How about a workbook?

[peter.fi...@gmail.com]

One of the things I've found as I've worked my way through applying
techniques, tools and so on, is that sometimes it takes exercising the
activity or tool. I've found that doing this provides a reality check
on being able to make things useful for me and not just a nice
sounding idea.

To give an example, when I started looking at twitter, I played with
it to see if I really could see a use for it... So I started taking
the idea that I wanted to make it a log of ideas for the projects I'm
working on that I could access from anywhere. Ultimately, this
experiment was an utter failure, because when I needed to catch one of
those ideas I couldn't get it into twitter fast enough. Here ended the
first flirt with twitter.

My second attempt came when twitter started offering command-line-like
options to integrate with all kinds of things... This sadly proved to
be my second failed attempt at making twitter useful, because I
discovered I was triple-entering everything. First I'd scribble madly
in meetings or taking mental notes in hallway converations to get
notes down, then twitter pieces that were critical to myself, and then
getting back to a base camp and collating a to-do list, a new project
list, and farming out pieces. What I discovered very quickly was that
I'd revert back to my written notes and memory to get the base camp
activities accomplished because I had to refer to them. Strike two for
twitter...

Now these activities that I went through are just an example of what a
process might be for twitter, different things apply to different
concepts and tools, however there are plenty of techniques for writing
such exercises to be generically helpful to multiple topics.

[samhealer]

Maybe at the end of each chapter, have a kind of "Exercises" thing, to
try it out? For example:
1. Try sending 10 updates to Twitter using a combination of SMS and
instant messaging over the course of one day.

Like, 3 of those per chapter?
Sam
On Sep 10, 6:02 pm, "peter.fitzger...@gmail.com"

[Dan Davis]

On 9/10/07, samhealer <samh...@googlemail.com> wrote:

Maybe at the end of each chapter, have a kind of "Exercises" thing, to
try it out? For example:
1. Try sending 10 updates to Twitter using a combination of SMS and
instant messaging over the course of one day.

Like, 3 of those per chapter?
Sam

That seems too much like homework for me... but the idea of real-world examples is good. It's one thing to know that Tool A has features X, Y, and Z. It's altogether different to know that feature X can be used this way to make that aspect of life better, etc.

dan

[samhealer]

Yeah, looking at it, I see what you mean.
Maybe some examples of how you could use it in real life?
E.g .
Twitter can be used for: 1. Telling your mates what the holidays like,
2. Post quick updates for colleagues while at a conference, 3. blah.

That any good?

On Sep 10, 7:44 pm, "Dan Davis" <danda...@dandavis.com> wrote:

[Nicholas M.]

IMO, I think If we bundled a little soft cover booklet thing into the
package that would definitely make up for writing in the book itself.
Do you understand what I mean?

[samhealer]

I like that, great idea!