Too Many Feeds
July 22nd, 2008Anna Farmery at The Engaging Brand offers five suggestions that might help you avoid a social media burnout.
Ken Carroll on Mobile Learning
July 17th, 2008Ken Carroll’s company makes Chinesepod, one of the popular Chinese learning podcasts on the internet. In his latest post, Ken talks about mobile learning and how we should look beyond the mobile technology.
The most obvious characteristic of mobile learning is the freedom - no walls, no schedules, no time or location confines. But in order to take advantage of all the freedom the mobile learner must be empowered to meet certain learning criteria: to access, to manage, to participate in the right information, and the right conversations, at the right time. (Of course, only the individual can know what the ‘right’ means here.) Again, this is something that goes beyond the technology. In my view, it might come down to communities of pactice as a source of those things.
There is a pull here, between the personal and the social: It doesn’t matter how smart or personal your phone is, learning remains social, a ‘conversation’, in Mike Sharples words, rather than a solitary activity. Let’s not make the mistake of thinking of the device is the source of the learning. It isn’t. But it can become one (integrated) conduit of that learning as conversation.
Visual Searching
July 11th, 2008Let me introduce a search engine that I have been using a lot these days. It is called Search Me and it uses a visual approach to search. Search Me makes it easy for you to zero in on the right web page for a particular search. Traditional search engine such a Google give you a list of web pages when you search for a keyword.
You often have to click through a couple of these to find the right web page.
Search Me creates an image gallery of the web pages that you can scroll through. This gives you an idea of how professional or complete a web page looks. You can then choose the page that you like.
Hybrid Software
July 9th, 2008Many proprietary software companies have gained an appreciation of the wisdom in not recreating the wheel, and are modifying and expanding existing open source software and selling it as their own proprietary product. While not being new, this practice of creating this type of ‘Hybrid Software’ is likely to become increasingly prominent in the years to come, as it results in several benefits for both software vendors and their corporate customers alike:
· Shorter development cycles results in cost savings for the software developer, which sometimes (though not always) is passed on to the customers.
· Popular open source code often has the benefit of having been mass tested for security vulnerabilities, stability issues and bugs by thousands of programmers worldwide, and so can often be of higher quality than code produced by a single software development house.
· For a new, unknown software company first entering the market, having products which are built on well established and recognized open source platforms can instantly lend an air of credibility to their products. This can make it easier for corporate CIO’s to sign off on products offered by less known but price competitive software developers.
Developments in a proprietary organization can be ill-targeted as developers may not be users, and therefore do not know which functionalities to develop or improve first, or simply where the bugs are. Open-source benefits from a “users as innovators” organization and attracts a variety of developers who use their own experience to correct bugs and suggest new developments.
Hybridization is a key strategy for producers who face competition. Not only do they try to improve their technology by copying characteristics from other technologies, but hybridization also plays a more important role as it is influenced by demand.
There is still a preference towards proprietary software, even if it has been implemented with several characteristics from open-source software. The new hybrid technology simply makes the product better by including new characteristics with previous ones.
Introducing Social Media Usage
July 8th, 2008Shel Isreal has two non-threatening ideas to help ease your organization into Social Media.
Adult Learning Styles
July 8th, 2008Workforce Development details the four generally accepted learning styles for adult learners. The article also links to a questionnaire that helps one figure out their dominant learning style.
Field Guide to Firefox 3
June 17th, 2008The latest version of Firefox browser (Firefox 3) is launching in couple of hours. Check out the Field Guide to Firefox 3 for a rundown of the new features.
The Top 100 Management and Leadership Blogs
June 16th, 2008The Top 100 Management and Leadership Blogs That All Managers Should Bookmark (via CoolCatTeacherBlog)
Awesome Highlighter
June 12th, 2008I got to know of this nifty Web utility from the MacBreak weekly podcast. Awesome highlighter lets you highlight a chunk of text in a web page and share the highlighted page with your colleagues and friends.
Let’s say your are reading this page
And you wanted to highlight this part of the page, a chunk of text that you want to share with your friends.
Head on to awesomehighlighter.com and paste the web address of the page you want to highlight.
Drag the text you want with your mouse. The area will get highlighted. Click on the done button to save the hightlighted text.
There you have it, a web address you can share with your friends. When your friends click on this link they will be routed to a copy of the original webpage with your highlighted text.
Tufte on Presenting Data and Information
June 10th, 2008Bill MacKenty blogs about a presentation by Edward Tufte on presenting Data and Information. Tufte is a leading expert in infographics and he was described as “the da Vinci of Data” in a New York Times article.
