What to Consider When Building Help for Mobile Devices for Field Workers

How timely is this?  My next project is to work on training for a mobile devices in the field, so I was delighted to find this article on the TechWhirl bog:


What to Consider When Building Help for Mobile Devices for Field Workers



There’s no denying that smart devices are taking over. Everywhere we turn, people are talking about the newest app they’ve downloaded (Angry Birds anyone?). But aside from avian masochism and borderline obsessive updates on Facebook, smart phones and other mobile devices (tablets, PDAs, etc.) have proven their usefulness in the professional world, and in particular, for workers in the field. Service providers like Verizon and ATT offer multiple business solutions for field workers. AirStrip Technologies, offered by Verizon, has a product called AirStrip OB which “delivers patient data, including fetal heartbeats and maternal contraction patters, in real time to the physician’s Blackberry, Palm, or Windows Mobile device” 


Click to read more . . . 

Writing for a Living in the Digital Age and a Sluggish Economy

Jason Boog from GalleyCat, (probably the book industry's leading website for insider news and gossip) claims that writers can learn from the Great Depression, according to HuffPost Books.  He outlines how writers suffered, then took to the streets to protest their plight in the 1930s, and how paperback books helped safe them.  Can digital publishing save us during the next few, hard years, he asks?





Read more about this interview at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/06/writers-great-depression_n_998995.html

Another Way for Writers to Earn Money: Whitepapers

Writers can do so many things: We can write fiction and nonfiction books. We can teach others how to write. We can be editors or marketing writers. We can be instructional designers or technical writers.  Here's another opportunity for those of us who know how and love to write:  Writing Whitepapers.



The bog Klariti: Small Business Tips for Smart People outlines what you need to know to get started:

"If you’ve got good writing skills and have in-depth subject matter expertise, you should be able to generate additional income by writing white papers.
I started writing them by accident when the in-house white paper writer fell ill and someone had to write it. Looking back, it wasn’t the greatest document I’ve written but the client accepted it and the customer response was positive.
Since then, I’ve managed to carve out a niche as a white paper writer, which has been very helpful when other avenues dried up. I thought I’d share a few tips on how I got started, how to build up a client list, and how much you should charge."

Click here to read tips on writing White Papers:

I love Tom's new post, over at the Rapid eLearning Blog:

9 Ways to Encourage the Adult E-Learners   (click above to read it all) The core of the article is a listing of these nine points, and from my experience in the worlds of both higher education and workplace training, I can see that he's right on target.  He includes some very good suggestions and comments on each:

1. Set clear expectations and objectives Let them know why they’re taking the course and what they should be learning.  People like to get oriented and know what’s expected of them.
2. Adult learners don’t like to fail, and they don’t like to fail publicly.  Make it clear when they are being tested and when they aren't.  (His article says a lot more about this, and I think it's a crucial point. Click above to read the whole thing.)
   
3. Create an environment where they have as much freedom as possible.  Let them click around and explore.  I know that many customers want to lock navigation so that they “get all of the information.”  This is faulty thinking.  If they need to confirm their grasp of the information, then give them exercises to practice applying it so they can demonstrate their understanding in a real way. (The more a learner interacts, the more they're probably learning)
   
4. Give them ways to collect information.  This is a great way to counter the locked navigation issue.  Create situations where they need to make decisions and then free up the navigation to collect the information needed to make decisions.  This is a much better way to assess understanding than viewing a screen full of text.  ( See above.  Dito)
5. Focus on relevance.  I’ve worked on plenty of projects where the learners are never considered.  I recall one company I worked for that wouldn’t let me talk to any potential learners, even though we were rolling the training out to 3500 people across the country.  If you’re content isn’t relevant to the learners, they’ll just tune out and you’re wasting time and money.  You can guarantee that little learning will happen.  (So true.  They have better things to do than waste their time on something that they do not think will help them do their job better.)
   
6. Create a visual design that is friendly and inviting.  This helps with the initial engagement and sets the tone of the course.  I’ve had customers tell me that they can’t do that because the subject matter was real important and serious.  So they needed to have a very serious tone (read boring).  If it’s important, than it makes sense to create a course that’s as visually inviting as possible. (Metaphors really do help people understand complex concepts.)
   
7. Elearning is a multimedia experience so it makes sense to leverage as much of the multimedia as you can (in context though).  You don’t want to add multimedia for the sake of it, but you do want to use all of your resources to create the best course possible.
   
8. Free Willy!  People are like orcas with floppy dorsal fins.  They yearn to be free.  One of the worst experiences in elearning is when the course navigation is locked.  There are better ways to help people learn.  Focus on relevant, decision-making scenarios.  And if you’re building a compliance, click-and-read course with no performance expectations, then make the course as simple as possible so that they learners can get in and out.  Don’t frustrate them or waste their time with a bunch of extra branched scenarios.  Tell them what they need to know and let them go.  (Get them involved.  Use graphical metaphors.)
   
9. Do you need to test everything?  Every day we take in all sorts of information that is critical to meeting our goals.  When my boss sends an email detailing new plans, he doesn’t follow it up with a quiz.  Assessing a person’s understanding is an important part of learning, but do we need to always have a test?  In many ways it retards the learning process. As soon as people find out they’re being tested, they quit learning and focus on how to pass the test.  If you don’t need a test, don’t include one.  If you do need to assess their understanding, perhaps there’s a better way to do so.  (Game Shows!!  Actually, if you are required to test [often the case] little game show-like quizzes along the way will help keep them from failing and build their confidence.)

Investing in your customer's knowledge is well worth the return

All companies strive for high customer satisfaction ratings, but many fail to achieve them. Have you ever wondered why?

Kevin Oakes knows a thing or two about these things. He's the CEO of the Institute of Corporate Productivity (i4cp), the world's largest vendor-free network of corporations focused on building and sustaining highly productive, high-performance organizations.

The traditional method for achieving high satisfaction ratings is to equip employees with a set of customer service skills and hope for the best. However, research shows that best-in-class companies spend training dollars on the customers themselves to boost customer loyalty. In the following article, Kevin shares his thoughts about the all-important yet often ignored link between customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Download White Paper Here:

Intrepid Thought Leadership Whitepapers

Comic Books Become Learning Delivery Superpower

The popularity of comic books at the movies has made the medium hotter than ever, and now this phenomenon is crossing over into business content delivery. SmarterComics has published more than a dozen titles on business and self-improvement in the comic book format. Some of these books are original content and others are adaptations of popular business books like The Long Tail by Chris Anderson and The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch

Read more about using comic books to deliver training in Chief Learning Officer Magizine

4 Golden Rules of Capitalization in Technical Documents

We all need an occasional refresher . . . .  from Technical Writing Tips, Tools & Templates

It is ebay or eBay or Ebay? How Technical Writers use capitalization in user guides creates many problems for editors, reviewers, and users. Part of the problem is a lack of guidelines and style guides. What you think looks fine break some style guide rule you were unaware of.

The Capitalization of Microsoft

A good example is the word Microsoft. When it started out, it was MicroSoft. Then it changed the uppercase S to a lowercase.

So, what do you do with all the legacy documents or international materials, for example, business documents for Chinese readers?

Guidelines for Capitalization

In general, use capitalization rules whenever possible – for example, common nouns are usually all lowercase and proper nouns are always capitalized.

1. Never use all uppercase letters for emphasis.
2. Follow the capitalization rules of software as necessary, as in case-sensitive keywords.
3. Do not capitalize the spelled-out form of an acronym unless specified otherwise in the List of Acronyms and Abbreviations.
4. Avoid over-capitalization.

Capitalization Of User Interfaces Elements

Microsoft recommends the following capitalization rules for interface elements:

• Menu names, command and command button names, and dialog box titles and tab names: Follow the interface. Usually, these items use title caps. If the interface is inconsistent, use title caps.
• Dialog box elements: Follow the interface. Newer style calls for these items to use sentence caps. If the interface is inconsistent, use sentence caps.
• Functional elements: Capitalize the names of functional elements that do not have a label in the interface, such as toolbars (the Standard toolbar) and toolbar buttons (theInsert Table button).
• Do not capitalize interface elements used generically, such as toolbar, menu, scroll bar, and icon.
• The Golden Rules of Capitalization in Technical Documents Do not capitalize unless it is case-sensitive.

Looking for examples

One of the hazards of having a love of words is that you see things that others take for granted.

So, when it comes to caps or should that be capitalizations… I see these everywhere.

For example:

Is it web site or Web Site or Website?

Is it the Bible of The Bible?

Is it IBM or I.B.M.?

What other examples would you add?

Great E-Learning Template and New E-Learning Website

So, I'm in love with Tom.  Sure, he's over there at Articulate, and I presently using Captivate, but I cut my e-learning teeth on Articulate, and their support is second to none. I'm even thrilled that now Captivate has introduced some of the same features that Articulate has always had, but I still don't know if you can do simulations in Articulate.  In the past, you couldn't.  I plan to download a trial and see soon.  


But Tom.  His blog is awesome and a must-read for an e-learning professional.  They come to me in my email, and each time, I can't wait to find out what goodies he has for me today!  


Today's is definitely a winner.  It's a PowerPoint template based on the Notes app on the iPad.  I've only played with an iPad in the Apple store and I just popped out to my YouTube account and played some of my YouTube videos on it then, but, no matter. This template rocks!


This is what it looks like:

To read about it, view a demo, and download it, check out Tom's blog.


And while I was out clicking links in the blog, I found the E-Learning Heroes site.  Once again, it's Articulate-centric, but I am excited to now be part of that community.  Check out this page of PowerPoint templates and other cool downloads.