Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown take on a new challenge - to tell people that it’s time to embrace a new culture of learning. I am reading this book now and I am already excited by the possibilities—possibilities that we can achieve together if only we realize soon enough that "[t]he world is changing faster than ever and our skill sets have a shorter and shorter life". One beautiful aspect that the authors highlight is the importance of learning "how to learn from others". ‘Others’ here refers to peers and the community at large. The reason I find this beautiful is because I’ve come across people who think that teaching is the only way to learn and teachers are the only people who can teach. They seem to gloss over opportunities that lay in normal everyday conversations they have with peers—they don’t pay attention to or build on these interactions. This book should be a must read for managers and leaders—this is where both the challenges and the opportunities lie.

Wonderful article by Ziba rebutting the recent skepticism on the UCD process: When Ziba investigates a specific user as part of a design project, the end result isn’t a set of new products, it’s an internal understanding of what that user is like: The challenges she faces each day, the things that excite and concern her, and her motivations and values. If you don’t come out of a research effort feeling like a different person, you’re doing it wrong.

Brilliant post listing down the things that are changing education. A great read and a whole lot of links to follow.

Nice post by Tyler Tate on how to approach content from the perspective of "learning styles". We learn through our verbal, visual, and kinesthetic senses, and our memories are encoded in these different formats. Each of us likely favors one style of learning over the others, but pithy, concrete text coupled with informative images is a potent content cocktail for people of all learning styles.

A very nice piece by Jared Spool on the art of practicing. Practice is different. Good practice focuses on the process, while work focuses on the outcome. When doctors, musicians, and pilots are practicing, they are not doing the entire job. They are looking at the process of the work, often repeating the same step multiple times. For example, when a surgeon practices their suture techniques, they'll use butcher shop animal scraps to practice sewing up incisions. They don't perform the rest of the surgical procedure, because they aren't interested in the outcomes. They just quickly and cleanly close the incision and do it again.

Our new article on tag bundles is up. Here’s the summary: It’s common for enterprises to have a document library in their intranets that houses all types of administrative and operational content. Such a document library usually has a taxonomy to improve the discoverability and findability of content. However, there is one problem: documents need to get into the library first! Submitting a document to the library involves filing or tagging the document with the right taxonomic terms, a procedure that can make people see red if not done properly. Tag bundles can help simplify this procedure and also improve the use of such document libraries.

When consulting on intranet projects we often found ourselves having long discussions with intranet managers on the many things that would unfold in such projects and how they could be better prepared for the long journey. These discussions would give them the confidence and the time needed to get things in order inside their organisations. Today, we release the Manager’s guidebook on intranet redesign projects— the result of those discussions with intranet managers. This 64-page guidebook (free download) takes the manager through eight stages of a typical intranet design project. Each stage has many activities that go under it. We’ve described the activities and included the insights we’ve gathered over the years. Enjoy!

We just published a new post titled "Observations on use of mobile devices at airports and train stations". We visited airports and train stations and sketched out how people interact with their phones and tablets. We learnt a few things in the process.

Interesting to see what Steve had in mind for higher education when making plans for NeXT Computer. Simulations and the learning experience were high on his agenda.

Nice article from ThinkGoogle on what is going to bring about change in the classroom.  "Though our world is changing, the spaces in which we teach are stuck in a time warp. According to some forward-thinking experts, only by embracing new technology and ideas can twenty-first-century schooling stay up to speed with the kids."