Re: advice on writing tutorials

[Susan Harkus <susanh -at- CARDSETC -dot- COM -dot- AU>]

Hi Jessica,
I don't disagree with the useful advice that Lonnye offered but I do think
that some of the books and papers on minimalism, such as John Carroll's
Nurnberg Funnel, are worth consulting as you define your tutorial approach.
For example, I think the Nurnberg Funnel provides "cathartic" guidelines
about what you should be trying to do in tutorials and about how tolerant
your tutorial learners will be. I call the guidelines cathartic because
whenever I return to the book, I seem to go through a process of design
clarification and resolution.

I have been developing self-study, or rather, self-directed learning
materials for the last decade and the one thing I have learned is that, if
you start from the premise of what you want to tell, show, get the learner
to do, you risk developing shelfware.

I listened to multimedia developers in my former company putting
constraints into their products so that learners "had to do X, Y and Z"
before they could move forward. I couldn't sway them from their confidence
that the learning product developer really had the power to force
self-study learners to do X, Y and Z.  Later, I watched learners within the
company using those same products - busily hitting the return key to get to
the info that met their objectives... or simply abandoning the learning
support.

 Minimalist research and practice strongly relates the content and approach
of learning support materials, such as tutorials, to how people learn to do
(cognitive strategies) and where people are coming from (their task
objectives). If you know that most of your learners will jump out of
detailed instructions as soon as they think they know what they are doing,
how do you design the instructions?

John Carroll suggested in his early research, and many others have trialled
and tested the approach, that you give people up-front information that
puts them in control: how to get out of the activity gracefully, what
fall-over points to expect, - anything that helps the learner make sense of
what they are about to do and will help them make sense of what they are
doing as they do it. Then if your learners choose to explore rather than
follow the instruction flow, you have supported them.

I don't think minimalism or anything else has final answers on providing
really enabling learning support and we will all continually strive to make
our materials, whether training or documentation, more useable and more
effective. However, minimalist literature certainly provides challenging
ideas for those who are developing learning materials that are not
facilitated by a human instructor. If you haven't visited The Nurnberg
Funnel, or the more recent Collection of papers, Minimalism beyond the
Nurnberg Funnel, I think they are worth a visit.

Susan Harkus

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