Red Hat helps teach about tech writing

In Brno in Czechia, Red Hat’s large local office has been helping the city’s Masaryk University to teach future technical writers.

Whenever someone tries to teach, though, they learn as well.

At the Open Source Summit in Prague, a senior member of Red Hat’s documentation team in Brno presented a talk called Diagrams & Dragons: Teaching Technical Writing to University Students the Open Source Way.

Red Hat has a large site in Brno, which is the second-largest Czech city and is also the home of the respected Masaryk University.

Red Hat’s Brno office has a substantial documentation team — this vulture was part of it for a while.

For the last four years, Red Hat has been working with the university’s Faculty of Informatics to teach a course unit in technical writing.

Jiří Herrman talked about what the course tutors had learned from the students.

For FI MUNI, its course PV177 Technical Writing.

Red Hat has a page with some of the materials.

“RH has been looking into cultivating technical writers in Brno for a while,” he said, but the launch of the course was “delayed due to the 2020 worldwide global… thingy.” The company particularly wants to work on what he described as “that tricky part of technical writing where you actually have to interact with other humans.” Some of the things that struck this former tech-docs writer the most are covered on pages 7 and 9 from Herrman’s short slide deck [PDF], which discuss what didn’t work.

Although the course was aimed at students with some technical knowledge, they found that setting classwork with shell-based tools didn’t work: some of the students had never used the command-line, some came with borrowed laptops without admin-level access, and some came with just phones rather than laptops.

Some we found less surprising.

Getting students to grade one anothers’ work, much as professional tech writers review one another’s contributions, didn’t work well – partly due to the speed required.

In the end, the compromise was to give the students a course in grading each other’s work “without pissing each other off.” It didn’t shock us, but we suspect might leave some training vendors taken aback, that interacting with remote teachers who were presenting online didn’t work well – especially when there were multiple tutors, changing with each class.