What is Workflow Learning?
Learning Circuits attempts to define workflow learning: "Companies are analyzing workflow in order to reduce the time needed for tasks and business processes, thereby increasing productivity and cutting costs. Embedding learning into the workflow can reduce the time needed for both training and informal learning."Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, July 28, 2004
701 e-Learning Tips
From the MASIE center comes this free download of 701 e-learning tips: "These tips are from senior managers and training professionals from major corporations around the world. We have edited and compiled 141 pages and 14 chapters covering the ABCAdd tag Permalink | Wednesday, July 28, 2004
The Empire Blogs Back
Companies are finding that small-scale Web publishing -- blogging -- reaps big benefits when it comes to customer feedback.blogging Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, July 27, 2004
High Turnover: Should You Care?
Knowledge nomads: "Knowledge nomads are highly mobile workers. Like nomadic people, they move frequently from place to place. No one organization is their home or life. But also like nomadic people they build homes. They form commitments when and where they stop." How do you retain them? "Spend less time trying to 'retain' employees through incentives like salary bumps and more time 're-recruiting' them by offering interesting challenges and learning opportunities. Retention will follow when appropriate."Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, July 27, 2004
The Three Orders of Organization
David Weinberger on the different orders of classification: "If you recall, we were all supposed to be lifeless at the bottom of an ocean of information by now. Why have we survived the information tsunami so confidently predicted in the late '80s and early '90s? Those predictions assumed that the principles of organization wouldn't evolve. But they have. Rapidly and profoundly." He goes to explain by his three orders of organization:- First Order: You arrange physical objects: You shelve books, you file papers, you put away your silverware.
- Second Order: You arrange separate, smaller objects that contain metadata about the first order objects: You create a card catalog. You make entries in a ledger. You index a book. You now have a second organizational scheme (e.g., the books are shelved by subject but the cards are arranged alphabetically), and it's physically easier to navigate.
- Third Order: You create electronic metadata so you can organize it in ways that simply weren't feasible before.
Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Support is where brands are won and lost
Another good article from Gerry McGovern. This time he offers advice on the topic of the moment -- brands and the support economy. Here's the essence of his article: "Products are becoming more and more the same, made from the same parts, doing the same things. What will give organizations of the future a competitive advantage is the set of relationships they have established. Organizations that outsource their support are outsourcing their customer relationships and outsourcing their brands."Add tag Permalink | Monday, July 26, 2004
Checklist for Building the Ideal News Web Site
Steve Outing lists a set of design issues to consider when building an ideal news website (or any website for that matter). Some points that stand out -- more interactive multimedia and more user-generated content.Add tag Permalink | Friday, July 23, 2004
A Definition of Interaction Design
Dan Saffer defines interaction design as, "the art of facilitating or instigating interactions between humans (or their agents), mediated by products. By interactions, I mostly mean communication, either one-on-one (a telephone call), one-to-many (blogs), or many-to-many (the stock market). The products an interaction designer creates can be digital or analog, physical or incorporeal or some combination thereof."interaction Add tag Permalink | Thursday, July 22, 2004
The Complete Guide to Isometric Pixel Art
I've been searching for something like this for such a long time. Till now, I've been relying on some fantastic piecemeal stuff on pixelfreak and zoggles. Isometric pixel art is the type of visual design that you see in SimCity. I strongly feel that this type of art can be used to explain complex processes and procedures, especially those that are geographically or spatially oriented. For example, see MSNBC Enron module. [Via Stephen Downes]Add tag Permalink | Thursday, July 22, 2004
ROI Is Not a Silver Bullet: Five Actionable Steps for Valuing User Experience Design
Scott Hirsch of Adaptive Path writes about the right way to justify corporate investment in web design. Return on investment or ROI, he says, is not the way to go: "Although ROI methodology can be a useful tool for prioritizing possible web development projects, by itself ROI is not the answer to building a stronger user experience design competency." Scott goes on to suggest 5 methods that can be used to highlight the benefits of web design: 1) understand the business value, 2) Look for quick wins, 3) target key user behaviors, 4) measure outcomes post launch and 5) evangelize success. To me the fifth point -- evangelize success -- is a key deliverable that will make stakeholders happy. Evangelizing success means writing a case study that shows the pre and post differences in design and how it has helped increase business value. This case study can then be used for internal branding purposes that can increase corporate-wide know-how on the affects of good web design. Here are some tips for writing persuasive case studies.Add tag Permalink | Thursday, July 22, 2004
Defining the Barrier
Nice piece of multimedia journalism this, telling the story of how the Israeli wall in the West Bank is affecting Arabs and Jews living there. [thanks interactiveNarratives]interactives Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Why Innovations Sit on the Shelf
Why? Because organizations don't "have the ability to conduct candid conversations about internal problems... According to our studies, the most effective way for a leader to realign his company is to facilitate open and honest conversation about any barriers the organization is facing." What? Haven't they heard of weblogs? Anyway, this article lists 4 methods to foster organization-wide conversations:- Advocate, inquire, repeat
- Cut to the chase
- Be open and inclusive
- Strive for honesty alongside low risk
innovation Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Sakai Project
"The Sakai Project is a $6.8M community source software development project founded by The University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, the uPortal Consortium, and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation." "Sakai software provides tools to support faculty research and service work in addition to course management.Add tag Permalink | Monday, July 19, 2004
Standards Vs. Sensible Design
Once in a while you want such articles to put some reality back into design issues. This one's on being too sticky about web standards. "Using Web standards is the right thing to do, but, as with any recommendation, there's no point following them off a cliff... Let's all get a bit less anal about the technicalities of the Web, and look at how to improve the usability and logic of the product before we start to develop it. Once this step is taken, the question of standards compliance will no longer warrant discussion."Add tag Permalink | Monday, July 19, 2004
Usability News
The current edition of Usability News newsletter has some interesting articles. There was a study on the affect of different layouts on online reading. It was found that "the use of margins affected both reading speed and comprehension in that participants read the Margin text slower, but comprehended more than the No Margin text. Participants were also generally more satisfied with the text with margins. Leading was not shown to impact reading performance but did influence overall user preference.usability Add tag Permalink | Monday, July 19, 2004
Online Learning and Fun
Nice article from eLearn Magazine that explores what it takes to mix fun and learning. "Passivity was cited as a common reason for an experience that was not fun: when a learner has no control of his or her learning and is just reading--or skimming--page after page of materials. Presentation has a huge impact; an example was given of presenting children with cooked vegetables at dinner or letting them find and pick vegetables themselves. And, of course, what makes courses fun? Courses can be fun when they encourage a learner to be active, be it through exploring, challenging exercises and projects, or communication."Add tag Permalink | Monday, July 19, 2004
Arranging ideas: KM in human terms
A wonderful explanation of KM by Amy Garhan. She likens KM to arranging ideas, which consists of 3 core tasks: 1) recording your thoughts, 2) organizing and storing your thoughts and 3) sharing your ideas and observations. The arranging ideas concept not only represents a refreshing way to look at KM but also provides a different framework for analyzing existing KM efforts. I would like to add that arranging ideas can be considered to be a core activity of 'idea practitioners'. The idea practitioner concept represents a different mindset, one that focuses equally on the self and on the image of the self as manifested by social networks. Thus when an idea practitioner contributes an idea, he/she takes special care to make that idea sharable -- by 'arranging ideas so people can use them'. This is also the core of what bloggers do, and thus one can say that bloggers are idea practitioners too. But this is not the case in organizations. A manager at a large control engineering group recently discussed some of his KM related problems with me. His main problem was trying to get engineers to 'arrange ideas' for reuse for the benefit of the organization. The engineers refused to work in the 'sharing ideas for reuse' mode and stressed the importance of working in the 'ideas for me and my project' mode. Now because of this difference a lot of know-how is locked up in project-based silos and this can be only be comprehended by the project members themselves. Now who or what is to blame here? The organization thinks the engineers are the ones not adapting and the engineers think that the organization is not making any sense. Now, although these differences can be reconciled by some extra effort from both sides in the long term, there's a simple quick win solution -- provide a separate space for idea practitioners and grow the sharing culture in a bottom-up, emergent fashion. This space is commonly referred to as communities of practices (CoPs). Thus, the organization should not create CoPs for CoPs sake, but to cultivate and grow the knowledge sharing idea virus to permeate the entire organization. In the engineers' case, it would be best to have the CoP take the initial responsibility to transform the documents from a project based mode to a sharing base mode and thereby start a practice of knowledge sharing.knowledge management Add tag Permalink | Saturday, July 17, 2004
Brand Value and the User Experience
Brand experience is an important facet user experience design. In this article, Kelly Goto explores 4 principles that go into providing a powerful brand experience. The user experience should be:- Comfortable
- Intuitive
- Consistent
- Trustworthy
Add tag Permalink | Friday, July 16, 2004
IA and Requirements Gathering
Good advice for communicating the requirements gathering strategy -- differentiating between the 'what' and the 'how' of requirements: "The hierarchy between what will be accomplished (the business requirement) and how it will be accomplished (the functional requirement) makes both types of requirements much easier to grasp. Sticky, easily understood requirements lead to arguments and arguments lead to solutions. These solutions then lead to a well-crafted strategy widely supported by the team. And all of this can happen long before a single pixel is planned."Add tag Permalink | Friday, July 16, 2004
Training Director’s Forum Webcasts
VNU provides some webcasts of TNF 2004. You first have to register though.Add tag Permalink | Friday, July 16, 2004
Reputation and Trust (aka “Network Closure”)
An interesting read relating structural holes and network closure. Structural holes are gaps between groups. They offer many opportunities for innovation. Network closure, the counterpart to structural holes, represents the level of trust within groups. Here's an excerpt: "The power of reputation rests on the idea of network closure, which is the degree to which everyone knows everyone else in a network. In a subgroup or "clique" where everybody knows everybody else, reputation can have currency much more powerful than money. Promises within the group can be trusted because the consequences of breaking a promise would be catastrophic. Anyone who mistreated a fellow member in such a group would quickly find himself ostracized by the entire group, his reputation ruined." [thanks elearnspace]innovation Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, July 14, 2004
History of Knowledge Management in Six Parts
Bill Ives takes on the history of KM in six parts: "This serialized work attempts to puts the current state of knowledge management in context, providing a brief historical overview of knowledge management and communication media, and offering a framework for examining issues based on cognitive psychology."knowledge management Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Ethnography and Anthropology in the Media
Here's a list of corporate ethnography and anthropology articles mentioned in the media. This type of research, as covered by the articles, has been made popular by product design and marketing and branding firms. But I see these disciplines also being part of serious KM related work. Dave Snowden is a proponent of such work. Dave Snowden is a proponent of such work. Btw, Dave Snowden has left IBM and is now concentrating on his new venture -- The Cynefin Centre.ethnography Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, July 13, 2004
The Power of Impossible Thinking
A nice analysis of how mental models matter in 'seeing and acting differently'. For example, "Take the four-minute mile. Before 1954, it seemed to be a physical barrier that humans could not cross. It was impossible. Then Roger Bannister broke this barrier on a British track. Within three years, 16 other runners had also cracked the four-minute mile. Was there some breakthrough in human evolution? No. What had changed was their thinking. Bannister showed it was possible. We think the barriers are in the world, but often they are in our own minds."Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, July 13, 2004