Re-Forming Information: A Case Study in Teaching

摘要

The challenges that face content management writers are not just tools, but the design principles and concepts underlying content management. This paper is a case study that explores the challenges of teaching writers both to create encapsulated content and to design that content within a user-centric approach to information design. The approach used in the class provided a fine-grained definition of information types to move the writers as far as possible from the traditional documentation approach. The insights presented in this case study are drawn from instructors' experiences in presenting a course in content encapsulation to technical writers, employed by a traditionally mainframe-based software company. Writer reactions suggested that the approach taught in the class assisted them in overcoming existing preconceptions of document design, user profiling, and content creation.