One Page Guides For Engaging Others!
Tim Davies has been working really hard producing a series of one page getting started guides with the goal:
that each sheet should take someone from not knowing what a particular social media tool is, nor how they would use it – to at least having taken the first steps to using it in a sensible and sustainable way. And it should do that in no more than one side of A4.
The Guides can be downloaded as either a PDF for printing or a Word document which you can edit and adapt for your own purpose provided you:
- Credit Practical Participation including their URL (www.practicalparticipation.co.uk)
- Use the same creative commons on your work.
- Let Practical Participation know about any adaptations or derivative works.
Here is an example of one of his one page guides on Introducing Wikis as a PDF for Printing version and a Word Document for Editing.
Whether we like it or not, there will always be people that we will need to use text based material with initially. We could use placement of these series of guides, in a various locations within our organisations, to increase the perception and interest in using these technologies. Also they would be ideal for people who are too scared of asking questions because they are worried that they are asking “dumb questions.” (Image from Tim Davies)
Here are the links to the One Page Guides that Tim has produced so far:
- FlickR
- Social Bookmarking
- RSS with NetVibes (ROFL I may need to adapt for Google Reader)
- Finding and Reading blogs
- Introducing Wikis
- Online Surveys
- Online maps
- Google Earth
- Voicethreads
- Motionbox Online Video Editing
FINAL THOUGHT
What is your opinion? Do you like the idea of the one page guides? And if so, what other Guides would you add to the series.
If you like the Guides, please let others know about them in your network and drop past Tim’s blog to congratulate him on his hard work.
6 thoughts on “One Page Guides For Engaging Others!”
Thanks for this Sue – at the OU we’re developing a learning design/pedagogic planning tool and one of the things we want to link out to are relevant support guides. We have the educause ‘7 things you need to know about…’ guides, some stuff from the Pheobe project at Oxford and these look ideal too.
Hey Sue
Thanks for the post 🙂
(I’m a bit behind catching up on RSS as you’ll see from how long it’s taken me to spot this…)
We definitely need a google reader guide in the series… I’d started with NetVibes as I felt it was probably easier for people to get heads round… but I’m a definitely a committed Reader user…
One thing I’ve found interesting in creating these guides is that having one self-contained page feels more accessible to many than exactly the same set of instructions on a blog post (originally I was introducing tools for an internal course simply as individual posts without the downloads) . Although there is definitely a frustration creating text-based paper-based guides in not being able to embed video content for explanations…
Hi Sue!
Happy New Year!
Well I would definitely like to see someone introducing the Ning community in one page.
🙂
Violeta
Hi Violeta – Happy New Year to you as well. I will let Tim know that you like his one page guides and ask if he is considering writing one on Ning.