[FM Discuss] Putting training exercises into Booki

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 14:38, Michael McAndrew
<michaelmcandrew at thirdsectordesign.org> wrote:
> Hey there (sending to FM-discuss and civicrm-book),
>
> Today we did a fair amount of work creating the user and administrator
> exercise book for CiviCRM.  Still lots more completing of exercises and
> proof reading, etc., to do but we think there is a decent structure in place
> now and shouldn't be too hard to finish off.

Excellent.

> We transferred the exercises (actually we are now calling them tasks for
> some reason) from the wiki to the book and came up with a standard task
> format, which is basically:
>
> summary of the task
> instructions on how to do the task (numbered if there are a lot of them)

Is this simply a do this, do this, procedural format, or do you allow
for exploration and discovery? Is there any provision for
collaborative exercises, where students practice taking someone's
result and working with it in some other way? I have done a lot of
procedural documentation as a Tech Writer in Silicon Valley, but I am
working on how to help learners achieve a deeper level of
understanding.

> data that should be used in the task (in formatted)
> space for notes (you can write on paper with a pen or pencil, FYI)
> any tips about the task

Have you thought about making the book interactive, with links to the
software? I know that this means abandoning print publication, or
having two somewhat different versions. Your text says that the
student will be connecting to a CiviCRM instance via the Web.
Presumably a tutorial instance could be set up with links between
exercise pages and prepared configurations.

> The book has three sections:
>
> intro
> exercises
> finding out more
>
> The exercise section is broken down into chapters which are one-to-one with
> a hands one session that we will carry out during the training.  The
> chapters (h1) are further broken down into h2s to help people find their way
> through the exercises.

This implies that the tutorial is sequential. Is that the intention?
Are you able to fit all of the topics needed into one sequence?

> You can see the work in progress here:
> http://booki.flossmanuals.net/civicrm-user-and-admin-exercises/_full/

The introductory section has no illustrations. It seems to me that we
could make it much clearer with a few diagrams and screenshots.

I expect to have more questions when I get deeper into the material.

> We plan to make each task summary an h3 and then style the css with an image
> to the left of the heading to show it is a task (rather than what we are
> currently doing which is bolding them and sticking a image above them.
>
> I think we'll handle the notes area by making an image with a fair amount of
> vertical white space and a 'keep with before' to  avoid any nasty page
> breaks and avoid any nasty page breaks).

"Keep with previous" actually creates nasty page breaks. You might do
better to use a two-column format or just an adjustment of the margins
to leave space for notes to one side of the instructions.

BTW, does anybody know of a Free Software PDF editor that makes it
easy to insert notes, in the manner of Adobe Acrobat?

> It would be great if we could get some div handling or something similar for
> 'data' and for 'tips' to avoid us using but I know that can be a huge pain
> so not holding my breath :)
>
> Hopefully I haven't gone into too much detail here and people are still with
> me :)

You can't push me away with detail, no matter how others may feel. ^_^

> Would be good to get people's feedback on what we have done so far and if
> people have any time to improve what we have done that would be awesome.

I'll see what I can do.

> Cheers,
> Michael
>
> --
> Michael McAndrew
> 07817 802299 (mobile)
>
> Third Sector Design Ltd.
> http://thirdsectordesign.org
>
> For support, email support at thirdsectordesign.org
>
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>



-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://www.earthtreasury.org/