Alright! Ben Hammersley of "The Guardian" newspaper (UK) writes an accessible treatment of how you can use a piece of software called a "Newsreader" to efficiently process news on the web. He even describes RSS (and what it's written in: XML) in an understandable fashion. Good job, Ben!

Chris Goetz referred me to this article on the Accenture website about the subtleties of virtual collaboration. This came up in an email thread about the usefulness of instant messaging.

This whole area on the Accenture site, "Outlook Online", looks like it will be an interesting read and area to track.

Nathan Shedroff's new book, Experience Design, arrived in the mail yesterday. I enjoyed diving into it. I've heard Nathan speak at a couple of web builder conferences and have enjoyed following his development of experience design as a discipline on his website and in the AIGA Advance for Design, an initiative to define Experience Design from the Graphics Artist direction, I suppose.

One of the sites referenced in the book was Virtual Tourist. I've gone there and set up my travels. Lots of fun.

But I digress: the book is a visual feast and I'm enjoying it as an unorthodox textbook. Definitely recommended.

Andrew Dillon, Dean and Professor of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science of the University of Texas at Austin is interviewed by IT@UT as to what he's trying to accomplish there. I wanna go, I wanna go!

Ok, I know you'll think it's nuts but here is an Evangelical Christian Pastor, a specialist/thinker on how the church should respond to the cultural paradigm shift towards postmodernism, proposing that making the "church" into a "learning organization" as part of the solution. Church on the Other Side: Doing Ministry in the Post-Modern Matrix.

I'm in the middle of reading George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things : What Categories Reveal About the Mind. It's tough sledding (read: serious research-y stuff) but very interesting as a primer on how people process and deal with "information".

Gerrit Visser's view on Learning Organizations, what got him interested in them and what books have been helpful. Addresses the question: "What is the difference between a LO and OL"

Closing the Cognitive Gaps: How People Process Information, An article from the March 22, 1999 Financial Times of London Mastering Information Management Series.

Constructivism explained. Systems of classification are interesting to me as a means by which we acquire and use knowledge (epistimology). Course notes from:
P540 - Constructivism, defines it in two was: as a philosophy and a set of instructional practices.

"As a philosophy, constructivism suggests that, while there is a real world out there, there is no meaning inherent in it. Meaning is imposed by people and cultures. So, for example, one who followed the constructivist philosophy might say that there is nothing inherently correct about the way we classify living things (genus, species, etc.). This classification system is a human invention, and it is subject to revision or replacement. Thus, when we teach this classification system, we should teach it not as fact, but as the current system accepted by scientists. And we should also teach about the process of creating a classification system, not just the end product.

As a set of instructional practices, constructivism favors processes over end products; guided discovery over expository learning; authentic, embedded learning situations over abstracted, artificial ones; portfolio assessments over multiple-choice exams, etc"

Idea Management. David Weinberger, editor of the "Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization", discuses in Internet.Com's Buzz Soup what Idea Mgt is all about (article posted TODAY! so very current). Dave is a co-author of "Clue Train Manifesto" and explains what he thinks the real differences are between "information", "knowledge", "know-how" (!) and ideas.

"Whatever you do, keep the three types of knowledge separate in your minds. For one thing, they live in different strata:

• Knowledge mining is in the province of marketing data wonks


• Know-how is in the province of people doing hands-on work with customers


• Idea development generally is the job of office workers in various departments -- although good ideas can come from anywhere, of course (whereas the sources of bad ideas are usually easier to identify).

And, for another, how you "leverage" all three types of knowledge is different: you mine the first type of data, you publish the second, and you encourage the third.

Idea Reservoir - Interactive Idea Management GroupWare. A tool for creating a "reservoir of innovation opportunities" sort of. Looks "not very professional" (like it was done by those more "technically" inclined).

Idea Management A consultancy based on the concept of Idea Management. The author claims to have thought of the whole thing in 1995 (at the dawn of the web age).

Idea Management. This is the Original Idea Management Homepage by Dave Beckwith where he offers up an index of I.M. tools

CMC Magazine: A Proposal for Web Idea Management. An essay about how to use keywords (defining a protocol the author calls "Nostradamus") for idea searching.

ShyGenius. I just discovered this category of tools today. Len Beasley passed on the link to this via his wife Cara who works with me. Cool idea but short on details as to how they do it.

Looks like "glue" between all the systems. Interesting idea ... what motivates people to generate ideas? Why do they do it? I'm a natural communicator and love to tell people about my ideas but not everybody's like that. There has to be some payoff (recognition; visibility into what's happening with the idea, etc.)

Organizational Learning as a tool for team performance improvement. This is my blog for capturing related information and ideas as to how to do this.