Is the Internet really a bad invention? According to Doris Lessing, yes. We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing,…
Several of us saw a demo of Coradiant Truesight yesterday (first mentioned in the BbWorld Monitoring post). Most of the demo, I spent trying to figure out the name Jeff Goldblum as one of team giving the demo had the voice and mannerisms of the actor’s characters. Had he mentioned a butterfly, then I definitely…
Hi, Your Mexican hold musak shows your obvious great taste. Why interrupt it every 30 seconds with, “Please standby. Your call is important to us.”? I know its important or you would not have let me stay on the line for 23 minutes. The lady in India who talked to me handled to the case…
Whois may die. I’ve used it in the past to determine who owns a web site. I’ve even been frustrated that a very negative web site had a privacy blocker in place so I could not determine who ran the site. At the same time, I have the same protection on most of my domains.…
I ran across Jon Udell’s post on The once and future university which pointed to Mike Caulfield’s post with the video (Transcript). Technology, I think, is a false Panacea. The role of information technology is to better aggregate information for whatever it is we do. Such aggregation draws disparate sources together, but the sources fail…
Previously I have seen usability describing ease of using a web site. These four essences of usability are interesting. I believe that to satisfy customers, a Web site must fulfill four distinct needs: Availability: A site that’s unreachable, for any reason, is useless. Responsiveness: Having reached the site, pages that download slowly are likely to…
One of my co-workers says about tracking, “One of the big selling points to [Blackboard] Vista is the wealth of tracking data for auditing, grade challenges, and catching cheaters.” Certainly, Reports and Tracking in Blackboard’s Vista 3 is one of the more favorite tools. So making sure the data gets there is critically important. The…