Monday, October 24, 2011

Why Print works

In my company, print is used for all purposes, as it was 15 years ago. We don't follow the current trend of avoiding printing as much as possible. And it has been working well. Here are some uses for printing our documents for:
- Printing day to day documents, i.e., emails, excel files, etc
- Manuals for internal and external training
- Trainers printing manuals when reviewing them

Our manuals account for around 100+ pages each, so if we have 6+ students for a class (webinar and face to face), it adds up. Once I remember printing around 3000 pages of manuals for a face to face class of around 8 students.
The reasons we print, rather than using the web are:
- Trainers need to review the material and so write notes on the paper (they are very old school, in my opinion)
- Clients prefer printed material, as the training we provide is they pay for it
- Our organization is very conservative and so change is not easy or quick, this is one of the traditions we still follow
- Not enough people are against using print

Personally, I don't think printing is a good idea, and web based documents are the ideal way to go and would provide significant benefits. For example, searching for key words would be possible and so you can skim and jump to the sections quickly. You save the cost of paper and ink.

3 comments:

  1. Hi umair,
    I am in Change11. The title of this post piqued my curiosity in today's daily. It is strange, isn't it, to move back and forth between groups that embrace technology (like the members of this course) and those that don't (like your fellow employees).
    I read all of your posts and enjoyed seeing how you are making sense of the course content and relating it to your work and life. I blog here esmequnhua.blogspot.com

    I am a doctoral student, looking into how people learn in MOOCs. I am curious how you came to join this course.

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  2. Yes, its not easy. I enjoy trying new technologies and trying to use them for our educational purposes and I feel change 11 helps with that, with all of the students' ideas and the presenters. And its almost the opposite at my work with the constraints we have...

    Change11 is a requirement of the course I am taking through my school.

    Thank you for reading my blog.

    Umair

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  3. Print work is using now in different things like screen printing which can be applied on t-shirts. Paper printing which is very common and so on.

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