Fast Company: In Praise of the Purple Cow
Fast Company: In Praise of the Purple Cow"This is an essay about what it takes to create and sell something remarkable. It is a manifesto for marketers who want to make a difference at their company by helping create products and services that are worth marketing in the first place. It is a plea for originality, for passion, guts, and daring. Not just because going through life with passion and guts beats the alternative ( which it does ), but also because it's the only way to be successful. Today, the one sure way to fail is to be boring. Your one chance for success is to be remarkable."
Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, January 15, 2003
Infoworld: Blogs refine enterprise focus
Infoworld: Blogs refine enterprise focus"Building on the success of Weblogs for personal Web publishing, enterprises are starting to tap into blogs to streamline specific business processes such as intelligence gathering or to augment traditional content-and knowledge-management technologies."
blogging Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, January 15, 2003
Cool Infographic: Iraq Navigator
Cool Infographic: BBC's Iraq NavigatorAdd tag Permalink | Wednesday, January 15, 2003
Learning Circuits: The Auditory Advantage
Learning Circuits: The Auditory Advantage"E-learning often lacks instructionally designed audio. And yet history suggests audio is critical to success. Given a choice, people fled video-alone formats for audio-video combinations. Films and video games have created audio parameters applicable to e-learning. E-learning programs that establish emotionally warm environments through integrated audio will gain competitive advantage. Here
instructional design Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, January 14, 2003
Business Week: A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Charts
Business Week: A Picture Is Worth a Thousand ChartsVisual presentation isn't a substitute for numbers and graphs, but an adjunct to them. "Information visualization answers questions you didn't know you had," says University of Maryland computer scientist Ben Shneiderman...
visualization Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, January 14, 2003
Working Knowledge: The Subconscious Mind of the Consumer (And How To Reach It)
Working Knowledge: The Subconscious Mind of the Consumer (And How To Reach It)"Many researchers tell us that one-on-one interviews are superior to focus groups. That is, even a few conventional one-on-one interviews yield essentially the same data as several focus groups. Additionally, there is now a lot of evidence that personal interviews yield deep insights that can't be obtained from focus groups. So, my preference is to conduct in-depth, one-on-one interviews that are enriched by using various techniques from clinical psychology and sociology. Often, the results of such interviews can be used to design more comprehensive surveys. And properly designed surveys, when subjected to careful statistical analyses, can yield further insights into unconscious consumer thinking."
Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, January 14, 2003
Boss Magazine: The 15 Year Itch
Boss Magazine: The 15-year itch"Karl Sveiby's 15-year itch theory finds that after 15 years working in the same field for the same company, employees start to feel they have no more to learn. This can lead to anger, frustration and burnout. Though the plateau transcends professions, says Sveiby, it hits creative workers, such as journalists, particularly hard. But it
Add tag Permalink | Monday, January 13, 2003
World Bank: Communities of Practice
World Bank: Communities of PracticeQuestion: What is the difference between a CoP, a network, a work team, and other types of communities?
Answer: A community of practice is different from a network in the sense that focuses on a substantive topic; it is not just a set of relationships. A CoP is different from a work team in that the shared learning and interest of its members keep it together. It is defined by knowledge rather than by an individual task, and exists because participation has value to its members. A CoP is different from other communities since its members are more likely to share a common profession or work situation...
community Add tag Permalink | Monday, January 13, 2003
The Chronicle: A Group Offers Model Licenses for Free Sharing of Scholarly Material
The Chronicle: A Group Offers Model Licenses for Free Sharing of Scholarly Material"Creative Commons, a group dedicated to making scholarly material, music, literature, film, and science widely available to the public, launched a new project last month to encourage creators to share and reproduce their works."
Add tag Permalink | Monday, January 13, 2003
CLO Magazine: Organizational Assessments: Aligning Learning with Strategic Directions
CLO Magazine: Organizational Assessments: Aligning Learning with Strategic Directions"With an agile workforce that moves from project to project, training for project-specific needs is as important as training to formalized position titles. As managers create project-related opportunities to encourage the growth of their employees, they will need to partner with training departments to provide the just-in-time development that will be immediately applied on the job. This is a win-win situation: Learning is improved through immediate opportunities to practice new competencies, and the organization receives immediate value from the training."
Add tag Permalink | Friday, January 10, 2003
CLO Magazine: Assessing Learning Management Systems
CLO Magazine: Assessing Learning Management Systems"There is a host of factors driving the implementation of LMS solutions. In today
Add tag Permalink | Friday, January 10, 2003
NetImperative: Dismay as BBC gets e-learning go-ahead
NetImperative: Dismay as BBC gets e-learning go-aheadThe industry reacted with expected dismay at the decision, announced today by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, after a long delay. Many firms feel the move will put them out of business and stifle choice for schools.
The BBC plans to spend
Add tag Permalink | Friday, January 10, 2003
Intelligent KM: Putting the “E” in Corporate Training
Intelligent KM: Putting the "E" in Corporate Training"Like e-commerce and other brick-and-mortar functions that have made their way online, e-learning will eat up more dollars than it saves if it isn't approached on its own terms. While the IT department builds out your e-learning system's technical infrastructure, your training department should focus on the underpinnings of your content. This means identifying the specific business processes for which employees are being trained, and focusing the learning on job-specific requirements."
Add tag Permalink | Friday, January 10, 2003
elearning Magazine: What’s Wrong With Distance Learning?
elearning Magazine: What's Wrong With Distance Learning?"The fundamental issue here-what's really wrong with distance learning-is a flaw inherent to many design situations: well-intentioned managers and designers so totally fall in love with designing and building that they get disconnected from those who are stuck trying to use their stuff... If you think I'm overly harsh and critical of hard-working and earnest designers, then you're getting my point. These guys think learning is distant because it's far away from them. The right mindset should be to make the learning feel as close to the learner as possible-close to their jobs, their minds, and their hearts. Sure, the problem is understandable. Organizations today are moving into a space where most training departments simply haven't lived before. But that's all the more reason to up the ante and start thinking like world-class designers who know their target audience intimately. Here are five principles that can serve as a guide..."
Add tag Permalink | Thursday, January 09, 2003
elearning Magazine: Where oh Where is Plug & Play?
elearning Magazine: Where oh Where is Plug & Play?"Real plug-and-play isn't just a matter of getting the course to operate with the LMS... The course also must run properly on the learner's individual computer. For companies that don't want to exercise rigid control over the software loaded on employees' computers, that opens a can of worms almost too terrible to contemplate. What version of Internet Explorer does this machine use? What version of Microsoft Word? What cookies are present and when do they expire? Is AOL loaded? Has the user, perhaps unknowingly, allowed RealPlayer to take over his download process by setting it as the default option?... None of them have much, if anything, to do with specs that might be adopted by IEEE, AICC, SCORM, or any other body concerned solely with standards for e-learning."
Add tag Permalink | Thursday, January 09, 2003
Law.com: Online Law School’s First Grads
Law.com: Online Law School's First GradsThe nation's first online law school has graduated its first class: 10 men and women whose home study bears little resemblance to traditional law school Socratic teaching. The November graduates face uncertain prospects and high hurdles should they decide to pursue traditional careers in law...since the American Bar Association won't accredit any "correspondence schools."
school Add tag Permalink | Thursday, January 09, 2003
Cool Design: Invention at Play
Cool Idea: Invention at Play"Invention at Play is a highly interactive, engaging and surprising traveling exhibit that focuses on the similarities between the way children and adults play and the creative processes used by innovators in science and technology. It departs from traditional representations of inventors as extraordinary geniuses who are "not like us
Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, January 08, 2003
KMPro: Five Tips to Reduce Knowledge Loss
KMPro: Five Tips to Reduce Knowledge Loss1. Don't let your best people leave!
2. Mentoring and Coaching
3. Sharing Best Practices
4. Sharing Lessons Learned
5. Documentation
Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, January 08, 2003
Elearn Magazine: Teamrooms: Tapping the Collaborative Learning Advantage
Elearn Magazine: Teamrooms: Tapping the Collaborative Learning Advantage"Teamrooms as a class of Web collaboration tools are taking hold in corporations, but will they live up to their promise? This article deals with the change and adoption issues around teamrooms, covering such topics as usability, group behavior, corporate structures, leadership, and innovation. Several design and training considerations that support successful adoption of teamrooms are offered."
innovation Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, January 08, 2003
NY Times: Columbia’s Internet Concern Will Soon Go Out of Business
NY Times: Columbia's Internet Concern Will Soon Go Out of Business"After three years and more than $25 million in investments, Columbia University will fold Fathom.com, the commercial company it created to provide courses and other material over the Internet, the university announced yesterday."
Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, January 08, 2003
KMWorld: Expertise location and the learning organization
KMWorld: Expertise location and the learning organization"As organizations try to make the most of their intellectual capital, awareness is increasing about the importance of connecting to the people with the right knowledge at the right time. Initially focused on targeted business goals such as reducing time for product development, expertise location and management (ELM), also called employee knowledge network solutions, are also well positioned to provide support to organizational learning initiatives."
- This article lists and describes some popular ELM softwares in the market.
organizational learning Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, January 07, 2003
CMSWatch: Value of Organized Knowledge
CMSWatch: Value of Organized Knowledge"While some subjects are relatively easy to categorize, most business functions are not... Nevertheless, you should seriously consider developing a taxonomy for the content management system residing underneath your e-business efforts in general, and your Intranet in particular.
Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, January 07, 2003
Workforce: Building Business Value Through
Workforce: Building Business Value Through "Communities of Practice"Researchers at IBM
community, innovation Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, January 07, 2003
Syllabus: Designing for Learning: The Pursuit of Well-Structured Content
Syllabus: Designing for Learning: The Pursuit of Well-Structured ContentConsider the relationship of well-structured content to the design of an online course. Online learning based on well-structured content impacts the identification, selection, and development of course content in three ways:
- Content must be semantically well-structured for instruction; this corresponds to the teaching component of the learning experience
- Content must be a good fit or well-structured for a particular student; this corresponds to the learner component of the learning experience
- Content must be technologically well structured; this corresponds to the environmental component of the learning experience
instructional design Add tag Permalink | Monday, January 06, 2003
Technology Source: Knowledge Environment for Web-based Learning (KEWL)
Technology Source: Knowledge "Environment for Web-based Learning (KEWL)The Knowledge Environment for Web-based Learning (KEWL) was developed at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) to facilitate research into online learning... KEWL has been made available at no cost under an open source license (GNU Public License). KEWL is suitable for use in any online learning situation, including in school, corporate training, and higher education."