According to an article at vnunet, the following are the top 10 reasons reported to and insurance company in England for why their laptop was no longer working:
Want to know how teleportation, firewalls, lock picking and air traffic control work?
Try out the How Stuff Works web site for everything you wanted to know about things you didn't even know existed.
Scientific American has recently announced the Sci/Tech Web Awards for 2002. The editors at Scientific American have selected 5 sites in each of ten different categories that they think are particularly useful and worth visiting. Categories include:
Check it out.
Here's a table of blogging tools and available features. Tools include: Blogger, Blogger Pro, Radio Userland, Grey Matter, Movable Type and others.
According to a recent article in HBS Working Knowledge, while it's simple to convey content on the Web, it's not always easy to supply context. John Seely Brown, in a talk at Harvard, says that the tools exist to convey both content and context and its the kids who know how to do it. He calls 'screen language,' the vernacular of digital culture and says that it can be seen in things like instant messaging, video games, movies, and the open source movment.
New media, screen language, vernacular communication and programming aesthetics have tools that we could be and should be looking at for online education. None of these approaches are necessarily more information-packed than plain text. They are different. And as such convey different information in new ways.
Dan Gilmor has a recent column on collaboration tools:
Collaboration on the web is being done in all kinds of ways--email, discussion groups, and weblogs, all the way up to high-end enterprise systems for use in international corporations.
Many of these tools are still learning to work the way we want to work, but for specific applications and user needs even the current set of tools is being adopted with enthusiasm.
According to a recent article in ZDnet News, most people's passwords can be cracked pretty easily. In addition, according to one recent survey, four out of five people would disclose their passwword to someone in the company who asks. Worse, two-thirds of the workers polled at a train station in London willingly gave their password to the pollster.
Complicated, frequently changed passwords bring their own problems, however. Users forget them, have to write them down some place, and have to call support for help getting into systems that have locked them out. Researchers are experimenting with graphical passwords, extended single sign-on, smart cards and biometrics to find a balance between high security and actually using the system.
Why doesn't everyone read user manuals?
According to a recent article in The Washington Post, ome people would rather take a class, some would rather call a support line and get an immediate answer without all the bother of flipping pages. Most people just want the 'thing,' whatever it is to just 'work.'
...Americans "won't read cell-phone manuals, any kitchen appliance manual" -- and forget the VCR manual," Laermer said. The PR executive knows what he's talking about. "Personally, I've bought a lot of stereo equipment, and I know they came with manuals -- I've got a whole file drawer full of them -- but I haven't read a single one. I want something that comes out of box that I can just plug in and it works."
The problem with wanting everything to 'just work,' though is that everything has gotten more complicated. Attempts at solutions include brightly colored stickers, computer interfaces, and condensed instructions with graphical illustrations. And those 800 numbers may also be part of the problem: "It appears that when a lot of people see that an 800 number is available, they find it much easier to call than to sit down and read the manual."
Everyone has a 'learning style,' a way that they can take in and process new infomration most easily. At least, that's one theory about how we learn and why one person can get a whole lot more out of a class than someone else.
A recent article at Trainingmag.com brings together several experts to discuss the concept of learning style and its uses and abuses.
From a recent article in The Chronicle:
Many colleges and universities ask staff to respond to student's email within a specified period of time. Online classes go on all the time, asynchronously. Classes used to be run in discrete blocks of time with set office hours--often one or two hours a week. In the brave new world of online courses, faculty are now wrestling with how to be available to students and still protect their time 'outside' the classroom.
A recent article at vnunet.com cites a study from the University of Arizona, which says that the average work station has 400 times more bacteria on its surface than the average toilet.
According to yet another recent article in WiredNews, a village of Ashaninka Indians in central Peru have their own web site. It helps them tell their story, educate their people and communicate with one another.
Other projects to help realize and maintain open Internet access for all include a community network project in a housing project in Massachusetts and other grassroots projects in nearly 20 countries.
Discussion of these projects and others took place at a recent four-day conference in Seattle called 'Shaping the Network', sponsored by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and the National Communications Association.
According to a recent article in Wired News, Macromedia has encouraged the creation of web logs for each of its newly released applications. The blogs (one for each product) are run by the appropriate community manager. Their purpose is to provide a fast, concise, informal forum for the managers to discuss their products in their own voices.
The sites were created by the community managers themselves using Radio Userland and Blogger, part of the logic being that they are not corporate sites speaking in a corporate voice.
"Giving the community managers a platform on which they can use their own voice, that was our idea," Hale said. "Our format (on Macromedia.com) just wouldn't be as quick as a blog is. We do have a community section in there, but a blog is five sentences and 10 links. And that gets to the heart of why people trust blogs -- they like the format."
Blogging for Macromedia are:
Want to see who links to who in the world of web logs?
Visit the Picture of Weblogs.
Customers often don't know what they want until they see it or use it. Sometimes they don't have the words or expertise to articulate their needs in a way that leads to the right product.
An article in HBS Working Knowledge suggests that rather than supplying them with products that attempt to meet ill-defined needs, organizations provide tools for customers to design and develop their own products. This approach can involve developing new relationships with customers and xtensive research in developing an effective and useful toolkit. It can also lead to new innovations and products.
Findability, according to an article called, The Age of Findability, by Peter Morville in Boxes and Arrows, is about designing systems that help people find what they need.
...a recent study by Vividence Research found poorly organized search results and poor information architecture design to be the two most common and serious usability problems.
In the past we haven't paid much attention to findability, but as sites get bigger, the nature of the information we're looking for gets more complex, and more interaction and our reliance on web-based information and large data systems increases, it will become more and more important to be able to quickly and accurately locate what we need.
Vischeck has come up with an algorithm to 'Daltonize' images, that is, shift the colors and contrast in a digitalk image so that the differences between objects are more visible to color blind users. The algorithm can adjust for different types of colorblindness.
Possible applications include: digital microscopes, digital video recorders, computer displays, and print media (especially where legibility is particularly important--maps, public safety documents, etc.)
Vischeck also allows you to check any web page to see how it looks to anyone with specific kinds of color blindness.
Fossil has a wrist PDA. It can store addresses, dates, and to do lists downloaded from your handheld. Currently compatible with the Palm OS, a pocket PC/iPAQ version is in the works.
According to recent article in The Chronicle, Columbia University's Senate has issued a report critical of the amount of money the university has invested in its for-profit, online-learning venture, Fathom. In particular, the report says that Fathom should be developing content from Columbia (and its other partners Fathom head, Ann Kirschner says they are, in fact, doing this) rather than developing its own independent conent.
In 2001, Columbia invested 15 million dollars in Fathom while the company took in $700,000 in fees and sales.