tekom-Jahrestagung 2012 - ActiveDoc

Professionelles Schreiben / Technical Authoring
Application in the Workplace
There is a difference between education and training, and that may impact
how approaches to “education” in DITA can be applied to “training”
in DITA.
The objective of education is to gain knowledge about facts, principles,
and concepts. Training is more focussed on teaching a skill. Assessment
of education is based on testing a student’s knowledge of concepts and
ability to apply concepts to solve problems. Assessment in training is
usually about testing the student’s ability to perform a task. This is usually
(perhaps unfairly) summarised as education = theory, training =
practice.
To be a competent DITA practitioner in the workplace, an author does
need to have a firm understanding of the concepts of structured, semantic
authoring. It is not a field where learning by rote (recalling which
buttons to press or menus to select) is relevant. DITA is principally a
methodology, and is not a software tool. For that reason, training authors
in DITA is very similar to educating students in DITA theory. While you
may be able to train someone to use a DITA authoring tool, you need to
do more to educate them to write within the DITA methodology.
In the Workplace
Workplace training in DITA can take a similar approach to university
education. The new skills required for a DITA author can be summarised
as:
−−
information typing
−−
topic-based writing for re-use
−−
minimalism
−−
separation of content and form
−−
XML and mark-up language
−−
DITA vocabulary
−−
Software tools
The first five of these new skills are conceptual, and the last two are
mostly practical.
If authors working in an organisation have no education in DITA or
structured authoring, they will need to be taught all seven skills. Those
with education in structured authoring may only need training in the
software tools used by the organisation, and perhaps in the DITA vocabulary
if their learning was based on another semantic mark-up
language.
Student Outcomes
Colin M. (graduated in 2009) was hired by a company based in the
Bouches-du-Rhône region, South of France about six months after
graduating. He later left that company to work for a semiconductor
manufacturing group in Eindhoven in The Netherlands, where he continues
to work as a Product Data Analyst and DITA Implementor. Without
the educational background in DITA, his career would have been
very different.
Peter C. (graduated in 2011) was already working as a technical communicator
in an automotive company in Melbourne, Australia, but was
tekom-Jahrestagung 2012
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