Elliott Masie points to this article in the Armed Forces Journal by T.X. Hammes (retired Marine Corps). In this article, Hammes systematically describes how Power Point is a horrible tool for doing decision-making briefings. "PowerPoint is not a neutral tool —it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them… PowerPoint has clearly decreased the quality of the information provided to the decision-maker, but the damage doesn’t end there. It has also changed the culture of decision-making." Hammes’ argument is that Power Point runs against the grain when it comes to the decision-making process. It just does not allow for deep understanding and does not provide the big picture—big barriers to effective decision making. Hammes however thinks that Power Point is good for information briefs and not decision briefs. But Hammes is not convincing in this position. He hardly spends a couple of paragraphs on the positive aspects of Power Point before going negative again!

The NY Times reports on something we intuitively knew was the case: Teenagers don’t tweet. "Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations."

A Stanford University study seems to suggest that multitasking reduces intellectual efficiency. "Nass [the author] says the study has a disturbing implication in an age when more and more people are simultaneously working on a computer, listening to music, surfing the Web, texting, or talking on the phone: Access to more information tools is not necessarily making people more efficient in their intellectual chores."

Clive Thompson discusses the new literacy in Wired Magazine. He uses a study by Andrea Lunsford of Standford University to base his claims that the Internet is providing a new ground for literacy development. "Of course, good teaching is always going to be crucial, as is the mastering of formal academic prose. But it’s also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions. The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision. At the same time, the proliferation of new forms of online pop-cultural exegesis—from sprawling TV-show recaps to 15,000-word videogame walkthroughs—has given them a chance to write enormously long and complex pieces of prose, often while working collaboratively with others." Compare this post with the previous post where another Standford study finds that the fast-paced literacy confuses the decision-making process. We’re living in interesting times!

Finally I’ve succumbed to including tags in elearningpost. In 2006 I had posted about my problems with categories. The main reason was that my posts were so varied that I found myself constantly creating categories. So I decided to remove them altogether. A few years on, I’m finding myself constantly using search to find old entries. I’ve tried to use tags in elearningpost before but found it too cumbersome to tag old entries. (I’m using Expression Engine as my CMS).  But a few days ago I decided to give it a shot and used EE’s Tag module. After going through the pain of migrating my entire website to a newer version of mySQL I must announce that everything is working fine. I found an innovative way to tag old entries and is based on some unique features of EE and the Tag module. Expression Engine has this quirky feature that allows you to search for entries and assign categories to them. Next, the Tag module has this quirky feature that allows you to harvest tags based on the categories assigned to them. So I put these two together and managed to tag 25% of my entries, which is a lot already. It’s wonderful to get to see old entries in e-learning, knowledge sharing, innovation, usability and so many more surface to the top. Here are some that caught my eye. Tags are available on the right column, so go ahead and explore. KM and Skimming Learning Spaces Poynter: Art of Explanation Communities of Practice and Complexity : Conversation and Culture Steven Pinker: How to Get Inside a Student’s Head

This is a sample chapter from Kristina Halvorson's upcoming book, Content Strategy. In this chapter Kristina discusses the value of doing an content audit. "Do not—repeat, DO NOT—skip the content audit. This process is not just about listing URLs and page titles. It can provide an extraordinary amount of useful, enlightening information that’s surprisingly valuable, especially when you’re fighting for project support and funding."

Here is a sample chapter from Dan Saffer's Designing for Interaction. In this chapter Dan offers a good commentary on Design Research -- what it is, why do it and how it can be done. "Imagine a zoo where the zookeepers don't know anything about animals, and they don't bother to find out about the animals' natural habitat, dietary needs, or natural predators. The zookeepers keep the animals in metal cages, group the animals randomly together, and feed them whatever they have around. Now imagine the chaos that ensues and the unhappy (or worse: sick or dead) animals that would be the result. Not the type of place you'd want to take your kids to. Our fictional zoo is the state of a lot of the products and services today, albeit not so extreme. While most businesses do have strong interest in their customers and put considerable amount of money into their products and services, a lot of that money is poorly spent. If only a small bit of the typical time, money, and resources used to make and market a product or service were put towards design research—observing, talking to, and maybe even making artifacts with customers and users—the products and services we use would be greatly improved." [Via Infodesign]

This report was out in July. It has articles by prominent personalities from Donald Norman to Edward Tufte. "Design thinking — distinct from analytical thinking — has emerged as the premier organizational path not only to breakthrough innovation but, surprisingly, to high-performance collaboration, as well. "It’s not about the pretty," says one design-thinking practitioner, "it’s about the productive." In this special section of articles, interviews, illustrated cases and research findings, the Review explores how to put design thinking to work."

J. Boye describes a method that he observed when discussing how intranet editors are trained—the intranet cafe. An interesting alternative to the usual options was presented by a retailer that had successfully introduced a regular "intranet café". Every other week on Wednesday afternoons the intranet manager and his team made themselves available in a training room to anybody interested, who could then show up without the need for any prior registration. Some would show up with specific questions, while other occasional intranet editors would show up simply to get intranet work done while knowing that a helping hand was nearby. These intranet cafés had become tremendously popular and really made an impact on training staff on using the intranet. Quite a nice bottom-up approach!

A good read by Donald Norman on the need to look at the systems view when it comes to designing products—"A product is actually a service. Although the designer, manufacturer, distributer, and seller may think it is a product, to the buyer, it offers a valuable service."