[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 and mostly out of date) paper documents.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stuff -- for example, update the online versions of all those out-of-date 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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