Kansas State researchers say that distracting visuals on TV screens make viewers less likely to retain content:

In the past few years, television stations have begun to reformat their screen presentations to include scrolling screens, sports scores, stock prices and current weather news. These visual elements are all designed to give viewers what they want when they want it.

However, Kansas State University professors Lori Bergen and Tom Grimes say that it's not working.

"Our conclusion has been that if you want people to understand the news better, then get that stuff off the screen," Grimes said. "Clean it up and get it off because it is simply making it more difficult for people to understand what the anchor is saying."

Grimes and Bergen are both associate professors of journalism and mass communications. They have collaborated with Deborah Potter, head of the Washington, D.C., research firm Newslab, in a study on distracting visual information. The study focused on viewers' ability to digest content in the presence of distracting information on the screen.

"We discovered that when you have all of this stuff on the screen, people tend to remember about 10 percent fewer facts than when you don't have it on the screen," Grimes said. "Everything you see on the screen -- the crawls, the anchor person, sports scores, weather forecast -- are conflicting bits of information that don't hang together semantically. They make it more difficult to attend to what is the central message."

...via BoingBoing

...or at least some video games:

A team of researchers led by Ricardo Rosas (...) studied the effects of integrating handheld video games into the first- and second-grade curriculum for 30 minutes a day. Their study was unique because they designed a teaching game with features similar to commercial video games. In a typical video game, the player must perform several tasks in order to reach a goal. As the game progresses, the tasks get more and more challenging. Players are highly motivated to learn the new tasks because it helps them reach the game’s ultimate goal.

Rosas et al. realized that in order for students to be motivated to play the games, the “goal” of the game can’t be something like “learn to read one-syllable words.” Instead, they designed games with goals like “saving the fairies imprisoned in the temples of the city.” From the child’s perspective, it just happened that in order to save the fairies, one of things you had to learn was how to read one-syllable words, such as “sol” for “sun.”

...from Cognitive Daily

Cutting Through has a good post on scenario planning:

The idea is to create a range of plausible, internally consistent futures, covering the range of circumstances that the project might have to operate within. The futures can then be used to evaluate how well potential strategies would operate - they are not forecasts as such, but “rich pictures” of possible futures.

A plausible scenario means that there is a coherent set of events leading from the present to the future, rather than the “with one mighty bound Jack was free” leaps of imagination.

An internally consistent scenario doesn’t contain any mutually exclusive assumptions - for example, increased volume of services together with reduced funding might be inconsistent.

The New Scientist reports on the news that 'Info-mania' lowers your IQ:

Eighty volunteers were asked to carry out problem solving tasks, firstly in a quiet environment and then while being bombarded with new emails and phone calls. Although they were told not to respond to any messages, researchers found that their attention was significantly disturbed.

Alarmingly, the average IQ was reduced by 10 points - double the amount seen in studies involving cannabis users. But not everyone was affected by to the same extent - men were twice as distracted as women.

...via elearningpost

Patrick Mayfield offers some suggestions:

Find our their 'WIIFM' ('What's in it for me?'). What benefits could there be in your programme for that stakeholder. What are the 'wins' for them. This is a deeper, and more personal level of stakeholder analysis that is particularly warranted for the difficult individual.

You need to be clear about what your fall-back position will be if you can't get agreement - your BATNA ('Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement'). In a programme environment this could mean some radical re-scoping of the programme to exclude the need for co-operation from his stakeholder or even in the most extreme cases recommending that the programme is stopped altogether.

...via Cutting Through

TheStompBox Project:

To use it all you do is plug it in to the cigarette lighter of a car (or a 12v supply when at home). It automatically boots up and links in to Verizon's "Broadband Access" service, turning itself into an access point. Turn on your laptop, join the network and voila -- you're on the net! It's just like using a hotspot (such as they have at Starbucks and airports), but it goes anywhere you car goes.

As long as I've got an always-on internet link in the car, why not make it do other things? As part of this project I've made it do live vehicle tracking via Google Maps, upload pictures from an on-board web cam and other tricks.

...via BoingBoing

Gary A. Berg, dean of extended education at California State University Channel Islands recently took a look at the University of Phoenix and commented in an interview at Inside Higher Ed

Q: Phoenix recently announced that it would begin to offer programs for traditional-age undergraduates. Should the rest of higher education be worried?

A: For the most part, no. However, third tier non-residential teaching institutions are likely to see increased competition. My guess is that the University of Phoenix must have noticed a large market opportunity to make such a major change in its policy, perhaps for students in the military and in their greatly expanding international market. Broadening its market represents a big change for the University of Phoenix, because one of its strengths has always been exploiting a niche market of first generation college and working adult students. Additionally, its pedagogical approach relies to a great extent on prior work and life experience — serving younger students complicates this effort.

...via elearningpost

All sorts of resources and information on running your Windows machine as a non-administrator.

From Aaron Margosis:

The #1 reason for running as Non-Admin is to limit your exposure.

When you are an Administrator, every program you run has unlimited access to your computer. If malicious or other “undesirable” code finds its way to one of those programs, it also gains unlimited access. A corporate firewall is only partial protection against the hostility of the Internet: you still browse web sites, receive email, or run one or more instant messaging clients or internet-connected games. 

Even if you keep up to date on patches and virus signatures, enable strong security settings, and are extremely careful with attachments, things happen. Let’s say you’re using your favorite search engine and click on a link that looks promising, but which turns out to be a malicious site hosting a zero-day exploit of a vulnerability in the browser you happen to be using, resulting in execution of arbitrary code. 

Georgia Tech/PARC research says that sharing music builds community and that users judge others by their playlists:

When one user decided to share his music, he recalled: “I just went through it to see if there was not like stuff that would be like, I don’t know, annoying, that I would not like people to know that I had.” Sensing that his library was “not very cool,” he added more music to create a “balanced” portrayal of himself.

Another participant was worried about what his co-workers would think of the Justin Timberlake and Michael McDonald music he had purchased for his wife and included in his library. Yet another user crafted his library around his German nationality and collection of German band music he thought others wouldn’t have. Meanwhile, other users hid their expertise because they thought their co-workers would not relate to it or find it distasteful.

...via Copyfight

This year's nominees are now up.

At Get Real, Arieanna Foley has some thoughts on Social Networking with Flickr and why people interact more on with photographs on Flickr than with the same photos on a blog:

One crucial difference between blogs and Flickr may be the cornerstone to this mystery. With Flickr, you have the ability to add notes, comments, and tags to photos. On Flickr, you can add a comment to any part of the photo; you can also tag a photo (yours or someone else's) to assign it to that keyword category. Since the tags are searchable, your photos are always coming up and being viewed by others - no matter when you took it. So, people are interacting with the photo in a way not otherwise possible. This creates an ongoing conversation about the photo and the fluidity of its meaning, constantly revising where it belongs in the taxonomy. And, perhaps as importantly, this interaction amongst the Flickr community gives one a sense of contributing to an overall archive of shared experiences.

At Cutting Through, Tim talks about the CTO at Sapient (Ben Gaucherin) and his general cluelessness about blogs.

Via InfoWorld, I came across this pearl of wisdom from Ben Gaucherin, CTO of Sapient:
[blogs] are a fad fueled by pop culture’s desperate search for the next big thing. [They are] the digital equivalent of the pet rock.

There are a lot of people who don't 'get' blogs. And in particular lots of folks, like the Sapient CTO who write about the need to control the message. Companies want competent, skilled, enthusiastic experts, but then worry that they might be want to talk about what they do. But the bottom line in the whole blogs vs message debate is at the end of this post:

The irony here is that I’m not likely to hear another of Mr Gaucherin’s opinions for a good long while, because the only way he’s got to communicate with his market is through press releases and PR. Whereas if he had a blog, I’d have already subscribed to his webfeed and would be reading his thoughts as often as he posted them. As would many of his current (and potential) customers. His loss, I guess.

Martin Burns has a great post on project requirements:

Step 1: Context Is Everything

Why did I mention Goals above? Because if you don't understand these, you won't get to the Objectives (and therefore Requirements) that the Sponsor actually needs. Take the Moon Landing project. The Goal was "Convince the World of the Superiority of American Technology." Just landing on the Moon wasn't enough - the Project also had to convince the World that it had happened (leaving aside Conspiracy Theorists for now). So a key requirement of the project was to ensure global publicity, including live television broadcast.

So step 1 is really Understand the Goals. How do you do that? With luck, it'll be documented for you (and if it's not, the old PM rule of If it's not documented, it's a rumour holds true), but unless you enjoy working on assumptions, you talk to the Sponsor and other key stakeholders (ie people who have an interest in the outcome of the project). Useful questions to ask include:

• Why are we doing this?
  
• If we're successful, what would be the outcome for you?
  
• What would happen if we didn't do this project?

Note that these are all Open questions designed to get the other person talking...

...via Cutting Through

Or, actually MP3 players in general:

• Some 11% of American adults say they own an iPod or other type of MP3 player. That amounts to over 22 million people.
• Men are more likely to have iPods/MP3 players than women. Some 13% of men have the players, compared to 9% of women.
• Minorities are more likely to own iPods/MP3 players than whites. Some 16% of African-Americans and English-speaking Latinos own iPods/MP3 players, compared to 9% of non-Latino whites.
• Almost one in five (19%) of those ages 18-28 have iPods/MP3 players. Fully 14% of those ages 29-40 have them; and 11% of younger Baby Boomers (ages 41-50) have them. That compares to 6% of older Baby Boomers (ages 51-59), 6% of those 60-69 and 1% of those 70 and older.

Also, more than 6 million Americans are listening to podcasts

NASA is podcasting:

Podcasting is a new technology that lets you search for audio broadcasts on the Internet -- so-called "podcasts" -- and download them onto portable MP3 players. You can take a podcast with you and listen to it whenever and wherever the mood strikes.

Science@NASA has been providing audio recordings of science news stories for years. Last December, the site began podcasting those stories. By February, Science@NASA was the #1 most popular podcast among users of the Podcasting News website

...via The Shifted Librarian

Standards for online content authors

Style

Be very concise: aim to reduce text by at least 50%
Use plain English.
Frontload headlines, paragraphs, links and lists.
Use short sentences (21 words maximum).
Use short paragraphs (65 words maximum).
Use "you" and "we" whenever appropriate.

...via elearningpost

Scott Adams has remixed the Cluetrain Manifesto for Education:

• Education is about conversations.
• The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
• People in networked schools have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.
• There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than Schools do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone

...via JoHo the Blog

43Folders offers April Power Hacks!:

• Pencils are a great way to write things down.
• Sharpen new pencils soon after you’ve bought them, so you can use them to write things down more easily.
• Make sure you put gas in your car, or it won’t run very far after you’ve bought it, and then you’ll have trouble getting to work.
• When you get letters from people, you can send a response by using some paper and one of the pencils I mentioned a little earlier. (Just make sure they’re sharpened!)
• If you have a long list of things to do, make sure to do some of them sometimes. Make pencil marks by the ones that are “finished.”
• When people ask you how you’re doing, it’s okay to say “Great! How about you?” They’ll probably have some kind of response, though, so be ready.

Guessing these are 'specially suited to April.