goodness and goodies

My goodness: The Giants win the Big Show. Contrary to comments by pundits and brother-in-laws who never played a single down of organized football, it was not a boring game. If you watched the game from the line of scrimmage (how most people who strapped it on at one time tend to watch a game), you would have seen a smash you in the throat, my guns are bigger than your guns, good ol' game o' football. Am I jubilant over the win? You betcha. Am I sorry for the Pats' defeated/undefeated season? Sure. The sportsman in me loves to see records set. But I might just be happier for Nick Buoniconti and Larry Csonka than I am for Strahan and Manning. Yes, it's good to be a Giants fan this week. Now I can focus on watching the Big East stagger into March and think up ten different ways the Mets can make Pedro and Hernandez last more than three months of the season.

On a professional note: I picked up the Adobe Technical Communication suite and am delighted at the cross-application integration and the overall improvements to FrameMaker. I've found real opportunity to reconsider single-sourcing a lot of our training documentation and online job-aids. Many thank to Tom Johnson for his posts, reviews, and interviews regarding the package.

On a final professional note: There's a post at Technical Communication about the ways in which documentation can be used to generate revenue. This isn't a new topic and many of the considerations are rehashed approaches from the late '80s, when documentation and QA geeks were increasingly finding their heads on the cost-cutting floor. This time around I'm seeing interesting similarities between value-in-documentation arguments and value-in-instructional design arguments, particularly for higher ed. It's always a fun exercise to swap out one subject for another in an argument and see what you come up with. In this case, the commentary is dead on when you consider it in the context of ID and course development. At the very least I'm thinking more about the discussions we've been having for the past five years about trying to formalize ID on this campus in a way that directly improves the quality of online and hybrid courses. More on the "Q" word later.