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Going Beyond Paper Based Training Material?
ydrol asks: "Training Companies (and training departments) seem to take great delight in handing over a pile of folders full of paper based training materials at the end of a course. Presumably, they don't want students stealing electronic copies of their work and training others, as it is a lucrative source of revenue. The downside is that it is often impractical to refer to these training notes after the course is over. Does anyone have any ideas — both for students (short of using psexec to grab the electronic notes from the teachers laptop) and for training companies themselves on how we can improve the situation?"
I know its less usable, but its not difficult to create individually watermarked handouts (say). I don't mean just adding text into a pdf, thats far to easy to remove - I mean a multipage tiff with the watermark text is burned into the image, or the pdf equivalent. That way if someone passes on a copy, you know who did it. You can also include the eurion constellation in the watermark to make it harder for people to mess with the image in tools (or with printers/scanners)
I'm not sure its worth protecting slides much more than this - if your course is so chalk & talk that the slides capture everything, the bad reputation you'll gain will cost you more than piracy.
I work at a company where if you take classes on campus you get a binder called a manual, which is primarily composed of printed out powerpoint slides. This makes for a useless 'manual' inclass, let alone outside. There's no index, no contents, usually just a few tabs to seperate sections.
If I had to choose, I would prefer a higher quality doc than a digital one.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Many are available, however, not in paper format. For 2 examples try the J2SE Documentation and the PHP documentation, which comes with user annotated . What you'll also find is that a lot of publishers just put out printouts of the API docs. You can get a 1000 page book on programming in Java, but 700 pages of that will be the API. That's a big waste of paper, especially since the API docs are out of date the moment the new version is release. I think that a good 3rd party programming manual shouldn't contain anything about the API, but other stuff that isn't typically discussed, such as weird pitfalls, and unexpected functionalities in the language.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Presumably, they don't want students stealing electronic copies of their work and training others, as it is a lucrative source of revenue. The downside is that it is often impractical to refer to these training notes after the course is over.
You are not buying a book. The fees paid to trainers are for their knowledge and skills at presentation. Handouts or binders are at best a bonus. Please don't confuse training with shopping at Amazon.com.
I admit to wondering how referring to printed handouts after the fact can be seen as "impractical." Do you have rare paper allergy? Are you illiterate or an individual with a visual impairment that makes reading text difficult?
Maybe try thinking of paper as the Linux of communication tools - universal, almost free (as in beer) and accessible to anyone, anywhere without the use of proprietary tools.
Three Squirrels
"Because I actually -prefer- paper training guides/manuals/etc. You know, with those fancy "Table of Contents" things, and that nifty "Index" in the back."
I don't think you're getting old, I think the real problem many developers haven't clued into yet is making electronic books act like real ones on the computer. I thought of going to rentacoder.com and have someone come up with a program to turn a PDF into a algorithmmically generated 3D model ebook that would behave as such, I think the real problem is not the screen but the usability of real books and ebooks are dissimilar, ebooks are cumbersome in manyways because the programmers of the software didn't take into account what makes books usable to begin with, how they are physically designed and how this can translate into easy-to-use virtual ebooks onscreen.
With 3D user interface in vista I hope programmers will take a clue from the real world and design digital "virtual objects" like their real world counterparts for a more "natural" usability factor.