Down with Boring E-Learning!
Interview withinstructional design Add tag Permalink | Monday, July 12, 2004
Into the Blogosphere
This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities. [Thanks Contentious]Add tag Permalink | Monday, July 12, 2004
The Ikea Story
Oliver Burkeman's in-depth coverage of the Ikea story. This is fantastic case study material.Add tag Permalink | Friday, July 09, 2004
New Online Learning Blog
Michael Feldstein has started a blog: E-Literate. Welcome to the blogosphere, Michael.Add tag Permalink | Friday, July 09, 2004
Lessons Learnt From Using Breeze Live
Jonathan Kaye takes an in-depth look at using Breeze Live to deliver presentations and meetings.Add tag Permalink | Friday, July 09, 2004
Australian government to offer guide to open-source
Now this is cool: "A new guide designed to help federal government agencies evaluate open-source products alongside their proprietary rivals is due to be completed and distributed by September".Add tag Permalink | Thursday, July 08, 2004
The Art of Underengineering
This underengineering advice can be used in any design field: "On average, 70 percent of the cost of any new product is fixed by the specifications and design. In other words, more than two-thirds of the total cost is designed into the product. By identifying what is integral to an automobileAdd tag Permalink | Thursday, July 08, 2004
Attention, Shoppers: You Can Now Speed Straight Through Checkout Lines!
Very nice article by Wired on future supermarkets where most functions are enabled by RFID technology. The article looks at 3 different perspectives of RFID technology: Depending who you ask, RFID tags constitute- the best thing to happen to manufacturing since the cog
- the biggest threat to personal privacy since the crowbar
- the near-exact fulfillment of the Book of Revelation's description of the mark of the beast.
Add tag Permalink | Thursday, July 08, 2004
The Power of Informal Learning
Nice overview of the rise of informal learning: "Although the pedagogical methods weinstructional design Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, July 07, 2004
Beyond the Buy Button in E-Commerce
Jakob Nielsen on total user experience: "The concept of total user experience says that you must consider everything that the user encounters -- not just the screen designs. Confirmation email plays a big role in comforting users and calming their anxieties, especially if there's a delay in fulfilling their order. And, even when everything goes right and the shipment will be on time, you gain credibility points when you send customers appropriate confirmation emails to keep them informed. Doing so creates the expectation that you'll treat them well in the future and in case of trouble."Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, July 07, 2004
Flash Accessibility White Paper
An updated white paper on Flash accessibility by Bob Regan.Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, July 07, 2004
(My) Three Priniciples of Effective Online Pedagogy
An in-depth article showing many examples of effective online learning. The three principles that form the basis of this paper are:- Let the students do (most of) the work
- Interactivity is the heart and soul of effective asynchronous learning
- Strive for presence
Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, July 06, 2004
KM tools put users in control
This article discusses two new KM tools: Flow and KnowledgeWorkshop.knowledge management Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, July 06, 2004
Instructoart
Some of Matthew Vescovo's instructional clips are hilarious. Check them out under the Archives link. Also available in book form.instructional design Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, July 06, 2004
Persistent Conversations
Denham Grey outlines why blogs are not knowledge exchanges. He argues that blogs cannot sustain conversations: "Feel you need a more neutral container, a safe 'knowledge' space to commune, a 'Ba' to build trust and sustain dialog, equal edit access to encourage true collaborative writing (annealing / refactoring / facile annotation), an easier turn-taking flow to practice persistent conversation before you can have full sharing, develop the cohesion & trust to enable creative abrasion, supply sufficient context for sharing meaning and a pull space for deep listening / reflection."Add tag Permalink | Monday, July 05, 2004
20Q.net
"20Q.net is an experiment in artificial intelligence. The program is very simple but its behavior is complex. Everything that it knows and all questions that it asks were entered by people playing this game. 20Q.net is a learning system; the more it is played, the smarter it gets." I've tried it out a few times, and it got all of them correct under 20 questions. Fantastic stuff. There's a discussion at David Weinberger's blog on how 20Q works.Add tag Permalink | Monday, July 05, 2004
Usability and listening to customers have limits
Gerry McGovern on balancing usability and real value : "Usability sometimes misses the point. If youusability Add tag Permalink | Monday, July 05, 2004
Thinking About Interaction Design
This is a very absorbing paper on interaction design. The author introduces the concept of 'productive interaction', where users have the ability to "create custom, personally significant meaning spaces of their own... Instead of laying out a linear narrative in an enveloping experience, the productive interaction designer frames an exploration of a meaning space, making sure the audience has the affordances to create their own "take". [thanks infodesign]interaction Add tag Permalink | Thursday, July 01, 2004
Capturing the Value of “Generation Tech” Employees
Good article from Marc Prensky on the need to understand "digital natives" (the new generation) and to leverage their capabilities rather than to restrict their creative freedom. "This generation is better than any before at absorbing information and making decisions quickly, as well as at multitasking and parallel processing. In contrast, people age 30 or older areAdd tag Permalink | Thursday, July 01, 2004
Collaboration First, Then Knowledge Management
A very broad and thorough article on online collaboration. Here's a nice observation: "The goals of collaboration should first be to allow knowledge workers to labor together to complete projects and only then to collect that knowledge to be leveraged for the rest of the enterprise. Too many collaboration technology implementations are led by a knowledge management team that may have reversed the order of those two priorities." [thanks ColumnTwo]knowledge management Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Decoding Value
This is a nice article detailing how people at different levels in organizations view ROI or any metric for that matter: "If your target organization that you want to communicate value to is a megacorporation, you may never communicate directly with the CEO or CFO, but the management layers you work with often do. You need to be able to communicate directly to your immediate audience. You also need to help the audience communicate value with the next level and up."Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Architectural Digest vs. This Old House
Zeldman on designers vs. clients: "I look forward to the day when most people who hire folks like us to design, structure, and program their web presences treat us more like the thinkers we are, and less like hired hands installing birdbaths."Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Roller Coasters vs. Driver’s Seats: Design and the Concept of Situational Control
Insightful stuff from Rashmi Sinha on the amount of situational control designer has: "You can describe any type of design situation in terms of the amount of control you have over their user experience. Think of the design of a train journey. You control the passenger's temperature, physical comfort, food, and noise levels. Now think of the design of an MP3 player. You (through your design) control only this small device in the user's hands. The rest is unknown. The user might be in a train, or walking through New York Streets or sitting in a class. The amount of situational control that the designer has is low."Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, June 29, 2004
E-Learning For Short Attention Spans
This is an interesting article touching on the content requirements to handle learning objects: "Experienced e-learning practitioners have found that it's better to shorten the lessons into digestible bites and deliver them to employees' desktops so they can apply their new knowledge right away... Storing and managing large numbers of simulation and other e-learning content components can be a technical challenge, especially if you're trying to create e-learning materials that are reusable objects that can be repurposed from one class to another." This is where I see that the e-learning industry focus is limited. Instead of hunting for or experimenting with new solutions to manage these objects, why don't we learn from a field that specializes in doing this kind of stuff -- information architecture?Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, June 29, 2004