This may be college, but we're still taking attendance. Quote: "One key to Pathfinder's success is identifying students who skip class within days rather than weeks of the start of a semester. If students miss more than a few classes, they get too far behind to recover." [Serious Instructional Technology]

Why isn't anyone asking why students are skipping class in the first place? A system to force compliance will never get to the underlying problems. This is exactly the same issue that companies dealt with when trying to improve quality before they finally adopted TQM for real. You can create all the inspection and compliance systems you want and improve some superficial measures. But you have to dig down to the underlying causes if you want long lasting change. To me, the "success" of something like Pathfinder is evidence of problem avoidance more than anything else.

7:17:23 PM •  • comment  

New Scientist "This article is different from anything else New Scientist has ever published. Before you read it, it's important you understand a few things. What sets it apart is that it has been released under a special kind of license called a "copyleft". That means you are free to copy, redistribute and rework the article, as long as you abide by certain terms and conditions. The exact terms and conditions can be found at the end of the article, or at http://dsl.org/copyleft/dsl.txt. All other articles on this site and in the magazine are covered by a standard copyright, which means that the right to copy, redistribute or modify the article belongs exclusively to us." [via Slashdot]

I hereby declare my site to be officially copyleft.

[The Shifted Librarian]

Something to keep an eye on. Maybe massive local action will actually work.

5:25:46 PM •  • comment  

McKinsey Quarterly.  A universal primer for understanding Web services. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

The McKinsey Quarterly generally has really good "so what" treatments of a range of technology topics.

5:22:07 PM •  • comment  

News.Com: Time to rewrite the DMCA. Rick Boucher. At the time, libraries, universities, consumer electronics manufacturers, Internet portals and others warned that enactment of the broadly worded legislation would stifle new technology, would threaten access to information, and would move us inexorably towards a "pay per use" society. That day is now close at hand. [Tomalak's Realm]

The more I think and read about, the more I come to believe that the big content creators clearly understand what they are trying to do to protect their economic interests in the face of the threats of a digital world.  They got that copy protection by itself can't work. If you can play it back, you can copy it. Hence, the DMCA. Make it illegal to figure out how to copy something, even if the protection scheme is fundamentally lame. In fact, with the DMCA, there's no real point to making protection schemes particularly strong. It may even be desirable for the schemes to get broken so you can arrest Russian programmers at technical conferences.

Where it all breaks down is in the assumption that consumers can continue to be treated like sheep with eyeballs and wallets only.  The cluetrain folks hit on a much deeper insight that I'm only beginning to appreciate. If all those people really are talking to each other, it only takes a few with brains to clue the rest in. It certainly helps explain why I rely on my network for 90% or better for advice on who and what is worth dealing with outside of the circle of my immediate experience.

I could always rely on that trusted network locally. What's new is that I can now extend that network by orders of magnitude. There's a learning curve, sure, and the tools to tap that network are still in flux, but momentum is on their side.

4:41:11 PM •  • comment  

Raskin decides to rename the field of Information Design. to the lovely mouthful: Designing Information Representation. While Jef loses out on the marketability & meme potential, he's got great points about Shannon (you do know who Claude Shannon is - don't you? ) and some of the challenges we face. [ia/ - news for information architects]

Raskin's article is on the long side. However, it nicely summarizes a lot of other stuff that is longer and more complex, so it's well worth the time. With Knowledge Management continuing to be an overhyped and, all too often, underthought field, this kind of call for both thinking and talking clearly is worth the time.

4:25:50 PM •  • comment  

Search Bar: "Search Bar is a little program I created because I hated having to open a new browser window, go to a search engine site, wait for it to load and then do my search. Search Bar is a little window that sits on top of all your windows to give you quick access to many different search engines. It comes with 6 popular search engines (Altavista, Excite, Google, HotBot, Lycos, and Yahoo), but you can add almost any engine you want. You can minimize the program to an icon in the system tray for quick access to the Search Bar.

At first, Search Bar was a simple program I created to make my personal searches quicker and easier. Then I read an issue of the Langa List that talked about search engines and quicker ways to search. After reading that, I realized that since my program had made my searches easier and quicker, it could do the same for others. "

This is the search tool I referred to in class on Monday night

3:40:31 PM •  • comment  

Context Magazine: Beyond the Horizon. Two modern practitioners of the craft--David Brin and Bruce Sterling--say science fiction can help penetrate the murk of the future partly because writers follow technological possibilities to their dramatic extremes, taking them further than most people are constitutionally capable of doing. [Tomalak's Realm]

Larry Niven, another great science fiction writer, once said that "good science fiction writers predict the car, great ones predict traffic jams."

The point that all three make is that useful technology prediction is rarely about the technology, it's about people. "What if...?" and "If this goes on..." are tremendously useful tools as long as you remember that stories are about people not props. I imagine that one of the reasons that so much technology forecasting is worthless is that those forecasting won't acknowledge the emotional roots.

3:11:04 PM •  • comment  

Newspapers lose web war. Interesting article in HBS Working Knowledge about how newspapers reacted to the disruptive technology of the Internet and how some succeeded by recognizing the serious threat of the new medium and reacting in kind and how others failed by recognizing the threat but cramming their reaction into the old newspaper business model. [ia/ - news for information architects]

A good walk through one researcher's effort to understand how the web functioned as a disruptive technology in the newspaper business. Sort of a detailed analysis of just why the industry couldn't buy a clue. A bit on the academic side in tone, but worth it nonetheless as a condensed case study of technology disruption.

2:53:26 PM •  • comment  

Information Week: New Way To Work. Which of these dreams of a future office will become a reality in the next decade? No one can say for certain. But because today's prototypes and predictions often become tomorrow's buying decisions, some IT managers are paying close attention to the ideas under discussion. [Tomalak's Realm]

Good overview of the variety of work going on trying to understand what future offices might be like. Interesting underlying notion that more companies are starting to think about how emerging technologies will filter into their organizations. This was a hot topic about 15 years ago as the PC began making major inroads into companies and AI was at near the peak of its hype cycle. Wouldn't it be nice to go back to those days? It seemed pretty complicated then, now it seems like such a simpler, slower time.

2:43:24 PM •  • comment  

Working on the Future Workers. The changing nature of the workplace -- and the employee -- in the corporate world is hashed out at a conference focused on human resource policies for the 21st century. By Manny Frishberg. [Wired News]

Richard Adler, ...director of the Institute for the Future ...warned that "it's very hard to predict how something is going to be used in the future" and noted that "technological innovations are not the same as social innovations."

I definitely find it much easier to predict what happened in the past. I suppose it is encouraging that an HR conference would at least acknowledge that there might be  a difference between technological and social innovations.

2:38:01 PM •  • comment