Posting today from some training on Toolbook. I think my boss volunteered me for these two days when I wasn't at a meeting or something...

It's software http://www.plattecanyon.com/instructor.aspx which allows you to develop computer based training which can either run on the web 'as is' or be put into our Virtual Learning Environment. The Library's interest comes from wanting to build some information literacy nuggets and wondering if this would be a good tool to use.

I'm wondering if a hour's demo to a wider library audience wouldn't be more efficient than two days of me getting to grips with the software and then trying to report back on whether it would be useful or not.

Still, I'm here with 5 or 6 others (some of the more 'important' people come and go) and at least R, a colleague from the computing department, and I can sit at the back end of the room and check our email when things get slow. I've been told off by the (external) instructor a couple of times for doing my own thing when we were specifically told we could try our own examples and then what I have on my laptop screen doesn't match what he's trying to show us. Sigh.

All that wouldn't be so bad except for some of the brilliantly unintuitive bits of the software interface. I appreciate it's powerful and can do some clever things, but all the same...

I wonder how much Microsoft is to blame by getting us to expect software to behave in certain ways. Whatever you might feel about the company, they've certainly standardized a lot of our way of working with software and even if Microsoft products themselves can have unintuitive bits for complete newbies, for those that have been around for a while it's a least familiar.

OK, back to thinking up some multiple choice questions to get the software to grade and comment on.