just write click

I have been talking to SJ Klein regularly via email and phone for my work on the wiki pages and kid’s user manual for the XO laptop for One Laptop Per Child, so I was excited to hear him speak and meet him in person. Also, directly afterwards I planned to go to lunch with SJ and with Robert Nagle, the technical writer (and self-named idiot programmer) in Houston who originated the idea of XO user groups across the states after the Give 1 Get 1 program completed.

I had tried my best to promote an XO meetup as a lunch after the Textbooks talk, even getting it listed on the entirely awesome sched.org, but when the four of us arrived at Las Manitas at about 10 after 1, we were the only ones with the “little computers,” as my son calls them. So we just waited our turn for seating, and got to know SJ and Melissa Hagemann, a program manager with the Open Society Initiative who was moderator for the panel. As it turned out, she and Robert had been in some of the same cities in south eastern Europe in the 90s. While speaking of books, Robert described hand-carrying two fifty-pound bags of books along dirt roads as a Peace Corp volunteer and for me it really brought home the fact that books - they are heavy. Much heavier than the two 3-pound XO laptops I had been “lugging” around the Austin Convention Center all day. The 3-pound OLPC library on the XO laptop probably contains hundreds of pounds of books, and you could add several hundred more pounds of books by putting in a small USB stick or SD card. Quite a revelation for me.

Here are my rough notes from the Textbooks of the Future: Free & Collaborative talk at SXSW Interactive 2008. I’ll link to the podcast of it when it’s available. (Updated to add the link, since now it is.)

For open source textbooks, take a look at cnx.org.

Yes, wikibooks are now possible. Pedia press had been doing high quality book output for a while, now partnering with Wikimedia Foundation.

OLPC’s interest in open education materials is that it gives students and teachers ability to share and collaborate on materials. They’re in a unique position in some ways, though, because they’d like to target 15 languages for their materials.

Why are open textbooks possible now?

• Convergence of technology and community
• Also XML - lets you build lego blogs of reconfigurable, recombinable objects (sounds like DITA topics, doesn’t it?)
• Online lets you go past books
• Intellectual property now has new licensing - creative commons license
• Development of quality control mechanisms, repository of content
• Lens - gives you a filter, lets you see things through a lens, filtering which items which you think are valuable
• National Instruments, Texas Instruments, checking the books, offering lenses

Print on demand options - if you can’t produce shiny books, you aren’t taken seriously in many parts of the world, and in some age groups, print is important. With just-in-time printing, books are assembled automatically, index generated automatically, print on demand only costs students $20 instead of $120.

The same thing will happen everywhere that knowledge is valuable.

Is there a role for publishers in the new learning environment? There can be conflicts even in branches of publishing. All major publishers he’s talked to know that a change has to happen. They’re investing/investigating.

What strategies are useful? “The Budapest Open Access Initiative: an international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet.” from http://www.soros.org/openaccess/index.shtml

Three dimensions -
people (blurring the lines of roles, in today’s society we have rigid lines of roles of teacher, or author)
networking, transmitters, guides

Q: Robert’s question as a representative from Teleread.org - people searching for tutorials or text books want “the best” - what’s the finished state?
A: People looking for most efficient and effective way to learn things. Those sites will rise to the top.

Q: Can you use a lens that is another company’s lens?
A: Next version, yes you can.

Q: What about “controversial” areas or areas that evolve year over year?
A: For CXN.org, they decided not to develop with a wiki model, allowing for a multiple entry model, such as causes for the civil war has multiple articles with author attribution. Lenses can then point towards most used, or most heavily peer reviewed, your choice.

Q: From instructional designer in corp. environment - she sees missing things such as visual representations or animations, what’s happening or needs to happen to bring in those valuable designers.
A: Inkscape - open source vector drawing application, access to others’ illustrations (svg, vector graphics standards) Also mentioned the payment for illustration contribution based on Phillip Greenspun’s donation to Wikimedia Foundation.

Steve Carl already wrote up his notes from BarCamp Austin and I enjoyed his viewpoint very much. This was only my second BarCamp experience, and this year, I decided to take the plunge and actually volunteer to present. Whurley was very encouraging despite my inexperienced questions. “What’s a badge that you wear vs. a badge for your blog?” for example. There are graphics for each, as it turns out. The graphics are completely awesome, and the t-shirts were great, arriving despite an actual train derailment preventing the first shipment from arriving on time.

For those not familiar with the BarCamp format, it’s an unconference where you show up in the morning and put your session into one of the time slots on a white board or on a post-it note. The wiki also had sign-up schedules but the hand-written timeslots at the event win over the wiki page.

The week before BarCamp, I went to the wiki’s Sessions page, clicked the Edit button, and wrote up a short description of a session called Hug the XO. I basically wanted to see if others could bring their XO laptops and I could show them the tricks I’ve learned recently, plus run the Sugar emulation on my Dell laptop.

Getting to Idea City

(photo by Chad Hanna from theotherpaper on flickr)

The morning of BarCamp, getting to BarCamp turned out to be more difficult than I had planned. I got downtown by 9:00, but couldn’t find the Silver Dillo to ride over to 6th and Lamar to GSD&M’s Idea City. So, I took a few touristy photos of Ester’s Follies and the row of SegCity’s Segways, turned around and went back to the Austin Convention Center. I attended a 10:00 SXSW Interactive session, Creating Findable Rich Media Content, and then went back to Sixth street seeking the ‘Dillo. I walked about five blocks until I was past Congress Avenue when I saw a Silver Dillo sign and a person waiting at the sign, then turned and looked up the street to see the trolley coming our way. I double-checked with the woman waiting to make sure there wasn’t a charge since I was silly enough to have not gotten cash out, and sure enough, it’s a free ride. I boarded the Dillo and was on my way.

Getting into BarCamp

Idea City itself is an incredible workplace, full of creative vibes and a wonderful open design with full windows in front. Steve Carl greeted me, I registered with a cool registration application that Twittered my arrival to @barcampaustin (very cool), I had my picture taken for the flickr photo stream, and Steve and I proceeded to the schedule board to see where I could fit in my pres. I really felt more like doing a demo than a full-fledged presentation, so I was happy to see that the demo room had a free half-hour slot at noon. I drew little XO icons on a post-it, titled it “Hug the XO” and headed upstairs to figure out the room layout. On the way up, I saw my old BMC buddy Cote, and ran into Decibel, a good friend of my husband’s, and also met Snax finally, having friends of friends of hers.

Hugging the XO

In the demo room, I hooked up my laptop and ran the Sugar emulation image downloaded from the RedHat Site by using QEMU. In emulation the Activities run pretty quickly, and it’s very easy to display on a large screen. There’s discussions surrounding a projection display for the XO itself, but it’s easiest to emulate for me.

I showed Turtle Art which is really exciting to programmers. People expressed an interest in showing the XOs at Codemash because there’s a grassroots Kidsmash that happens in parallel, so I’ll definitely be following up with Josh on that idea.

I also learned some neat tricks to get deeper into the XO. One way to view the files on the flash memory without using a command line is to launch the Browse Activity and type file:///home/olpc/ as the URL. Now that is a handy shortcut.

I also learned that you can transfer files to and from the XO by using scp from the Terminal Activity by reading the XO setup user guide at OLPC Austria. First, get the IP address by typing iwconfig at the prompt. Then, you can use these instructions:

To upload the file test.py from a pc to the xo (into /home/olpc), use: scp FILE_NAME USER@IP:TO_DIRECTORY

scp test.py olpc@192.168.0.2:/home/olpc

To download the file /home/olpc/xo_test.py from the xo to a local pc, simply reverse the arguments:

scp olpc@192.168.0.2:/home/olpc/xo_test.py ./

We finally got the Acoustic Tape Measure Activity working correctly, and I’ve updated the instructions on Floss Manuals appropriately. Test your task instructions, I always say! Fortunately, this was a fun one to test. We had to have the laptops beep at each other at least 4-5 times before the measurements came into a reasonable range, starting out at nearly 200 meters, and eventually settling on just over 3 meters. Success! The noise they make to each other almost sounds like they’re spitting at each other. Kids will love this activity with a pair of laptops.

People really enjoyed the Speak Activity and we laughed to discover you could give it multiple eyes.

I think we had at least a dozen people stop by the demo room, and after the demo session was over, we set up two of them near the lunch pickup line. Steve was nice enough to “babysit” the XOs while I went back to some afternoon SXSWi sessions, and he said he thinks at least 100 people got to see and try out the XOs for themselves. We downloaded Flipsticks, played some Tam Tam Jam, showed off the Browse Activity, surfing to any URL we needed to, and generally had a great time. We met other XO owners and I told them about the XO-Austin users group, and told everyone they could meet us at Las Manitas on Sunday for an XO meetup. I’ll write another story about my lunch meeting with SJ Klein from OLPC, Robert Nagle, the XO-Houston user’s group organizer, and Melissa Hagemann from the Open Society Institute (OSI). We had a great time together.

Summing it up

This experience was such a great opportunity for me to talk to people about things I believe in (kids, technology, and education) while having fun being a technical writer. I was intimidated initially because I’m not a programmer, and so I wondered if I’d be questioned for even volunteering to present, but I realized that no matter how technical I was, I would be less technical than someone in the room and more technical than someone else in the room. So, the correct action to take is to share the knowledge you have and listen to others to learn more about the topics that interest you.

My only regret from BarCamp is not staying longer for Dawn Foster’s talk about Community Management. I had asked my husband to meet me at the Convention Center with my two sons so we could go to Screenburn together, but after seeing how intimidated my four-year-old would have been by the shoot-em-up video games there, I cancelled on them and wished I had stayed at BarCamp longer. I’ll just have to settle for reading Dawn’s notes about her BarCamp experience instead.

What can you teach with the XO laptop? I’m still pondering that question for US-based classrooms. I’m reading the news from Birmingham Alabama and the blog entries from Dallas-Fort Worth Texas school systems with interest. Apparently you can buy a certain minimum of XO laptops if your school district or other group wants to incorporate them into their learning activities. Sign up at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Laptop_requests. With some grassroots fundraising efforts, a large-scale purchase of XO laptops seems attainable, perhaps even for Austin ISD.

Last week’s post with a picture of my four-year-old using the XO at our dining room table generated a response that a picture shows it all. I’d say that these pictures capture even more of the spirit of the OLPC project, showing a preschool teacher and two students have a blast with them, taking pictures of themselves, each other, and even taking pictures of the others’ XO.

I’ll also attest to the durability and sturdiness of these laptops. My son was walking quite quickly in the classroom with it (okay, maybe even running, but it’s not like he runs with scissors!) and tripped and fell with it. He was unhurt, these kids bounce back unbelievably from falls, and I was equally impressed with the complete durability that the XO displayed even when it probably took a bounce on the carpeted classroom floor.

So, what am I teaching with the XO?

My first session with the kids focused mostly on TamTamMini and Turtle Art, both auditory and visually appealing. These are four-year-olds, so they’re a little young for the target age for these laptops. The target age is about 6-12 years old. But, they figured out the touchpad quickly (and some, like my son, want the touchpad to allow for a mouseclick event when tapped like my Dell laptop responds, but not so with the XO touchpad.)

The kids also crowd around the screen and want to touch everything, which is fine, until I want to do the Turtle Art demonstration which involves clicking Project, and then clicking the icon for Samples and then waiting and then opening a sample file. But they were rewarded for their hands-off stand-off with bubbles and rainbow colors.

In Turtle Art, I thought I’d always have to open the Blocks menu and drag the “clean “puzzle piece out, then click it to get the full starting effect. However, I just discovered that many of the samples have the clean block out already, it’s just hidden behind the menu. I finally figured out to click the hide, erase, or stop buttons to have the turtle stop mid-way through his task. The kids liked the Turtle Art demonstration as well and asked for more. I must admit, I didn’t feel like I was teaching them anything, but these are four-year-olds. With repetition and some more ideas we could build several learning opportunities around that Activity, I believe. I just got a great PDF file showing how to make the turtle draw letters, and I intend to use this demonstration for my next visit.

The next session I attempted to get the Acoustic Tape Measure Activity to work, but it failed miserably. I think it’s because I didn’t go to the Group view and Invite the other XO to the Activity. We’ll try again another day, after I’ve done some more testing.

I also introduced the Record Activity and this was a huge hit for photos. I didn’t show them how to record audio or video, thinking I’d save that for another day. The pictures it takes are 640 x 480, and quite nice with natural lighting. See examples at the XO Photos group on flickr. In a future update of the XO, EXIF data will be available on the photos taken with the XO, and Flickr can then identify the source of the photo as an XO. I’ll have to upload some of the photos the kids took.

One kid even took a picture of his behind with it, reaching way back to push the O button on the game keypad (a nice shortcut way to take pictures with the Record Activity so that you don’t have to use the touchpad and X button click!) His teacher and I laughed so hard at his ingenuity and problem-solving - just to get a picture of his bottom.

Who else has taken their XO into a classroom setting, and what are you learning and teaching with the XO? I’d love to hear more, and I’ll be at SXSW Interactive and BarCamp Austin as well so please do say hi if you see me there.

Lisa Dyer and Alan Porter presented at last week’s DITA Central Texas User Group meeting, and both told tales of end-user doc written and sourced in DITA, with wikitext in mind as an output. About 20 people attended and we all enjoyed the show. I wanted to post my notes to follow up, and I’ll post a link to slide shows as well.

This post covers Lisa Dyer’s presentation on a wiki sourced with DITA topics. I’ll write another post to cover Alan’s presentation.

Although, actually, first, Bob Beims shared Meet Charlie, a description of Enterprise 2.0. Seems very appropriate for the discussions we’ve had at recent Central Texas DITA User Group meetings talking about wikis and RSS subscriptions and web-based documentation.

Lisa has made her presentation available online. My notes are below the slideshow.

DITA source to wiki output case study

Lisa Dyer walked us through her DITA to wiki project. Their high level vision and business goals merged with a wiki as one solution, and Lombardi has customers who had requested a wiki. Lombardi’s wiki is available to customers that have a support login, so I won’t link to it, but she was able to demo the system they’ve had in place since July 2007.

What wiki toolset - open source or entprise wiki engine?

On the question of choosing an open source or enterprise wiki engine, Lisa said to ask questions while evaluating, such as where do you want the intellectual property to develop? Will you pay for support? Who are your key resources internally, and do you need to supplement resources with external help? They found it faster to get up and running and supported with an enterprise engine and chose Confluence, but she also noted that you “vote” for updates and enhancements with dollars rather than, say, community influence. (Editorial note - I’m opining on whether you get updates to open source wiki engines through community influence. I’m certain you can pay for support and enhancements to open source efforts with dollars.)

Run a pilot wiki project

She recommends a pilot wiki, internal only at first, to ferret problems out while building in time to fix the problems. While Michele Guthrie from Cisco couldn’t present on the panel at the last minute, she also has found that internal-only wikis helped them understand the best practices for wiki documentation.

Meet customer needs - or decipher what they want and need

Lisa said that customers wanted immediate updates, knowledge of what’s new with the product and doc (800 pages worth), and wanted to tell others what they had learned. She found that all of these customer requests could be met with a wiki engine - RSS feeds, immediate updates, and the ability to share lessons learned. At her workplace, customers work extensively with the services people and document the implementation specifically, and that information could be scrubbed of customer-specific info. They found that rating and voting features give good content more exposure. Also, by putting the information into wikis, they found that there were fewer “I can’t find this information” complaints.

Intelligent wiki definition and separate audiences for each wiki

They have two wikis - one is for end-user documentation, one is for Services information. In the screens she showed us, Wiki was the tab label for the Services wiki, Documentation was the tab label for the doc wiki. The Documentation wiki does not allow anyone but the technical writers to edit content, but people can comment on the content and attach their own documents or images. The Services wiki allows for edits, comments, and attachments. The customers and services people wanted a way to share their unsanctioned knowledge such as samples, tips, and tricks, and the wiki lets them do that. The Services wiki has all the necessary disclaimers of a community-based wiki, such as “use this info at your own risk” type of disclaimers. Edited to add: The search feature lets users search both wikis, though.

Getting DITA to talk wiki

There are definite rules they’ve had to follow to get DITA to “talk wiki” and to ensure that Confluence knows what the intent is for the DITA content. For one, when they want to use different commands for UNIX and Windows steps in an installation or configuration task, they would use ditaval metadata around in the command line text (using the “platform” property) and use conditional processing for that topic. However, because of the Confluence engine’s limitation of one unique name for each wiki article, they had to create separate Spaces for each condition of the deliverable (UNIX Admin guide or Windows Admin guide, for example). This limit results in something like 12 Spaces, but considering it’s output for several books for separate platforms, 32 individual books in all, that number of Spaces didn’t seem daunting to me. She uses a set of properties files during the build process to tell Confluence what file set to use, and what ditavals they’re seeking, and then passes the properties to the ant build task. The additional wiki Spaces does mean that your URLs aren’t as simple as they could be - but in my estimation, they’re not completely awful either.

While I was researching this blog post further, Lisa also added these details about the Spaces and their individual SKU’s (Stock Keeping Unit, or individual deliverable). “Building on this baseline set of spaces, each new SKU would add 1 to 7 spaces hosting 3 to 21 deliverables, depending on the complexity of the ditaval rules and the product. Obviously, the long pole in this system is ditaval. A more ideal implementation would probably be to render the correct content based on user preferences (or some other mechanism to pass the user’s context to the engine for runtime rendition). Or, a ditaslice approach where you describe what you need, and the ditaslice is presented with the right content. Certainly innovation to be done there.“

Creating a wiki table of contents from a DITA map

She creates a static view of the TOC from the DITA map as the “home page” of the wiki. She currently uses the Sort ID assignment a DITA map XSLT transform to generate the TOC. She said they implemented a dynamic TOC based on the logical order of the ditamap by dynamically adding a piece of metadata to each topic – a sort id using a {set-sort-id} Confluence macro. The IDs are used to populate a page tree macro (the engine involved is Direct Web Remoting, or DWR… an Ajax technology). Currently, their dynamic TOC is broken due to a DWR engine conflict, which should be fixed in the next release. In the meantime, they are auto-generating a more static but fully hyperlinked TOC page on the home page of each Space. A functional solution, not great for back and forth navigation, but it shows the logical order which is pretty critical for a decent starting point.

DITA conref element becoming a transcluded wiki article

Another innovation she wanted to demonstrate was the use of DITA conrefs output as translusions in the Confluence wiki engine, so that in the wiki, the transcluded content can’t be edited inside of an article that transcludes the content. I don’t think it quite behaved the way she wanted it to, but knowing it’s a possibility is exciting. Edited to add: This innovation really does work, Lisa simply was looking at the wrong content (she admits, red-faced.)

Burst the enthusiasm bubble, there are limitations and considerations

One limitation that I observed is that when you transform the DITA source to Confluence wikitext, there are macros embedded, so when someone clicks the edit tab in the wiki, they must edit in wikitext, not the rich-text editor, to make sure the macros are preserved. In the case of the Documentation wiki, they can instruct their writers to always use the wikitext editor. But, for the Services wiki, one attendee asked if users prefer the wikitext editor, and Lisa believes they do. Someone running MoinMoin at their office said they finally just disabled the rich text editor because they didn’t want to risk losing the “cool” things that they could do with wiki text. The problem at the heart of this issue is that if users really like the wikitext editor and do a lot of “fancy” wiki text markup (like macros), then another wiki user using the rich-text editor can break the macros by saving over in rich text. Edited to add: Lisa wrote me with these additional details which are very helpful - “actually, the macros are preserved when in Rich Text Editor (RTE) mode. the problem is that it looks ugly as heck – and if the user is not techie, potentially confusing. the RTE does add all kinds of espace characters to the content– in a seeming random way - and can negatively impact the formatting in general when viewing, but it doesn’t seem to affect our macros. However, if a user wants to use macros to spiffy up the content, then wiki markup mode is definitely recommended.”

We tackled this question and then some at the January Central Texas DITA User Group meeting. I’m a little tardy in writing up my notes and thoughts about the presentation but it went really well and I appreciate all the attendee’s participation as well. We had a high school teacher in the audience and I applaud him for wanting to learn more about DITA to pass that knowledge on to high school students.

I brought along my XO laptop since I was talking about my work with wiki.laptop.org and Floss Manuals and found some more Austin-based XO fans, so that was a great side benefit to me as well.

One of Ben’s answers to the question “What does DITA have to do with wiki?” is “Maybe nothing.” Love it!

Ben introduced another the triangle of choices - you have likely heard of “cheap/good/fast, pick two.” How about “knowledge/reuse/structure, pick one.”

I have to do some thinking about that one and his perception of the limitations and tradeoffs offered by those choices or priorities. Reuse and structure are particularly difficult to pair but also give you the most payoff. Structure and knowledge are another likely pair, but it could be difficult to find subject matter experts who are also able to organize their writing in a very structured manner, and finding writers who know DITA really well and also have specific content knowledge may also be difficult to obtain. His workaround for the difficulty you’d face while trying to come up with a structured wiki is a sluice box - where raw, unstructured data is the top input, some sort of raw wiki is the next filter, and the final tightest filter of all is a topic-oriented wiki.

Original photo of a sluice box by t-dawg.

My take on the question is that there are three potential hybrid DITA wiki combinations, and Chris Almond at this presentation introduced the fourth that I have seen, using DITA as an intermediate storage device, interestingly.

The three DITA-wiki combination concepts I’ve seen are:

• Wikislices - using a DITA map to keep up with wiki “topic” (article) changes. Michael Priestly is working on this for the One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC.)
• DITA Storm – web-enabled DITA editor, but not very wiki-like. However, with just the addition of a History/Revision and Discussion tab, and an RSS feed, you could get some nice wiki features going with that product. Don Day had an interesting observation that sometimes when you add in too many wiki features on a web page you can hardly tell what’s content and where to edit it. I’d agree with that assessment.
• DITA to wikitext XSLT transform- but no round trip, have writers determine what content goes back to DITA source. Lisa Dyer will describe this content flow in the February session.

The slides are available on slideshare.net. Here are the slides that Ben Allums, Ragan Haggard, and I used.

Here are Chris Almond’s slides and his blog entry about the presentation. I described Chris’s project to Stewart Mader of wikipatterns.com and he blogged about our presentation as well at his blog ikiw.org.

I’ve signed up for the Give 1 Get 1 program for One Laptop Per Child, and just received the email today, November 12, 2007, with the link to the site, www.laptopgiving.org.

I read the terms and conditions with interest because I am seriously considering purchasing a laptop either for my son, who is four, or for his classroom of four-year-olds. Plus, I’ve been volunteering to help with their end-user documentation.

I’d love to buy one for every classroom at my son’s preschool but that’ll take some fundraising. I’ll boldly propose here that you can contact me if you’re interested in buying enough for a small preschool in Austin, Texas in addition to kids in least developed countries around the world.

I absolutely LOVE the spirit of the support statement. It reads as follows:

Neither OLPC Foundation nor One Laptop per Child, Inc. has service facilities, a help desk or maintenance personnel in the United States or Canada. Although we believe you will love your XO laptop, you should understand that it is not a commercially available product and, if you want help using it, you will have to seek it from friends, family, and bloggers. One goal of the G1G1 initiative is to create an informal network of XO laptop users in the developed world, who will provide feedback about the utility of the XO laptop as an educational tool for children, participate in the worldwide effort to create open-source educational applications for the XO laptop, and serve as a resource for those in the developing world who seek to optimize the value of the XO laptop as an educational tool. A fee based tech support service will be available to all who desire it. We urge participants in the G1G1 initiative to think of themselves as members of an international educational movement rather than as “customers.”

I’ve been working on documentation for the XO laptop in the wiki at wiki.laptop.org/go/Simplified_user_guide and then taking the wiki content over to an Author-it instance. I’ll write more later about a wiki-based workflow, especially with translation in mind, and we are putting a process in place. Please, feel free to edit that page or contact me if you are interested in contributing.

Personally, the most difficult part so far has been my limited ability with design and layout. I have grand visions but feel my layout skills are inadequate for a kid- and parent-friendly look within Word. Nonetheless, it is an exciting time to be a small part of such an influential project.

I’m one of the friends, family, and bloggers who is willing to help with the XO laptop. So I urge you to go to www.laptopgiving.org and put your U$399 to good use.

In my previous post, I interviewed Diane Fleming who had completed a graduate degree in technical writing later in her career. Today’s interview is with Melissa Burpo, who has completed the coursework and internship portions of the graduate program but still needs to write up her internship report (an equivalent assignment to a master’s thesis) before graduating. I was especially interested in the most current graduate’s perspective and Melissa graciously agreed to answer all these questions.

Melissa Burpo’s Interview

Anne: Could you give me a little bit of a bio - your employer, how long you’ve been there, what you do there?

Melissa: I work for Dovetail Software (www.dovetailsoftware.com), a CRM software vendor. Before I was hired as an intern in October 2006, Dovetail had never employed a writer of any sort, and I had never been employed as a fulltime technical writer. Because both the company and I are new to this whole “technical writer” thing, my job duties can be somewhat nebulous. Common tasks include rewriting, reorganizing, and redesigning legacy documents; writing end-user documentation for new functionality alongside a small agile development team; and lately, moving all of our scattered documents into AuthorIT, a single source content management system. I also occasionally handle marketing tasks, such as writing, designing, and voicing product demonstrations; designing product and company brochures; and producing graphics as needed for other marketing purposes.

Anne: First of all, tell me what your undergrad degree was in?
Melissa: Bachelor of Arts in Communication from Oglethorpe University, with a minor in Sociology

Anne: What led you to a graduate degree in tech comm?
Melissa: An undergraduate professor suggested that I look into tech comm after I finished my bachelor’s degree, but it took me three years to find my way to the MTSC program at Miami University. At first, I was turned off by the idea – I thought tech comm meant writing instruction manuals all day. Eventually I figured out that there was a very cool side to it as well – tech writers are constantly learning new things, exploring new technologies, and then figuring out how best to communicate that information to a user base. It seemed like a fun and innovative space to work in, so I decided to get the degree.

Anne: What other degree programs did you consider?
Melissa: I briefly looked at degrees in Professional Writing and Literary Nonfiction, but tech comm won out in the end.

Anne: What did you learn in the degree program?
Melissa: I learned how to practically apply technical writing theory to real-world problem solving contexts. Almost all of my school projects were for real clients in a variety of industries. For example, I collaboratively put together a website for a waste water group, wrote and designed a procedural reference card for nurses at a local hospital, and wrote a white paper about a local environmental issue for the university.

Anne: What do you wish others had told you about technical writing before you got a job in it?
Melissa: I wish someone had warned me that being a technical writer is just as much about building successful interpersonal relationships as it is about writing and designing good documents. Forging a good relationship with your SMEs is vital, because they are your information resource. Everything works a lot better if he or she is happily willing to share information.

Anne: What do you consider to be the “value” of the graduate degree - in monetary terms, employability terms, and general learning?
Melissa: I don’t see the value as the degree itself, but instead, I see the value as the experience I gained while in the program. The experience translates into a full portfolio, a well-rounded resume, and the ability to find and secure a good job.

Anne: Do you think the degree has paid for itself?
Melissa: Yes, absolutely.

Anne: How well has the education “aged,” meaning, are the subjects you studied still current for the field?
Melissa: So far, so good – of course, I’ve only been out of the program for a year : )

I do want to mention one thing, though. The technology I studied has already been replaced by new versions and new innovations. But that’s okay, because one of the greatest lessons I took away from my program is the ability to quickly learn new technology as needed.

Anne: Do you think that an undergraduate degree in tech comm offers the same results as a masters degree in tech comm?
Melissa: Yes. If the undergrad degree has a practically-based curriculum that prepares students for a professional career, then there shouldn’t be much of a difference. I needed the graduate program because my undergraduate degree was unfocused. It didn’t prepare me for a career.

Anne: If you hadn’t gotten the master’s in technical and scientific communication, speculate about what might be different for your career path and job prospects.
Melissa: In the one year since leaving the program, I’ve already completed two contract jobs and an internship, and I now work in a regular full time position. I don’t think any of this would have been as easy or possible without the experience I gained in my graduate program. If I hadn’t gotten my MTSC degree, I would probably still be struggling to establish myself as an employable, valuable professional.

Anne: What would you advise others who are thinking about pursuing graduate work in technical communication?
Melissa: When looking for a program, find one that gives you practical experience in the field. This will not only start you off with a great portfolio, but it will also give you the knowledge and confidence to move into a real job. Also, keep in mind that studying a specialty area is important. For example, if you want to work in the pharmaceutical industry, you’ll probably need to know something about human biology, drug chemistry, regulatory issues, etc. This should be reflected in your studies, whether it’s before, during, or after you enter the tech comm program.

It’s no secret that I have a masters degree in technical and scientific communication from Miami University. With all the hype about Web 2.0, outsourcing, crowdsourcing, and social media like wikis, an interesting question that I get asked occasionally is, “should I get a graduate degree in technical writing?”

I’ve had quite a few interesting online discussions while seeking interviewees, and I’ll post two interviews this week, and then try to discuss all the complexities in answering this question in a third post.

I emailed questions to two current technical writers in the Austin area who have masters degrees in technical writing. This first post is an interview with Diane Fleming, a Senior Technical Writer at NetQoS. The second interview is with Melissa Burpo, a not-quite-graduated degree candidate who’s working as the only technical writer at DoveTail Software.

Diane Fleming’s Interview

Anne: Could you give me a little bit of a bio - who is your employer, how long you’ve been there, what you do there?
Diane: I currently work as a Senior Technical Writer at NetQoS. I provide all documentation for SuperAgent, an end-to-end performance monitoring tool. Because the Training and Technical Writing departments are combined at NetQoS, I provide product docs (pdfs and online Help) and curriculum for customer training.

Anne: First of all, tell me what your undergrad degree was in?
Diane: It’s a BA in English from SUNY Buffalo.

Anne: What led you to a graduate degree in tech comm?
Diane: I had never heard of technical writing as a profession (this was in the late seventies), but a graduate of RPI’s technical communications department offered a one-night seminar at a local college entitled, “A Career in Technical Writing.” After taking the seminar, I discovered that a high school friend of mine had also graduated from RPI, so I started exploring their degree program. At the time, I was working at the Poughkeepsie Journal and they had a very open tuition reimbursement program. They agreed to pay for my degree at RPI, though it required that I work full-time and commute to Albany to complete the degree (a two-hour commute in each direction).
But I couldn’t pass up the free tuition.

Anne: What other degree programs did you consider?
Diane: None, though later I began work on an M.S. in computer science (which I never completed).

Anne: What did you learn in the degree program?
Diane: I don’t remember the exact titles of the classes, but we learned writing and editing, project management, and computer programming. One of the classes required that we work as a team to produce a piece of documentation, which unfortunately required an extra weekly commute to Albany for me. We also took a communications
class, which entailed a general review of communication theory.

Anne: What do you wish others had told you about technical writing
before you got a job in it?
Diane: I’m not sure anyone could have told me, but I always regretted not pursuing computer programming in lieu of writing because of the greater respect programmers garner – tech writers have to constantly remind others of their value. Sometimes it seems like a losing battle. With offshoring, the message seems to be, if you can speak English, even minimally, then you can be a tech writer!

Anne: What do you consider to be the “value” of the graduate degree — in monetary terms, employability terms, and general learning?
Diane: My degree opened a lot of doors for jobs I’d otherwise be overlooked for. I’ve managed to stay employed as a tech writer since 1988, and I’ve been paid well.

Anne: Do you think the degree has paid for itself?
Diane: Absolutely! Especially since my employer paid for the degree. Even if I had paid for it, the degree was worth its cost. It’s enabled me to put two sons through college and to support my family.

Anne: How well has the education “aged,” meaning, are the subjects you studied still current for the field?
Diane: The skills that have aged well are writing, editing, and project management. But as technology changes, my skills degrade. New programming languages, wikis, agile development, blogging, browser-based interfaces, so on and so forth – all these innovations require that I keep learning new things to stay current.

Anne: Do you think that an undergraduate degree in tech comm offers the same results as a masters degree in tech comm?
Diane: Probably. When I got my M.S. degree, lots of teachers were retraining to become technical writers. In fact, the original program at RPI was geared toward teachers. RPI ran summertime institutes so that teachers could retrain during their time off. The masters degree enabled people in other professions to retrain in a couple of years. But for someone coming right out of high school, an undergraduate degree should suffice.

Anne: If you hadn’t gotten the master’s in technical and scientific communication, speculate about what might be different for your career path and job prospects.
Diane: I doubt I would’ve become a tech writer – I’d tried to “break into” IBM for many years – it was the major employer where I lived, even minimally, then you can be a tech writer!

Anne: What do you consider to be the “value” of the graduate degree - in monetary terms, employability terms, and general learning?
Diane: My degree opened a lot of doors for jobs I’d otherwise be overlooked for. I’ve managed to stay employed as a tech writer since 1988, and I’ve been paid well.

Anne: Do you think the degree has paid for itself?
Diane: Absolutely! Especially since my employer paid for the degree. Even if I had paid for it, the degree was worth its cost. It’s enabled me to put two sons through college and to support my family.

Anne: How well has the education “aged,” meaning, are the subjects you studied still current for the field?
Diane: The skills that have aged well are writing, editing, and project management. But as technology changes, my skills degrade. New programming languages, wikis, agile development, blogging, browser-based interfaces, so on and so forth – all these innovations require that I keep learning new things to stay current.

Anne: Do you think that an undergraduate degree in tech comm offers the same results as a masters degree in tech comm?
Diane: Probably. When I got my M.S. degree, lots of teachers were retraining to become technical writers. In fact, the original program at RPI was geared toward teachers. RPI ran summertime institutes so that teachers could retrain during their time off. The masters degree enabled people in other professions to retrain in a couple of years.
But for someone coming right out of high school, an undergraduate degree should suffice.

Anne: If you hadn’t gotten the master’s in technical communication, speculate about what might be different for your career path and job prospects.
Diane but at the time, I was told that women were secretaries and that was that. I had worked as a temp secretary at IBM, even with an English degree. It wasn’t until I received my masters degree that someone would interview me for a tech writing job at IBM. I might’ve eventually pursued a computer science masters degree in order to become a programmer. But if I hadn’t done that, maybe I’d still be at the Poughkeepsie Journal doing graphic design for retail ads.

Anne: What would you advise others who are thinking about pursuing graduate work in technical communication?
Diane: Check out certificate programs first – RPI offers a HCI certificate (human-computer interaction), which might help you find work as a tech writer. Also look into current technologies – are companies using wikis? What kind of technical information do you want to document? If you’re interesting in writing about programming interfaces, you might get an M.S. in computer science to complement an English degree – this might be of more value in the long-run in terms of pay scale and promotability. Also look into distance learning – schools offer low-residency programs in technical writing, which enable you to keep working and pursue your degree at the same time. Also look for a program that’s tied into a particular industry. RPI was associated with IBM, which really enhanced their program. I think more academic programs are less useful. If the program seems to focus on a lot of theory, it’s probably not going to help you be a good tech writer, though it might help you teach. Also, see if you can talk to a tech writing manager at a local company and ask them what they recommend to become a tech writer.