Education Days: Great Topics and
Great Prices

by Fei Min Lorente, Education Manager

Most of you have probably heard someone say, "You've got to get an education." But no matter what you have as your formal education, you have to keep learning because practices and tools keep evolving. In fact, the most recent STC free webinar (The Top 10 Mistakes Writers Make When Looking for Work) lists not keeping current as one of the top 10 mistakes. To help you correct that mistake, we are hosting four sessions over two days. Peter Vogel is presenting his sessions on May 11, and Patrick Hofmann on May 12.

May 11 with Peter Vogel

Peter Vogel will present these two workshops:

• Instructional Design: Introducing Interactivity to Technical Training (morning session)
• Three Tutorial Styles: Making Tutorials Work for the Reader (afternoon session)

Instructional Design

Participants are experienced technical writers who are interested in conducting classes that leverage facilitative techniques to help participants move from rote learning to really understanding.

Three Tutorial Styles

There are three different templates for generating great tutorials -- picking the right one depends on understanding the tutorial's audience and your purpose. This session shows how to write all three kinds of tutorials and how to select the correct one.

Biography

Peter Vogel (MBA, MCSD) is a principal in PH&V Information Services which provides consulting services in application development, user interface design, and technical writing. PH&V clients include Volvo, Christie Digital, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, ScotiaBank, and Microsoft. Peter's articles have appeared in over two dozen magazines (including Datamation, Information Week, and Contract Professional where he wrote the "Professional Skills" column). He is currently the ASP.NET columnist for Visual Studio magazine. Peter's white papers appeared in the Visual Studio .NET and the Office 2003 release packages, and he has written extensively for the Microsoft Developer Network. He is currently working on his fourth book.

In addition to teaching for Learning Tree International, Peter wrote Learning Tree's technical writing course and is the technical editor for all of Learning Tree's other writing courses. Peter lives in Goderich, Ontario and presents at conferences all over the world.

May 12 with Patrick Hofmann

Patrick Hofmann will present these two workshops:

• Visual literacy for technical communicators: Thinking and expressing more graphically (morning session)
• Visualizing your information: Advanced techniques to make your documents more graphical and usable (afternoon session)

Visual Literacy for Technical Communicators

Key objectives for this session include:

• How to visualize as you write -- with navigational cues, conceptual diagrams, technical illustrations, flowcharts, or screenshots
• How to make your visuals consistent and professional -- applying simple "templating" techniques and attributes to all your visuals
• How to repurpose and "transport" your visuals to other media and formats, and overcome resolution and incompatibility problems
• How to improve the visual appeal and usability of the information that you produce
• How to use a toolkit of tips and tricks to become visually and graphically savvy

Visualizing Your Information

Having studied information products from worldwide companies over the past 13 years, Patrick is very impressed with the growing number and richer nature of graphics that appear. Now, to bring that information up to the next level, the graphics need to incorporate the same level of usability analysis, style-guide templating, and organizational thought as the "worded" infrastructure.

Biography

Patrick Hofmann -- coined the "man of few words" -- started his career in 1993 as a technical writer and illustrator in Waterloo, Ontario. From the beginning, his mission was to research and improve the universality and user-friendliness of information by reducing or even eliminating text in documents, interfaces, and digital products. In an industry and profession anchored in communicating technical information through text, Patrick broke the mould by expressing technical information with graphics.

He has spoken at over 50 conferences and lectured at 7 universities. His visualizations have also been seen world wide through wordless guides, visual websites or interface icons that he has created for companies like Nokia, Research in Motion (RIM), Motorola, HP, Logitech, NetGear, FedEx, Sprint, and Philips.

Patrick now works at Google in Sydney, Australia, where he is employed as a User Experience Designer on their many well-known products.

Great value

In today's economy, everyone is making a concerted effort to spend their money wisely. If your company is cutting back on expenses, they won't want to pay for a conference or commercial training, but they might pay for some local seminars. With the many layoffs and plant closings, people are also looking at education as a means of moving forward when there is no work. In our two days of training we are providing great educational opportunities at great prices.

Members - $375 for 2 days, or $200 for 1 day

Non-members - $575 for 2 days, or $400 for 1 day

The difference in price is basically the cost of obtaining an STC membership, so sign up to become a member of our chapter. You not only get the cheaper rates, but you also get to experience the benefits of being an STC member.

More Details

Watch our website for more details about the sessions and how to register.