Organizing Confetti: Verbal to Print in Instructional Design

 Presented by: Joan Hardy Eison, founder and principal of Reset 3 Consulting

If you aspire to translate technical or instructional verbal presentations into clear, concise, and useful printed materials step away from software templates and computer keyboards. Beam your initial focus on creating the primary story you want to convey with the use of a white board, pad of paper or scribbled sticky notes arranged on a wall.

Once the story has been fleshed out, identify characteristics and limitations the varied user audiences who will be expected to “do something” with the instructional content. The most basic purpose of technical or instructional writing is to convey directions, explanations or ideas, some very concrete, others rather abstract. Documents must be very readable, yet, precise, and definitive while discernable by both professional and non-professional audiences.

In this 90 minute workshop, participants will experience some of the following methods and techniques for designing/developing technical and instructional materials:

• Design, not just decoration, a clarifying tool
• Ignoring “expert’s mind” in favour of “beginner’s mind”
• Seeking and identifying subject matter patterns, intersections and links
• Deciding what matters; and, letting the rest go
• Studying your own presentations to re-balance and streamline content