[thelist] Teaching Staff to Fish
Rudy_Limeback at maritimelife.ca
Rudy_Limeback at maritimelife.ca
Mon Oct 2 14:55:00 CDT 2000
> The "Fearless Leader" in question is attempting to drag a
> substantial number of folks kicking and screaming into the
> digital world and is up against substantial resistance.
> FL hopes to bring them around to accessing this material
> online and giving up their precious (difficult to maintain
> and mostly out of date) paper documents. The spoon-feeding
> exercise will hopefully bring them into the brave new world
> and they will cast off the chains blah blah blah etc etc ...
hi bonnie
whoo boy, can i ever relate to that -- that sounds *so* much like the
intranet i work on, except in our case there is no fearless leader, and
i'm basically an intranet guerilla (i do stuff like reword any sentence
that has "click here" in it -- tricky sometimes, as there are english and
french versions of every intranet page)
anyhow, your FL is to be congratulated and assisted in every way possible
-- so don't get into a disgreement, just try to make it work...
however, please tell him/her from me that "you can't push a rope"
you won't get anywhere by force-feeding intranet information to employees
try to arrange it so that discovering things on the intranet is fun, so
that people will want to explore
make sure there's "something in it for them" when they use the online
stuff -- for example, update the online versions of all those out-of-date
paper manuals, and make them easier to use than the paper versions
as for your questions with regard to the icons...
> 1. When clicked on, they will open specific html pages
this is simple html, yes?
<p><a href="foobar.html"
><img align=bottom src="/Images/html.gif"
hspace="3" vspace="0" border="0"
>Foobar html page</a></p>
> 2. They will be customized to reflect the contents
> of the pages that they point to
as a rule, i don't bother to put the "html" icon beside a link that goes
to another web page, but i definitely do include icons for links to any
non-html documents or files
<p><a href="foobar.doc"
><img align=bottom src="/Images/weeword.gif"
hspace="3" vspace="0" border="0"
>Foobar Word doc</a></p>
i have icons for Word, Excel, PPT, and PDF -- let me know and i'll send
them to you off list
save you a little time, anyway
> 3. Be capable of being emailed and
> "dragged from the email to the desktop"
okay, i'm stumped why FL would want to do that
most email systems will recognize links in the body of an email message
for example, are any of the following blue and underlined in your email
system? i assure you i only typed the text...
foobar.com
www.foobar.com
http://www.foobar.com
fred.html
http://your.intranet.com/fred/html
as for dragging and dropping, especially to the desktop, i don't think
this is advisable
the best you can hope for is to get people to click a link in the email
message
once the target is opened in a new browser window, they should know how to
bookmark it
focus on teaching them bookmarks, not drag & drop
the only thing you want on people's desktops is one shortcut to launch the
browser, which automatically opens on the intranet home page
does this help?
rudy
r937.com
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