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).

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.
Step 2: Add a nice welcome page, some text and an image. Upload a document in the shared document library
Step 3: Uploaded some more documents Activated the TAG cloud, note that we can use the TAG for browsing. Added a link (the image) to an online course
Step 4: Started a discussion forum
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.
Step 6 Activate the “My Site” functionality

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’.

Sven Forster and Bart Hanssens talked about how they could open the FEDICT information to the public and developers. The goal is to present the data structured and readable , create a community and streamline the way we could handle the data

The FOD Economics is sitting on a lot of data about population, economics, traffic, energy, environment and lots of other stuff. Its already available via www.statbel.fgov.be but it’s static data that’s published in pdf or xls format. Objective is to present the data dynamic, interactive and customized to the need of the visitor. And of course exportable in lots of different formats.

OpenBiz by Toon Vanagt (my favorite), very inspiring session but also an eye opener on how much private data can be found out there. With a short demonstration of the application they developed Toon showed us how much ‘private and personal’ information you can find about people and  companies. Inspiring was the “Start-up weekend” concept. Bring the right people together and build the application during that weekend. Results can be seen on www.OpenBiz.be

I’m looking forward to the next session about Open Data and OpenGov. 2.0

http://www.vincentvanquickenborne.be/blog/2011/03/opengov-2-0-update/

Smartboards… I have never seen that many Smartboards in one place as at BETT 2011. Now the thing that surprised me the most was that almost every vendor was doing product demos. And I would love to see such a board in action in the classroom. Promethean has some nice things but again bring on a teacher that tells the story.

Every1speaks had an interesting concept about visualizing trends when sharing ideas & opinions. It seems to me that this is a much better way to do than using the standard forum tread principle.

Lego, yes Lego at BETT. Fascinating to see how youngster started building the blocks and using the computer to play with the ‘things’ they have build. Just wondering how many schools here in Belgium already introduced this in the classroom? And yes, I wish I had these things 20 years ago

Frog “Enabling ordinary people to do extraordinary things”.  One of the few learning platforms that uses a widget store to build the learning environment. And why are these platform for primary and secondary education always that fancy?

Now, there was a teacher speaking (@Chickensaltash) and he had some interesting stuff to tell. How to use free and/or open source tools in the classroom. His Pecha Kucha presentation can be found on Slideshare and here is his blog post about BETT 2011