Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

I was searching for material on media literacy and came across this very insightful definitions of deductive and inductive arguments: Mastering the art of picking out premises and conclusions is the first step toward good analytical thinking, but we must also think about whether the premises really do support their conclusions. Making that sort of determination requires that we think a little bit about the different kinds of arguments. There are several ways of categorizing arguments, but for our purposes, we can distinguish all arguments into one of two types: deductive and inductive. Deductive argument: an argument whose premises make its conclusion certain Inductive argument: an argument whose premises make its conclusion likely (Note: Some dictionaries - and even some older logic texts - define deductive arguments as arguments that reason from the general to the specific and inductive arguments as those that reason from the specific to the general. That particular usage of the terms is obsolete.) The difference between deductive and inductive arguments is easiest to see by way of examples. Smith owns only blue pants and brown pants. Smith is wearing a pair of his pants today. So Smith is wearing either blue or brown pants today. This is an instance of a deductive argument. We can tell that the argument is deductive because the two premises (that is, the first two sentences) guarantee the truth of the conclusion. If the two premises really are true, then there is no possible way that the conclusion could be false. Here’s another example: The soccer game is on either Thursday or Friday. I just found out that the game is not on Thursday, so the game must be on Friday. Again, this is a deductive argument, for the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. Contrast those examples with this one: January has always been cold here in Siberia. Today is January 14, so it is going to be another cold day in Siberia. This argument is inductive. The premises makes the conclusion likely, but they do not guarantee that the conclusion is true. To put the point another way, it is possible that the premises of this argument could be true and the conclusion could still be false. One can, for example, imagine a freak warm day in Siberia on January 14. But one cannot imagine that Smith owns only brown pants and blue pants, that he is wearing his own pants and that his pants are not brown or blue. To make the conclusion about the color of Smith’s pants false, one has to make one of the premises false. But one can make the cold day in Siberia claim false while keeping the premises true. Here is one more: The local branch of Wachovia Bank was robbed yesterday. Jenny needed money to pay off her gambling debts. She just bought a gun two days ago, and I saw her hanging around the local Wachovia Bank yesterday morning. Today the bookie’s goons stopped looking for Jenny. So Jenny robbed Wachovia Bank yesterday. This is the sort of inductive argument that should be familiar to anyone who has ever watched an episode of "Law & Order." Again, though, as anyone who has seen "Law & Order" can attest, these sorts of inductive arguments can be (and frequently are) wrong. Even if all the premises are true, it is still possible that the conclusion is false.

From an interview with Peter Morville: Peter Morville: The terms "faceted navigation" and "parametric search" are often used interchangeably, but for the sake of comparison I find it valuable to define interfaces that require the simultaneous, up-front specification of all search parameters as exemplars of parametric search. Like the Boolean queries of yore, this forces users to formulate and execute a search strategy without guidance or feedback. Sliders and pull-downs are easier than ANDs and ORs, but syntax is only part of the problem. In contrast, faceted navigation lets users begin naturally with a keyword or two. They’re rewarded with traditional results plus a list of facets (or fields) and values, usually on the left. This SERP (search engine results page) serves as a custom map that offers insights into the content and its organization. And, this is a map that’s also the territory. Users can take a simple next step to clarify or refine their query by clicking on a facet value. And, by taking several of these simple next steps, users can construct a sophisticated, powerful query. So, not only do users find what they need, but they also learn along the way.

Snapped this at a local video store. There are multiple Top 1s, Top 2s, etc.

Sarah Lacey writes about the education and training opportunities in the developing world: "But in emerging markets, modern education is still developing on an elementary, collegiate and vocational level. Burgeoning populations who want better opportunities are struggling under the confines of what young democracies can provide, giving a huge opportunity for private, for-profit education systems to play a bigger role than they’ve played in the West historically. And obviously, the Web and mobile is a big part of this. It’s not just about access, it’s about breaking learning down into affordable, consumable chunks—the same way the Web has broken music and media down into sell-able, bite-sized pieces of the song and the blog post. Some of this is happening inside the classroom and some is redefining what a "classroom" is."

Nice collection by Smashing Magazine. "We’re all mostly accustomed to educating ourselves by reading articles. Rare are the opportunities to attend conferences or watch live shows on subjects that we’re interested in. That’s why we are presenting here phenomenal videos and related resources on the topic of user experience (UX) by different presenters at different events. We have focused on current content but have included some older videos that are still relevant. It will take you more than 16 hours to watch all of these videos. So, make some popcorn, turn off the lights and enjoy."

Gates believes that in five years time you’ll able to find the "the best lectures in the world". You can now, but its "unevenly distributed"! "One particular problem with the education system according to Gates is text books. Even in grade schools, they can be 300 pages for a book about math. ‘They’re giant, intimidating books," he said. "I look at them and think: what on Earth is in there?’"

Simon Goh has written a thought-provoking piece on managing common content on the intranet. The intranet comprises broadly of corporate and business common content. Corporate content are stuff such as backoffice processes, policies, templates, news, corporate events and employee benefits. Business content are stuff such as standard contract clauses, services & solutions offerings, project references, document deliverable templates, delivery samples and methodologies. Regardless of the category, 5 things need to happen for an intranet to be a trusted place for staff to get common content. Common content needs to be: available as soon as they are at the right place well-written accurate, current and comprehensive rid of Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial (ROT) content

Gerry McGovern has a point here about web customers craving speed: People don’t want experiences on websites. They don’t want to emotionally bond with a website. When was the last time you felt delighted after you booked a flight? Did you have a great experience booking that cinema ticket or did you have a great experience at the cinema?

We are organizing a 2-day usability bootcamp with Christine Perfetti. Here are the details. Will your website or application be successful when it’s launched? Will people be able to use it easily? Will it meet the business objectives? Will you be able to account for the time, money and effort spent on it? To answer these questions, Perfetti Media’s expert usability professional, Christine Perfetti, has put together a 2-Day Usability Bootcamp to help you learn the skills needed to evaluate and improve your designs, be it for a product, website, web application or intranet.

Nice list. I found many resources that I can use today!

An very nice HTML5 book that reads like an iBook.  The book is filled with pictures and small animations that add that little extra that makes the difference. And yes, the most important thing - the topics are short.

Jakob Nielsen’s Intranet Annual 2011 is out. He notices big improvements in mobile deployments and in knowledge sharing using social media tools. I think this is just natural progression—catching up with what is available on the Internet. But it is nice to see successful executions. Knowledge management progressed from cliché to reality, based on simpler and thus more-used features. Mobile intranets doubled.

Mike Gotta makes a nice point about the need to really unpack user adoption when it comes to collaborative apps. When it comes to collaboration, knowledge management, and E2.0 efforts, "culture" is often cited as the reason results fail to meet expectations set when the project is approved. While some projects might acknowledge the need to support post-deployment activities early in the planning stages, strategists and project leaders have consistently told me that they were surprised (and not in a good way) at how they underestimated the effort necessary to gain "adoption" of their solution.

From Six Revisions: This guide covers popular site navigation design patterns. For each site navigation design pattern, we will discuss its common characteristics, its drawbacks, and when best to use it. Nice summary of patterns, but I like O’Reilly’s book on Website Navigation better.

It truly is a new day. One where the old management model is breaking down and being replaced by a new model.  One that is much more flexible and agile. But to achieve this, we need to Humanize Work.  We can’t keep working the same way we always have and think that we will be(...) The post Humanize Work: The Ninth Day (VIDEO) appeared first on VINJONES - Kevin D. Jones.

What is a COG?  COG is short for the term "Corporate Cog" …an employee who is obedient, diligent, comes to work every day, on time and works for the money. They may have gone to school for their job and even received advanced degrees, but they don’t really enjoy what they are doing.  But they(...) The post Are You a Cog? appeared first on VINJONES - Kevin D. Jones.

Weekly VINJONES Discussions get you, me, and your team, in one room to have a discussion.  Here is the first of many weekly videos. The weekly VINJONES Discussions series is a catalyst to higher employee engagement. Here’s how it works: Step 1: Pull up one of the VINJONES Discussion videos at the beginning of your team […] The post Weekly Shots of Employee Engagement - Introducing VINJONES Discussions appeared first on VINJONES - Kevin D. Jones.

Just like you, I was fed up with politics.  I was in a job I loved that was being made much too difficult by people playing games.I wanted to do a great job.  Was that too much to ask? Let’s find opportunities.  Help me help you be awesome. Let’s create great things together.  These were my […] The post Be Willing to be Fired - Now appeared first on VINJONES - Kevin D. Jones.

Last month I wrote a post that included a presentation on enterprise social dimensions. It was based on three different perspectives I had come across. I recognized certain patterns and put these together to create a lens that could be used to determine if a selection of enterprise social network tools covered the spectrum of performance/learning needs in a networked workplace. The presentation has been well-received and so far I have not seen a similar approach. In working with the framework, I realized that not only do the seven facets address tool requirements, but they can also be used to look at workplace competencies in the digital workplace. I am not a fan of competency models but these facets might be handy in creating professional development plans. The seven facets align with several parts of Jane Hart’s Smart Worker model, specifically - encouraging employee generated content; learning and sharing with others; and developing trusted networks of colleagues. Both collaborative behaviours (working together for a common goal) and cooperative behaviours (sharing freely without any quid pro quo) are needed in the network era. Most organizations focus on shorter term collaborative behaviours, but networks thrive on cooperative behaviours, where people share without any direct benefit. This is the major shift we need in creating Enterprise 2.0 or social businesses. Being "social" means being human, and humans are much more than economic units. We like to be helpful and we like to get recognition. We need more than extrinsic compensation and our behaviour on Wikipedia and online social networks proves this. For the most part, we like to help others. This is cooperation, and it makes for more resilient networks. Better networks are better for business. The image below shows an initial set of competencies that focus not just on collaboration, but also cooperation.

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past week. Leadership: To survive a shock to the system, become an unplanned organization - by @rbgayle We see this again and again throughout history, as well as in our most entrepreneurial companies: the person who is best suited for dealing with one sort of shock (war, raising capital) is seldom the best for dealing with another shock (peace, shareholders, etc.) Since we cannot know what shocks are in store, nor what is really fragile in an organization, a robust solution to a world of shocks is to create a group of diverse and somewhat redundant talents with leadership dispersed in a way to allow the right talent to rise up when a particular shock hits the system. Compounding Intelligence: learning social skills leads to better decision making - by @quinnovator The point being that learning social skills, using good meeting processes, and emphasizing diversity, all actions similar to those needed for effective learning organizations, lead to better decision making. If you want good decisions, you need to break down hierarchies, open up the conversation channels, and listen.  We have good science about practices that lead to effective outcomes for organizations. "microblogging is the closest we have to human conversation" - by @RossDawson One of my most consistent messages is that high-performance organizations are increasingly driven by the quality of their networks. Microblogs, through their ease of participation and the breadth of their visibility, are excellent facilitators of organizational networks. Staff can easily get a better sense of activities, capabilities, and personalities across the firm. After 15 years of ‘expertise location’ being on the agenda, microblogs are proving to be one of the simplest and best ways to find the relevant expertise in the organization to address a problem or opportunity. BBC News - Nokia decline sparks Finnish start-up boom - via @tar1na Miki Kuusi of Start-Up Sauna - a non-profit programme that coaches entrepreneurs before connecting them with investors - likens Nokia to a big tree in a very small forest. "Now that Nokia is doing worse the ecosystem around it is developing," he says. "Some people even say that the current downfall of Nokia is the best thing that’s happened to this country because it’s challenged us to come up with new ways to have a foundation for our welfare."

John Stepper discusses how people can get started working out loud and shows examples of different types of networks that one could connect with. It’s very easy to understand, but not quite so easy to do. Most people are too busy managing in the industrial/information age workplace and have no slack to try to learn how work in the network age. But they probably won’t. Because they’re already busy. Because they’re afraid to make a mistake or unsure of their writing or speaking skills. Because they’re simply not used to working this way. The most important step in learning a new skill is the first one. This same step has to be repeated many times before it becomes a habit. As John concludes: For these people I offer some very simple advice: Schedule time in your calendar for working out loud. Start with simple contributions. Keep shipping. Over time, you’ll develop the skills you need to be effective and the habits you need to do it regularly. I strongly suggest that the first step of starting to work out loud, as part of personal knowledge management, has to be as simple as possible. Free Your Bookmarks: This is a very simple shift that only requires a slight deviation from a common practice: saving bookmarks/favourites on your browser. Using tools like Diigo, or Delicious moves them off a single device, makes them more searchable, and (later) makes them shareable. Being able to share is usually not a prime reason why people start using social bookmarks. Aggregate: Driving as many information sources as possible through a feed reader such as Google Reader or Feedly, saves time and helps stay organized. It’s amazing how many people do not understand RSS or how to grab a feed and save it. Aggregation makes information flows much easier to deal with. Connect: How do you get started micro-blogging on a platform like Twitter? I suggest beginning with an aim in mind, such as professional development or staying current in a specific field. Use the search function to find people who post about your area of interest. Then follow no less than 20 and no more than 30 interesting people. Dip into the stream once or twice a day and read through any posts that interest you. Over time, as you follow links, you may add or delete feeds. Within a week or two, you should be able to sense some patterns and then can modify your stream to help you in learning more about the areas that interest you. Sometimes we get all caught up in the latest social media tools. Getting started working out loud is not complicated and should not involve a steep learning curve on a complicated system. Start with simple tools and frameworks and then use your experience over time to modify them.

A three-part series on Foucault and Social media, by Tim Raynor, ends with this conclusion: Foucault would recommend an artistic approach to managing the contradictions in our online and offline lives. We should imagine ourselves as works of art in progress. Works of art are not simple things; they pull together substances, practices, and social worlds. So do you. If you use social media creatively, you can use it to explore different aspects of your person, your potentials and singularities. If you feel fragmented, follow Walt Whitman’s lead: ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes’ Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855) Engaging with social media can let us be better works in progress, or embrace perpetual Beta. While the problems inherent with playing to an online crowd are much discussed in this essay, I have found that social media are more liberating and controlling. I find it interesting that many critiques of online engagement, whether it be for learning, working, or just finding others with similar interests, come from people who live in large urban centres. For me, the Internet has been liberating, as I am no longer limited to rural Atlantic Canada. My son has said that his online activities, gaming, socializing & blogging, made high school bearable. I remember life before the Web, and it was nowhere near as interesting as it is today. Social media have helped me explore different aspects of my learning and my profession, much more than I could have on my own or in my community. I do not think that it is unnatural to feel more affinity for some of my online connections than for my local neighbours. Living with contradictions can help develop critical thinking. As social media enable more of us to live like artists, constantly redefining ourselves and our work, traditional hierarchical institutions will continue to feel threatened. I think we will see greater backlash against the "evils" of a network-mediated life, as power continues to move to the edges. But there is great good that can be done with two billion people connected to each other. I intend on continuing to embrace contradictions, explore new ideas, and be a work of art in progress. Much of this I will do while connected via the Net. As more of us do so, we can strengthen our commons, work for a better society, and promote democracy. The past decade of living a very active online life has helped me contain more multitudes. I would highly recommend it.

2005 was the year when more than 50% of US workers’ occupations involved non-routine cognitive work, that long-awaited milestone. - Stowe Boyd "Work has become distributed, discontinuous, and decentralized, hence, 3D", says Stowe. As hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, so does work fragmentation subvert organizations. Given the nature of 3D work, it may be possible that we are witnessing the end of the corporation as a wealth-generation machine, just as its current power seems to have no limits. In knowledge-based work the primary unit of value creation has shifted from the organization to the individual. Work is modularized and distributed globally across algorithms and human work. - Ross Dawson Stowe Boyd calls this the rise of the emergent business. We can look at this change from the perspective of knowledge networks, in which most of us will be working, whether we are farmers or software engineers. A knowledge network in balance is founded on openness which enables transparency. This in turn fosters a diversity of ideas, and promotes innovative thinking. The emergent property of all of these exchanges is trust. In an economy based on trusted knowledge networks of individuals, the role of the organization may revert to merely a supporting one. We might even see corporations bidding for the privilege of supporting knowledge networks. This is quite the opposite from today, where someone recently stated on a forum that 95% of companies are not in the top 5%, yet they all demand the top 5% of talent. Perhaps in the future companies will have to fight for talent. As more people work in distributed networks they may realize how little they have to gain from organizations. If autonomy, mastery, and a sense of purpose motivate people to work, as Dan Pink says, then networks are a much better vehicle for rewarding work than organizations can ever be. It’s the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. While the industrial era, based on the principles of scientific management, used extrinsic rewards, the network era requires personal motivation. Organizations, driven by external and formal direction, cannot compete with self-motivated and connected workers in the network era.