Welcome to the STC Chicago Community

By Linda Jansak

In Chicago, I often find myself scrambling to find enough time to attend meetings, client sessions, and networking opportunities. Like many of you, I typically travel across wide expanses of territory—also known as “Chicagoland”—during the course of a single day. One of the reasons I enjoy attending the Technical Communication Summit is that nearly 200 educational sessions take place under a single roof, and STC event planners do all of the scheduling before I step foot in the host city. While I didn’t have time to attend all of the sessions on my list this year, I thoroughly enjoyed the sessions I attended, and I learned a lot.

STC Chicago and CISPI (Chicago-International Society for Performance Improvement) are sponsoring the Chicago e-Learning & Technology Showcase on Wednesday, August 20,  at Roosevelt University's Downtown Campus (Gage Building), 18 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago.

Anyone who wants to hear and see e-learning in all its shapes and forms should attend this event. You will be able to network with instructional designers, instructional developers, technical writers, trainers, training managers, content managers, and media developers just like yourself to learn the newest and best.

STC Chicago community members proudly accepted the 2008 Community of Distinction Award at the STC Honors Banquet in Philadelphia this year. The Community of Distinction Award is the highest community honor conferred by the Society for Technical Communication. We are thrilled to receive the award again—our second consecutive win. This year, the Society recognized our chapter “for continuing to have excellent initiatives that sustain a vital STC community.”

Congratulations are due to Tom Lunde, recipient of the 2008 STC Chicago President's Award.

Tom has served as editor of Byline, our award-winning newsletter, for three years. During that time, the newsletter received awards of Merit and Excellence from STC.  In 2007, Byline received the APEX Award of Excellence for significant achievement in graphic design, editorial content, and overall communications effectiveness.

By Christine Abbott

After careful deliberation, the Robert G. Frank committee has decided unanimously to present two Robert G. Frank Awards for 2008, in part because both recipients made important contributions to the creation of the Institute for Professional Development: one award goes to Anna Miller and one to Mary Ryba Knepper. Each has made significant contributions to the field of technical communication and to STC at the Chicago and international levels.