Syllabus: Building an Access Ramp to Information Technology
Syllabus: Building an Access Ramp to Information Technology"At many institutions, the technical departments have argued that all of the needs of students with disabilities should be handled by that office. Not only does that department
Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, August 06, 2003
Step Two: Knowledge management for front-line staff
Step Two: Knowledge management for front-line staff"Knowledge management is an approach that can benefit all staff within an organisation, from senior management, to front-line staff, and out into the field. This article looks at the way front-line staff operate, and how knowledge management can be used to meet their needs."
knowledge management Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, August 06, 2003
Gerry McGovern: Quality publishing is about saying no
Gerry McGovern: Quality publishing is about saying no"Professional web publishing is not about getting lots of stuff up. It's about getting the right stuff up. There's a world of a difference between the two. Content can create value. Content can also destroy value. It can damage your reputation."
Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, August 05, 2003
MSNBC: Putting your social contacts to work
MSNBC: Putting your social contacts to work"Say you
Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, August 05, 2003
HBS Working Knowledge: The Few, the Proud, the In Crowd
HBS Working Knowledge: The Few, the Proud, the In Crowd"Think about it for a minute. The basic building block of organizations isn't the job, the team, the process, or even the share -- it's the decision. People in organizations collectively make hundreds of thousands of decisions each day, usually without knowing exactly what the results will be. These decisions are made amid a maelstrom of competing jurisdictions, commitments, desires, and needs, including each decision maker's own self-interest. We make sense of a particular decision by asking ourselves, consciously or not: "What would so-and-so think of this?" The organizational core group consists of the aggregate of all these individual so-and-sos."
Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, August 05, 2003
elearnspace: If I Wanted to Make Money in Elearning… Here’s what I’d Do
elearnspace: If I Wanted to Make Money in Elearning... Here's what I'd Do"A great product alone did not result in success. Neither did public awareness. Or superior instruction. Yet, people and organizations are making money in elearning. The revenue models are emerging - many innovative approaches have resulted in profits and promising careers. A strong commitment to listening to the "customer", experimenting with new ideas, going with the stream of how things work in the online culture, and a willingness to fail and learn are all needed. These are areas that I would explore if I were to focus on making money in elearning."
instructional design Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, August 05, 2003
INC: The “4+2 Formula” For Success
INC: The "4+2 Formula" For Success"Quality that significantly exceeds the customer's expectations doesn't seem to pay off. This "delight the customer" stuff isn't rewarding. One has to be careful about delighting customers too often, because it sort of reshapes customer expectations. You're better off being extremely reliable in terms of consistency, meeting the sort of expectations that are implicit in whatever value proposition that you have. Customers are enormously punishing when companies don't meet their expectations."
This relates to Nohria's article in the July issue of HBR: What really works
Add tag Permalink | Monday, August 04, 2003
CIO: Wireless: Just What the Doctor Ordered
CIO: Wireless: Just What the Doctor Ordered"That's why wireless systems, especially those based on the 802.11b standard (also known as Wi-Fi), are more widely deployed. This new conduit lets staff access and update records and make orders at the point of care. That reduces errors and delays, and fits into the doctors' and nurses' workflow. And they're inexpensive to deploy, costing a few percent of the total budget of an electronic medical records (EMR) system. Plus, they can be a springboard to services such as communications badges and mobile sensors."
Add tag Permalink | Monday, August 04, 2003
Wired: Educators Turn to Games for Help
Wired: Educators Turn to Games for Help"People will object to games that have a variety of choices because they can't limit the choices their children make. However, if you remove that type of ambiguity, you've removed any sense of morality from the game because there are no consequences to bad decisions."
gaming Add tag Permalink | Monday, August 04, 2003
DUX Case Studies: Personas: Practice and Theory
DUX Case Studies: Personas: Practice and Theory"In three years of use, our colleagues and we have extended Alan Cooper's technique to make Personas a powerful complement to other usability methods. After describing and illustrating our approach, we outline the psychological theory that explains why Personas are more engaging than design based primarily on scenarios."
Download the PDF (340Kb)
personas Add tag Permalink | Friday, August 01, 2003
Pew Internet & American Life: Daily Internet Activities
Pew Internet & American Life: Daily Internet ActivitiesOn an average day, about 72 million American adults go online. Here are the kinds of things they do on a typical day:
Send E-mail: 52%
Get News: 32%
Use a search engine to find information: 29%
Create a blog: 1%
Add tag Permalink | Friday, August 01, 2003
Stephen Downes: Design, Standards and Reusability
Stephen Downes: Design, Standards and Reusability"In order to use a learning design with a set of objects, the learning design must specify the objects to be used, and if the objects to be used are specified, then the learning design is not reusable."
usability Add tag Permalink | Friday, August 01, 2003
Interesting terms—“sensemaking” and “cosmology episode”
Interesting terms -- "sensemaking" and "cosmology episode"A people-sized definition of sensemaking from Karl Weick:
There are many definitions of sensemaking; for me it is the transformation of raw experience into intelligible world views. It's a bit like what mapmakers do when they try to make sense of an unfamiliar place by capturing it on paper. But the crucial point in cartography is that there is no one best map of a particular terrain. Similarly, sensemaking lends itself to multiple, conflicting interpretations, all of which are plausible.
Weick’s definition matches the "Knowledge Representation" step in the design framework mentioned yesterday. Staying with Weick, here’s the definition of another one of his frequently used terms -- cosmology episode.
Basically, a cosmology episode happens when people suddenly feel that the universe is no longer a rational, orderly system. What makes such an episode so shattering is that people suffer from the event and, at the same time, lose the means to recover from it. In this sense, a cosmology episode is the opposite of a déjà vu experience.In moments of déjà vu, everything suddenly feels familiar, recognizable. By contrast, in a cosmology episode, everything seems strange. A person feels like he has never been here before, has no idea of where he is, and has no idea who can help him. An inevitable state of panic ensues, and the individual becomes more and more anxious until he finds it almost impossible to make sense of what is happening to him.
Interesting terms; they pack so much exformation in them. Yeah I know, here's the definition of exformation (this one's really interesting):
[E]xformation is everything we do not actually say but have in our heads when or before we say anything at all. Information is the measurable, demonstrable utterance we actually come out with.
The End.
Add tag Permalink | Thursday, July 31, 2003
RFID in Action: LobsterTales.org
RFID in Action: LobsterTales.org"Currently in its pilot stage, LobsterTales.org is an educational project which helps students and lobstermen from small Maine lobstering communities discover their connections to a global market. If you purchased a lobster with a numbered claw band, please take a moment to enter your number and we
Add tag Permalink | Thursday, July 31, 2003
Design Process - Just the Essentials
Design Framework - Just the EssentialsGary Klein, naturalistic decision making expert and author of Intuition at Work and Sources of Power, suggests a three-step process to analyze cognitive tasks. The steps are,
- Knowledge Elicitation. Here the intent is to gather first-hand information (observation, interviews, etc.), and not second-hand information (training manuals, PPT slides, etc.).
- Analysis. This phase is still a hunt for clarity (inspecting, selecting, simplifying, abstracting, and transforming information, developing explanations, and extracting meaning).
- Knowledge Representation. This is interesting. It is the transformation of the findings from step-2 into a more usable representation (process of displaying data and depicting relationships, explanations, and the meaning).
These steps seem to offer a simple design framework, especially for knowledge oriented work. Not because the steps follow the ubiquitous Rule of Three, but because they include just the essentials and thus are easier to communicate to team members and to clients.
Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, July 30, 2003
Strategy+Business: How to Win the Information Battle
Strategy+Business: How to Win the Information BattleAdd tag Permalink | Wednesday, July 30, 2003
Adaptive Path: Keep Office Politics Out of Your Design
Adaptive Path: Keep Office Politics Out of Your Design"It happens again and again. You spend hours in design meetings debating a point, and then a single word from upper management squashes your decision. Or maybe your design debates just go on for weeks because of office politics. How can you streamline this process? By deriving your conclusions from research instead of just "experience."
Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, July 30, 2003
Just for laughs!
Just for laughs!Check these out. They're hilarious!
Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, July 29, 2003
Learning Circuits: How Long Does it Take? Estimation Methods for Developing E-Learning
Learning Circuits: How Long Does it Take? Estimation Methods for Developing E-Learning"Currently, there are many variations and techniques for developing a time estimate, but most of the methods revolve around four basic techniques. While none of these methods are flawless, they each contain strengths for developing an accurate estimate.
- Similar Projects
- Using Formulas
- Bottom-up Calculations
- Industry Standards
Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, July 29, 2003
Harvard Working Knowledge: The Secrets of Successful Idea People
Harvard Working Knowledge: The Secrets of Successful Idea People"What idea practitioners share is more than the ability to get excited by an idea's potential. As they scan the horizon for new ideas to bring back to their companies, their finely honed sensibility for what it will take for an idea to overcome internal resistance serves as a filter. Only those ideas that pass this workability test get brought forward. At that point, the IP's skills as cheerleader, viral marketer, ambassador, battlefield tactician, and savvy political insider come to the fore."
innovation Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, July 29, 2003
Computer User: Simulation: bringing e-learning to a new level
Computer User: Simulation: bringing e-learning to a new level"Part of the problem is that nobody has shown definitively that simulation training works in the business world. In gauging the impact of e-learning initiatives on sales, customer satisfaction, or overall company performance, training departments don't isolate simulation from other forms of online content, such as workbooks and lectures."
simulation Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, July 29, 2003
Gerry McGovern: Seven deadly sins of web writing
Gerry McGovern: Seven deadly sins of web writing"What's the single most important thing that could improve the Web? It's not broadband. It's better writing. The general quality of writing on the Web is poor. The way you write has a major impact on what people think of you. Avoid these common mistakes and you will achieve more with your website."
writing Add tag Permalink | Monday, July 28, 2003
Macromedia: Flash Paper
Macromedia: Flash Paper"The practical way to share any printable document as an intrinsic part of a web page."
This is just nice for displaying MS-Project or Visio type documents for which there are no default players. I wouldn't replace Adobe PDF documents with this though.
Add tag Permalink | Monday, July 28, 2003
Wired: Web Cliques Too Cool for School
Wired: Web Cliques Too Cool for School"A clique is traditionally defined as a group of mostly teens who spend a lot of time together, control who hangs out with them and talk about a few specific subjects. But these days, another definition of a clique is a website that serves as a virtual gathering place, where the site's owner picks the topic of discussion, sets rules for joining and vets whose on-topic sites can be linked."
school Add tag Permalink | Monday, July 28, 2003
Webmonkey: Metadata, Mark II
Webmonkey: Metadata, Mark II"In the pages that follow, I'll be giving you a bird