Recap of Education Days

by Debbie Kerr, Attendee at both education days

This year our education days (workshops) were on May 11 and 12 at the Holiday Inn: Kitchener-Waterloo Hotel and Conference Centre. There was one speaker for each day and each day consisted of two workshops. Day one was specific to training and day two focussed on graphics. Here is a summary of each day's events.

May 11 - Peter Vogel

In keeping with Peter's adage of learning through doing, attendees spent a lot of time on their feet working with flip charts and, for one exercise, assembling Lego. We exercised our minds, and our legs.

Part 1 - Creating Interactive Technical Training

While there are many ways for introducing interactivity into training, the best techniques:

• Leverage the participants' knowledge by having them talk about what problems they want the training to help resolve and the characteristics they want in the solutions.
• Tie the training to the participants' problems and provide solutions to those problems and talk about the pros and cons of each solution./li>
• Allow the participants to evaluate the proposed solutions to determine if they meet the characteristics that they wanted in a solution.

To demonstrate his own form of interactivity, Peter gave us exercises to complete. We did many of these exercises in groups (more interactivity) and then, to confirm our understanding, we sometimes moved to another group's flip chart to see how well we could use their information to complete the next phase of training development (yet another form of interactivity).

Part 2 - Three Kinds of Tutorials

While there are basically three kinds of tutorials, only two of them should be used. The standard one is to complete a series of steps in a procedure without any way to catch errors and address them.

To be effective, tutorials should be:

• Examples of how to do something (task based)
• An "empowerment" tool instead of a training tool
• Actions that involve "users" and "doers"instead of just "readers"
• In the best format to meet the users' needs (for example, new versus expert user)

To meet these requirements, there are really only two acceptable kinds of tutorials: playscript and minimalist. The playscript tutorial identifies the user, the action the user must take, and the result/response to that action. The difference between this method and the standard tutorial is that there are checks and balances in place that tell the user when they have made an error. This enables users to go back and repeat previous steps until they achieve the correct result. This type of tutorial is best suited for new and novice users as well as transfer users (for example, users who may have prior knowledge that they can apply to the task at hand).

A minimalist tutorial focuses on goals without step-by-step instructions. Instead, users are provided with hints/tips and methods for resolving errors. This type of tutorial is best suited for expert users or transfer users that have enough knowledge to be able to "explore" and "discover".

To make his point about the failure of the standard tutorial, Peter put us into groups of two and gave us a Lego model to assemble...without the typical graphics. Instead, he had his own written instructions (a standard tutorial). There was nothing in the instructions to reinforce whether or not one step was completed correctly before moving to the next step, which meant that there was no way to go back and identify where a problem occurred so that it could be fixed. The final results varied and, inevitably, there were some pieces left over and one group who could not complete the task. Had Peter used either of the other tutorial methods, the task would have been easier to complete and could have been completed more quickly.

May 12- Patrick Hofmann

Patrick is one of those people who, by his personality and teaching technique, takes you through a large amount of material without you ever being bored. In fact, you are so entertained that you almost forget that you are learning.

The Ice Breaker

Not only did Patrick's ice breaker get attendees to interact, it was also a learning experience. The mission was to teach someone to use a washroom - more specifically, the toilet. Depending on the country, the operation of the toilet may not be obvious to everyone, so some type of documentation is required. Since Patrick's speciality is graphics, the instructions were to be graphical...without being too graphic.

As with any documentation, we had to know our audience. We discussed whether the audience was male or female; what level of knowledge they had; whether there was knowledge that could be leveraged for these instructions. After some discussion, Patrick showed us a graphic of a stick person sitting on the toilet (legs hanging over the front) and the person was smiling. To keep it simple, the graphic only showed one way of using the toilet regardless of gender. The bodily functions were crossover knowledge, and the smile was there to show success.

Part 1 - Visual literacy for technical communicators: thinking and expressing more graphically

This workshop covered:

• Problems with graphics
• Templating your graphics
• Showing what you mean
• Dealing with screen shots
• Dealing with flow charts
• Handling file information and new technology
• Reviewing your documents

Part 2 - Visualising your information: Advanced techniques to make your documents more graphical and usable

This workshop covered:

• Using alignment to enhance reading and usability
• Reducing visual traffic
• Improving typography
• Distinguishing line weights and values
• Improving annotations and legends
• Reducing eye wandering

In Conclusion

The workshops were a great success, especially from the perspective of someone who got to attend them. With the smaller class sizes, attendees received a lot of individual attention. The feedback was positive, and some of the attendees on the second day asked if we could arrange another training day so that people could learn how to effectively produce the graphics.