Minnesota Fun with Friends!

By Jackie Damrau, Newsletter Editor

May was full of fun and camaraderie as the STC Annual Conference took place in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota. I call this the “city of skywalks where you can get lost quite easily!”

Experiencing Minneapolis

Honestly, though, my greatest time in Minneapolis (outside of the conference activities and honors) was visiting the two-story Target department store that included a shopping cart escalator. This was the first time that I had ever experienced such a device. During my nine-day stay, I visited the Target store every two days, just to take a shopping cart up the escalator! Yes, call me crazy (if you didn’t know that already, well…), but I find the little things in life help reduce the stress of the big things in life.

I also discovered a very nice used book store where you know that a writer cannot pass by without going in to look and coming out with a purchase or two. Before you ask, I did purchase two books for my husband who is collecting hardback first-edition copies of Rex Stout’s “Nero Wolfe” detective novels. It is interesting what you find in these old used book stores. I then wandered up the street a few more blocks and visited the Minneapolis Public Library and its used book store. I walked out of there with a great book on writing requirements for the sage price of $1.

After the conference, Mike Hiatt and I met up and shared a shopping trip via the rail line to the Mall of the Americas. You can’t visit Minneapolis and not go here. We didn’t visit each store, nor did we walk the entire mall. We did, though, ride one rollercoaster together (I rode the other one by myself) and visited the underground aquarium. The next day we met to go on a narrated Twin Cities tour with stops at Minnehaha Falls Park, the Mississippi River, St. Paul Cathedral, and Summit Avenue Victorian-era mansions. It was very nice to share these trips with someone I knew.

Minnehaha Falls	St. Paul’s Cathedral

Experiencing the Conference

The STC Annual Conference itself was different this year as the STC tried a new format. From what I’ve heard, the conference format was a success and will be repeated again next year in Philadelphia on June 1–4, 2008 (finally, a conference not held on Mother’s Day weekend).

Here’s my review of the sessions that I attended:

Sunday, Leadership Day, May 13th

The morning started with the outgoing and incoming STC presidents giving their vision of the future of communities within the organization. Cindy Currie, the incoming 2nd Vice President and Community Advocacy Committee chair, announced that the “Leadership Community Resource (LCR) is up and running.” Cindy then opened the Leadership progression on 12 leadership topics.

During the progression, Mary Jo Stark and I hosted the LCR table where we had the online leadership training on display and met with community leaders or members to see where the LCR can help struggling communities or acquaint folks with the purpose of the LCR.

During the Sunday festivities, I assisted in awarding the Merit and Excellence awards to STC communities. I was also rewarded for my efforts by receiving the LCR Volunteer of the Year plaque with the following citation:

“For your leadership, passion, desire, and willingness to seek and encourage members to help STC and our profession continue its growth. This includes your work with the IDL and Management SIGs, the funding model project, the LCR Training Planning and Development Committee, and the Newsletter Competition team, as well as your service as a Technical Communication book reviewer, 2006 Region 5 Conference chair, 2006 Lone Star competitions general manager, and as a contributing newsletter editor.”

Monday, May 8th

• Keynote Speaker: Simon Singh, Author of “Fermat’s Last Theorem”
  
  Simon talked about how he created the documentary about how Andrew Wiles solved the proof of Fermat’s last theorem. He shared with us how this form of communication is important as well as the importance of not messing with (or altering) the interviews that you conduct with subject matter experts. Simon says that in the world of documentaries, it is often easy, with clever editing, to have experts say things they really didn’t. The most impressive part of this talk was how Andrew Wiles’ professional character climbed after taking seven years to solve Fermat’s last theorem only to plummet severely when it was discovered that he had made an error. Andrew didn’t give up though; it took him another thirteen months to actually solve Fermat’s last theorem.



• “Incorporating Usability into Content Management: A User- and Customer-Centric Approach” (Pamela Kostur, Parallax Communications)
  
  This session talked about how implementing content management is not just about the tools. It’s about the content. I learned that technology can enable content re-use; yet the business needs to figure out what it wants to do with the content to serve the users. Pamela asked everyone who is considering using content management to approach it first by asking two questions:
  
  1) What are the goals of the content management project?
  2) Where does usability fit?
  
  Following this, she reiterated the importance of performing a needs–user–content analysis; asked us to always focus on the purpose and use of the content, define the key information types in our industry and design structures that fit into them, and then to ensure that we communicate within our organizations about the need to follow an established process.



• “Participatory Design: Political Statement to Business Model”
  (Bill Hart-Davidson)
  
  This session talked about how Participatory Design (PD) focuses on user-centered design and user participation where you work with and alongside users to understand the aspects of the project. PD lets users take an active role in the project and to advocate a view of the systems as broader than their technical components alone. In some instances, you can use paper prototyping to ensure that everyone is speaking the same language. Plus it involves users at every design cycle stage, thus ensuring that the final result is a product that is usable by the intended audience. Bill then spent a bit of time talking about contextual inquiry and the difference between taxonomies and folksonomies.



• “Instructional Design & Learning  SIG Progression”
  (My IDL SIG progression session)
  
  My session topic during this progression was on “Designing and Developing Online Training for STC Leaders.” I presented on how my LCR team of eight worked virtually over two years to produce the online Leadership Training course, the reason we chose to use RoboHelp, and to ask attendees for suggestions on what else they would like to see. Many of the attendees were interested in how this team was able to produce all the content we did by holding one teleconference a month, with the rest of the work being conducted by e-mail.



• STC Annual Business Meeting
  
  We discussed the revision to the STC Bylaws, the reasons why it is necessary to revise them, and the timeline for getting them out to the membership for voting on by early September 2007. The incoming STC officers were installed; the major theme “The Now World of STC” was announced; and the 2007–2008 committee managers were introduced.

Tuesday, May 9th

•  “Knowledge Management 101”
  (George Hayhoe, George Hayhoe Associates)
  
  This session explored the basic concepts and methods of knowledge management, including organizing and leveraging communities of practice, creating organization “yellow pages,” implementing best practices systems, capturing and transferring strategic knowledge, designing intranets and portals, and selecting and implementing collaborative tools.
  
  During the presentation, I learned that companies should consider conducting a knowledge inventory to collect, in writing, the intellectual capital from its employees before they leave the company. A sample knowledge inventory should ask:
  
  
  • What areas of the company have you worked in or with on projects (Engineering, IT, Marketing, HR, etc.)?
  • What unwritten business processes do you perform on the job?
  • Who else knows how to perform each of them?
  • What do you regard as the three most important skills or areas of expertise you regularly draw on in doing your job?
  • How did you learn each of these?


• “What Is Knowledge Harvesting?” (Larry Todd Wilson)
  
  This session presented a proven methodology for rapidly converting expertise into knowledge assets that can dramatically improve corporate performance, competitiveness and valuation. During this session, I learned that it is often difficult for subject matter experts to share their information, language is an ultimate barrier, and there are four types of knowledge: contextual, declarative, procedural, and social. Depending on where your business model and its processes are, a knowledge management professional needs to be aware of how to harvest information from individuals using various techniques that are specific to each knowledge type. Harvesting knowledge follows a similar process to that of a project, where you focus, find, elicit, organize, package, apply, evaluate, and adapt the information you receive into re-usable content chunks for future business dealings.



• “Making Your Career Happen” (Panel discussion: Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler; Rahel Bailie, Intentional Design Inc.; and Ann Rockley, The Rockley Group)
  
  This session provided tips and suggestions for how to learn about the content management field, areas of opportunity, and guidelines for making it happen. The main points that I took away were:



• You need to be aware of the tools, but you don’t have to be knowledgeable of or have experience with them all.
• You need to become a knowledge management evangelist outside your area and knowledge set by writing well-informed documentation and learning more about the tools and their use.
• You need to present like a professional when interacting with senior management or company executives.
• You should manage by results, not process. (Do the right thing, not produce the wrong thing.)
• Get out of the corporate silo by collaborating! Independence = isolation.

Wednesday, May 10th

•  “Using Unified Language Artifacts 101 – Getting Started”
  (Mark Hanigan, On the Write Track, and Cindy Skawinski, Walt Disney World Operations)
  
  This session presented a basic overview about Unified Markup Language (UML) concepts and artifact deliverables.



• “Ten Things You Should Know about Mobile Learning”
  (Ellen Wagner, Adobe Systems)
  
  This session provided a great overview for why many businesses today are not yet ready to deliver online learning or training to the popular portable consumer devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, iPods, handheld devices, and game consoles. Ellen cited the work of Ambient Insight and Adobe’s own benchmark research on the difficulties of providing online training through these devices. She provided us with the 10 questions that we should ask when the business asks for training to be delivered to mobile devices. You can ask me for those questions if you have an interest in them.



• Keynote Speaker: Ze Frank, Author of “Fermat’s Last Theorem”
  Ze spoke about how technology and creativity intersect, especially in Web design, marketing, and new forms of media. This was a comedic look at the many different communications materials that people tend to collect, such as airline vomit bags and safety cards. We were all rolling in the aisles.