Tom Johnson has me thinking about using story in technical writing. Run a search on “story” on his blog, and you’ll find a long list of results. Because I enjoy fiction writing, I’ve tried to think about how narrative can be woven into documentation more. People connect readily with narrative because it’s part of our everyday interactions. And I think it’s more fun to write. I haven’t written about this as much as Tom, but I’ve written a bit.

I was thinking about it today and had an idea. I think I may have seen this done before, but not much. The concept is creating tutorials around the idea of the learner helping someone who’s stuck. Many people learn better, get concepts cemented in their minds, when they teach those concepts to someone else.

Well, why not work a narrative into an e-learning module that describes a problem a co-worker is having, and then turn things over to the user to guide this character through the next steps? You work in both a story and a way to have the user teach someone else (albeit a fictional character). And it may remove pressure from the learner because the focus isn’t on him or her.

This is certainly an idea that needs some development. If you’re aware of places where this concept has been used in e-learning, please let me know.

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I’ve been thinking about user-led learning lately. I have a set of tutorials that we refer to as “tours.” I imagine this term was chosen because the object is to give new users an overview of how to use the various parts of the application to accomplish the main task.

Some Background

Let me give you a bit of history on these tours. Before I was assigned to maintain the project’s documentation, these tours were built as PowerPoint presentations and run through a Breeze engine to create a Flash presentation. (I don’t know if Breeze in that form exists anymore.) Some pages had short videos created in RoboDemo. The presentations contained links to move forward and backward, so the intention was for the user to go from start to finish, similar to taking a tour in a museum: You begin in one place and move through a linear experience.

When I upgraded to the version of Breeze that came out after I took on these files, I found that somehow, multiple videos could play simultaneously. I could start a video on one page, then go to the next page and start that video. I would hear additional mouse clicks. If I went back to the previous page, that video would still be running.

Messy.

I manually moved the content into a new set of HTML pages because I knew that one page loads at a time, so it would be impossible for multiple videos to be running at once. I took the opportunity to learn CSS so I could lay out the pages that way.

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