#14859
When you create named destinations, make sure that they are in the view that you want them to be when created because that is the view that will be applied when that named destination is called up later. Also, remember to use the Document Properties preferences to force Acrobat to use the preferences that were assigned to the document (as opposed to Acrobat's own viewing preferences). You may find that your file will open and view differently in every Acrobat application that is used if you do not save the document with your preferences.
PDFzone (2000). Design>Publishing>Online>Adobe Acrobat
#29648
Focus Groups in Usability: From Face-to-Face to Screen-to-Screen Dialogue 
Electronic focus groups became a popular alternative to face-to-face groups in user research in recent years. They are largely known for the benefits of anonymity, accurate discussion tacking, and low cost. At the same time, the quality of results generated by on-line focus groups remains uncertain. The paper explains five fundamentals of the focus group technique, such as content, context, representation, facilitation and interaction. It reviews different stages of focus group development and provides recommendations for facilitating each stage. The paper discusses the potentials and limitations of electronic focus groups, provides practical tips for facilitators, and compares them with face-to-face groups.
Gorlenko, Lada. STC Proceedings (2005). Articles>Usability>Online>Focus Groups
#24399
Formation of Norms in a Blog Community
Blogs are often situated within a blog community of similar interests. These communities can be a useful way for readers to access a specific slice of information.
Wei, Carolyn. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Rhetoric>Online>Blogging
#30860
Forums for Citizen Journalists? Adoption of User Generated Content Initiatives by Online News Media 
The mainstream online news media face accusations of being slow to respond to so-called 'grassroots' or 'citizen journalism', which uses the world wide web, and in particular blogs and wikis, to publish and promote independent news-related content. This article argues that the adaptation of established news websites to the increasing demand from readers for space to express their views is driven as much by local organizational and technical conditions as it is by any attachment to traditional editorial practices. The article uses qualitative research interviews with the editors and managing editors of nine major British news websites to reveal the debates journalists are having about their changing roles, the challenges of meeting commercial expectations and legal obligations, and the innovations taking place in online newsrooms. It provides journalism and interactive media scholars with case studies on the changes taking place in journalism's relationship with its consumers.
Thurman, Neil. New Media and Society (2008). Articles>Publishing>Online>Community
#23660
Commercial courseware management systems efficiently distribute expository instructional shovelware without regarding how adults actually construct knowledge or develop practical skills. Critical, unaddressed instructional problems increasingly face the commercial and academic distributed learning community and require thoughtful, boldly pragmatic instructional design solutions to this salient issue. Alternative, innovative pedagogical approaches more appropriate for 21st century communications technologies need to be systematically explored, developed, validated, and creatively implemented. One promising perspective is to focus emerging technology systems on the design of cognitive learning environments based upon what we know and what we are discovering about how people actually learn, develop performance skills and heuristic competencies, and construct meaningful, transferable knowledge throughout their lifetimes.
Lasnik, Vincent E. STC Proceedings (2003). Articles>Education>Online
#13121
From Email to the Web: Teaching an ESL Technical Writing Class
This paper discusses the author’s experience of teaching an English as a Second Language (ESL) technical writing class. The class consisted of students from several European and Asian countries who work for the same company as the author. The class began as an email “correspondence” class, but the author developed a web page which served as a “home” for the class to meet. As with most good classes, the teacher ended up learning as much or more than the students. This paper shares some of what the author learned from teaching.
Crawley, Charles R. STC Proceedings (2001). Presentations>Education>Online>Technical Writing
#20341
From Information to User Assistance: A Support System for a User Technology Organization
Our plight as users of process information is much like that of the users of the information for our software products. Like them, we want to do useful work and get appropriate assistance when we need it. Instead of just reading about a task such as writing an information plan, we want the templates and samples to use when writing the plan. Just-in-time assistance, experience captured in a useful form, would suit us just fine. This paper, by the designers and developers of a system that supports the work and processes of a user technology organization, presents the information design issues that we encountered and the design of the system that we created.
Hargis, Gretchen, Deirdre Longo and Lindsay Bennion. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Documentation>Online>Help
#21510
From Online Document to Electronic Performance Support System
This demonstration introduces the concept of an Electronic Performance Support System (EPSS), an online end-user support system that provides whatever is necessary to generate performance and learning at the moment of need. The speaker will step through a five-level analysis of the design and delivery components of an EPSS and demonstrate how to design and position online documents for inclusion in an EPSS.
Hyman, Francine N. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Documentation>EPSS>Online
#23661
From Online Help to Embedded User Assistance
Online help systems have evolved over the past twenty years to meet the needs of our users. Designers must consider the content, format, presentation, navigation, and access methods of online help systems. A series of design checklists based on the past 20 years of research are presented in this paper, which summarizes a journal article currently being considered for publication. The latest trend in online help system design is embedded user assistance, which includes integrating information into the interface and including an embedded help pane within that interface to display a context-sensitive online help system.
Corbin Nichols, Michelle. STC Proceedings (2003). Articles>Documentation>Online>Help
#23597
A panel of industry experts provides an overview of the CD-ROM publishing process—and its business issues–for technical communicators who are responsible for implementing CD-ROM publishing in their organizations. The panelists will discuss how to gain the benefits of reduced manufacturing warehousing and distribution costs, without degrading documentation quality.
Gale, John, Stephanie L. Rosenbaum and Pamela Sansbury. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Documentation>Online
#19463
From Sea to Shining Sea…Bi-Coastal Teaming
This presentation addresses the issues that technical communicators face when team members are in different geographic locations. Issues such as communication, team building, project management and planning, and successful practices that help teams succeed without regard to their physical locations will be discussed. The management of distributed teams, what obstacles managers face, including labor and employment laws, cost-of-living relative to salaries in varied locations, and how to conduct performance appraisals when managers and employees work thousands of miles apart will also be explored, along with employee perspectives and issues of change and collaboration.
STC Proceedings (2001). Articles>Collaboration>Online
#13140
From Sea to Shining Sea…Bi-Coastal Teaming
This presentation addresses the issues that technical communicators face when team members are in different geographic locations. Issues such as communication, team building, project management and planning, and successful practices that help teams succeed without regard to their physical locations will be discussed. The management of distributed teams, what obstacles managers face, including labor and employment laws, cost-of-living relative to salaries in varied locations, and how to conduct performance appraisals when managers and employees work thousands of miles apart will also be explored, along with employee perspectives and issues of change and collaboration.
Chappell, Leah P., Deborah Gill-Hesselgrave, Strecker Peterson. STC Proceedings (2001). Presentations>Collaboration>Online
#24565
From the Margins to the Center: The Future of Annotation
This article describes the importance of annotation to reading and writing practices and reviews new technologies that complicate the ways annotation can be used to support and enhance traditional reading, writing, and collaboration processes. Important directions for future research are discussed, with emphasis on studying how professionals read and annotate, how readers might use annotations that have been produced by others, and how the interface of an annotation program affects collaboration and communication on revision. In each area, the authors emphasize issues and methods that will be productive for enhancing theories of workplace and classroom communication as well as implications for the optimal design of annotation technologies.
Wolfe, Joanna L. and Christine M. Neuwirth. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (2001). Articles>Editing>Online
#31242
Fulfilling the Promise of Open Content
Unfortunately, the movement to use open educational resources in higher education hasn’t yet realized the full impact that its founders anticipated. Open content is still in its infancy and faces some technical and cultural challenges that affect its widespread adoption.
Petrides, Lisa. Inside Higher Ed (2008). Articles>Education>Online>Open Source
#18469
Gauging the Value of Online Grade Posting: An Inquiry into Full Disclosure
With the continued development of the Internet, distance learning initiatives and Web-based mechanisms designed to support traditional classroom pedagogies are here to stay, and traditional notions of teaching are forever changed. Online colleges and universities like the University of Phoenix already boast burgeoning enrollments, as students flock to a curriculum that will gladly meet them on their own terms and in their own homes and offices. On the Web, teaching moves from brick and mortar classrooms with thirty students entering and leaving every hour, on the hour, to a compendium of synchronous and asynchronous experiences characterized by bulletin board posts, downloads, real-time chats, file transfers, and video and audio files. Web-based approaches to teaching writing and rhetoric are, generally speaking, multivalent, offering new and important capacities that surpass some of the dimensional and practical constraints of the traditional written page. Moreover, many of the practices common in Web-based pedagogy are well supported by theories of dialogism and negotiated learning, and those in the computers and composition community have long trumpeted these benefits.
Knievel, Michael. Kairos (2001). Articles>Education>Instructional Design>Online
#14262
Genre Theory, Engineering Education, and Circumventing Internet Bandwidth Problems
A growing body of empirical research has implied that media seem to make little difference in education. In contrast, in the article “Distance Education Horror Stories Worthy of Halloween,” David Hailey, et al. argue that Internet-based education can be dangerous to the point that it can “sometimes threaten a teacher's career.” Although this might seem troublesome for researchers who maintain that media make no difference, we believe that it points to a different issue. The problems we found stem from genre rather than media choices. The point in this paper is that while media choices may matter little, genre choices are critical – substituting an essay for a lecture or an instruction set for a demonstration can have pedagogical consequences that can improve or disrupt learning.
Hailey, David E. and Christine E. Hailey. Frontiers in Education (2002). Articles>Education>Online
#19825
Getting Started on an Online Project with Cognetics’ Design Methodology
Many electronic documentation projects fail because usability and interface design are not included in the initial project definition and integrated into the process. The Cognetics Design Methodology is an approach to project planning that places the user at the center of the design. Whether you are just getting started on your first project or looking for ways to make your work better, the Cognetics Design Methodology can help you produce high quality work. This workshop will focus on the initial project definition steps, and is intended to give participants practical experience in the difficult task of getting a project off the ground.
Quesenbery, Whitney. STC Proceedings (1995). Articles>Project Management>Online
#13192
Drawing on experience in bringing the material of many clients to the Internet and CD-ROM, this paper describes how to develop an intelligent online document repository. The paper describes how to plan scalable solutions, how to manage production, what to watch out for, and how to maintain your collections into the future.
Thurston, John. STC Proceedings (2001). Presentations>Publishing>Online
#24694
Goal-Oriented Paper Versus Online Documentation Search Strategies
In this age of information, advanced technology gives us access to more than ever imagined. Are people easily moving toward gathering information online instead of from paper? This study investigated novice and expert user access of paper versus online documentation.
Anson, Patricia H. and Robert Anson. STC Proceedings (1996). Articles>Documentation>Online
#24452
Going Online: Making the Right Decisions
Putting documents online takes planning and special expertise. Making the right decisions up front can save you months of frustration later on— and help you avoid many pitfalls. This workshop provides everything you need to know about planning and managing an online project. It deals with the decision-making process, not the design process. It is intended for managers, technical communicators, and consultants responsible for putting documents online.
Rockley, Ann. STC Proceedings (1995). Articles>Publishing>Online
#19925
Going Paperless — No Longer a Revolutionary Idea
Moving user documentation from paper to online requires long–term planning and hard work. You must rethink how you design documents and determine the best way to present information online. You can take steps to downsize the existing documentation workload. You may even change the way you work with the software development staff. As a result, you will probably produce better documents, start working a lot smarter and save the company a lot of money.
Mulreany, Sharon R. and Risa Glick. STC Proceedings (1996). Articles>Documentation>Online
#22192
Distance education research tends to focus on students' experiences in the online classroom because students are the bread-and-butter of distance learning programs.
Kitalong, Karla Saari. CPTSC Proceedings (2003). Articles>Education>Online
#23565
Good Online Indexing: It Doesn't Happen Automatically
Indexing online information is a key skill for online information developers, yet not much information exists on how to do it right. After defining online indexing and briefly presenting the research the authors were involved in, the article provides all the key ingredients for creating a good, searchbased online index.
Berry, Robert R., Ralph Earle and Michelle Corbin Nichols. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Indexing>Online
#19802
Graduate researchers in technical communication help prepare other students for using the National Information Infrastructure, known as the super information highway. Here graduate students report recent research on the importance of logical screen sequences in hypertext, eight types of information to include to make proposals persuasive, and a profile of surveyed university computersupported writing facilities to point out needs such facilities have.
Battle, Mary V. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Education>Graduate>Online
#21186
We often hear how the Web can be used to deliver technical documentation. But have you ever thought about the Web as technical documentation? When dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of people, all using the same product, start posting tips and solutions to problems on different Web sites, the entire Internet becomes a kind of crude users’ manual.
Martin, Maurice. Intercom (2003). Articles>Documentation>Online>Community
