Author: ellen

Enhancing Learning through Technology – Part I

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This is a talk I gave recently to a group of educator/trainers within the U of M Health System. Although it contains many UMHS-specific references, the concepts outlined in it can be applied to other training environments as well. There’s nothing particularly original here, just some suggestions for how to select among different technologies commonly available. This was the first part of a two-part presentation. The second part featured tips for creating engagement and improving digital photography.

 

Best Practice Showcase: Enhancing Learning through Technology

Our team has lots of tools you can use to create online training. There are so many choices, in fact, that it can be difficult to decide which to select when you’re starting a new project.  

To help you sort through all the options, I’m going to give you some typical instructional situations and suggest tools that might best support them, without breaking the budget in the process. These are all things you can use – they don’t require a computer science degree to get a good result!

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Defeat the IE 7 z-index bug

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Picture 33.jpg

The z-index bug in action

Although Internet Explorer 8 has been widely adopted, IE 7 is still the browser in use at my office, so all new projects must be compatible with it. Even though IE7 was already obsolete when we adopted it, it was a wonderful change from IE 6, because of the reduced need for CSS and javascript hacks, workarounds and compromises in general.

So it was a surprise to realize that an old Internet Explorer 6 stylesheet problem, the “z-index bug” still lingers on. You’ll know you’ve hit this bug when your drop-down menus fall UNDER elements that are lower down on the page. (…I should add: and there are no iframes or frames on the page).

There are several sites that do a fantastic job of telling you exactly why this happens. I’m just going to tell you how to fix it. In fact, if you want to jump to the fix right now, click here

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How and why to #quitFacebook

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After logging in to Facebook yesterday and seeing yet another notice about how Facebook is going to swap my data with just about any site they feel like, I realized I don’t want to have to check their extremely complicated privacy settings every week or two to make sure they haven’t changed something I care about.

Besides being an incredible waste of time, it’s futile: they have made a practice of making significantly bad changes you can’t do anything about. Some of these changes can have real consequences down the road, and I just don’t need that. Moreover, it is not clear what real effect the settings have, in practice. So, since I didn’t grow up with Facebook and I’m not going to go through social withdrawal, it’s out.

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Best Groupwise calendar app for iPad so far…

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Novell’s Groupwise version 7 is not compatible with the iCalendar (.ics) format. This makes viewing your Groupwise calendar a challenge on an iPhone or iPad.

In the past, I’ve used a kludgy method of syncing my Groupwise calendar to iCal by delegating any received appointments to a Google calendar, then subscribing to that calendar with iCal. This was hardly a perfect system: appointments would get missed or doubled sometimes. So it was nice to finally find a better solution: “GW Calendar” from Ghost Pattern Software.

GW Calendar allows you to see your Groupwise calendar in realtime in either one-day or week views. It also allows you to forward, accept and decline meetings, but not create new ones or do busy searches. There is no month view yet. And most importantly, no Push notification of upcoming meetings. However it is quite useful for accurate viewing of your Groupwise calendar over the next few days.

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Style Confluence with CSS using a back-door approach

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I recently had the task of creating a new theme for a Confluence-based corporate wiki in time for a big launch date.

There were a few restrictions on how I could do this, including:

  • There is no user access to the Space’s Page Layout features, which means that any changes needed there must be sent to an administrator to be added to the site. 
  • There is no user access to the server, so editing stylesheets would have to be through the application or by giving them to the admin to upload. We could put assets on another server but sometimes this can cause security issues with browsers, coming from mixed security level domains. Similarly, every image to be used at the Space Page Layout level would have to be sent to an admin for upload. 
  • The Documentation theme was not available to us yet. 
  • ThemeBuilder was not available yet. 
  • And – it goes without saying – the schedule was tight.
Our first challenge was to add a collapsible navigation tree on the left side of the page, similar to the Documentation theme does, but without using the Documentation theme, since we do not have that option yet.

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