Stratepedia Services archives

Sometime this week, I’m going to shut down the S.O.S. (that’s “Stratepedia Online Support”) section of the Learning Labs. I thought providing a level of peer support was a good idea, but it never really caught on in this case and I think confused more than it helped. Not to worry: Our Stratepedia Guidebooks are still online, and you can always e-mail your questions to us at help@stratepedia.org.

If you have any questions about this transition, drop me an e-mail or leave a comment.

In other support-related news, Amber and I are in the process of revisiting and revising the aforementioned Guidebooks to make sure they address the kinds of questions we find ourselves answering more often than not. These new Guidebooks will be rolled out as we get them done and will be available for free in both web-based and PDF formats. The latter is suitable for printing, if that’s your liking.

We’re using a great new application I found a few weeks ago called ScreenSteps. It’s great for creating how-to guides for anything to be done on a computer, and can be exported to blogs (if you’ve been following my series on Goodreads you’ve seen ScreenSteps in action), straight HTML, or PDF. I think Depot’s Guidebook will be updated to this new format within the next few weeks; other guidebooks will follow.

But that’s not all! Keep following Hello (the blog you’re reading right now) for tutorials, case studies, and anything else that might not fit within the context of our guidebooks. If you’ve got tips or success stories to share with others, let us know and we’ll showcase your work within Hello’s virtual pages.

To recap: S.O.S. is going away, the Guidebooks are staying put but will be getting a significant facelift (and PDF versions), and we want to showcase your tips and successes on our blog. Thanks!

Time for another round of Moodle updates–over the course of the day I will be patching the eMentoring4educators server and the Strategic Tutoring support server. Each will be unavailable for 30-60 minutes for the update process.

Tonight, at 9:00 CDT, the Learning Labs will be unavailable for the same amount of time.

Sorry for the inconvenience–Moodle is kind of a pain to keep current.

Hello!

Whether or not you were able to attend our session last week at the SIM International Conference, I’d like to share our presentation slides with you.

You can access the PDF version here:

Getting More from the Learning Labs Slides

Or just view the presentation here:

GettingMoreFromtheLearningLabs

We demonstrated a few ways to add to your Learning Labs “course” by collaborating over wikis, quizzes, video conferencing, and glossaries. We also showed a video titled Wikis in Plain English by Lee Lefever that several of you were interested in. Aaron has referred to these videos in many previous entries, such as this one.

Here is his website if you are interested in using that video or any of Lefever’s similar work.

Thanks for your interest! Please leave us some feedback regarding the presentation or the resources.

Thanks to everyone who attended the Stratepedia sessions at last week’s conference in Kansas City. I know we were up against some big hitters, so I appreciate you stopping in to visit with us. Here are the slides from our first presentation–I’ll have Amber upload the Learning Labs-related slides sometime today.

You can download the slides from our Depot and Content Enhancement presentation (PDF format) or view it below via SlideShare.

Unfortunately these slides don’t include the hands-on portions of our presentations, but they should serve as a good overview of some of the things you can do with Depot to aid Content Enhancement professional development. Questions? Comments? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

I’ve had some changes ready to apply to Depot sitting on the back burner for awhile–in the interest of getting them in place in plenty of time for the conference I’m planning to push them out to the server over the holiday weekend. Downtime should be very minimal, since the changes are mostly cosmetic.

Gail Cheever had an awesome idea–instead of lugging along stacks of paper as handouts for Neatest Things: Content Enhancement, she’s posting them to the Models for Professional Development group in Depot. You can too!

If you’re a Depot user and have CE examples to share at the conference, contact Gail or me for information on accessing the group. It takes a minute or less to get started, but after that you can easily share your CE files with other attendees at the conference, not to mention those who couldn’t make it.

Don’t forget to attend our session Using Stratepedia Depot for Content Enhancement Support to learn everything there is to know about using Depot for professional development! I think we’re scheduled for sometime Thursday morning. Come say hello!

Thanks to Gail for the great idea!

Heads up! I’m about to start a little reorganization project with the categories in the Hello sidebar. Things should work in the meantime, but may look a little weird. When I’m done, though, the categories should be much easier to browse.

The updates to the Learning Labs I mentioned earlier are now complete. Upgrading Moodle to new versions is never as easy as it should be, so let me know if something looks odd. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused!

Heads up, all you Learning Labs fans: Sometime this evening (probably around 10:00 central time) I’m going to take the Learning Labs offline for a bit so I can upgrade to the latest version of Moodle. This will take anywhere from five minutes to an hour, but I’m guessing it’ll be on the shorter end of that spectrum.

Moodle 1.9 has a ton of new features, but nothing that’s going to make the site look out of the ordinary the next time you sign in. Let me know, though, if you see something odd.

Keyword searching was broken in Hello, but now it should be fixed. Sorry about that!