Day one of earning my Power End User merit badge from Mindsharp began with all the summit participants gathered in one room for an introduction to the course, and to the course instructors. The instructors are an eminently personable group, who obviously not only know their stuff, but clearly share a passion for teaching. Combined, there are easily over a hundred students in attendance to participate in one of the four tracks being offered. In addition to the Power End User track that I'm on, there are also tracks for Developers, Site Administrators, and users of SharePoint Designer all going on concurrently. Thoughtfully, an invitation was issued to all participants that if a someone felt that they would be better served participating in a track other than the one for which they registered, they're welcome to switch tracks entirely, or split their time between different tracks as they wish. This is most commendable.
With introductions complete, students and instructors of the separate tracks retreated to their designated classrooms to hit the books. The Power End User training manual, by the way, is massive, and is itself an indispensible resource. There are upwards of 50 students in the Power End User class, so lead instructor Janis Hall, along with proctors Nancy Kabakjian and Sharee English have their work cut out -- especially since students are heartily encouraged to not only ask questions, but to contribute their own experiences and use cases throughout the course. And contribute the students do, with lots of hands being raised throughout the day to either ask for, or to contribute, additional information within a given module.
The beauty of Mindsharp's "summit" style of instruction is that in addition to the lead instructor being available to field questions or comments, the two proctors are also always on hand (one on each side of the room) for individual sidebars as necessary. As well, the proctors (actually a bit of a misnomer in the case of Kabakjian, who is more of a co-lead instructor), each of whom possesses their own specialized SharePoint knowledge, can be called on by both students and by the lead instructor to further amplify any number of points of information.
Each module of the course is structured with demos (which students can follow along with on their own provided-by-Mindsharp laptop) interspersed seamlessly throughout the instructional modules. Each module concludes with a Student Labs section including various exercises for students to complete individually. These Lab exercises both supplement and enhance the instruction and demos which have come before and, needless to say, completing these exercises individually is the best way to not only learn, but to retain the knowledge.
Today, we worked through the first two and a half course modules, including the Introduction to SharePoint 2007; Working with Lists; and Working with Document Libraries. I was initially stricken with a laptop which made dial-up appear to be blazing fast, but after suffering through half of the first module's Student Labs section moving at a snail's pace (through no fault of my own! ...or, it must be noted, of Mindsharp's, as such is the occasional nature of running SharePoint on a Virtual PC), I switched machines and raced through the remaining exercises in record time.
I should mention that each of the provided laptops is running its own instance of MOSS via a Virtual PC. Which reminds me, I really need to get back the Virtual PC that I loaned a colleague for our trip to Tech Ed back in June. By the time I've completed the Mindsharp Power End User training, I expect I'll be ready to rededicate myself towards my efforts at imaging that Virtual PC for my own use!
Read Mindsharp Power End User: Day Two ... the adventure continues!
Posted
Aug 11 2008, 06:58 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Bamboo Nation's de facto managing editor and, while he has learned much about SharePoint in his first year, he gleefully awaits the release of SharePoint 2010, and the reset button that release will represent for SharePoint Blank.