OKC

Just finishing up a trip to Oklahoma City. Very profitable as the style guide should be pretty close to completed. My marketing counterpart found an error in my tutorials and I should have those errors corrected Monday. Said goodbye to a really neat and cool several levels up boss…I will miss her very much. She had a very contagious enthusiasm and energy.

I also taught the team building class at this facility. Seemed to go well in both places. I need to find a way to work team building between two very different locations.

Tool of the Day: Read Me First, A Style Guide for the Computer Industry. Sun Technical Publications

My new company didn’t have a style guide when I started working, so I threw something very simple together so I could maintain consistency in my work. My marketing counterparts are using it too. This little project has now kind of snowballed to cover all of the product types we handle. We needed something more robust than my little record of how I was setting up documents. Because we are a Linux shop, I thought the Sun Style Guide would be a great jumping off place for us. The book is very clear, concise. It does contain some basic writing tips that are very helpful if you are not a technical writer. Especially helpful, Common Usage of Terms

Tools – Part 1

I mentioned several posts ago that I would talk about the tools I am using as I am beginning this new part of my career.  There is, in case you didn’tknow, a wealth of eLearning/Training material out there.  I have found some wonderful blogs that have been invaluable in expanding my knowledge and directing me towards materials to teach me while I am working.

My current “go-to” guide at the moment is “Developing Training Courses, A Technical Writer’s Guide to Instructional Design and Development” by Rives Hassell-Corbiell.  It has a great breakdown of what to do and how to it.  For example, there is a breakdown of the Project Plan, Learner Analysis, Task Analysis and Training Environment Analysis.  I have followed the guidelines and was able to write an in-depth report detailing the learner’s needs (internal and external), what tasks we need to present to meet the Learner’s learning objectives and the appropriate delivery of the training and documentation.  We are now finalizing the objectives, then onto test creation.  I have to say, my ignorance of Instructional Design probably is quite clear here as I didn’t know that tests should be created before the curriculum.  Everything I read stressed this and it makes sense.  The reasoning according to Hassell-Corbiell, “Objectives project what the learning outcome will be.  Tests evaluate whether the learning objectives were met.  Criterion tests and objectives together provide a skeletal structure on which to build the course content, which includes the selection of instructional methods that best supports the content, the selection of instructional media that best supports the instructional methodology, and the documentation, such as learner and instructional guides, that best facilitates the content.  (p. 131-132)