The future of Training is Learning
One of the “frequently asked questions in a SharePoint course is “should I store it in SharePoint or not?”
There are some simple guidelines: these files don’t really belong in SharePoint:
Joel Oleson posted a great overview.
I used OneNote already fairly often as a typical “meeting-note-taking” tool, but last week I tried to use it to make digital handouts: instead of just printing out my slide presentation, I created a new notebook, imported my slides “as printout”, distributed them across different sections, added keywords, diagrams, screen clippings… I zipped the notebook folder and made it available to students as a download before the session. The responses were very positive!
Of course, everybody needs to have OneNote.
There are good examples of educational use of OneNote.
http://jvbelle.jaiku.com
Last week, I attended the Microsoft event in Louvain-La-Neuve where they launched their new Unified Communications products. As always, it was a very impressive show with lots of presentations, information, partner boots… Unified Communication will be a great tool to increase productivity and offer new ways of communication to the information workers.
I can’t wait to start using it, but as a trainer, I am also wondering how we will teach people how to use it? Using Office Communicator, is this something that you can learn in a classroom environment? Just imagine 10 students calling each other… Will you learn it using e-learning? Seems rather static and unreal to me. Do you have any suggestions?
One thing I realised is that it will be necessary for the users to understand the full picture of the infrastructure: where is my mailbox, what is happening when I start a voice chat, what happens when someone calls me, when I divert a call…
Another thing that I am always curious about is the different presentation skills and the presentation styles of the presenters. Presentation Zen has a an interesting blog post about the presentation styles of Microsoft’s Number One compared to Apple’s Steve Jobs.
I had the luck of seeing Bill Gates in action on the Vista launch last year, and I can agree with some of the remarks of Garr Reynolds; and as an Apple fan, I never miss a keynote of Steve. But to select a “winner” would be disrespectful for both: they are both passionate about what they do in their own way, and I experienced it again in Louvain-La-Neuve last week.
As an IT professional, you meet a lot of people who are disappointed, sad, angry or even frustrated about the quality of the software they need to use every day. Maybe it is good to share a positive experience with software…
A friend was celebrating her birthday, and as always a lot of pictures were taken. But the next day, the 4 GB SD card contained… nothing!
In an ultimate attempt to save the pictures (they had been there, because we previewed them at the party on the camera), I called google to the rescue, to find a program called CardRecovery. I must say I was rather sceptical.
On the website, you could download a free trial version, that allowed you to preview the images, but not to recover them. That’s already something, at least you only pay when it works.
I installed the program, attached the camera, let it run for about half an hour, and… it showed me the preview of the 500 lost pictures! Including a “Buy Now” button, of course.
I clicked the button, payed the price (29 €, very reasonable), entered the license key, clicked “Next” and it recovered the pictures. I did not even have to close the program.
So you see, lighten up! There is great software out there!