I’m becoming a big fan of the commoncraft show, where Lee and Sachi LeFever posts their brilliant introductions to Web 2.0 elements. His low-tech representations of the workings of RSS and most recently, Wikis, using a white board, marker, and cut-outs of screen elements, somehow seem so much friendlier than the screencam approaches we’ve all
Sherry Turkle writes in Forbes this week about the tradeoffs incurred in our technologically-facilitated multi-tasking approach to the world. She observes: The self that grows up with multitasking and rapid response measures success by calls made, e-mails answered and messages responded to. Self-esteem is calibrated by what the technology proposes, by what it makes easy.
One of the things I find most fascinating (and frustrating) about games is that typically you’re not modeling an external goal-set, but are creating one out of whole cloth — and thus one that the potential user must find attractive, engaging, and fulfilling. It sets a whole new bar on software “usability.”This observation by my
Tom Haskins paints an intriguing picture in his answer to the Learning Circuits blog big question this month. He replies to the question “ILT and Off-the-Shelf Vendors – What Should They Do?” with a description of what things are like “now” and the recommendation that given this set of circumstances “Leave a clean corpse” is
To hear some Web 2.0 enthusiasts tell it, “training” is becoming an outmoded concept. These days, anybody who needs to know anything can find it on the web. It is a new dawn for the autonomous learner. It is true that the read-write web has brought us an unprecedented avalanche of instantly available information. If
Raph Koster has a fascinating slide show he presented to the 2007 Games Development Conference. I like to keep a weather eye on the games industry, because they know a *lot* about how to engage people in the art of learning. In his presentation, he offered a slide with these points: The fail fast, fail
One of the ongoing struggles in the computer world is the quest for the “intuitive” interface. There are consultants who make big money helping software developers create interfaces to their software which might conceivably be understood by the mere mortals who seek to operate it. Personally, I’m a big fan of Alan Cooper, who pointed
Learning Circuits asks us to ponder our pondering this month. I love it when a group I’m a part of gets around to asking this question. It was one on which I was raised, by a wise mother of 4 little girls who knew that spending a lot of time and energy on answering the wrong
The Learning Circuits big question this month is “What are the trade-offs between quality learning programs and rapid e-learning and how do you decide?” I guess the issue I have with the term “rapid e-learning” is that it’s sort of a misnomer. There is little evidence that participants in programs regarded as “rapid e-learning” learn
We are seeing a wave of new entries into the collaboration software category which incorporate the new hot web 2.0 applications. Everybody and his brother is building platforms with profiles, blogs, wikis and rss, and depending on which piece the developers know best, that piece is the centerpiece. The Blogtronix people clearly believe that the