Canadian Community

You may be aware that a new version of the STC Community Handbook has been released, and can be downloaded from the Leadership Community Resource page. Members of the Global Strategies Committee, of which I am one, have been asked to provide feedback. I looked through the Handbook for things that could be a problem for Canadian members of the Society, and found none.

That’s not necessarily the end of it, though. I might not have spotted something that one of you would have. And because the Handbook is supposed to be globally applicable, perhaps it would be useful to come up with our own supplement to the Handbook. Such a supplement could address:

• Topics in the Handbook from a Canadian perspective.
• Topics not in the Handbook that would be useful for STC communities in Canada.

So, please have a look at the Handbook and leave a comment if you have some thoughts on it.

–
Milan Davidovic
Canadian Issues SIG Liaison to the Global Strategies Committee

Date: Saturday Oct 20, 2007

Location: SFU Harbour Centre, Room 2205, 515 W Hastings, Vancouver
Time: 9:30am to 4:30pm (lunch will be provided)

Cost:
STC Members - $150
Non-members - $175
Students - $125

E-Learning for Technical Communicators: Best Practices in Design, Development, and Delivery

Explore the exciting field of e-learning and examine best practices for designing, developing, and delivering e-learning presentations, seminars, and courses. Discover how adding e-learning to your product offerings increases client satisfaction and reduces support costs. Bring your business cases, e-learning projects, and ideas to the workshop to get practical feedback and advice.

What you’ll learn:

• What is e-learning? What does it look like?
• Why and when to choose e-learning over face to face learning
• The advantages and disadvantages of e-learning
• How people prefer to learn and how people actually learn
• What turns people off/on about e-learning
• How to identify what people need to learn
• What’s the best method for teaching (based on what people need to learn)
• How to assess what people have learned
• What are the best instructional design methods for e-learning
• What instructional design looks like in action
• What tools to use to develop learning materials and what specialized skills, if any, do you need to use those tools
• How facilitation and communication aid learning
• The challenges of online facilitation and what a facilitator can do to encourage learning
• What can you do to facilitate learning without a “teacher”
• How to integrate e-learning into your product offering
• How to judge ROI for e-learning

About Rowena Hart

The workshop will be facilitated be e-learning specialist Rowena Hart. She holds an MA in distributed learning and is a member of the Canadian Society for Training and Development. You may also recognize her as an instructor in the SFU Technical Communication Certificate Program.

As space is limited and this will be an extremely popular event, you must register and pay in advance for this workshop.

Clilck here to register online

In case you didn’t happen to look at the upper right corner of page 34 of the September/October 2007 of Intercom:

During the June 2007 Board of Directors teleconference meeting, the Board unanimously approved the Atlantic Canada Chapter STC’s petition for provisional status.
For more information about the Atlantic Canada Chapter STC—based in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada—please contact William Gill at william.gill@innovatia.net.

Welcome!

–
Milan Davidovic
Canadian Issues SIG Liaison to the Global Strategies Committee

Everyone familiar with this nationwide festival?

Some time ago, STC Toronto used to participate in this, but hasn’t recently. I’m looking into the history of this, with an eye to our participation next year.

I checked the Vancouver, Calgary, Kitchener, and Halifax lists of exhibitors (one wasn’t up for Vancouver at the time of this posting), and I didn’t find any STC participation.

I’m going to start asking around; maybe we can get STC at each of next year’s festivals (okay, Halifax might be a tough one, unless someone’s getting something going there… ). One thing that it might be good for is promoting the STC competition, if your deadline and judging take place later in the year as STC Toronto’s does.

–
Milan Davidovic
STC Toronto Competition Manager
competition2007@stctoronto.org
http://stctorcomp.blogspot.com/

Judging from this, it looks as though countries in the STC world are taking it into their own hands to start establishing reliable occupation-related data on technical communicators.

Myself, I haven’t yet “caught the bug” on this issue; I wonder if there are STC members here in Canada who would champion a similar effort.

Milan Davidovic, STC Toronto

STC Toronto has started its competition — go to http://stctoronto.org/ and click “Competition” (on the left) for details.

How about the other chapters?

Milan Davidovic
STC Toronto 2007 Competition Manager

So, it appears that STC has struck a committee to help improve how it functions as a global organization. The other day, Michèle Marques got in touch with me and asked if I’d be interested in being our SIG’s liaison to that committee, and I agreed to give it a try.

There’s no particular job description that goes with this gig, so I’m interpreting it as follows:

• If SIG members (or other Canadian STC members) have something to say about how STC supports and accommodates its Canadian members, I can relay it to the committee.
• When the committee does stuff, I’ll let the SIG know about it.

So, if you’ve got something to say, let me know. Otherwise, stay tuned…

–Milan Davidovic, STC Toronto

Just learned that we have a new provisional chapter for Atlantic Canada. I don’t have a lot of details right now but I think it’s a great addition. Hopefully it will garner enough interest to get out of provisional status.

- Kitty MacAlpine, STC Eastern Ontario

One of this SIGs goals is to educate members of STC internationally about issues that are unique to Canada. I’m kind of weak in this area; I know that our tax situation is different here than in the U.S., but I suppose any part of the Society outside of the U.S. could say the same thing.

What are issues do you think are unique to STC members — and technical communicators — in Canada? And of these, which do you think are important to educate the rest of STC about, and why?

–Milan Davidovic, STC Toronto

If you’re a member of the STC Canadian Community or an officer in one of the Canadian STC chapters, you’re welcome to become a contributor. Just leave a comment to this message to this message about one or more topic areas on which you’d like to post, and I will get in touch with you.

- Michele Marques, Manager, Canadian Issues SIG