Podcast: Trends in Technical Communication
This podcast on Trends in Technical Communication is a recording of a presentation I gave at the Missouri State University Workshop for Teachers of Technical Writing on April 22, 2010. Although trends in technical communication could cover a variety of topics, I chose to focus on four trends: hybrid roles, social media, collaborative authoring, and multimedia. Here's the description of my presentation:
In a sea of ever-changing technologies, tools, and methods for documentation, technical writers often find themselves gasping for air trying to keep up. At the lead of the current trends, the following topics continue to gain traction: multimedia, such as screencasts and other video content; wikis, as well as other collaborative authoring tools and methods; hybrid roles, especially with usability, quality assurance, and audiovisual tasks; and finally the messy, fragmented content of social media, which stands in sharp contrast to structured authoring.