Best practices for best practices

This is a bit of tooting the old horn, but it’s my blog, so I can. I just finished cooking up YAPB (yet another best practice) document for instructors in the faculty. The thing that I noticed while putting this one together is that everyone is saying more or less the same thing, and the variations are likely as much to do with the age of the document as they have to do with the teaching philosophy of the individual putting the document together.

Some of the documents were posted in the mid ’90s and talk about the occasional use of email, while others that are more recent are suggesting the use of chat or desktop video conferencing. So it came to me – after showing another colleague on campus – that there should be a best practice for putting together best practices. For my 2cents, here is a list:

• If you are going to put one of these out there – make it current, as in the last two years tops
• Use something like a wiki to encourage changes (or take a look at Wikipedia for guidance)
• Solicit feedback
• Make the document accessible and transferable

That is it for now… and in the seemingly continual changes that seem to be happening to WP2.1, it seems that there is a little AJAX pop up to put links into the visual editor, where before it was a browser window and previous to that, there were barely any tools at all and you had to hand code. What’s up with that? They are fixing these bits remotely it seems, so I hope they remotely make the spell check work – or at least allow OSX to see the text (was Tiny MCE that bad?), but at least the fix for that is easy – drop into code view.