss those, I will share my Summit 2023 feedback.
By Marcia Shannon, Membership Manager
We’re ready to welcome to a new year of challenges and opportunities. Wait a minute, that’s every year, isn’t it? Yes, it is, and we have another chance at making good choices. Choosing to be part of the tech comm communities is one of those good.
First of all, thank you, everyone who joined or renewed your membership in STC and IDL. Welcome or welcome back to the many aspects and variations of being a technical communicator. If you have not renewed or joined for the first time, do not despair, you can join right now, or next week or whenever your circumstances favor you taking that step.
When I was thinking about what to report to the IDL Community about the fourth quarter of 2022, these questions popped up: Who are we? Who are these folks who are interested in instructional design? Where do we live and work or work remote from? What hints do our job titles give to explain what we do in our careers? How long have we been involved with STC? As membership manager, I ran our roster through several data filters to discover the answers to those questions. I hope you benefit from these quick views of the IDL community members.
Continue reading “Membership Report – 2022 Q4”
By Marcia Shannon, Student Outreach Coordinator
We are redesigning some parts of our Student Outreach Article Competition for 2023. The major change is that articles from students about instructional design will be accepted from February 1 through November 1, 2023. We hope this will allow us to publish at least one student essay in each quarterly issue of IDeaL.
The prize for each published essay will continue to be a one-year paid student membership in STC and the IDL SIG, to be awarded for the year after the essay is published. If you will not be a student in that year, you will be awarded that amount toward your STC membership
If you are an undergraduate or graduate student, or if you are enrolled in a certificate program for instructional design, you are eligible to submit an essay.
What should you write about? Tell us about a concept or practice that caught your interest, or surprised you, or confused you about some aspect of instructional design. Did you complete a group project that concentrated on a particular idea in ID? Have you submitted classwork that could be shared with the wider audience of ID professionals?
If you are changing careers, which previous job skills are transferable to instructional design? How did you figure that out? Can you compare and contrast business training practices with ID concepts?
Use our First Fridays @ Five social hour to float essay ideas, to ask for help, or to offer some to other students.
Essays should be 500 to 1000 words.
The Student Outreach Essay competition can be the first step to building your published portfolio. We have seen webinars grow out of articles, giving you another opportunity to expand your professional presence. The website information will be updated soon and more information will be included in email announcements.
Email any questions to the Membership Manager.