Ideas which we are incorporating into our Heartbeat Education

As mentioned elsewhere, many of these ideas[1] were inspired by Kathy Sierra[2] and her most excellent Creating Passionate Users[3] blog. AlanRobertson[4] saw her speak at Linux.Conf.Au 2007[5]. Her most excellent talk was captured on video[6] and Alan recommends it to you highly.

• Teach people what they need to know to do their job, not how the tool works
• Engage as many of the senses at a time as possible
• Do some unexpected things
• Make things look like a conversation to help engage the brain
• Help people get over their fear and do it anyway
• Educate more instead of spending more
• Have multiple levels of accomplishment to give people goals and a sense of accomplishment
• Create a little mystery for tension (that's not quite how Kathy Sierra puts it, but that's how I'm doing it).

Things teachers would probably like about it:

• Address different learning styles, written, auditory, kinesthetic

Alan also wishes to thank Ralph Giles[7] for introducing him to screencasts[8] at LCA2007.

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This information provided courtesy of the Linux-HA project at http://linux-ha.org/