RE: What color is my parachute? (long).

["rpl" <rpl -at- iexplain -dot- com>]

Mrass wrote

"The primary project I'm working on is, well, something I have zero interest
in.  Not so much because of the content, but because of the main tool
(ToolBook II Instructor) used to work on the project.  Talking to other
tech writers, I found that none had even heard of ToolBook II, and even the
members of my team have commented on how much they hate using it because of
its obscurity and difficulty level.  They want to move on to another tool,
but the company, apparently, has invested too much into it for that to
occur any time soon."

Could it be perhaps that that neither the content nor main tool used in the
project are at the heart of your feeling a lack of interest? The reason I
ask is that I was in a job as a technical writer/trainer where I were sort
of forced to make the move to Macromedia Authorware because the company was
anticipating making quite a bit of money on CBT's developed by the tech
writing/training team for various software products. Having spent quite a
bit of time strictly as technical writer I found the transition to the
"training" part of my new job description quite difficult. I'd never really
been particularly interested in training people - even though in the past a
few people have suggested to me that I'd make "a good teacher". Anyways, I
had made similar comments about the difficulty of learning Authorware, but
now I look back and say that I believe my comments were actually just
protestations (I've always wanted to use that word!) against the transition
I was supposed to make to my new role as trainer.

As a tech-writer my interest has always lain primarily in getting into a
complex, high-tech product, complex software, or complex system and learning
every little facet, every little button on every little new window that
opened. I love to see & try to UNDERSTAND how stuff works and the
relationships between the subassemblies or parts of a bigger system. And I
really love to explain how stuff works to people, in detail. (especially
when it comes to the topic of aerospace and aviation). Sometimes so much so
that it bores people, or scares them away.

So when asked to make the transition to create CBT's I kind of balked,
mostly because CBT contains the word "training". Again, I was saying on the
surface that Authorware was difficult to learn and use. It wasn't the
software at all. It was more because I had little idea how to take my
experience as a technical writer and translate that into something that
could be successfully used in this new environment of training. I did have
some experience teaching but for some reason I developed a really negative
attitude towards that part of my job description, I started thinking, "I'm a
TECH-WRITER not a trainer I can't DO this! You know?

I have since faced my fear of getting into training and teaching and now I'm
an accredited English as a second language teacher - with no real experience
yet but I took it upon myself to learn some fundamentals about teaching,
because I finally recognized my fear was because I had no training as a
teacher, and not really because of having to learn a new tool. I believe CBT
creation will be an inevitable part of any documentation department now and
so I thought to myself I better start to really embrace this part of the
technical communication field and learn as much as I can about making good,
audience-friendly, appropriate, useful CBT's that teach the learner what
they're supposed to learn and that make it easy for the trainer to evaluate
what has been learned or not learned. Now, I find the CBT design process
actually quite fascinating and see myself getting very involved in every
aspect of it. To start with, Open script tutorials, here I come!

It surprised me that you said: "Talking to other tech writers, I found that
none had even heard of ToolBook II, and even the members of my team have
commented on how much they hate using it because of its obscurity and
difficulty level." It surprised me because I was under the impression that
we as Tec writers usually spend a good quantity of our time figuring out
software that is far more difficult and obscure than Toolbook II Instructor,
don't we?

I've also heard from course designers that Toolbook Instructor II is very
versatile and fairly easy to use. I haven't used it myself yet but will need
to get ramped up in a big hurry after I finish off my English degree in
August - if every thing work out well in the next couple of weeks.... :).
And just to answer your comment about the apparent obscurity of Toolbook
II - I think maybe it's because only a few companies so far have begun to
see how versatile it is. As to the apparent level of difficulty - certainly
open script is a new programming language to learn. But as a fairly low
level programming language, it can't be all that hard. Especially for us
tech-writers, no? Imagine the stuff you could do if you had a good grasp on
Open Script! Turbo-supercharged HTML?

Anyway, the icon drag and drop method in Toolbook II is supposed to
eliminate the need to write raw open script code isn't it? Making things
easier yet.

Well, I hope my comments have not been too negative.

Rob


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