ICTlogy

Via Column Two

Five ways to identify intranet usability issues, article by Donna Maurer, points five checkpoints you should follow to (a) design your intranet (b) maintain it ( c) improve it.

• Stakeholder interviews
• Walking through scenarios
• Review existing data
• Usability evaluation
• Expert review

In few words:

• see what the user needs (not what he will need)
• see what the user does (and why her or she does it that way)
• fix your errors

Even in less words: your intranet problems are not user incompetence by yours

Nothing new under the sun, but I guess it’s a good reflection :)

Well, it’s been quite easy.

• download this or, better, this
• follow this

and done.

Now it’s time to customize – once again :( – home page, CSS and some other layouts such as admin and so.

Anyway, thanks to WordPress team for such a thing!

I guess I should visit my Blogroll saved items more often – plenty unread stuff there!

(via Knowledge Jolt With Jack)

Lee Lefeever writes about Email Lists vs. Message Boards.

In my opinion, the middle ground lays on an intranet where e-mail and message boards are just a part of a whole thing where everything is embedded in a coherent virtual community system.

I think that having a “place” is quite a must if there’s even a slight commitment with knowledge management and/or some kind of filing effort with all the information running through the community.

Some intranets allow the user be notified of new posts and even let the user customize some views so he can see all board updates at a glance when entering the intranet (and before reaching his mail inbox).

All in all, the matter surely is having your communication/community applications in a suite the same way you like to have your office applications (word processor, spreadsheet, etc. at MS Office) or your web design applications (code editor, photo editor, etc. at Macromedia Dreamweaver+Fireworks) or, even better, as just one application.

Via the Development Gateway I find these Inter-American Development Bank e-Courses on “The Logical Framework for Project Design” and “Monitoring and Evaluation of Projects” .

Sorry, too lazy to comment the link: I just came back from some strange mix of holidays and ill-in-bed days and being back to work is still a sort of challenge ;)

Thus, I’ll sit and quote John Daly’s description. Sorry pals.

“The Logical Framework for Project Design” and “Monitoring and Evaluation of Projects” are offered online, free, by the InterAmerican Development Bank. Certificates of Completion are offered to those who successfully complete the courses. An online discussion forum is available (in Spanish) to those taking the courses. It appears that these courses were developed in 2002, and Certificates were awarded as recently as two weeks ago.

The two roles of e-learning professors

Last week I got a meeting with people of Intermón Oxfam about the possibilities of setting up an intranet and an e-training programme within.

I like these meetings because they make me think and improve my skills in abstraction, conceptualization, etc. Then the output is sometimes pleasant sometimes not: these meetings make clear what I know and what I don’t.

Talking about the roles played by the professors in an e-learning environment I made the point in distinguishing content from communication or, in better words, authorship from lecturing.

One of these typical errors related to translating presencial learning to distance (on-line) learning deals with not being able to see you can (you should?) treat authors and teachers as different roles, and not as the same person, as in presencial courses happens.

The author must:

• Master contents, he or she has to be (if possible) the best in his field
• Focus on content, meaning that he has to consider mainly an output, a contents support, a learning object
• Not think of his availability during the course: he might not even take part in it!

The teacher (virtual tutor, class tutor, etc.) must:

• Master communication, he’s the responsible of the course tempo and the students participation
• Master the environment where everything will take place, know the rules of the game, what will work better and what worse, etc.
• Know the content, but not necessarily master it
• Be available during the course

Of course this can be done by the same person, but also by different people, even more than two: different authors, the best on each subject; and different teachers for different virtual classrooms.

I think this is of special interest in the field of NGOs and non-profits: availability of people is quite an issue and content is found in the minds of some people (experts) that have worked in some projects, places, etc.

E-learning brings them the possibility to

• make their experts work as authors and, if everything is well documented and filed, authorship becomes quite easy
• make their (on-line) volunteers (e-volunteers in e-volunteering for e-training programmes) be the teachers, staying home, with maximum availability at the minimum effort

There are, of course, plenty more roles in e-teaching, but I guess this categorization is a good starting point.

Since last Google pagerank update this page has reached pagerank 5, which has quite amazed me:

• I don’t have lots of visits – actually, I have few visits
• I don’t think I’m being linked by more than a couple of friends and a bunch of web spiders

So, how did I get to pagerank 5!?

The only reasons I find are:

• There’s not really many people around blogging on ICT4D such as e-learning, e-volunteering, intranets and knowledge management, an so.
• I try and not write about plenty of things but just the previous subjects – there’s some exceptions, as this post ;)
• I’ve been (luckily) spotted at the Development Gateway, a site with a quite high pagerank (8)

Now that I’m using PowerPhlogger to manage my site visits/logs I see funny things such as being listed #2 in Google searching the string “kinds of freedom”, which should be coped by GNU/Linux pages.

I like to see people bumping into my page searching for “opensource ware” or “opensource lms” but it’s more surprising to find me through “mit opencourse”. The most surprising yet came last Wednesday: somebody got here through “opencourseware berklee”: fun, Berklee itself did not appear in none of the 40 results listed by Google.

So, what’s going on out there with Google? :O