By Doug Ryan, Chair of the Education and Training Committee.

In the end, the chapter's newly-revived Education and Training Committee had a phenomenally successful 1996-1997. I thank the following chapter members who hung in there with me and did a lot to make this success happen: Hilary Harris, Diane Feldman, Candee Hellberg, Leatta Welch, Mike Uhl, Kay Ethier, Ivan Manestar, and Sarah O'Keefe, and everyone else who came to committee meetings, made suggestions, helped, and more.

We Set the Pace

All our hard work paid off. Somewhere, someone's paying attention. Because of the dedicated and excellent work of the Education and Training Committee, the Carolina Chapter was honored with a Pace setter Award at this year's annual conference (see the feature article on page 1).

Training Workshops Given

After trial, error, and hard work, we met our 1996-1997 goal of starting a series of affordable, peer-taught workshops for chapter members with a highly successful, two-afternoon course in basic FrameMaker on May 8th and 13th. Chapter member Sarah O'Keefe of Scriptorium Publishing Services, Inc. led the class, while Lucent Technologies's ASCC loaned us its workstations, network, and classroom for hands-on training.

Media Presence Established

Along with this column and periodic e-mail messages via the chapter's membership list, the Education and Training Committee has its workshops and meetings on the chapter Web site's Events page (http://stc.org/region2/ncc) and voice mail (406-6600).

Let me take this opportunity to thank our chapter's newsletter editor nonpareil, Michelle Corbin Nichols; our previous Madonna of membership management, Kathy McKenzie; and especially our Web site goddess, Kim Spangler, for their consistent (and patient!) work with our committee members during this part year.

Partnerships Set Up with Corporate Sponsors

Along with the chapter as a whole, the Education and Training committee has established partnerships with the following companies, whom we take this space to thank again: Mallet Technologies (contact Kay Ethier, 406-1500 x22), an Adobe authorized trainer and value-added retailer (VAR), for providing many courses at a discount to chapter members; Sarah O'Keefe, head of Scriptorium Publishing Services, Inc., (775-7147), for teaching our basic FrameMaker training; Lucent Technologies' Advanced Software Construction Center (ASCC), (380-4520), for its computer classroom for our basic FrameMaker training; and Advanced Concepts, Inc., a technology consulting firm, (910-563-2579), for subsidizing some workshop costs.

Plans for This Year (1997 to 1998)

The Education and Training Committee will lead a lunchtime discussion on education and training opportunities in the Triangle and in the chapter at the Carolina Chapter's annual summer conference in RTP. Please, join us!

We plan to expand the "education" side of things to examine what constitutes the education of a technical communicator. We'll work with the NCSU student chapter to learn about the theories being taught in the Masters degree curriculum and offer speakers about what is going on "out here" in the profession.

Peer workshops we hope to have available in August through October include:

• Indexing
• HTML
• Online help
• The seven habits of highly effective people (based on the book by Stephen Covey)
• A repeat of the basic FrameMaker training.

You can reach Doug at dsryan at mindspring dot com.