Learning Conversations

When I start exploring a new topic, I often look for a tutorial on the subject.

Often, these might take the form of a Powerpoint, or a PDF. That's great, because I can easily print it to read offline. The problem with putting materials in these chunked up formats is that they then become pretty inaccessible if I'm in a more "informal" mode of learning - when I want to find or link to a specific page of information.

So we've tended to break apart tutorials and put them in a separate web pages, often in a content management system. This will automatically build navigation elements, links to related pages, search engine indexes etc.

That's great for informal learning, but now, if I want to print a whole tutorial off I have to do each page individually.

I was looking for a way of combining the best of both worlds - and I've found it. There's nothing new here. A lot of high-powered sites already have ways of displaying multiple pages in one window ready for printing. I've not found it in the low-cost / open-source CMS's until now.

My current CMS of choice is Etomite. It stores content in a tree structure, with each page being a branch of the tree.

Etomite allows designers to add "snippets" of code to perform specific jobs.

So, all I did is wrote a snippet that looks at a particular part of the tree and pulls out the content from all the child pages of that branch; displaying them in a new window.

Now we have the best of both worlds. Experienced learners can find and jump to specific pages very quickly. New learners can work through in sequence, or print out a whole section so they can work through offline.

It's not rocket science, but it's what Content Management Systems are great for - reusing the same content in lots of different ways.

More info on the snippet