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.

I’m in cold San Jose this week attending Devlearn 2009. The first day keynote was by Andrew McAfee. He is the author of a recently published book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges. I’m not going to describe the subject of his talk; there are many blogs that have done that already (here and here). It was a nice talk and he gave many pointers. But he made no attempt to bridge the gap between Enterprise 2.0 and Learning 2.0. Or answer questions like ‘how Enterprise 2.0 can be used to leverage Learning 2.0?’ Maybe the breakout sessions were meant to do just that - and there were many, many sessions that had social media and especially Twitter in their agenda. This surprised me a lot, in a negative way.  I found that there is a very big hype on using social media for learning. Many are talking about it and there seems to be a divide between those who have experimented with it or have a program for it and those who are just trying to grapple with their day-to-day learning challenges. The 2.0ers feel elevated, hip, trendy and scoff at the those who are still trying to make the best of taxpayer or shareholder money by being conservative and seeking out what works. But all of this talk on social media I heard had a lot to say about the media part but very little on the learning part. They are still advocating the creating and access to content with very little attention on why this is being done and how is it going to help learning and improve performance in the long run. The systems view I think is missing here. The mantra seems to be "get social and you’ll learn". This has a lot to say about the maturity of Learning 2.0. Talking about maturity, there were many talks that were just blasts from the past - "How to grab attention", "How to use video effectively", etc. All I can say is, WOW! Here is my frank opinion on the first day - the talks did not excite me but they did give me a good picture of the e-learning landscape in the US. It shows me what people are busy with and what they are experimenting with and what we can expect to see in the next few years. The total experience is more than the sum of the parts I guess. But I can tell you what excited me - meeting Jay Cross. Here we are, two individuals on opposite sides of the planet, engrossed in each other’s work for over 10 years but never having met face-to-face. Then I finally see him and what a joy it was.

I’ve written a new article at PebbleRoad, The culture of collaboration and what it means for your intranet. Here’s my punch line: the adoption or participation you’re going to get on your intranet is directly related to the culture of collaboration that exists in the organisation. Having the right collaboration technology does play a part, but only as a sidekick to the culture of collaboration.

Brilliant article by NPR on Atul Gawande’s new book, The Checklist Manifesto. Gawande has written an entire book on how checklist and other reminders help in complex situations. Here is a good quote: There was about 80 percent who thought that this was something they wanted to continue to use. But 20 percent remained strongly against it. They said, ‘This is a waste of my time, I don’t think it makes any difference.’ And then we asked them, ‘If you were to have an operation, would you want the checklist?’ Ninety-four percent wanted the checklist." I’m waiting to read Gawande’s new book but right now I’m in the middle of another book that talks about the same checklist culture from a very different angle. This book titled Streetlights and Shadows and is written by the brilliant Gary Klein. Both Klein and Gawande are my favourite authors. I’ve read all their previous books. So, this is interesting for me to see how their worlds collide. In his book, Klein spends an entire chapter debunking the use of checklists in complex scenarios. His idea is that checklists are wonderful in well-structured and predictive environments and do not work that well in ill-structured and unpredictable environments. Here’s the question I want answered when I start reading Gawande’s book: are the checklists just for mechanical tasks or are they for complex procedures? The surgical safety checklist mentioned in the article looks quite general. Maybe that is the point: even the ‘general’ stuff in surgery can lead to a life or death situation.

Kristina Halvorson has put up an interesting diagram that shows how the different roles in a we project team relate to one another.

A wonderful list of shortcuts and techniques to help out with common tasks.

When will this infection catch on worldwide? These are the small pockets of hope that we have left. Brilliant stuff Kiran!

From Noupe. Good starting points to get more on IA and infographics. (via Infodesign)

John Hagel and John Seely Brown talk about Creation Spaces - "places where individuals and teams interact and collaborate within a broader learning ecology so that performance accelerates." They go on to discuss how these spaces are different from the traditional KM systems: "Knowledge management traditionally has focused on capturing knowledge that already exists within the firm — its systems rarely extend beyond the boundaries of the enterprise. Creation spaces instead focus on mobilizing and focusing participants across all institutional boundaries."

Interesting post on Lawrence Lessig’s views on the Google book deal. "By breaking up books into different licensable parts, Lessig fears that we are going to encounter the same problem with books that we do today with film. He gives the example of documentary films which are sometimes nearly impossible to restore or preserve in digital form because the rights to every song and clip of archive footage need to be cleared again. This is an artifact of the types of licensing contracts that became the norm for film, where each constituent part of a work carries its own copyrights into perpetuity, making it more difficult down the road to update into digital form or pass along as a piece of shared culture. Up until now, books for the most part are treated as one single work."

A good read on how storytelling can unite the different aspects of the user experience such as brining different perspectives together, defining the goal or defining the user (personas). However, there is another benefit that the article briefly touches upon and that is defining the journey (scenarios). It’s one thing to define a user, but a whole different perspective when you chart out the journey of this user accomplishing goals and tasks.

From Kristiana Halvorson: "The most important thing to understand is this: Content strategy isn’t a bunch of tactics. It’s a plan." "It’s a well-founded plan, fueled by your business objectives and user goals. An achievable plan, created with your current business reality, content assets, and limited resources in mind. A future plan, for what’s going to happen to your content once you send it off into the world. And, most importantly, a profitable plan, where your measures of success ultimately have impact on your organization’s bottom line."

Evan Rosen, author of The Culture of Collaboration, writes about his 5 ways to bust silo mentality at work: Eliminate Needless Formality and Hierarchy (easy access) Provide One-Click Access to Entire Organization (easy access to everyone) Design Dedicated Physical Spaces for Collaboration Adopt Common Systems and Processes (standard platform) Establish Cross-Functional Mentoring

I came back from work today to find my 6-year-old daughter in a bad mood. She was upset because Mommy told her that she got low marks in a math test! Surprised? Yes, in Singapore, reality hits early! I find it surreal that tests are given so early but I’m going along with it to see how all this works. So I’m biased over here. But that is not why I’m writing this post. I decided to write this post after what happened next. I picked up the math paper and it took me a while to figure out how to do the sums. I’m pretty sure it will take you a while too. Here is part of the math paper. Were you confused? I was. The instructions are too complex and there are just too many distractions on the page. The sums are numbered, the options are numbered and then the answers too are numbers! And did you find the "brackets"? They are on the right hand side, a trick I guess to test the range of the eyes! See my daughter’s first answer in the brackets. Now see her second answer. Do you blame her for putting in the right answer in the bracket? Read the instruction, which number do I put in the bracket? The option number or the correct answer? The point of this test I gather is to help the student better ‘see’ math in abstract and concrete terms. That’s fine, but where does trickery come in to play? So, I took a shot at redesigning the paper and this is what I came up with in 5 minutes. I gave the same paper to my grumpy daughter and asked her to try the sums out. She looked at the paper and knew exactly what to do. She had a smile across her face. That is when I decided that I should share my concerns with the world. We live in a scary world where 6-year olds are asked to do such math sums. The least we can do is to motivate and encourage them to take on this challenge. Giving badly designed papers to these kids is such a cruel thing to do. So, if you come across papers like these then please do something about it.

An interesting take by Danah Boyd on how the information streams that we are living in (blogs, tweets, facebook, buzz, etc.) need some change in order to be relevant. The main argument here is that it is difficult to direct attention to something in a stream. And if we do manage to do that, it is difficult to hold on to it. I feel the same way when living in the stream of blogs and tweets. At times I long for the slow pace of a book. If only I could control the pace of my stream…. "To be relevant today requires understanding context, popularity, and reputation. In the broadcast era, we assumed the disseminator organized information because they were a destination. In a networked era, there will be no destination, but rather a network of content and people. We cannot assume that content will be organized around topics or that people will want to consume content organized as such. We’re already seeing this in streams-based media consumption. When consuming information through social media tools, people consume social gossip alongside productive content, news alongside status updates. Right now, it’s one big mess. But the key is not going to be to create distinct destinations organized around topics, but to find ways in which content can be surfaced in context, regardless of where it resides."

Designing collections for the web - my new article over at PebbleRoad. The idea of the article came up when the team was discussing how best to leverage and surface homogeneous information. We were doing a redesign of a hospital website and found out that patients wanted to be connected with getting care in many different ways - by clinic, by doctor, by diseases and conditions etc. This idea let us to investigate collections, first as used by libraries, and then modified and as used by social media. This article compiles our experimentation and learning on the subject. "A collection is a list of homogeneous items. A collection on the web can be as simple as a blog (a list of posts) to as complex as a library collection (multiple lists of different library materials). Collections are an integral part of many websites, but not all collections are designed with ease-of-use and ease-of-retrieval in mind.  In this article, I’ll cover some theory and give practical advice on designing online collections for the websites and intranets."

Great piece on teaching math that is fun and memorable by Dan Mayer. His blog has more.

Donna Spencer on the different ways to classify information (alpha, location, task, etc.). A nice pick up from Wurman’s 5 hatracks article. "When you do information architecture work you’ll realize that most sets of content can be organized in more than one way. One of the challenges for an IA project is figuring out what way works best for your audience, your content and your project’s goals. In this article I’ll talk about a few different classification schemes you can use to organize your content, and offer tips on when and how to use each."

Very nice article by on faceted navigation by Peter Morville and Jeffrey Callenderi. I really like the part where they differentiate faceted browse from parametric search. "On the other hand, the distinction between faceted navigation and parametric search is relevant. In parametric search applications, users specify their search parameters up front using a variety of controls such as checkboxes, pull-downs, and sliders to construct what effectively is an advanced Boolean query. Unfortunately, it’s hard for users to set several parameters at once, especially since many combinations will produce zero results."

Nice list by Leah Buley on things to do before starting a project. It’s been said that the two hardest parts of a project are the beginning and the end.  In the middle, it’s often perfectly clear what should have gone differently at the start.  But when you’re kicking off a project, you’re often so preoccupied trying to establish cordial working relationships and understand the nature of the project that some of the trivial but essential details get neglected.  That’s too bad, because it’s often the trivial essentials that build trust.

Nice piece by Tony Schwartz over at Harvard Business Review: So here’s the paradox: Americans are working 10 percent fewer total hours than they did before the recession, due to layoffs and shortened workdays, but we’re producing nearly as many goods and services as we did back in the full employment days of 2007. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke called these gains in productivity "extraordinary" and unforeseen at a recent Senate hearing. There’s a simple, visceral reason for the gains, Mr. Chairman, and it’s called fear.