STC News and Events, Jan-Feb 2011

The Instructional Designers Community of India (IDCI), whose mission is to foster community building, training and learning for instructional designers has joined hands with the STC India Chapter. The collaboration will allow for streamlined and regular learning sessions.

IDCI will plan, identify topics, speakers and arrange learning sessions and workshops on instructional design. STC India will assist IDCI with the venue for the sessions and workshops, setting up the workshop infrastructure and the WebEx sessions. The collaboration will come into effect from March 2011. The learning sessions will be held at Novell, Bangalore.

STC India User Research and Usability SIG sessions

The User research and Usability SIG conducted two sessions in January 2011.  Business Impact of Accessibility by Srinivasu Chakravarthula, from Yahoo! and Out-of-the-Box Experience (Designing for First-time Use) by Amit Patil from IBM.

The Business Impact of Accessibility session focused on the misconceptions about accessibility and the low priority it is accorded in the SDLC. It discussed the negative impact of ignoring accessibility and the positive impact on a business if addressed right.

The Out-of-the-Box Experience (Designing for First-time Use) session discussed how first-time user experience stays as the major differentiator for product adoption and acceptance.

The fact that the sessions can be attended via WebEx has enabled more professionals access and participate in the learning sessions, increasing the reach of the training programs.

The sessions were sponsored by Continuous Computing, on whose premises the training sessions were conducted  and Technowrites, who enabled the WebEx session.

STC Hyderabad Learning Session on Freelancing Survival Kit

The first learning session in Hyderabad for 2011 was organized by the STC Hyderabad representative on February 26, 2011. The session was Freelancing Survival Kit anchored by Ravikumar,  a technical writer with close to eight years of experience, currently works with Progress Software, Hyderabad as a Principal Technical Writer.

The presentation provided a hands on guide to all aspects of running an independent freelancing business from scratch. It also covered building and honing skills to showcase your expertise in the open marketplace, nuances of client handling and price negotiation and the varied roles that freelancers can assume like becoming retainers for company where they are contracted for a long term relationships.

Progress Software, Hyderabad sponsored the venue.

STC Gurgaon’s Learning Sessions

STC Gurgaon has kicked off the year with a series of sessions in February 2011. Februray 26th saw three speakers coming together to talk about knowledge management, estimation techniques and creating documentation in multiple formats.

Angelo Mohan, a Senior Specialist on the Capability Development team from Accenture discussed how technical writers can broaden their role by understanding and managing the vast knowledge banks in their organizations.

Makarand Pandit from Technowrites ran through estimation techniques for documentation projects.  Alok Sharma’s topic was how to create documentation in multiple formats from a single source using HTML Doc, Acrobat, and Dyoxygen.

The session was sponsored by Ericsson.