According to Customer.Community, the 12 principles of Collaboration are:

1. Purpose The community should fufill a necessary and useful function for its participants
2. Identity Members need to be able to identify each other and build relationships
3. Reputation Members have reputations based on their own activities and others' opinions
4. Governance Faciliators and community members agree on management and on shared principles of behavior for the group
5. Communication Members must be able to interact, share ideas and information
6. Groups Members can segment themselves according to specific interests and tasks
7. Environment A synergistic environment with seamless flow from one activity to another can help members achieve their purpose
8. Boundaries The community knows why it exists and what makes up the 'inside' and 'outside' of the community
9. Trust Members must be able to build trust over time
10. Exchange The community recognizes that there is an ongoing exchange of value
11. Expression The community has a recognizable character
12. History The community remembers what has happened and can change and grow
Posted by dcoates at 01:51 PM

According to a recent article in Wired News, American University in Washington is getting rid of wires. Students will use cell phones not desk phones for their voice communication and, assuming their computers are laptops and wireless-enabled, they will be able to surf the net and check email from anywhere on campus.

It's not clear from the article whether cell phone and wireless networking will also be used exclusively by faculty and staff, though it does mention that the efficiency of the wireless network will depend on a high-speed wired network already in place.

Lessons Learned at Dot-Com U

According to a recent article in the New York Times, American universities have spent upwards of 100 million dollars producing Web-based distance education offerings. Fathom, a spinoff of Columbia University is now giving their offerings away free as short courses rather than the semester long for-fee courses that were part of its start-up model. NYUOnline has closed after a 20 million dollar investnemtn and few takers (500 student peak enrollment).

One successful entrant in online education has been University of Phoenix with more than 37,000 students enrolled for online courses. They claim their success comes from branding, marketing and infrastructure.

Janice Fraser at Adaptive Path has a list of tips for setting priorities:

1. Make a "Big List of Things to Do"
2. Organize the list according to Dependencies (can't do X until Y) and Baseline items (absolutely, positively must be done)
3. Have the appropriate co-workers score each item according to:
• Technical feasibility
• Creative feasibility
• Importance to the user
• Importance to the business
4. Graph the overall scores

A task that shows up with both high feasibility and high importance scores should be done first. Something that gets low feasibility and low importance scores probably shouldn't be done at all. The tricky tasks will be those that fall in the category of: high importance/low feasibility meaning that they're important, but difficult.

Not that I think millions visit regularly, but in case you stop by and wonder, I'm on vacation for the next two weeks.

Regular updates will resume when I return.....

Another article on weblogs.

This one talks about their potential in e-learning and knowledge management.

Weblogs filter information. The ones you look at every day may be different from the ones I look at every day. They help make learning personal, informal, and possible given the huge amount of content on the web.

Dirty Laundry on the Web

How do large corporations show their 'face?' How do they gain trust and demonstrate commitment to principles?

For Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Comanies, one way is to provide open forums where critics, supporters and everyone else can speak freely, including open accusations of murder and corruption. And where employees respond in their own voices, rather than pre-approved PR releases.

What makes websites work for children?

According to a Jakob Nielsen usability study, many of the same things that make them work for adults. Children are as easily confused by poorly designed websites as adults. In addition, they tend to view ads as content, like colorful designs, and respond favorably to simple text and narration.

The study was done with 55 children ranging in age from 6 to 12.

The Big O: IA Lessons from Orienteering
...from Boxes and Arrows (by Gene Smith)

Lost is lost. When you can't find your place on a web page, it's every bit as frustrating as when you can't figure out where you are in the woods. Orienteering, a sport where competitors use a pre-marked map to navigate through a terrain, uses map reading skills, catching features, and attack points to help practitioners reach their goals.

How can this apply to designing web pages? Orienteers ignore details on a map that aren't important to the goal and focuses only on important features. In a similar way, someone reading a web page scans for important information and ignores everything else.

Catching features and attack points rough and precise map reading, help orienteers and your web page visitors figure out where they are, whether they're getting close to their goal, and what to do when they get where they want to go.

Dan Bricklin talks about riding a Segway, the new two-wheeled scooter that's supposed to be almost like walking...only faster. According to Bricklin the Segway is remarkably stable, rugged, and versatile.

Segway has some video on their site, if you want to see the scooter in action.

According to a recent article in the Chronicle for Higher Education, two researchers at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln have conducted a study to measure the impact of ‘link-rot’ on online education.

‘Link-rot’ is the disappearance or movement of Web pages so that when someone follows a link on one page it leads them to a ‘Page not found’ error page or a different page entirely.

Links in the three online courses studied were found to have a half-life of about 55 months. That is, half the links were ‘bad’ within a 55 month period. This means that there is online maintenance involved in every course that needs to be, but is currently often not, included in the costs of offering the course.

E-learning, at a snail's pace

According to a recent survey in the UK, less than a third of the organizations surveyed are using e-learning for staff training and those who are using it are doing so sparingly.

Training managers in general:

• Spend only 10% of their budget on it


• Feel that e-learning has been overhyped by vendors


• Are concerned about the possibility of wasting large amounts of money

Training managers use e-learning most frequently for teaching IT staff.

Dan Gilmor, a journalist who also keeps a web log, says that the next wave of journalism, which we may already be in the middle of, will revolve around four basic principles:

1. My readers know more than I do;
2. That is not a threat, but rather an opportunity;
3. We can use this together to create something between a seminar and a conversation, educating all of us;
4. Interactivity and communications technology -- in the form of e-mail, weblogs, discussion boards, websites and more -- make it happen.