Learning, Technology & Change

No matter what a charity a does, who leads, where it serves, nine times out of ten when it seeks assistance the question posed is: "What's your efficiency?" People often expect charities and nonprofits to to have 0 administrative costs which is impossible. This isn't a sustainable practice for any charity looking to make a large impact. There needs to be people dedicated full-time to a worthy endeavour. Few people have the means to make this happen. There have been some disappointing headlines recently about charities with massive golden parachutes and less than stellar visibility.  The efficiency of some large charitable organizations running lotteries and big galas is suspect. While the non-profit sector is not where you should look to get rich, you shouldn't have to live at the poverty-line either. Enter MoneySense , they looked at the the top charities in Canada in terms of the cost of raising $100. The goal is to provide increased transparency for poten...

In business, you get what the market believes you are worth. This is why so many website logos have reflections, and use a similar font. This is why there are so many "me-toos". They know what those solutions are worth, and they become a checklist for how to get things done. All the little things they do, we'll do. Whether it's valuable or not. This month's big question at the Learning Circuits blog is around the effectivness of audio in eLearning. When should a professional voice be used? Should it be dropped altogether? Is text-to-speech sufficient? Looking at this from the business-side, less from an academic effectiveness, I think about: What will the client think if we drop the audio narration?  When you go to a restaurant and see that the portions have been reduced, do you think it's because cost of goods have gone up? Is the restaurant trying to help me lose weight? Or - they're cutting back to save a few bucks. That's exactly what ma...

Some interesting insight on consolidation by lrnr . This was sparked by the acquisition of Learn.com by Taleo. It seems like a a natural progression given the rest of the market. An interesting point Ani makes is that enterprise consolidation seems diametrically opposed to the web's social software which takes a more plug and play stance (read: open social ). I think this all comes down to the almighty dollar. Enterprise consolidation is all about fully branding customers with a complete "solution". Not leaving an inch in related verticals where a competitor could unseat them. With Many of the social apps are small startups, looking to join a bustling ecosystem. The best way to do that is to play well with others. In an enterprise license what should small niche players do? Integrate with a big guy and hope they acquire you? or stay open and adaptable to the entire system? which leaves you vulnerable if the established players decided to build or buy. Working with p...

Sadly on Friday Bloglines announced that they will be shutting down the site on Friday. Why? What does this mean? Officially they cite focus, but really it's a shrinking non-profitable product. Other sites like Netvibes and Pageflakes have worked to integrate and try and monetize their users better, they've branded and added features like podcasting.  The RSS aggregator itself has been completely commoditized by browsers, email and even some OS'. Worse than that is Twitter. When RSS came out, it was a huge productivity hack. "Push" enabled content authors to get content to all audiences without them having to continually check for themselves. Getting an RSS update was knowing when new content was there as quick as you could check your page. It was like real time. But it wasn't, now twitter - that is real-time. While RSS has grown immensely in popularity (hence the commoditization) anyone I know who doesn't bear a self-appointed geek badge doesn't k...

Tier 1 solutions are typically large robust solutions that are implementation heavy. In other words - not simple. Each Tier1 has a great deal of inertia in the form of business rules. Some make more sense than others, but all must be implemented! These pigs must fly! These are the requirements - make it happen. Apple is the icon of simple elegant design. Doing specific things very well. But will scope creep infect Apple? The major reasons this doesn't happen is that Steve Jobs runs things with well-documented incredibly iron-fisted discipline. Conventional thinking said that serious business users wouldn't submit to Steve's way or the highway. The fallacy was two fold: in an increasingly complex and information overloaded society people like simple and elegant solutions people want to be cool Apple is the new cool, and lots of execs want to be hip. That's why they now pay lip-service to things like usability and read stuff on their ipads. Mid-market out of the box ...