Hobgit Web Hosting News

How do you organize the content of a new web site or blog? Do you really need to spend specific time ahead of launching to organize the content sections and hierarchy of your web site? Can’t one simply identify the key content categories of his future site and be done with it?

Photo credit: a) Sitemap - Flickr / Shilpa13 b) Butterfly - Adrian Matthiassen mashed up by Robin Good

The best answer is always relative to where you want to end up.

So, if you want to launch a new site because you just want to have some fun, and have no desire or expectation to be very visible on major search engines, or to provide a meaningful navigation path to your readers, then you are very much OK to just click and start playing.

Fun is fun.

But, if you are after building a serious, professional-looking web site, where you are going to need as much relevant traffic as possible, good visibility on major search engines as well as lots of happy and loyal readers, deciding ahead of time how to organize the content of your site may be one of the most important activities you can invest your time on.

Thanks to Dev.Opera, a fantastic web resource for anyone who wants to learn more about tech-savvy creative web design and development, Jonathan Lane introduces today for you the very basics of what goes under the label of “information architecture“: how do you organize the contents of a new web site in a meaningful and effective way?

Here all the details:

Information Architecture - Planning Out a Web Site

by Jonathan Lane

Photo credit: Contens CMS

Introduction

Traditionally, the planning stage of a web site (or any project) can be a little stressful. Everyone has an opinion about how a web site should be built, and often their opinions will conflict with one another.

Your number one goal on any web site should be to build something that’s useful for the people who will be using it. It really doesn’t matter what your boss says, what that guy down the hall with a doctorate in software engineering says, or even what your personal preferences are; at the end of the day, if you’re building a web site for a particular group of people, their opinion is the only one that matters.

This article is going to look at the early stages of planning out a web site, and a discipline that is commonly referred to as Information architecture, or IA.

This involves thinking about who your target audience will be, what information and services they need from a web site, and how you should structure it to provide that for them.

You’ll look at the entire body of information that needs to go on the site and think about how to break that down into chunks, and how those chunks should relate to one another.

The sections below are as follows:

• You need to plan out the site you’re building
1. Introducing “The Dung Beatles”
2. Now what? Drawing a site map
3. Naming your pages
4. Adding some details
5. Summary
6. Exercise questions

You Need to Plan Out the Site You’re Building

Image credit: Robin Good - IKONOS sas

You’ll come upon the odd web project that you can just dive right into without any up front thought, but these are, by far, the exception and not the norm.

We’re going to take a look at a fictional band called “The Dung Beatles” and try to help them work through the early stages of planning out their web site.

We’ll talk with the band and find out what goals they have, and what they would like to see on their web site. Then we’ll dive in and start working on a structure for the band’s information.

Introducing “The Dung Beatles”

Photo credit: Austin Chronicle

The Dung Beatles (TDB) have a problem. They are the hottest Beatles tribute band in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, but they need to raise their profile for an upcoming North American tour this summer.

They’ve got venues scheduled throughout Canada and the United States, but they’re virtually unknown outside of their hometown. If only there was some way, using technology, to reach a large number of Beatles fans for relatively little money.

Lucky for TDB, we’ve got this thing called the World Wide Web, and they quickly decide that building a web site is the answer they’ve been searching for.

TDB needs a place to promote their tour dates, build a fan base in other cities and raise awareness of the band.

You’re going to work through their ideas with them and see if you can chart out a plan for their web site.

You schedule a meeting with your new clients to hash out the details of what they’re looking for and to decide on due dates and costs.

You open the conversation by suggesting that you talk about the goals and objectives of the web site in order to get an idea of what they want.

What does the band hope to achieve with their online presence?

Web Site Goals

Photo credit: Silvia Bukovac

TDB starts talking about their upcoming tour, and how they want to get the word out to Beatles fans in all of their scheduled stops. It’s February now, and they’re scheduled to kick off their tour in five months time.

Hang on a second! A web site alone won’t build it’s own traffic and publicise itself.

You extract from the conversation thus far that the main goal for the site is to provide a home for TDB fans online; a place where they can keep up to date on the latest news, tour dates and venues. Through the fans (word of mouth), and some other advertising venues, new people will be driven to the web site where they can download sample tracks, check out pictures of the band (in full costume) and find out where/when they can check them out live.

Raul McCoffee, the front man of the group, points out that it would be nice to be able to raise a little extra money for the tour through the sale of some CDs and band merchandise.

You gather the band around and draw out a quick sketch of what a visitor might want when they visit the web site. This is just a really rough brainstorm of ideas; it’s got very little structure at this point.

Identify Future Audience(s)

Figure 1: A rough sketch of what your web site should contain - What your web site visitors want.

There are two general groups of people who will visit the site—people who know TDB already and like them (fans), and people who are unsure. You’ve got to cater to both those groups in different ways; potential fans need to be “sold” on the group, whereas current fans want to “feed their addiction” (so to speak).

What sort of information is each of these groups going to be looking for?

Figure 1 gives an indication of this—this is a typical sketch of the type that you’ll want to make at this point in future web site projects.

From this, you’ll work out what pages the web site needs, and how they should link to one another.

You settle on a budget, and agree to launch the web site in one month. You promise to get back to the band in a couple of days with some plans outlining the direction you’re going in.

Now What? Drawing a Site Map

Figure 2 shows my attempt at taking the brainstorm and turning it into a site org chart: the first iteration of the site structure - This image shows the first attempt at structuring the example web site looked at in this article. The component pages are organized in a spider diagram, with the “Home” page at the centre. the pages linked to this central point are “Store”, “Biographies”, “Fan Discussion”, “Tour dates and locations, “Pictures”, “Discography” and “Contact”. The “Discography page has two further sub-pages spidering off it, “Lyrics” and “Sample tracks”.

A lot of people will throw together a site map at this stage — this looks like an org (organisational) chart. This is usually a pretty basic graphic showing simply the names of each page on the site and how they link into the overall structure of the web site.

Personally, I like to put in a little more detail and talk about the purpose and content of each page.

For example, a page may be labeled “Home”, but what is the home page? Is it a cheesy “welcome to our web site” message (yuck!) or is it a more dynamic page containing news items and enticing images?

Take a few minutes to think about what pages the above sketch might turn into, and what might be contained on each page. Have a go at drawing your own site map before moving on to the next section.

Now let’s get started with the basics: one of those org charts that I mentioned above.

That definitely captures all of the pages we’ll need, but there’s no real grouping going on here. It’s just a big mess of pages now, and at this point I hadn’t really given a lot of thought to what things are called.

I did one more pass and try to “chunk” the information into slightly larger groupings — Figure 3 shows what I did: the site structure grouped more logically

Figure 3: Site structure, revised. - This images shows a refined example site structure. The “Home page now has the following subpages spidering off it: “Contact”, “Store”, “About TDB” (which links to further “Biographies” and “Pictures” subpages), “Band news” (which links to further “Tour dates & locations” and “Fan discussion” subpages), and “The music” (which links to further “Lyrics” and “Sample tracks” subpages).

I’ve done a couple of things with the revised site structure.

a) The “Band News” page gives TDB a place to post anything they want to share with their fans. Even after their summer tour is over, and the “Tour dates and locations” page is no longer relevant, they’ll be able to post stuff.

b) Adopting a blog format here will let fans comment in context on the various stories, and will help to build an online community around TDB. News and tour events will likely spark the most discussion, so let’s group that all together.

Additionally, the word “News” is a simpler, more general word that people will be able to recognise faster if they’re skimming a page for the information they want.

Our new “About The Dung Beatles” page groups together the band members’ biographies as well as their pictures. Going this route gives us a jumping off point for individual band member biographies.

Following a similar argument to the one we made above, “About” is a common term used on a lot of web sites. Anytime a visitor wants to learn more about a company, a product, a service, or an individual, they usually look for an “About” link.

Finally, the term “Discography” is a bit of a technical term. It’s possible that less people will understand what the term than “The Music”. Also, it opens up this page to additional content: sources of inspiration, history of a particular song…you get the idea.

I think we’re ready to roll. After I’ve talked a bit about naming pages sensibly, we’ll move on to add a little more detail about each page.

Naming Your Pages

Page names can be one of the most crucial decisions you’ll make during web site design.

Not only is it important for your visitors so that they can find their way around your web site, but it is another thing that dictates how easy your site is to find using a search engine.

In general, search engines look at the text included in a web page, the URL of that page, and the text of any links to that page when they’re deciding “how important” it is.

Giving your pages sensible names and sensible URLs will encourage anyone linking to your pages to use sensible descriptions.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re a car company, and you have a model called “The Speedster”. You’ve got a web site to promote your automobile, and one of the pages lists available features. Do you call this page “Features”, “Available Features”, “Features of the Speedster”, or “Bells and Whistles”?

I would suggest that “Features of the Speedster” is the best option from this list.

It’s specific to what the page contains, chances are that the title will be displayed high up on the page and will be prominent (good for search engine indexing), and you may even be able to fit it into the URL (something like “www.autocompany.com/speedster/speedster-features/”).

Adding Some Details

Figure 4: Page Details for the Home page.

You don’t have to figure out everything at this point, but you need to at least provide a brief description of what you have in mind for each page.

After you’ve got the site structure, number each of your pages and provide a brief description for each page, like I’ve done in Figure 4 for the home page (you’ll get a chance to do this for the other pages in one of the exercises questions at the end of the article.)

This is about as involved as you want to get at this point. You don’t need to describe page functionality, the technology you’ll use to build it, or the design / layout in great detail. Just describe what you have in mind in general terms.

Your goal here is to communicate what you’re thinking to your client and to force you to think things through.

It’s not uncommon at this stage to come to the realization that you have too many pages, and you’ll never be able to find content for them. You can go crazy in creating a hierarchy of pages.

For example, if the band members just wanted to publish one paragraph about themselves, it wouldn’t be necessary to create separate biography pages for each member. They could all be combined into a single page.

Summary

This article has looked at the web site as a whole, and how you should think about structuring it.

1. First you decide on the content of a web site, and decide how to structure that content into pages.

2. Next you decide on the functionality that will actually be used on your web site.

3. The last thing you do before you actually start going ahead and coding your web site is work out the visual design of it—the page layouts, and the colour scheme, etc.

Exercise Questions

Photo credit: Pablo631

• Look back at Figure 1 and try to develop a similar brainstorm for a web site about a car (pick any current or imaginary car).

• What will visitors to the web site want to know?
• Is there anything at existing car web sites that you see as essential? Frivolous?

See also:

• Web standards—beautiful dream, but what’s the reality?
• What does a good web page need?

This article is part of the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, the ultimate client-side web development teaching course) and was first published on July 8th 2008 for Dev.Opera as “Information Architecture - Planning out a web site”

About the author

Jonathan Lane is the President of Industry Interactive’a web development/web application development company located on Mayne Island, British Columbia, Canada. He got his start in development working for the University of Lethbridge Curriculum Re-Development Center as their web projects coordinator for many years. He blogs at Flyingtroll and is currently developing Mailmanagr, an e-mail interface for the Basecamp project management application.

Peer-to-peer is an emergent philosophy and way of working, collaborating and creating wealth among human beings. The peer to peer philosophy is based on living principles that are quite different from those that you may have been educated with but which in many ways may feel more “natural” and close to your nature than the ones you have seen at work in the business world around you.

I have explored several times in the past, here on MasterNewMedia, the value and implications of P2P both from philosophical, social, technological, economic and political aspects as P2P silently but relentlessly keeps conquering new presence in many of these fields.

Nonetheless P2P is often mistaken as the label for “illegal music file sharing“, there is a lot more to understanding P2P and the ideas behind it without getting caught in this “fear” propaganda launched in the last few years by record companies and their allies.

Great examples of P2P at work are Wikipedia, Skype and similar peering technologies, social bookmarking services such as delicious.

Education, learning and the institutions that work in the direction of crystallizing and distributing knowledge to others are all top candidates for adapting themselves to the sweeping changes happening around them. Peer to peer is a venue for these institutions to remain relevant, socially useful and economically thriving, at least where these are willing to abandon the restrictions and walled gardens of the past and are willing to embrace the free, opennes and participation traits of the peer to peer approach.

P2P evangelist Michel Bauwens, explains in this video interview I snagged during his brief stay over in Rome, the relevance, vision, and practical path that educational institutions can take to bring peer-to-peer into their immediate future.

This video interview was originally shot and first published as a key resource for the online learning conference emerge2008 which is coming to an end today. I must thank Tony Carr of The Centre for Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town, for motivating me to carry out this interview and for the value that he brings to the academic world via his conference. I think that the outcome and the learning that has ensued from this has way surpassed the time and effort required on all sides to have made this possible.

Here the whole video interview in 12 small clips, accompanied by a full text English transcription.

P2P and Education: Robin Good Interviews Michel Bauwens

1) Comparison Between The History of Ancient Rome and a P2P Society

I often compare the change from capital society to a peer to peer society as something very similar to the change from the slave-based society of Rome to the feudal society in the Christian west. And so basically what happened was that Rome had a crisis of extensive development: in other words it could no longer grow in space.

When a slave-based empire cannot grow in space, what happens is that slaves become expensive, and then usually it’s replaced by another empire. But that didn’t happen with Rome: what happened was that the society moved from a production by slaves for the roman market, you know exchange value, making commodities which could be sold, it moved to a society based on the production of the use value by serves instead of slaves.

So the serves, the peasants, the farmers would produce for their own, and would give the surplus to the local dominant lords. And that was the base of the feudal system, so it was a move from extensive development to intensive local development, and it was a move from extensive, space-based development to local intensive development.

And what I’m arguing is that the change from capitalism to peer to peer is very similar: so what we have is a change from production of exchange value, not making commodities for sale.

To communities, people using communities producing for use values directly, you know people who share on YouTube they don’t make a video for sale, they make it to show, you know it’s directly useful for other people. And the people who produce Linux don’t produce Linux to sell it, they produce it because it’s directly useful for themselves and others.

And the other change I think is that we are similarly facing a crisis of extensive development of capitalism. If India and China want to be on the same level as Europe and United States, we need five planets, where are they? We don’t have them. So we are facing now a crisis of extensive development: higher prices, food prices, water, and all these crisis are commuting because we cannot continue in the same way we have been doing.

And so what we have is a similar shift from extensive development in space, to re-localize production on the local level but the globalized aspect is open design communities developing the intellectual value.

At the same time look at Rome: what happened was localized production feudal but with the Church as the globalized intellectual force.

And so the more you look into it, the more you see actually similarities.

Let me tell you one more: the Marxist vision of taking power first and then controlling the means of production, that never happened, and it never happened in history. What happened was that the Romans did. They started in a way liberating slaves into becoming serves cause it was cheaper for them: they didn’t have to feed the slaves. But it was a lot better for the serves because they had their own land, their own families, they could work for themselves and similarly today we see less smart capitalists like Google, and Ebay, and YouTube…They invest in participatory production. They let the user communities produce use value. They create proprietary platforms and they try to monetize that.

So what we see is knowledge… and capital owners becoming enablers and empowerers of participation. So both classes are changing, reconfiguring at the same time. So again, very similar to what happened at the end of the roman empire. That’s basically the story.

2) What Is Really P2P? Does It Just Mean File Sharing?

Peer to peer is much broader than file sharing: what it is really about is how computers are organized, but crucially how the people are organized.

So peer-to-peer is a relation, dynamic distributed network.

It’s a network whereby every individual has a freedom to act and a freedom to engage in relationships without asking permission.

So these are really the keys: permissionless networks. So it doesn’t matter whether the network itself is purely peer-to-peer, the Internet is no longer pure peer to peer. The web is “client - server“, but as long as it permits individual to produce, to distribute, to share, to work together with other individuals without asking permission, for me that’s peer to peer.

3) What Does P2P Mean for Learning Communities?

Well P2P in the context of learning is changing a presumption in the sense that what you want to learn is not necessarily outside of your community. It’s not out there, it’s basically collective intelligence that’s already present and implicit in the group itself. But of course the group basically, if you wanted, is worldwide.

And so it’s how you can create a structure whereby you enable people to learn from each other, because you can never say beforehand where a particular piece of knowledge is that you look for. It can be one particular person, who had one particular experience at some point in time. You don’t know that, but he or she knows.

So [the real question should be] how can you create a system where you can broadcast the needs and people can then self-aggregate and say “I know the answer to this question, I can teach you that“?

4) How Does P2P Change Learning Inside the Community

Apart from the fact that you enable individuals to get in touch with each other, and to ask each other questions and therefore learn from each other, what it also does is it changes the institutional logic of learning.

Learning in a modern society is: you have an institution and you consider individuals to be separated individuals and therefore you need to socialize them, you need to teach them and you consider a kind of input-output process as an institution.

In a peer-to-peer environment it’s: “how can I enable and empower people who are always already connected to learn from each other, how can I put more grease into that already existing process of sharing and learning from each other“.

5) P2P and Informal Learning

Well I think what happens is that with peer to peer the informal processes, the informal curriculum is becoming more important as compared to the formal curriculum.

Now usually changes don’t change everything: what I think is that smart institutions will basically adapt and incorporate participation in their processes and it will use open access, open publishing, open textbook, open courseware, will allow people to change their curriculum, to adapt it to their needs.

And then it will create a commons so that everybody can actually profit from what you’re doing with your institution and your community so it’s not limited to your own community, it starts engaging in dialog, outside of the community.

And so it’s not about abolishing education institutions, it’s about adaptation processes.

6) What Are The Fundamental Paradigms Around Peer-to-Peer in Education?

I would start thinking in terms of three paradigms:

a) the open and free,

b) the participation paradigm, and

c) the commons oriented paradigm.

So open and free means opening up and using open education material: material which isn’t copyrighted, which is available in Internet, which your students can use as well, which they can modify, distribute.

The second part would be thinking in terms of participation: can they turn in their work in a way that’s usable by other people, can they use a wiki, can they use a blog, can they find the right people to answer their questions, which are not necessarily inside your institutions, but can be the whole Internet basically.

And finally the older results should be available for the next generation: so can you use creative commons licenses, or commons … approach.

So your community of learners stop, but the next generation of learners can actually build on what you’ve already done and continue to create a resource for next generations to use.

7) How Does P2P Challenge Educational Institutions to Change Systems and Practices?

I think that basically a way an institution thinks is about how are we different from others: you think of yourself as somehow being self-enclosed, you think if you pay the best teachers you’ll be the best education institution. And so what I’m suggesting is that today you have to think differently.

You have to think that there’ll always be more talent, always be more learning outside of my institution than inside.

So instead of thinking about the core, core-competency, self-enclosement, you think about opening up developing edge competencies, how can we tap into all that richness that’s already happening out there and not inside.

Are there P2P Technologies That Do Not Require High-Speed Internet Connection

Not necessarily, I think there’s a lot of technologies that are low-bandwidth, asynchronous like email, mailing lists, forms, bulletin boards, so you can use those if you don’t use multimedia, you know there’s a whole brain-to-brain communication that can happen at very low bandwidth.

9) What About Connections Between P2P and Connectivism

Well I think connectivism is related to P2P as an attempt to kind of think about a learning theory and it’s basically about listing, about transmission from someone who has a knowledge to somebody who doesn’t have the knowledge. Rather than thinking who and what, where can I find the information and knowledge that I need in that particular moment by accessing the network.

So the value becomes your experience in tapping the network, rather than a particular relationship between teacher and learner.

10) How About P2P and Just-In-Time Learning, Anything Comes to Mind

P2P and “Just in Time Learning” could happen by creating, I think lots of little modules, you know like…, that would be kind of self-enclosed but would be linked to all kind of learning material that are available and therefore if you need something you’d be able to very quickly find those modules and that would connect you to the whole world of learning resources.

That’s for the formal part, and the informal part is knowing what kind of people do have the knowledge or do have access to the knowledge that you’re looking for, and it’s knowing the when, the where, the what, of knowing who’s doing what in terms of expertise in your field.

11) What Can Institutions Take as Initial Steps Toward This

OK I think in terms of opening up an institution to peer-to-peer dynamics: the first one is to open up yourself, in other words everything that you produce should be open, should be accessible, not just by the people inside your institution but by everybody. There’s no reason why it should be limited.

The second tip is enabling and empowering your students to produce material so that is not just the teacher to produce but the whole community of learners is themselves an active participant in the production of knowledge. And I think combining those two is basically already enough to have a start.

12) Is There a Link Between P2P and Education

I think every institution has to adapt to peer-to-peer because if you do something in a peer to peer way as we have seen with Linux compared to Microsoft, or Wikipedia compared to Britannica, there’s just no way that traditional productions can compete with access to a whole community, a whole world of people can contribute to a project.

And so even then most conservative institutions would have to open up to peer to peer, and would have at least partially to become participative if they want to survive.

Original interview by Robin Good for emerge2008 Online Conference - text transcription Nico Canali De Rossi - first published on July 18th 2008 on Master New Media as “P2P And Education: Robin Good Interviews Peer-To-Peer Evangelist Michel Bauwens”

“Media literacy” is increasingly the keyword to which I attribute the greatest importance when it comes to become effective trainers, online communicators as well as effective and successful entrepreneurs of yourselves. Understanding, to the very root, what communication means, how we do it, what reality and consensus are, is as essential as knowing how to browse or how to bookmark a site.

Photo credit: Bruce Rolff

Those who have not spent time understanding the deep roots of communication, from the interpersonal level to the mass media universe, are going always to be succumbing to those who not only know how to use the tools, but have spent serious time learning what are the mechanisms and components that produce effective communication in any situation.

George Siemens, connectivism guru and respected scholar of the effective use of educational technologies and social media, takes you in this weekly digest to places, writings and people that can help you explore, chart and understand these critical grounds in a serendipitous, explorative fashion. My personal advice is to follow George in his wanderings as the pointers and resources he shares are always of the greatest value.

Here what he has found this week:

Intro by Robin Good

What Does It Mean To Be Digitally Literate?

Doug Belshaw applies his usual critical and thoughtful perspectives as he shares Ed. D. thesis proposal on What does it mean to be digitally literate?:

“To have some clarity as to what it means to be ‘digitally literate’ will help move on the debates taking place at all levels in the western education system…Education has a pivotal role to play in society as it is the link between past and future generations. In the past this link has been relatively easy to achieve, as the knowledge and skills useful to acquire would vary only slightly within a generation. In the brave new world of digital technology, however, fundamental shifts in required knowledge skill sets and knowledge can occur several times within a generation.“

I’m looking forward to seeing more of Doug’s work. It is an important area that requires exploration beyond the hype and cute catch-phrases that currently define much of the conversation on digital literacies.

Endless Conversation: The Unfolding Saga of Blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Social Sites

An interesting view on our increased fragmentation - Endless Conversation: The Unfolding Saga of Blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Social Sites:

“The challenge today is that while the size of individual contributions to online conversations is getting smaller, the frequency of conversations are increasing on these new social media platforms.“

I maintain that while we are currently getting very good at fragmenting our ideas, our identities, our relationships, and our conversations, the real value arises in seeing how the pieces fit.

We haven’t had as much innovation in “pulling pieces together” as we have in fragmenting them. Sure, we have sites like Friendfeed, PageFlakes, Netvibes, and others, but they have so far adopted a fairly unoriginal approach to making sense of our distributed selves.

Bringing pieces together involves more than bringing them together (ok, that likely doesn’t sound sensible, but it is).

Tools that make sense of fragmentation need to provide visualization, unknown connections between elements, peripheral elements of potential interest, history of our own behaviour, etc. I just haven’t seen much that excites me in this area yet.

Our Data, Ourselves

An axiomatic statement in concept, but often ignored in our online habits Our Data, Ourselves: “Who controls our data controls our lives…Our data is a part of us. It’s intimate and personal, and we have basic rights to it. It should be protected from unwanted touch“.

As far as I’m concerned, not many statements are more obvious and more likely to result in universal head nodding.

But for some reason, we are allowing sites and applications online to handle our data in almost abusive manner while we use their “free” tools. Not all costs of use are economic, but all data can be used for economic purposes by someone.

What To Advise A Student About Using The Web

Seb Schmoller has compiled a short list on what to advise a student about using the Web. The list is a good starting point for educators who are trying to improve their own use of the web (after all, we need to become somewhat competent with the tools before we expect to model use for learners).

Neurotech Research

Photo credit: Ken Bennett

Neuroscience research is opening new doors every day. Some have declared this the century of the brain, indicating a highly optimistic view of what we will discover about ourselves as we move forward. In very few areas are we finding a blurring of corporate interests and research as significant as in the neurotech field.

The Ultimate Cure offers insight into the current state of this emerging field. While a great deal of research suggests we’ll find cures to many of the brain-based problems now common in society, this report illustrates the prominence of business-oriented interests driving the speculation.

I’m comfortable (but only marginally so - our understanding trails behind technology) with research driven by scientist’s and society’s desire to push back boundaries of what we know. But, when neuroscience becomes a market-based speculation, we are asking for infractions, violations, and ethical infractions. Neurotech research (via Mind Hacks)

TLt Summit

I’m in Saskatoon at the TLt Summit. I presented last night on Education: An ecology of connections. Great work on the part of the conference organizers in putting together what looks like a great conference (a sell out at 600 attendees) - Alan November is speaking today, Stephen Downes tomorrow. The concurrent sessions are a challenge - too many good options.

Wiki Adoption

Unlike blogs - which, when public, seem to appeal to a certain personality type - everyone is a potential contributor to a wiki. Terms and concepts are currently blurring as learning management systems are adopting the functionality of blogs and wikis, Google Docs seems more like a ramped up wiki than a word processor, etc. This short article - Sage Advice on Wiki Adoption - provides an important perspective: start with small pilot groups and let things unfold. To mandate is to kill a wiki project. I could, however, do without the term “go viral“. It no longer means anything. And it’s so 2006.

WorldWide Telescope

Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope is now available. I haven’t had a chance to download it (I’m on a back up laptop as my still new Dell is undergoing repairs for hardware failure - I try to whine about this in every forum I can). Comments and reviews have generally been favorable. As with the Google Earth, this is likely to be an important resource for teachers to add a greater sense of realness to subject matter often taught with grainy videos and text.

Originally written by George Siemens and published as weekly email digest on eLearning Resources and News. First published on May 17th 2008.

To learn more about George Siemens and to access extensive information and resources on elearning check out www.elearnspace.org. Explore also George Siemens connectivism site for resources on the changing nature of learning and check out his new book “Knowing Knowledge“.

When it comes down to content classification and findability, “tags” are for many new online publishers still something they have not fully grasped and are often used in ways that are not only less than optimal but often outright useless. Tagging blog posts, news articles or reviews has become a general and widely utilized strategy that allows content to become more easily found, aggregated and distributed in other relevant context.

Tag Cloud of most popular terms on Robin Good’s MasterNewMedia home page - created with TagCrowd

My simple definition for tags: “Tags are short keywords that define what your online digital content is all about.”

And here the official one:

“A tag is a relevant keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (a picture, a geographic map, a blog entry, a video clip etc.), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification and search of information.”
(Source: Wikipedia)

Most content management systems and blogging platforms now integrate a facility to add tags to any content that is posted online just like most web-based content publishing platforms, from YouTube to Flickr. If such a facility is not directly available in your publishing system it can generally be easily added via a plug-in… just ask on some webmaster forums.

So, the issue is not really having a special tool to do this but rather using this functionality in the best possible way.

In essence, the art of effective tagging consists in selecting a comprehensive enough set of keywords that organically describes the specific content while offering enough relevant hooks for this to be picked up by user searches.

Here more details on how to best craft your article tags:

Tags Overview

A tag helps users find relevant web pages. Tags represent aspects of web pages that are hard to capture with normal query terms in a search. Think of a tag as a simple category name.

Tags are read and used by major search engines, social bookmarking and social media sites like Delicious, Flickr, YouTube and even by Gmail to easily categorize, find and aggregate similar content without limiting the user to a pre-determined set of rigid categories.

Tags can be manually defined by a news editor, a blogger or by anyone in control of the publishing process on a web site just as much as they can be contributed, edited and refined by the readers / viewers of that same content. On social media sites it is generally the public who defines the relevant tags of any piece of shared content. On web sites and blogs it is instead the author who decides whether to associate tags with his blog posts or not.

“Tag classification, and the concept of connecting sets of tags between web/blog servers, has led to the rise of folksonomy classification over the Internet, the concept of social bookmarking, and other forms of social software.

Larger-scale folksonomies tend to address some of the problems of tagging, as astute users of tagging systems will monitor/search the current use of “tag terms” within these systems, and tend to use existing tags in order to easily form connections to related items. In this way, evolving folksonomies define a set of tagging conventions through eventual group consensus, rather than by use of a formalized standard.

Although “tagging” is often promoted as an alternative to organization by a hierarchy of categories, more and more online resources seem to use a hybrid system, where items are organized into broad categories, with finer classification distinctions being made by the use of tags.”

(Source: Wikipedia)

Tags Types

When using tags you need to be thinking of how these tags can become useful “hooks” or effective “labels” so that your content can be found, searched, aggregated and redistributed more easily.

The major error that takes place when someone not familiar with tagging prepares content for publication is that it uses either internal category names or other labels that are unique to its publication department or industry to define that information.

In reality, what needs to be done is exactly the opposite. You need to associate tags to your content that come as close as possible to the labels that your potential users would use if they had foudn your content and were asked to label it.

Although this appears quite simple and clear in this explanation, in practice it is not as easy as it may seem, unless you have exercised yourself at doing it for some time.

The best way to approach the selection of tags is to selectively analyze the major classification areas to which your information may belong to.

Here some reference guidelines on where to identify such classification areas.

• Content Type

  Is this a review, an aticle, a white paper, a scientific report. Images, maps, catalogs, biographies, interviews, movie_reviews, news, forums, demos, downloads, specifications and product manuals are all examples of possible document types that can be used as tags. These are all excellent labels because it is hard to restrict a search to a specific document type strictly by using search terms.
  Defining the typology of document with a relevant tag is a good first step in providing a useful label for increasing the findability of this content.

• Subject

  What is the information in your content about? Is it about an online marketing strategy or about a new interface design study? The main key reference topic should always be clearly identified within the tags.

• Source

  Where is this information coming from? Is this material coming from corporations, universities, government, nonprofits? Providing insight into the source of the information published can be a valuable characterizer in many situations.

• Author

  Who has authored this content? Whether you or someone else, the author(s) of any published content can be a very useful defining tag for making the content more accessible.

• Audience

  Any term you can use to complete the following sentence: ‘This page is written for ____’. Labels such as ‘for_students’, ‘for_patients’, ‘for_kids’, ‘for_lawyers’, etc. are very useful as the intended audience is hard to pick up with search query terms.

• Related Products / Services

  Complementary or related product and services which may be very relevant to the main subject of your content. These can be brand or product names that hold a special relationship with your content subject, are mentioned or referenced inside your content one or multiple times.

Tags Testing

How can you tell whether a tag you are considering to add is truly a useful and appropriate one? One easy way to find out is to do the following mental exercise. Ask yourself: if someone went to a major search engine or to a tag engine like Technorati and used the specific tag you are now considering for use to search for content, would they find the content you have associated to that content useful?

In other words, if for this article I wanted to associate the tag “content classification” to it, when someone will use this tag to search for content and will find this very article, will this content be relevant? The more you can answer yest to this question, the more likely the tag you have selected is a good one.

Obviously, the more generic a tag, and the fewer tags associated to a piece of content, the more difficult to define comprehensively its traits and characteristics. This is why, most professional online publishers typically assign three, four or more tags to any piece of content they publish.

More on Tags

Find out more:

Content Tagging: What Are Tags And Why They Are So Important For Web Publishers

• Technorati tags: an introduction
• How Findability Determines Authority Online: The Wikipedia Phenomenon
• Grassroots Cooperative Categorization Of Digital Content Assets: Folksonomies, What They Are, Why They Work

From social media to personal networks, all new media and technologies play an increasingly important role in how we understand and handle our increasingly complex lives. Media, news, video games, communication theory, philosophy, and other areas contribute to my understanding of the role of technology for learning. But learning is not confined to colleges and universities. For those in the forefront, the ability to form networks has now become nearly vital for achieving personal and career goals.

Photo credit: http://www.nelshael.com/ophelia“>Lars Christensen

Nonetheless we often say that we do not have the time required to invest in social media and their related activities our ability to share and to form social networks will be increasingly vital to achieve your personal and career goals.

E-learning technologies scholar, researcher and guru, George Siemens, takes you into this weekly exploration of stories, resources and research data to better understand how media and technologies influence, expand and revolutionize the way we work, learn and evolve new ways of co-operating intelligently.

eLearning Strategy

On Monday (May 12), we will begin our online conference: Shaping our future: Toward a Pan-Canadian elearning research agenda. Terry Anderson is the first presenter and will be presenting on The value, form, and function of a large scale research agenda. All sessions can be accessed here. Discussion during the conference (and more information on schedule, themes, etc) will be held here. If you’re interested in attending our Monday presentation, please review how the scheduled time translates into your time zone.

Networking for Your Career

I spend most of my time looking at networks from the perspective of learners and educators. I find my own personal network for learning far exceeds any other information source (including Google). As I begin to follow/read different practitioners and theorists, I begin to develop in my own understanding - especially if they represent a related, but not overly similar field.

Media, news, video games, communication theory, philosophy, and other areas contribute to my understanding of the role of technology for learning. But learning is not confined to colleges and universities. As this article states, the ability to form networks is vital for achieving personal and career goals. When I suggest how important personal learning networks are, I often encounter the statement “I don’t have time“. As this author, Herminia Ibarra, states: “If you want to succeed you need to make the time“. She then goes on to suggest that we need to schedule time for forming networks so that it becomes habitual. I wonder how many educators regularly set aside time to consider the quality and diversity of their networks…

Twitter

A short exploration of Twitter as a tool for reporting, filtering information, and consuming (much) time. A particular focus in the article is the use of twitter for finding information. I frequently see educators posting requests on Twitter…and the network replying with a great list of resources, often within minutes.

Email lists no longer exhibit this spirit of sharing. It might be due to email fatigue and the fact that most of us see email as a burden, not an opportunity for helping others. With Twitter, the spirit of sharing and assistance remains strong. At least until network fatigue kicks in…

Walking Uncertain Paths: Technologies and Models of Learning for Tomorrow

During this last week, at MADLaT, Peter Tittenberger and I presented several sessions. The first was a workshop addressing approaches educators need to consider as they move content online. The second session - Walking Uncertain Paths: Technologies and models of learning for tomorrow - was focus on where we are heading with educational technology, as technology both influences and reflects existing mindsets within society. I enjoyed both sessions as most of the time was spent in conversation rather than presentation. At one point, as a group of educators were addressing some of the change pressures they face, I asked about the key question guiding their technology plan: Is the question one of should we use technology or one of how should we use technology? Everyone in attendance stated technology use was a foregone conclusion. The only question they were grappling with was how to make it work. Not sure how I feel about that. A few good cynics are always nice to have around :).

Social Networks Around the World

This is a bit dated (from last year, which is a condition of obsolescence in online tools and applications) but still useful to consider how social network sites are positioned around the world. I’m interested in how countries not yet dominant in social networking, but possessing large populations, will influence maps like this. Will sites like Facebook and Myspace be able to successfully internationalize? Or will companies such as South Korea’s Cyworld serve their own markets more effectively?

What Do We Do with Computers?

RescueTime is a tool that tracks what a user does with her/his computer. I tried it for a while. It was depressing, so I stopped using it. They’ve now publicized some aggregate information on computing habits of early adopters. The results are not surprising - most people still spend the bulk of their time in Microsoft-based applications. Google is coming on strong, however, with their email service approaching Outlook in terms of usage time. Google Reader rated quite highly as well for early adopters, almost on par with time spent in Google search.

Facebook

Identity is challenging in a distributed environment. When dealing with educators, I often mention that if they are not involved in networked conversation, their voice essentially doesn’t exist (which raises the prospect that learners will receive information from less than ideal sources). Well, in reality, if you’re not online, it’s not only that you don’t exist. Instead, the challenge arises that others may form your identity for you.

For example, in a neighboring city of Brandon, Manitoba, a teenager has been charged with impersonating a teacher for creating a Facebook account using the teachers name and identity. While I see the parallel with impersonating a person in a physical space (and therefore the basis of the arrest), these types of things are almost impossible to control.

The onus of confirming identity - much like email spam - should rest on the people interacting with the Facebook profile. I have become cynical over the last few years about people offering me huge sums of money if I will only provide my personal banking information. In a similar sense, when I encounter an individual online, I need to question/be wary. As astonishing as it may appear, not everything we encounter online is completely accurate.

Leading Learning

I presented at the Leading Learning conference this morning…presentation slides are here: On Becoming: cognitive and social impact of technology.

My focus was on retaining the needed elements of education - transforming learner and society, deep understanding, cultivating capacity for ethical thought, and emphasizing “what it means to be human” - while fostering greater innovation in teaching and learning through the opportunities of technology. It’s a tough balance to get right.

Originally written by George Siemens and published as weekly email digest on eLearning Resources and News. First published on May 10th 2008.

To learn more about George Siemens and to access extensive information and resources on elearning check out www.elearnspace.org. Explore also George Siemens connectivism site for resources on the changing nature of learning and check out his new book “Knowing Knowledge“.

Pulling together a great brainstorming session is often much more difficult than breaking one apart, as the techniques required to make a brainstorming session effective are generally different to the way we normally act during spontaneous conversations. But given enough desire, awareness and a positive mind-sharing attitude it is not so difficult to move good ideas around by simply avoiding to turn off, blank out or suppress the ideas and thoughts of the other brainstorming session participants.

Photo credit: Drx

As you may have already learned in my previous post, “Effective Brainstorming: 7 Tips To Brainstorm Better With Your Team”, what really counts in making brainstorming sessions effective is your ability to ignite, encourage, synergize and extend your partner thoughts and ideas without ever spending useless energies in criticizing or vetoing this or that proposal.

All ideas are good, they are only limited by our own ability to connect them rapidly with other, relevant ones to create mental mashups or to jump to alternative solutions we wouldn’t have considered otherwise.

If you are serious about making a meeting of the minds become a powerful opportunity to discover new ideas, solutions and alternative approaches to just about any topic, you may want to take good notice of the few simple rules listed here below.

Rather than providing you with more tips on how to do proper brainstorming, these will help you avoid making common mistakes which can kill mental energies and enthusiasm rapidly.

Here the details:

6 Ways to Kill a Brainstorm

by Ken Thompson and Robin Good

1. The Boss Gets to Speak First

The boss is like everyone else. If he was a real genius he wouldn’t be working here. Don’t elevate the status and ability of your boss to be a brilliant brainstormer beyond logic. Treat him / her just like everyone else in the group. Because if you don’t, your boss may really destroy your brainstorming session in no time at all.

The boss will either kill or help idea flow!

2. Everybody Goes in Turn

Brainstoming requires flexibility, fluidity, improvisations, opennes to meet the unknown. Too rigid a scheme or an approach for passing the microphone around and the best ideas or more spontaneous contributions may become buried instantly. Let the flow guide, not the order in which you are seated.

Creeping Death kills brainstorming.

3. Experts Only Please

Brainstorming helps people find unusual, unthought of ideas. Brainstroming helps you break out of the mold of “standard thinking”. The least “experts“, and the more “outsiders“, the better your ability to break out from what is generally assumed and publicly maintained by experts.

Diversity is key!

4. Do It Off-Site

Brainstorming is not a formal ceremony to honour the past successes of a company. Brainstorming is an active collaborative approach to find new ideas and solutions within a mastermind group. Unless you can bring in, expose and sell the value of brainstorming as an integral part of a company activities, you may find yourself creating another dull, boring formal activity, which will require lots of energies to set up but will have no home in the hearts and minds of your team-mates.

Needs to be a regular office thing - not just once a year.

5. No Silly Stuff

Brainstorming is a serious thing but this doesn’t mean you can’t have a truckload of fun while doing it. Actually, from my personal experience I can positively assure that the very best brainstorming sessions are those where ideas, jokes, and high-energy intuitions keep pouring down from an excited group of participants.

Anything goes and it needs to be fun

6. Write Down Everything

Writing down is the holy grail of any serious thinker, inventor, businessman. Unless you jot down each and every little idea that comes out of the brainstorming session, you may really lose on some extremely valuable ideas, which, just like they came, will fly and disappear away in the blink of an eye.

Taking notes shifts focus to the wrong side of the brain

If you haven’t yet, please give a look to:
Effective Brainstorming: 7 Tips To Brainstorm Better With Your Team

Photo credit:
The Boss Gets to Speak First - presmaster
Everybody Goes in Turn - winterling
Experts Only Please - khz
Do It Off-Site - Malbert
No Silly Stuff - Perrush
Write Down Everything - shapiso

Originally written by Ken Thompson for Bioteams.com and first published on January 19th 2006 as “6 Ways to Kill a Brainstorm“. Edited, formatted and extended with personal comments by Robin Good and Giovanni Panasiti.

Knowing, understanding, making sense of how new technology, media and people work, learn and interact together is the focus of this weekly digest authored by George Siemens and reprinted with his benediction here on Master New Media.

Photo credit: Gabriel Moisa

Generally published on Saturday, this weekly report analyzes key issues and technology news as they emerge spontaneously or as they are encountered and discovered during a educational technologist every day research and writing activities.

As always before, also in this issue you will find great pointers, links and suggestions to immerse yourself deeper in discovering the new media and technologies universe that is networking us.

Here George’s digest:

Correct Interpretation?

Dave Snowden makes a statement, that while seeming obvious and intuitive is often misunderstood, summarizes much of what I was trying to communicate with Knowing Knowledge a few years ago: “A very large part of what we know, and how we know it is fluid, evolutionary and context dependent.”

Nomads at Last

Seems like mobile technology is the theme this week…the Economist has an article/interview titled Nomads at Last that explores how technology (well, wireless communications) is changing how people live and work. An appropriate quote from Castells sums it up nicely: “Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing“.

I spend more time most days interacting with people in other countries than with people down the hallway. And I suspect the ability for people to interact outside of geographical constraints will replace much of what it means to “be here“. Several times this week, I’ve approached people standing at counters, under the assumption they were there to provide a service for me, only to discover that they were in rather animated conversations with someone on their phone (go Bluetooth). “Here” means less and less. Connected means more and more.

Cellphones and Poverty

While I don’t care for the general concept of this article (solving complex issues like poverty requires more than just a new technological tool - it requires a political/ideological shift in thinking) - Can the cellphone help end global poverty - the impact of mobile phones on developing worlds is touch to over emphasize.

The author cites

“a growing number of economists who maintain that cellphones can restructure developing countries…Today, there are more than 3.3 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide, which means that there are at least three billion people who don’t own cellphones, the bulk of them to be found in Africa and Asia. Even the smallest improvements in efficiency, amplified across those additional three billion people, could reshape the global economy in ways that we are just beginning to understand.”

This is likely true. But the bigger issue for me relates to where the money flows and who will have control over the new infrastructure. As I was reminded by a participant in an online presentation I delivered this morning, technology cuts both ways. It opens and it closes.

It frees and it imprisons. That’s why we an ideological shift in how we interact with developing nations. The article provides a valuable look at how mobile phones are being adopted in developing countries, with growth in ICT expenditures out pacing basics such health and education.

How Much Time Does Web 2.0 Take?

To date, I haven’t really considered time elements with regard to the use of social technology for learning. But I just came across a site museum site that explores “how much time does web 2.0 take?.” Newcomers to the concept of the participative web sometimes feel a bit overwhelmed with the new terms, tools, and concepts. How does a person know where to start? Perhaps, as this article suggests, available time is the best starting point.

Can’t commit too much time each week? Well, start by reading a few blogs or tracking themes on technorati (or Google alerts). Have more time? Join/start a Facebook group. Or a Ning community. Start your own blog. Or podcast. From my experience, significant value exists in the gradient approach permissible with distributed, single functionality tools. We don’t need to figure out an entire system to get started. Just one tool at a time. And that often only takes a few minutes. Don’t try and figure it all out. Try and grow a tool or concept at a time.

The Future of Social Networking

Two of the most significant trends in society today - social networking and mobile phones - are destined to converge. Several concerns still exist (quality of web access via mobile devices…and if you’re Canadian, the rather insane data fees), but the convenience of continual access to both data and your network of people is highly desirable.

The Future of Social Networking:

“A few years from now we’ll use our mobile devices to help us remember details of people we know, but not well…Once this network is established, you’ll know everyone’s name who’s around you (if they choose to share it), and enough basic information to jog your memory if you know them, or meet them if there’s mutual interest.”

I’ve posted the slides from my presentation earlier this week. My focus is increasingly turning to the impact of information flowing in networks and the systemic changes required (and prominent barriers).

Presentation: NY

I’ve posted the slides from my presentation earlier this week. My focus is increasingly turning to the impact of information flowing in networks and the systemic changes required (and prominent barriers).

Design and the Elastic Mind

I had the opportunity yesterday to visit The Museum of Modern Art. It made me realize the tremendous value museums provide as a way of making sense of the world. Walking between exhibits, moving image artifacts, a touch of history (dueling media of typewriter and 35 mm film), Picasso, van Gogh, and others.

The tour of ideas, concepts, and emotions communicated through art culminated in the sixth floor exhibit: Design and the Elastic Mind. The exploration of how technology impacts who we are as human beings was eye opening. As stated in the exhibit: “Designers give life and voice to objects, and along the way they manifest our visions and aspirations for the future, even those we do not yet know we have.” I encountered some familiar tools like data visualizations and Twittervision…and some provocative (frightening?) consideration of our ability to engineer ourselves at a genetic level.

Originally written by George Siemens and published as weekly email digest on eLearning Resources and News. First published on April 12th 2008.

To learn more about George Siemens and to access extensive information and resources on elearning check out www.elearnspace.org. Explore also George Siemens connectivism site for resources on the changing nature of learning and check out his new book “Knowing Knowledge“.