Hands-On With iBooks Author
Check out what it is like to author textbooks using iBooks Author.
Everything feels very fluid and it’s obvious that the same team that worked on iWork was also responsible for this product. This isn’t iPhoto for books, by any means, though. While it’s not Adobe InDesign or a complex design tool like either, it’s clearly meant for users who are willing to put in a bit of time to create the best possible product…
education, learning, ibooks Add tag Permalink | Thursday, January 19, 2012
Wolfram Education Portal
From the Wolfram Education Portal:
Wolfram has long been a trusted name in education—as the makers of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, we’ve created some of the most dynamic teaching and learning tools available. We are pleased to offer the best of all of our technologies to you here in the Wolfram Education Portal, organized by course. In the portal you’ll find a dynamic textbook, lesson plans, widgets, interactive Demonstrations, and more built by Wolfram education experts.
education, learning Add tag Permalink | Thursday, January 19, 2012
Can Technology Transform Education Before It’s Too Late?
Another TechCrunch article on Education:
We are in a time of convergence: teachers are incorporating technology from their everyday lives to increase student engagement, while visionary administrators are using the momentum of grassroots digital learning movements to move our institutions forward. Hopefully education will catch up before the Singularity arrives.
education, learning Add tag Permalink | Monday, January 16, 2012
Vinod Khosla on Education
Vinod Khosla on Will we need teachers or algorithms?
We have focused so much of our education system on children attending primary school, then middle school, then high school, all with the objective of attending university. This is a progression that still remains unchanged and largely unchallenged. Yet, this system is completely linear and, most tragically, unwaveringly standardized not only through instruction methods, but also through testing. Worse, it is mostly what I call “fixed time, variable learning” (the four-year high school) instead of “fixed learning, variable time” to account for individual students’ capabilities and status.
Vinod goes on to discuss decentralization and gamification as two trends to watch out for.
education, learning Add tag Permalink | Sunday, January 15, 2012
Richard Feynman - No Ordinary Genius (full version)
Full documentary on this amazing person.interesting Add tag Permalink | Saturday, January 14, 2012
Recoding the Classroom
Nice article from ThinkGoogle on what is going to bring about change in the classroom. “Though our world is changing, the spaces in which we teach are stuck in a time warp. According to some forward-thinking experts, only by embracing new technology and ideas can twenty-first-century schooling stay up to speed with the kids.”
school, google Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Steve Jobs on Higher Education
Interesting to see what Steve had in mind for higher education when making plans for NeXT Computer. Simulations and the learning experience were high on his agenda.
education Add tag Permalink | Sunday, January 08, 2012
Observations on use of mobile devices at airports and train stations
We just published a new post titled “Observations on use of mobile devices at airports and train stations”. We visited airports and train stations and sketched out how people interact with their phones and tablets. We learnt a few things in the process.
ux, mobile Add tag Permalink | Thursday, January 05, 2012
Manager’s guidebook on intranet redesign projects
When consulting on intranet projects we often found ourselves having long discussions with intranet managers on the many things that would unfold in such projects and how they could be better prepared for the long journey. These discussions would give them the confidence and the time needed to get things in order inside their organisations.
Today, we release the Manager’s guidebook on intranet redesign projects— the result of those discussions with intranet managers. This 64-page guidebook (free download) takes the manager through eight stages of a typical intranet design project. Each stage has many activities that go under it. We’ve described the activities and included the insights we’ve gathered over the years. Enjoy!
Add tag Permalink | Sunday, July 17, 2011
Using tag bundles in intranets
Our new article on tag bundles is up. Here’s the summary:
It’s common for enterprises to have a document library in their intranets that houses all types of administrative and operational content. Such a document library usually has a taxonomy to improve the discoverability and findability of content. However, there is one problem: documents need to get into the library first! Submitting a document to the library involves filing or tagging the document with the right taxonomic terms, a procedure that can make people see red if not done properly. Tag bundles can help simplify this procedure and also improve the use of such document libraries.
taxonomy, intranets Add tag Permalink | Monday, June 27, 2011
Learning Styles: The Cognitive Side of Content
Nice post by Tyler Tate on how to approach content from the perspective of “learning styles”.
We learn through our verbal, visual, and kinesthetic senses, and our memories are encoded in these different formats. Each of us likely favors one style of learning over the others, but pithy, concrete text coupled with informative images is a potent content cocktail for people of all learning styles.
content strategy Add tag Permalink | Friday, June 17, 2011
Developing a UX Practice of Practicing
A very nice piece by Jared Spool on the art of practicing.
Practice is different. Good practice focuses on the process, while work focuses on the outcome. When doctors, musicians, and pilots are practicing, they are not doing the entire job. They are looking at the process of the work, often repeating the same step multiple times.
For example, when a surgeon practices their suture techniques, they'll use butcher shop animal scraps to practice sewing up incisions. They don't perform the rest of the surgical procedure, because they aren't interested in the outcomes. They just quickly and cleanly close the incision and do it again.
ux, learning Add tag Permalink | Thursday, June 16, 2011
How the Internet is Revolutionizing Education
Brilliant post listing down the things that are changing education. A great read and a whole lot of links to follow.
education Add tag Permalink | Sunday, May 15, 2011
Innovation Always Starts With Empathy
Wonderful article by Ziba rebutting the recent skepticism on the UCD process:
When Ziba investigates a specific user as part of a design project, the end result isn’t a set of new products, it’s an internal understanding of what that user is like: The challenges she faces each day, the things that excite and concern her, and her motivations and values. If you don’t come out of a research effort feeling like a different person, you’re doing it wrong.
research, ux Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, April 05, 2011
The new culture of learning
Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown take on a new challenge - to tell people that it’s time to embrace a new culture of learning.
I am reading this book now and I am already excited by the possibilities—possibilities that we can achieve together if only we realize soon enough that “[t]he world is changing faster than ever and our skill sets have a shorter and shorter life”.
One beautiful aspect that the authors highlight is the importance of learning “how to learn from others”. ‘Others’ here refers to peers and the community at large. The reason I find this beautiful is because I’ve come across people who think that teaching is the only way to learn and teachers are the only people who can teach. They seem to gloss over opportunities that lay in normal everyday conversations they have with peers—they don’t pay attention to or build on these interactions.
This book should be a must read for managers and leaders—this is where both the challenges and the opportunities lie.
education, learning, culture Add tag Permalink | Thursday, March 17, 2011
Introducing Insightico!
We launched a new webapp called Insightico. This online application helps you use and reuse your research data.
How many times have you gone back to those interview recordings that you so carefully planned at the start of the project? Or those snapshots you took when surveying how people work? I’ve spoken to many people in the business and they usually say “never”. In fact, some of the interviews we did for past projects are still in the audio recorder!
We want to go back to research, but the problem is that it is a painful process trying to locate that 15 second clip where you saw something interesting.
Insightico addresses this gap by enabling you to add your insights to specific parts of images, documents, audio or video files.
Say you are viewing a 30 min audio interview. You hear something interesting, now instead of noting what you heard and the timestamp on a sticky note, you can just select the part of the audio file and directly add your insights to it. Yes, you can tag your insights as well. Repeat the process with all your research data and now you have an inventory of insights but all connected to the relevant bits in the sources. This inventory along with the tags gives a good picture of the research findings.
The most important feature of Insightico—you can do all of this collaboratively with your team.
Check Insightico out by signing up for the beta.
research Add tag Permalink | Friday, March 04, 2011
Guide to Website Navigation Design Patterns
This guide covers popular site navigation design patterns. For each site navigation design pattern, we will discuss its common characteristics, its drawbacks, and when best to use it.
Nice summary of patterns, but I like O’Reilly’s book on Website Navigation better.
navigation Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Changing IT Mindsets From Deployment To Adoption
Mike Gotta makes a nice point about the need to really unpack user adoption when it comes to collaborative apps.
When it comes to collaboration, knowledge management, and E2.0 efforts, “culture” is often cited as the reason results fail to meet expectations set when the project is approved. While some projects might acknowledge the need to support post-deployment activities early in the planning stages, strategists and project leaders have consistently told me that they were surprised (and not in a good way) at how they underestimated the effort necessary to gain “adoption” of their solution.
intranets, collaboration, adoption Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, February 15, 2011
10 Best Intranets of 2011
Jakob Nielsen’s Intranet Annual 2011 is out. He notices big improvements in mobile deployments and in knowledge sharing using social media tools. I think this is just natural progression—catching up with what is available on the Internet. But it is nice to see successful executions.
Knowledge management progressed from cliché to reality, based on simpler and thus more-used features. Mobile intranets doubled.
knowledge management, intranets, mobile Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, January 05, 2011
Testing Content
A good article on how to test the content of a website. Angela Colter lists few methods to test the decoding and comprehension of content. Seems like her preferred method is moderated usability testing.
To find out whether people understand your content, have them read it and apply their new knowledge. In other words, do a usability test! Here’s how to create task scenarios where participants interpret and use what they read:
- Identify the issues that are critical to users and the business.
- Create tasks that test user knowledge of these issues.
- Tell participants that they’re not being tested; the content is.
content strategy, content testing Add tag Permalink | Monday, December 20, 2010
Google’s Nifty Guide To Web Technology
An very nice HTML5 book that reads like an iBook. The book is filled with pictures and small animations that add that little extra that makes the difference. And yes, the most important thing - the topics are short.
interesting, html5 Add tag Permalink | Friday, November 19, 2010
Over 75 Free Rapid E-Learning Resources
Nice list. I found many resources that I can use today!
instructional design, research Add tag Permalink | Thursday, November 11, 2010
2-Day Usability Bootcamp with Christine Perfetti
We are organizing a 2-day usability bootcamp with Christine Perfetti. Here are the details.
Will your website or application be successful when it’s launched? Will people be able to use it easily? Will it meet the business objectives? Will you be able to account for the time, money and effort spent on it? To answer these questions, Perfetti Media’s expert usability professional, Christine Perfetti, has put together a 2-Day Usability Bootcamp to help you learn the skills needed to evaluate and improve your designs, be it for a product, website, web application or intranet.
usability Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Web customers crave speed, not emotional experiences
Gerry McGovern has a point here about web customers craving speed:
People don’t want experiences on websites. They don’t want to emotionally bond with a website. When was the last time you felt delighted after you booked a flight? Did you have a great experience booking that cinema ticket or did you have a great experience at the cinema?
usability, ux Add tag Permalink | Sunday, September 19, 2010
Making common content work on the intranet
Simon Goh has written a thought-provoking piece on managing common content on the intranet.
The intranet comprises broadly of corporate and business common content. Corporate content are stuff such as backoffice processes, policies, templates, news, corporate events and employee benefits. Business content are stuff such as standard contract clauses, services & solutions offerings, project references, document deliverable templates, delivery samples and methodologies.
Regardless of the category, 5 things need to happen for an intranet to be a trusted place for staff to get common content. Common content needs to be:
- available as soon as they are
- at the right place
- well-written
- accurate, current and comprehensive
- rid of Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial (ROT) content
content strategy, content management Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, September 15, 2010