NL DITA 2011
Last week (June 1st) I was invited to give a keynote session at NL-DITA. Knowing not that much about DITA I was forced to look at DITA from another angle. I’m familiar with structured writing from a previous life but that’s all. At Xylos we always look at things from the end users perspective and that exactly how I looked at DITA.
Opening with the statement that the paper manuals as we know them today will disappear wrapped-up in plastic in a dark dungeon and eventually end up in the shredder… Let’s face it “Who reads manuals today?” people with lot of time on their hands?
Users don’t have the patience anymore to use manuals when looking for information. So the “Writing business” should come up with other means of delivering information to the end users. Information split into little chunks (Topics), easily to find and easily to understand. Presenting the right information at the time the users needs it that’s key. As stated by Jang Graat in his closing note, instead of “WYSIWYG” we are moving to “What You Get is What You Need” (WYGIWYN).
SharePoint 2010 for Learning [part 1]
The last few months we often got questions regarding the use of SharePoint as a learning environment. And yes it’s possible I would even recommend it to use it for learning purposes. Why? Well SharePoint 2010 covers almost all functionalities we need or would like to use in a learning environment.
We distinguish 2 main area’s:
The standard collaboration features:
- Document sharing (inc. rating and metadata functionalities)
- Discussion forums
- Survey or polls
- Wiki pages
- Tagging (TAG could based navigation)
- Keywords
- Etc.
The social ‘networked learning’ area
- My site
- Newsfeeds
- User profiles
- Organization browser
- Outlook and Lync integration
Point is that lots of organizations are already using SharePoint to store documents, projects related information and other things. Knowing that all the information is stored in SharePoint and people now where to look for information it’s a small step to setup a site for learning purposes. Together with my colleague Jan (@jvbelle) we did some demo sessions on how do to this. Our goal was to setup a SharePoint Learning environment in 35 minutes. So here we go.
| Step 1: Let’s start by setting up a default SharePoint team site. Doing that gives you already a few standard functionalities to start. |
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Step 2:
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Step 3:
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Step 4:
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| Step 5: Due to the fact that managers still love to have some figures on course usage we build our own SharePoint Webpart that pulls out the courses from the Learning Management System. |
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| Step 6 Activate the “My Site” functionality |
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Perhaps the first question we could answer is the use of an external Learning Management System. You need to know that the reporting functionalities of SharePoint are limited. So in case you need some statistics about course usage you need (at this time) a ‘real’ Learning Management System.
In the next episode we will dive deeper into SharePoint and discuss some features that we can use for what’s called ‘social learning’.
