"A tribesman was transported from a remote mountain wilderness (a society that had not yet discovered the wheel) to a large city. When he returned, he reported that the most significant thing he saw was somebody using a wheelbarrow to carry more bananas than he ever thought possible. He literally did not see the significance of automobiles and skyscrapers. He was not prepared to see them." By Arie de Gaus as stated by Peter Schwartz in Art of Long View, p.g. 33. Good to keep this in mind when dealing with the adoption of new ideas or a new way of working.

This is a good article on how to write the 3 types of page headings: Question heading: A heading in the form of a question Statement heading: A heading that uses a noun and a verb Topic heading: A heading that is a word or short phrase Here is another article on headings by Ginny Redish where she provides many more examples.

Mert Tol has created an exhaustive checklist of all design issues that one should consider before going live. There are points from visual design to architecture to content. Useful to have all these in one page.

Andrei Hagiu assistant professor in the Strategy unit at Harvard Business School tries to rationalize why websites are so confusing: "Thus, consumers coming to the supermarket to buy daily staples (say, bread and milk) might be induced to also get expensive chocolate if they have to walk past the corresponding aisle anyway. Shoppers visiting a mall for its anchor store (say, Macy’s) may decide to stop by a small design store while walking around the mall. And while flipping through the pages of a magazine in search of the article promised on the cover, readers are exposed to advertising, which produces most of the revenues." "In the same way, Google faces a subtle issue in designing its search result pages: consumers are mostly interested in the "objective" (i.e., middle) search results, but all revenues come from the sponsored search ads on the right hand side. The result is a compromise between what users want and what produces more revenues. For any given search, the 11th objective search result might be more relevant than any of the sponsored search results displayed on the right; yet it will be displayed on the second search page only—well beyond the reach of most users."

The good folks at Devlearn have given me a journalists pass to attend Devlearn this year. So I am going. While I’m there I’ll also be attending KM World. I think it will be a terrific opportunity to meet the community and make new friends. If you are going as well and if you like to connect do mail me at maish-at-elearningpost.com. Looking forward to these events.

PEP stands for Passion, Experience, People. It's an event where experts share their passions with college students. Nice talks all around. From Chis Rockwell on Mind of Design to Jim Hendrickson on "choosing" vs. "following" your career path.

CNN reports on the increasing awareness and demand for digital ethnography education. "As trained observers of how people in a society live, ethnographers can help companies figure out what people need and then work with designers to meet those needs with new (or more often tweaked) products and services. In a world in which ever more people are using technology products on a daily basis, such skills are increasingly in demand."

A great way to show a technique in action. Patrick Lambe speeds up a video of ‘Ancedote Circles’ and explains steps in the process.

Amber Simmons writes about making websites 'learner-friendly'. "Most websites are not learner-friendly. Web creators might aim for beautiful, accessible, usable interfaces to house their smart, web-native content, but they don’t often have learners’ goals or needs in mind—if they even know what those needs are... As an industry, we haven’t done our best to make our content-rich websites suitable for learning and exploration. Learners require more from us than keywords and killer headlines. They need an environment that is narrative, interactive, and discoverable." You may also want to skim an article I wrote back in 2001 titled Serendipitous learning.

Michael Hawley has written an article describing how ‘Communities of Practice’ or CoPs can save intranets from the findabilty problem. "The key to intranet success is to provide value to employees and give them a reason to visit the site repeatedly. One of the primary ways to achieve this is to connect employees with the people and groups with whom they need to collaborate. Workgroups, or communities of practice, provide the basis for a living, growing, vibrant space in which people can access the information they need, share best practices, and contribute to a shared knowledge base." I don’t think CoPs can save intranets. The CoPs may solve the local findability problem but not the global findability problem. What if a staff from another department wants to find something that sits in a siloed CoP? We’ve seen this again and again. A new technology comes along and people get excited with it, start using it and then find out they are doing the same things with the new technology as before. In my experience, intranets have seen progress when changes are made to the process—the way the work is done. In his talk yesterday Michael Sampson mentioned that when e-mail and shared access came to the enterprise we learned to work with them and became comfortable with them because the technology worked and because there was nothing better for a long period of time. Now we’re seeing a fast pace of change in the technologies available in the enterprise. These are much better and more efficient but we resist giving up our way of working. There is always going to be this gap and if we don’t do something to bridge it then CoPs and whatever comes next will just add to the chaos.