A few years ago, a cheeky grad student at one of my undergraduate presentations characterized structured authoring and OASIS DITA in particular to be a "dinosaur dance party." Her argument was that the once-prominent DITA evangelists were all retiring, companies seemed less willing to make long-term investments in content, and XML structure had all but vanished from college course offerings. If the world were moving toward more disposable or more AI-generated content, what was the point of teaching undergraduates concepts and/or best practices for structured authoring?

Her observations are partially correct – and we need to address those concerns.

I chair a committee in ACM SIGDOC that is focused on three things:

• Understanding current obstacles to instructors teaching structured authoring.
• Providing no-cost content and consulting that instructors can use to jump-start courses on structured authoring.
• Building industry/academic partnerships in support of teaching structured content.

Our ACM SIGDOC charter is at: https://sigdoc.acm.org/structuredauthoring/
Our Committee resource library is at: https://acm-sigdoc-structured.org/1-curriculum-resources.html
We have learned that the fundamental concepts and best practices associated with structured authoring can be separated (in large part) from implementation technologies, e.g. DocBook, DITA, MS Word, Google Docs, et al..

We have learned that the fundamental concepts and best practices associated with structured authoring can be separated (in large part) from implementation technologies, e.g. DocBook, DITA, MS Word, Google Docs, el al.. This seems congruent with the theme of your conference, focusing on the "what" of a program more than than the “how.”