Category: Confluence

Enhancing Learning through Technology – Part I

Posted on May 21, 2010 by ellen

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!

Style Confluence with CSS using a back-door approach

Posted on April 28, 2010 by ellen

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.

Confluence: Remove page icons from old-school PageTree macro

Posted on February 12, 2010 by ellen

The pagetree plugin for Confluence is a commonly used navigation widget for the popular wiki. There are now 2 versions: the older “pagetree” and the newer “pagetree2” which has several improvements, including a less cluttered look. The older version displays the standard Confluence page icons next to each node of the tree, whereas these can be hidden (and usually are) in the newer version.

Old-style “pagetree” New-style “pagetree2”

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An ontology of Collaboration patterns

Posted on January 13, 2010 by ellen

In trying to gain some understanding of collaboration patterns, I came across an interesting article that proposes a layered ontology or model of collaboration that reconciles the many ideas on collaboration patterns expressed elsewhere.

Towards an ontology of collaboration patterns proposes a “collaboration stack” which clarifies the relationship of collaboration patterns to collaborative services and to the underlying communication technologies.

Confluence: create structure to help new wiki users get started

Posted on December 27, 2009 by ellen

Once you’ve created a shared online space for your coworkers, you may discover with some frustration that it doesn’t receive the level of interest you are hoping for. One reason for this reluctance to contribute may be lack of structure. Wikis don’t make a lot of assumptions about how you want to structure or navigate through your data, and this lack of structure can be confusing and somewhat intimidating to users, particularly if they aren’t sure where to put their information. This confusion is not limited to non-technical people: I’ve seen IT community sites and wikis lose members largely because of poor planning and navigational cues.

Although theoretically, the ability to add labels or tags to wiki pages eliminates the need to put them in any particular location within the site structure, people still like to know “where they are” within a site because the relationships between documents carries a lot of information about the significance of the document itself. Users need clues as to what else might be there and what to expect when they click to other pages.