Writing educational content in 2023

As you may have heard, Ruben Van de Walle and myself recently published our first book on Archicad, a well-known and popular BIM software, developed by GRAPHISOFT .

A BIM Professional's Guide to Learning Archicad

While the publishing process set upon us by the publishing company ( Packt ) was clearly defined, using Google docs during outlining, Microsoft Word templates during writing and reviewing, with the use of track changes and finally handing over the manuscript to the layout team using (assumably) Adobe InDesign to prepare the final printable copies, we actually started earlier than that, for our internal draft.

More traditional approaches

Initially, when I first wrote papers and course documents, I experimented with a few software tools which are more optimised for writing. I have tried writing in LaTeX, which was sell suited during the writing of my PhD in 2007, as a solo endeavour mostly, but which was too cumbersome for this type of book, needing direct collaboration and countless images. Well, it's possible, but it doesn't translate well into other publishing flows, like web or so. I've tried though and got some success (e.g., using "pandoc" scripts to convert code into PDF or markdown or others, but I felt that it hindered the writing itself). I didn't want to bother too much with elaborate conversion setups...

eBooks

I've tried Apple iBooks and Scrivener and MacJournal as dedicated tools for book or blog writing. The Apple product is now deprecated, and Apple asks you to use Apple Pages instead, which never really clicked for me. Scrivener seemed to work fine for quite some novel writers and seems to be well thought out to keep all kinds of references, outlines and plot organisation, but I really hated the rich text writing environment which seemed to not give me the structure that I preferred. MacJournal was more streamlined and had a few nice options to publish to a blog. I used it a lot (initially) for preparing course material and could even sync between iPad and laptop, but eventually it didn't offer me the robustness of collaborative editing and publishing directly online. It's still available for free, so give it a try if you are running an Apple device.

Publication flows using versioning systems

Then I went through a series of markdown platforms, including GitBook. They all followed more or less the same process, but in most cases there was a writing step (duh...), a step to include a table of content (often created separately or by adding special markup codes) and a publication step (to turn the markdown into HTML ready to be uploaded).

It all worked but it all took a lot of steps. And then you still have to push the result to be hosted somewhere, although that was nicely resolved with Gitbook, when I tried it.

Recent no-code platforms

And finally I tried Notion, which is a no-code platform, with an always-online (or web-first) approach. It lacks some of the bells and whistles and deep control of a few other platforms, but it makes up for it with a few very important features:

• It has a basic but clean markup-like style of editing leading to structured text, using basic headings, bullets/numbers. It is easy to remember, fast to type and gives fairly clean page layouts and typography. The slightly minimalistic style of Notion appeals to the architect in me.
• You can embed rich content, including images, video, PDF and a series of content from external sites. I haven't dived very deep into it, but I did include YouTube embeds, a few charts made in Whimsical and I've seen people embedding graphs, charts or tables from apps like Airtable as well.
• With some more effort, you can even have a (simple) 3D model displayed interactively, as there are a few options available. It can make a page slow, but gives the student a clickable and navigable 3D model right into the page.
• It has tables, which act as databases. Notion is a bit limited in the depth of its formulas and doesn't give the full power of a relational database system, but for the majority of use cases it works surprisingly well. You can set up tables for e.g., products, companies, file formats, tasks or anything you can imagine. And you can link tables, turning it into a usable albeit lightweight relational database system, without the complexity of SQL or needing to fix the table structures. It's like Excel tables, but with real relations instead of cumbersome lookup formulas. And you can still add or remove fields (columns or properties), change names of fields (!), turn some fields into another type with decent recovery of the data that is already entered. And you have some Excel like table editing features, which makes it easy to paste in tabular data, when the CSV or other imports don't work for some reason.
• And finally the big one: tables have "views", which gives them a lot of flexibility in showing databases all over your documents. You can embed a view in another page, while still managing the content in a single table.

I've moved most of my course material over to Notion, replacing older HTML and LaTeX and MacJournal documents. I've added countless additional knowledge lists and tables, such as terminology, lists of software products, with categories and features, lists of file formats, to link to software products. It's kind of addictive, which I read as a trait with many users initially: you almost want to put everything in there. Eventually, I slowed down a bit, but I've seen it being picked up in many places.

I helped setting up the #ISO19650 wiki page for Buildwise within Notion, which you can consult here: https://bimbuildwise.notion.site/Belgian-ISO-19650-wiki-e463f716154743ccb2d0c67c1b857525

And every page is online immediately. See a spelling error? Correct it. Boom. It's already available in the live version. Luckily you still have control over which pages (and subpages) become publicly visible, so you can use your page hierarchy as part of the publishing workflow, moving draft pages underneath the published pages, to add them to the published one. In the example wiki above, many pages are still in preparation for publication in 2024 or later.

Is Notion perfect? No, of course not. And when you have multiple members, it can become a bit expensive, but you can invite guests to pages (and sub-pages) which can help with commenting or editing.

But does it have AI?

Oh... it's 2023 (still for a few days): it has a bunch of AI features, so you can ask a large language model to write pages or other content for you. But it's a separate subscription and I frankly want to stay in control over what I write (just like with this testimony page).

Conclusion

There you have it... a gradual evolution of publication methods and tools. Who knows which other platforms I might dive into in 2024. I've heard good things about Obsidian (for linked Markdown texts with full control and privacy) and Coda (which is giving more app-like powers and more elaborate formulas in comparison to Notion). I looked at Fibery as well, which was more flexible on the data modelling level. And even Microsoft is adding similar approaches to embeddable live content with their Loop collaborative app. They even look a lot alike...