Karl Stolley is associate professor of digital writing & rhetoric and co-director of graduate studies in the department of humanities at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He regularly teaches courses on Web design and development, information architecture, and humanizing technology. At the Summit, he’ll be leading two preconference workshops in the Responsive Design and Development Certificate Bundle—Developing Web Apps: Foundations in HTML5 and Developing Web Apps: Front-end Interaction.
Responsive Web design is getting a lot of play these days in tech comm. What are the main ideas running behind these two workshops in particular?
Web design is going through an identity crisis: smaller screens are smaller and higher resolution than ever; and big screens are bigger than ever. The challenge is, how do you deliver the most useful user interface under such conditions? It may seem like mobile content is expensive and challenging, but when you plan for mobile, it doesn’t have to be that way. In the workshops, we’ll look at mobile-first responsive design: designing a mobile experience first forces you to make hard choices early on, but those choices often pave the way for a better experience on larger displays. As we build our apps together, we’ll talk about those design decisions.
The great thing for tech comm is seeing how neatly the three primary languages of the Web—HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript—work together responsively across all different sizes of screens. Designing responsively means getting to establish a relationship between form and content that transcends a particular screen size or device type.
What can participants expect during the workshop?
In the workshop, we’re going to build a simple, HTML5-based app together. We’ll start with the planning and design of the structural HTML5 (including the data-attribute and other HTML5 semantics) and the foundations of responsive CSS. HTML5 does all of the familiar work of structuring documents, but it also goes further in terms of exposing browser features for building Web applications. As participants will see, when we go back to the basics like HTML5 and CSS, we can take better control over what we’re doing with our projects.
In the second workshop, we’ll continue that work by looking at manipulating the Document Object Model (DOM) using JavaScript at the jQuery framework. We’ll also use jQuery to pull in 3rd-party data from open data APIs. At the conclusion of the workshop, participants will have created their own small web application that runs entirely in the browser and pulls data from an open API. Not bad for a day’s work.
So how will these new skills benefit me as a technical communicator?
A single workshop is obviously not going to teach everything you need to know, but it is going to better prepare you to be able to read some code, craft your own scripts, talk with developers, get different perspectives on systems, create rapid prototypes, and so on. One of the most useful things about learning web development is that it will help you to recognize both the limitations and possibilities of existing systems as well as to explore new ways of doing things based on the languages (versus the systems) being used.
So tell me about the session you’re doing during the Summit itself, Agile Professional Portfolio Development.
Maintaining a portfolio site seems unnecessary and taxing, especially at a time when it appears more important to keep an updated profile on Twitter or LinkedIn. But obviously those platforms and others like them don’t provide for the opportunity to showcase work the way a portfolio site does. The problem with an online professional portfolio is that it tends to be more of a headache than a vehicle for advancement and professional development. Static portfolio sites often go stale quickly, while portfolios built on self-hosted blogging or CMS tools require maintenance and upkeep for security reasons alone.
Your portfolio should showcase your projects and skills, rather than the tool you’re using. This session is going to walk through a professional portfolio development approach that uses a static site-generator (Jekyll) to publish content to the Web. Session attendees will learn how to get into an agile, content-centered mindset and learn the basics of automating the thankless parts of the maintenance of portfolio sites.
Complete the sentence: “You should absolutely plan on attending this session if you …”
Are a professional working in the field. It’s important not just to your own advancement but to the stature of our field for members to go beyond Twitter and LinkedIn and build compelling professional portfolios that showcases the final product of technical communication as well as the story behind it. We need stories of the intellectual effort behind your work, your unique way of tackling and solving a problem. A high-caliber portfolio raises your profile within an institution and collectively raises the profile of technical communication as a profession.
In the evaluations, we ask attendees, “What is the best idea you heard in this session that you plan to use?” What do you expect the top answer to be?
I want to tackle the idea of agility and what it means, especially in terms of introducing people to tools that can change the way they work and think about working. I’d expect answers to be about those new technologies, although I want to work hard as a presenter to emphasize the concepts of agility that change work in meaningful ways (rather than just adding to the inherent buzzwordiness of “agility”).
What are you looking forward to most in Phoenix?
The warmer weather. And being able to meet people who are new to the field, who are new to the conference, and to hear their stories. I think a lot more can be learned about the direction of the field by talking to newcomers and what attracted them to tech comm in the first place.
More about Karl