Goals:
Create a body of users who are confident enough to train others.
1st day – create a basic publication with a title, sections, and some articles
2nd (and subsequent days) – allow participants to practice what they’ve learned, design and create a Front Page. Introduce them to advanced features, such as administration tools, using advanced HTML, etc.
Procedure:
As a way of introducing the participants to each other, ask someone to volunteer to be the system administrator – as each person introduces him/herself, enter the names as new users into the system – now all the users have been created
Start a brainstorming session among the participants to decide:
The theme or intent of the journal to be created
The audience for the journal
A title
Section organization
Organization of responsibilities within the group, e.g. more than one hierarchy of editors? Who will be editors? Who will be administrators?
Divide people into two or three groups – technical administrators, writers and editors, depending on their decisions about their own organization
Ask a volunteer to sit at the demo PC and actually create an article. After that brief demonstration, ask the writers and editors to get started on creating some content.
Work with the technical administrators to show them how:
to create groups (if any are needed)
to make users members of groups
to create sections
to modify templates
to translate the user interface to another language (if necessary)
Writers and editors will be
working on writing and editing – provide coaching as needed
Notes:
If possible,
arrange to have at least one or two of the participants be people
with some software skills, who will be able to learn some of the
administrative tasks such as editing templates, producing and
analyzing logs, or editing configuration files. There is a great
deal that could be covered in the area of configuration and
administration, so it would be useful, if it can be arranged, to
have a separate workshop on just those topics.