You have achieved much during these past weeks, and now we are positioned to make one last, big step forward as you learn how to deepen your understanding of your topic and do so collaboratively.

The justification for this approach is rather straight-forward: your “textbook knowledge” typically takes the form of generalizations, idealizations, and case studies of successful practices over the past years — something many of you have become expert in summarizing, and so we are indeed ready to move forward.

But as an employee, your problem will be to address NEW SITUATIONS, NEW TECHNOLOGIES, and the NEW OPPORTUNITIES which rapidly changing circumstances present and which firms must address successfully if they are to survive in highly competitive business environments.

That is, for every benefit you will want to look for and discuss COSTS, COMPLICATIONS, and CONSIDERATIONS, for the simple reason that, “no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” (For example, There Are No Simple Businesses Anymore).

COLLABORATIVE work means responding to each member’s new blog posts creatively and imaginatively: since you are heading out into unknown territory, recognizing every little step made by your classmates will help you know better what you might do, and receiving supportive comments for your own achievements is absolutely necessary if you are not to be held back by uncertainty. With a little practice, your work will become coherent, mutually-supportive, and recognizeably the work of a group: you will achieve “knowledge transfer”.

Using Google

Searching for “rfid chips problems” on Google will serve you Problems with RFID. Asking Google for “facility layout problems” will give you Factors in Determining Layout and Design.

“Technology automation problems” will serve you articles like Justifying Office Automation: benefits and problems.

“Inventory management problems” will produce articles like Common Inventory Management Problems“.

IT Impact on Management” will give you an excellent Wikipedia article as well as Supply Chain Management Six Issues That Impact Its Effectiveness.

And so on … These may get you started, but the true adventure will be using Google Blog Search.

Using Google Blog Search

Once you have explored problems on Google, explore how differently thse problems appear on Google Blog Search. For example, on Google Blog Search, “Common Inventory Management Problems” will give you:

A very timely, short, compelling blog post called Be Prepared, which suggests how businesses ought to consider immediately some of the lessons of the BP catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico (soon to be renamed “The Black Sea”).

A post on Anger Management Classes, because just about any change in plans (such as a new homework assignment) will face questions and resistance.

Variation and Its Impact on Safety Management, which will be of particular interest to students of Head First Data Analysis for its example of how to examine data more critically.

The Assignment

Your assignment for these last three weeks is to prepare at least THREE main blog posts and THREE secondary, totalling SIX posts altogether, plus offer at least THREE comments suggesting where you see your group project going and where you think it might best go next.   

These new posts should be designed to significantly deepen the NORMATIVE DESCRIPTIONS most of you have offered of your topic thus far (“textbook understanding”) by exploring PROBLEMS, including case studies and discussions of the relevant issues.

These three MAIN blog posts should be organized to appear daily, one after another: make a publication schedule and keep to it. Respond to each other’s posts on a regular basis. Use Twitter to notify all of your posts.

A note on knowledge transfer

Here is the highest standard for knowledge transfer and group work packages that my colleague Marcus Birkenkrahe has developed for Business Application Systems (our course in the next semester).

Knowledge transfer between members on the same team working on different subtopics is expressed in overall coherence of results. Whole expresses visibly more than the sum of the parts. Quality homogeneous.

Every team member has a specific task both relating to content and project; work packages are balanced, well defined and collectively cover the project topic.

In this post I will talk about how your blog design — including the strategies you use to search for relevant blogs; how you describe, analyze, and evaluate them; your choice of blog theme, and the way you title and display categories and recent posts in your sidebar, and headers, sub-heads, bullet lists, quotations, and links — involves not only care in word choice, arrangement, style, but also sets up, influences, and basically controls the kind of writing that you do, the presentation that you make, as well as the use your users might make of it.

(See also Kathy Sierra, designer of the Head First series at O’Reilly, Creating Passionate Users. This post currently overlaps with my Multidimensional WordPress)

By Design We First Mean Structure

It is important that you choose a WordPress theme, a graphic design, that might please your readers. By blog design we mean first structure and then style, but most importantly, we mean the user’s experience: how they are led to understand your web site’s content, navigation, and how they might best take advantage of it.

That is, by design I am inviting you to think about your writing is more than ideas all dressed up, but how, in very practical terms, your visitor is led to consider the application, site, content, graphics, links, etc., etc., that bring bring your visitor to you, your work, and out beyond you into the professional world.

This user-oriented view is illustrated (as above) in the contrast between blogs that say “me-me-me” with those that say “you-you-you”: while presenting a professional yourself is important, we professionals are primarily concerned with contributing to our professions, disciplines, and society: our job is to help others do whatever they are trying to do.

Moreover, your building this real-world orientation into your design will create a constant reminder of who you are writing for and why.

Structure and the user’s path

If you drew up a list of the dozen websites that you find most useful, you’ll likely find Google at the top of it. How do we approach Google? We want simply to get beyond it. How is Google designed? Simply. Google is among the easiest-to-understand and easiest-to-use because it presents its business right up front: we type in what we are looking for and it delivers. Your websites, ideally, should be so simple.

Your favorite websites most likely offer a very clear path as your eye travels from the upper-left on down, across the title and most current post, to such significant navigational markers as lists of categories, tags, and previous posts: each with its own special way of helping us sort the pile of posts added one on top of the other into meaningful, browsable groups.

That is, you will want to wrap your head around the idea that your individual and group blogs are, for all practical purposes, hardly about you at all: they are about what good uses your visitors might make of them.

You might also think of this as a story, a narrative, a path through a village or house, where your visitors may see at a glance what your blog is about, how much is there, how it is organized, and what they might be able to do there.

So, for example, it is all very nice that you have created detailed mind maps of your topic, but your visitors are likely not interested in the details of your thought processes, but in what value you have added to what is already known.

Consider the top of Sophie’s site, above, where the title image indicates right away what her blog is about and where it is going: she is interested in current and forward-looking marketing research.

In the two tabs, we see right away that while we might click on her “About Me”, we will always be able to click “Home” and get back to where we started.

In this way, our blogs are best understood in somewhat theatrical terms: as an experience for viewers who are looking for meaning and may be guided to it in organized ways.

Drilling down

When we visit a site we want to get down to business and that means finding the posts that will matter to us. Websites are best designed when they bring you to those posts as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Where the reading of books is a problem of turning pages, the reading of blogs involved drilling down through stacks. Sophie’s site tells us right away that we are starting off at the top of a big pile of things. Our indications of depth are set up with the sign and signpost heading down, the silver “Y” at the top of the pole points like an arrow down. We are also invited so “search” through the pile, to scroll down posts dated from the present on down, and through “Categories”, the groups of posts.

Consider a professional design blog

A List Apart has designed its blog in a similar fashion. In this screenshot of the “Design” category, what they’ve named as a “topic”, we also start on the top left with a logo designed, in the letter “A” and the rest of the site title stacked underneath it, to convey the blog’s vertical, stacked design. On this category or “topic” page we see a brief explanation of the topic in a shaded box and then short summaries of each sub-section one on top of the other. The list of “topics” on the right also reinforces the stack design, with each topic arranged in alphabetical order.

Although your blogs will likely not have the hundreds of articles as here, you will likely soon have a dozen or more articles on the first page and a handful in each category, and the way to insure that they are first presented to offer an overview is the break each post up by hiding all but the first, introductory paragraph by using the “more” feature — which when editing is simple to implement by putting your cursor after the first paragraph and clicking the icon above showing the text broken in two and producing the “More …” mark on the lower right (which will insert the following code, visible in the HTML view: <!—more—>)

Navigation is about purposes: tell me “why” before you go off telling me “how”

We expect novels to present us with all sorts of mysteries and obscure metaphors, because when we read novels we want to be entertained at our leisure, but for us blogging means business, and that means stating our business directly right from the start.

In the illustrations above you see that the titles are short and to the point and that the first sentences are equally to the point. They provide the reader with an opportunity to decide right away if he or she wants to continue. Within seconds we know right away what these posts are about and our “costs” for this knowing are kept low.

But what about all the important details? Put them below. Web developer Mark Bernstein explains:

People are fascinated by detail and enthralled by passion; explain to us why it matters to you, and no detail is too small, no technical question too arcane. Bad personal sites bore us by telling us about trivial events and casual encounters about which we have no reason to care. Don’t tell us what happened: tell us why it matters. Don’t tell us your opinion: tell us why the question is important.

By understanding the uniquely important role of titles and opening paragraphs, you will likely pay more attention to identifying the high-level generalizations and organizing principles governing your blog post concept and design.

Choose a theme that supports this drilling down

Overall blog designs are called “themes”: a set of styles for type and image size, placement, and their relationships that are applied to the underlying structure of posts, headers, text, etc. Choose a theme that supports this business of efficient drilling down through the stack.

Consider how the “Simpla” theme in the center of the three themes illustrated above appears comparatively light, airy, and legible in contrast to the bold columns and bright color blocks of the designs to either side. Even at a reduced size I am sure you can see that the designs on either side obscure your blog’s fundamental structure of posts, each with a title and body, stacked on top of each other underneath a header.

The best way to learn this is to make your own comparison by switching from one theme to another, make screenshots, and setting them out on a table beside each other so you may consider them at a distance.

To do this, log on to your WordPress blog’s administrative panel, go to the Appearance/Themes section, and “activate” a number of styles. Themes you might try include the “Simpla” and “Solipsus” themes you see here as well as the those with fat headers that take up a lot of space, thin columns that don’t let you see too much, graphics which scream at you reader, and colors that burn the eyes like red pepper.

By choosing among the possibilities you will develop a “feel” for various themes and a sense of the “tone” or “mood” they add to your site’s basic structure. When writing, a clear feeling for your blog’s tone will help you find your voice.

Cleaning up the right-hand column

By default, WordPress populates the right-hand column with “widgets”, little pieces of code and functionality, that fill it up with lists of recent posts, links, etc. You get rid of them by opening up Appearance/Widgets, dragging everything out, and dragging in the “Categories” widget to start: start off with this simple, clean structure.

What should your categories be? Think of your blog’s categories as the main branches of your mindmaps: the most general terms for the major collections of ideas or topics. And probably the best way to determine those categories is to make a mindmap.

Changing the subtitle, url, etc.

Blog title and sub-title

By clicking Settings/General you will be served a page with fields for your Blog Title and Tagline: change these and click “save changes”.

A more readable URL

By clicking Settings/Permalinks you will be served a page that allows you to choose the url for each blog post: change it from “Default” to “Day and Name” by clicking the appropriate radio button, or even simpler, as I do it, click “Custom” and paste: “/%postname%/”

Links and RSS

If you’d like to include a list of links in your right-hand column, click Links/Edit, unclick the default links WordPress has offered you to start and then “Add New” to begin inputting your own links.An even more flexible way to add links is to create a del.icio.us bookmarking site, copying its url and pasting the url into a Links widget in the right-hand column. If you’d like to add a feed to your Twitter or other blogs, drag the RSS widget into that column and paste your RSS url into it.

Additionally (this section is presently an outline)
Muliple Authors. Create accounts for each author so that we know who speaking and users may sort by author.
Schedule Posts. Blogs are alive with frequent, best daily posts. In your teams, create a posting schedule so that at least one of you is posting something each day and that at least one of the others is offering comments.

This blog includes a number of VERY thoughtful posts! I like especially how the writer’s notes on the Career Day reflects her taking the opportunity of time off from class to attend this special presentation, her identifying three websites of some interest (and including the links in the post!), and the informal, conversational style, and especially her report on a discovery: “I was especially interested in the Trend hypecycle ranking that they introduced to us, since I have never heard of such a ranking before …”

Her Ducks, Fish & Diagrams post includes a very personal account confirming her reflections on what she is learning in her studies of the Data Analysis text, including, testing her learning by discussing her work with her family: “After writing my description about the diagram on page 95 of our Data Analysis Book, I presented my diagram description to my family. While presenting I instantly realized that I was not going follow all of the bullet points I had written down in order. There were many questions that I got asked right away. So I had to change my description to make it more suitable for my audience (my family).”

These anecdotal accounts stand in a complementary relationship to the report on the assigned group topic of The Value Chain, her first post. This report is well-structured, including a definition at the start, a report on a relevant article (using report structures), the identification of an issue (quoting: “our major challenge is …”) as an issue, discussion of that issue, and than a personal reflection on what she learned.

There is a pattern here, a story that is being told, that gives this website coherence as it conveys to the reader a learning process, a workflow as we say, suggesting a commitment both to her own learning and her connecting this learning to conversations with family, friends, and those of us who would visit her website.

Plus, her writing (in English) is very good, and reading it one sees how she has taken the opportunity to craft her sentences carefully, choose images that support her text, experiment with headers and sub-headers to clarify her topic and assist the reader in navigation.

annita’s posterous

This blog also features a significant expansion of blogging style and identification of interest. Like many others, the author’s first post is a report on the assigned group topic and includes a definition of “e-business” and notes two relevant articles, but without going into them in any detail. In my view, a good, if unremarkable start.

One may read the expansion of style and interest in the third post, following a post featuring a mindmap diagramming her interests, also on the Career Day, where she reports not only on who was there, but reports on the atmosphere and the one thing she found completely new and interesting.

She also found a very nice image to head that post, where four cartoon characters are holding hands in a gesture of mutual support, and one finds the theme of support in her next brief post, including a cartoon and supportive note to me (“don’t worry laptops are sometimes thirsty, too”), and in the following post, illustrated above, where she highlights the topic of open data at top and her interpretation, “sharing”, at the bottom.

I simply love the symmetry of this highlighting, not least because it brings out the movement good paragraphs offer, of bringing the reader from point a to point b, but also because of this particular point, which I would summarize as: “from data to people”. The highlighting, then makes vivid her point, and the point itself represents a profound understanding of Tim Berners-Lee’s argument: she did not need to write page after page to tell us about it: she brought us to this deep meaning using the special, succinct, highly-graphic way that the blog format encourages.

The next two posts repeat such graphical cues and in two interesting ways.

First, her Cab Sense post, a section of which I have illustrated to the left, exhibits what I guess I’d call a block-like symmetry, this time featuring sub-heads that are colored and on separate lines and which easily bring the visitor’s eye from the question of “how does it work?” to “where can we use it?” In her Forestle post one finds a similar formatting-based telescoping leading to the “CO2-neutral” text … she’s got a good system, and she is adapting it to different kinds of emphases.

It also follows closely on what she undoubtedly learned from the Tim Berners-Lee video as it illustrates the sharing of open data in the manner of a mashup to create something socially useful. And like her comment on the video, she balances here interest in sharing with a “how it works” analysis. That is, there is a “logic of pairs” at work in these posts that is helping her decide how much to include and how to structure it, and that within this very limited space — these are posts of just a few lines — she has managed to make one definite point per post (and make good points at that).

Following in my reading immediately after annadora’s posts, I would hazard to suggest a possible next step, another level of complexity, based on her reading of annadora’s reflections: that at some point she might add a third, perhaps more subjective dimension.

1. The narrative dimension

The first dimension is surely your text, pasted from your word processor, which when written well offers a path through your thought and expression. Like all good narratives, the story that you tell is enriched when it appears as a dialogue with your sources and your audience.

To add dimension to your story, find and engage relevant conversations in your field (Searching, Target Language & Professional Community), report on what they have to say (Reporting), and use “They Say, I Say” rhetoric (They Say / I Say).

2. The community dimension

To this we bloggers add dimension by our giving and receiving of comments. When done well, these comments offer support, advice, encouragement and thereby give our narratives an affirmative, enriching glow. This is the glow of community, which as Darcy Norman illustrates above is something I look for and find by looking for smart people and engaging in a variety of conversations so I might reach them.

To add community to your posts and websites, give comments and solicit the comments of others, and while you are at it be shameless about it: look for and engage those who want to communicate and connect. Figure out what they are talking about and figure out what you might add to it and add to it.

3. Disintermediation and the Infinite Web

We extend our original text considerably when we add images, links, and videos, etc., which tantalize our visitors with promises of well-recommended paths out into the infinite web — those communities upon communities extending our reach sometimes far beyond the imaginable.

To reach for the infinite, add lots of links. And set up each link to open up in a new window so your reader will not leave and forget you.

Images can help you grasp concepts and methods otherwise presented in words. Those old, highly experienced newspaper editors photographed next to a young blogger are posed in attitudes of wonder, skepticism, and amazement, and they have good reason: while they have risen slowly up the ranks, this young political blogger reaches millions directly through her blog. That image gets at something no words likely do so well.

For example, download Jing, a cost-free application you can install in a minute, and learn how to screenshots and movies of your computer screen and publish to the web.

With this technology, in just minutes you can make video presentations that just a few years ago would have involved cumbersome, expensive, and time-consuming film technologies. That’s simply amazing. Do it!

4. Organize your website using Categories

Just about any topic worth looking at has many sides to it, and in your website design you’ll want to make it easy for your visitors to figure out what you are doing. Posts are arranged in a stack, with one piled onto another, but those exploring your topic may well want to explore more complex relationships. One way to do this is to organize your posts in chronologies and offer your visitors an easy way to find and navigate them.

The Categories solution involves identifying your interest in a limited number of terms, assigning each post to one of them, and implementing a function that allows visitors to see your terms, select among them, then selection among the posts associated with each term, or Category.

Categories reflect your thinking about how best to organize dozens of objects in a limited number of terms: the names you give them are high-level generalizations. In the little illustration to the right you see two of my current categories, “web work” and “advice”, because I distinguish between methods and advice, how to work with the web and how better to think about it. You might best determine your categories by creating a mind map of your topic and finding keywords to identify the 3-4 main sections or divisions — keywords that will become your category names.

To see how this works, click any of the categories in the right-hand column.

Implementing categories involves logging on to your group’s WordPress blog as an administrator, on the “Dashboard” creating a list of Categories, and when posting, putting a check in the box in the category you want to associate with your post.

In addition, you will need to set up your web page itself to display the Categories, which you do by opening up the “Widgets” panel in the “Appearances” section and dragging the “Categories” widget — a widget is a piece of code that you get to manipulate by simply dragging and dropping a box with the name of it — to the “Primary Aside” column, which is the place in the template that will appear as a column, most often on the right-hand side (but could be anywhere). This is easier to understand by watching a demonstration, so I’ve made a short video.

For more about Categories, you might visit one or more of the links below

• Remarkablogger explains the general difference between categories and tags: categories let everybody know right up front how you’ve organized your blog (tags are far more promiscuous).
• Web site in a weekend says you profit from defining only 3-7 categories and using them “to more effectively focus your writing.
• Lorelle explains how to design your blog to better convey its purpose.
• Problogger offered the short version of all of this in 2007.

5. Tell us who you are and address your reader

The “address the visitor” dimension is an important one, because with any human or machine encounter we want to know who we are talking to and what they think they are about; such contextual information is vital to putting communication into perspective.

You might start off by explaining that you are students working on a project for school, outline briefly your course of study and career goals, and then add some personal dimensions that will help your reader know and appreciate your being human.

Professional blogs do this all the time, as you will see by visiting one or more of the examples below.

• Prakky’s Blog offers a provocative list of short Twitter bios that are to the point and fun!
• Guy Kawasaki is straight-forward, humble, and a wonderful role model for business students.
• Mahalo and Persona Branding Blog offer models for when you’ve accomplished something and are ready for the big time — just so you see where you might being going with this and why it makes sense to start now: you’ll be writing such things for much of the rest of your professional life!

6. Introduce your blog and what you are doing with it

Create a Page (not a post, a page) that explains what your blog is about, including how your group has approached your topic, organized your authoring and posts, and where you think you will be going with it. For models, you might look at the self-presentation page of these professional websites.

• A LIST Apart
• 43 Folders
• 37signals

7. Make every author an Author, so we know who is talking

Create additional author accounts so that when each of you adds a post we visitors can see who is doing the writing. Don’t be afraid to link to your own individual web sites, either: your visitors need to know who is speaking so they might better evaluate your arguments.

Generally speaking, I am inviting my students to use the web to deepen the learning that goes on from their assigned readings, lectures, and discussions and to prepare for modern workplaces that use the web for research, marketing, and communications. To be somewhat systematic about it I’ve identified a number of topics and arranged them in the manner of a workflow, including such activities as:

• Searching for conversations about our course topics
• Reporting on these conversations
• Reviewing and Summarizing these conversations
• Connecting our audience to these conversations
• Discussing and Evaluating what we find
• Collaborating in teams to maximize both individual and collective work

On this page I’ll briefly outline what might be found here.

Finding Your Target Language/Conversation

On this page I offer advice on looking ahead and finding things.

Using the web is mostly about looking ahead. While textbooks are great to get started, smart use of the web helps us to address problems that are only now just emerging. And forward-looking web use will help you deal with the future.

Build on what you know. As you read the assigned text, list keywords, cited texts and authors, and any links or footnotes that you think might lead to writers who are paying attention and sharing what they know.

Keep it personal. To go beyond the important fundamentals of technologies, business models, etc., that have been developed thus far and look for writers who are discussing change and the different ways people are dealing with it: look for the leading edge writers, the connectors, who make it their business to know how people are talking about things.

This past will help you get started.

Collecting, Storing, and Retrieving

Once you start looking for things, you will find yourself with piles of stuff to select from, sort, arrange, and hopefully, store in a memorable, accessible way. This page will get you started on the path of personal data collection, storage, and retrieval.

Reporting

Once you’ve found some interesting stuff you’ll need a way to talk about it. With report structures, you will be able to examine your sources critically and invite your readers to learn from and trust both your sources and your evaluation of them.

They Say / I Say

The purpose of reviews is to describe what relevant other writers are discussing in as neutral and clear a fashion as possible AND offer a critical commentary that, while it may include your opinions, is designed to illuminate the relevant issues and so contribute to the professional conversation: you write not simply to express yourself, though this is very important, but in a professional context we write to move the conversation forward and find solutions.

So that instead of looking for “the facts,” we look for discussion of issues organized by networks of commentators. Instead of looking for opinions, we look for professional debate and discussion of issues over which reasonable people disagree.

5 Negotiating Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

You might think of writing as a form of negotiation and your role as one of connector, where:.

• You build trust with your author and readers when you sincerely acknowledge insights and information you have gained
• You learn far more from listening and asking questions than when you do all the talking (and trying to show off what you know)
• You demonstrate your openness and flexibility when you consider multiple and evening competing interpretations and leave the problem open for the opinions of others.

Ideas are important, and your having them is a wonderful thing, but the connector probably does much more, because he or she brings others together with a minimum of means to a maximum of effect — something we do when we find, evaluate, select, and present information, ideas, and arguments which our readers may evaluate quickly and efficiently and click on to discover even more valuable things — and return to thank us for the help!

How Google Works

• Social Networking in Plain English
• How Google Social Search Works
• How Google Search Works
• Google Parisian Love
• Google Container Data Center Tour

Web work involves searching for relevant websites, reporting on what you find, and connecting to your audience both at the HWR and in your chosen field.

Searching

Using the web is mostly about find one’s professional communities and looking ahead. While textbooks offer the fundaments, smart web use helps us to identify emerging problems by finding the professionals talking about them.

Build on what you know. As you read the assigned text, list keywords, cited texts and authors, and any links or footnotes that you think might lead to writers who are paying attention and sharing what they know.

Keep it personal. To go beyond the important fundamentals of technologies, business models, etc., that have been developed thus far and look for writers who are discussing change and the different ways people are dealing with it: look for the leading edge writers, the connectors, who make it their business to know how people are talking about things.

I discuss this work in more more detail in my Finding Your Target Language/Conversation post.

Expand your web work tool kit!

Not incidentally, once you start looking for things, you will find yourself with piles of stuff to select from, sort, arrange, and hopefully, store in a memorable, accessible way. My Collecting, Storing, and Retrieving post will get you started on the path of personal data collection, storage, and retrieval — something you will need to start thinking soon!

Reporting

Once you’ve found some interesting stuff you’ll need a way to talk about it. With report structures, you will be able to examine your sources critically and invite your readers to learn from and trust both your sources and your evaluation of them — as I review in my Reporting post.

Enter the conversation!

The purpose of reviews is to describe what relevant other writers are discussing in as neutral and clear a fashion as possible AND offer a critical commentary that, while it may include your opinions, is designed to illuminate the relevant issues and so contribute to the professional conversation: you write not simply to express yourself, though this is very important, but in a professional context we write to move the conversation forward and find solutions.

So that instead of looking for “the facts,” we look for discussion of issues organized by networks of commentators. Instead of looking for opinions, we look for professional debate and discussion of issues over which reasonable people disagree — as I review in my They Say / I Say post.

Become a Connector!

Not incidentally, you might think of writing as a form of negotiation and your role as one of connector, where:.

• You build trust with your author and readers when you sincerely acknowledge insights and information you have gained
• You learn far more from listening and asking questions than when you do all the talking (and trying to show off what you know)
• You demonstrate your openness and flexibility when you consider multiple and evening competing interpretations and leave the problem open for the opinions of others.

Ideas are important, and your having them is a wonderful thing, but the connector probably does much more, because he or she brings others together with a minimum of means to a maximum of effect — something we do when we find, evaluate, select, and present information, ideas, and arguments which our readers may evaluate quickly and efficiently and click on to discover even more valuable things — and return to thank us for the help!

To understand more about your relationship to your reader, you might visit the Harvard University Program on Negotiation website, 5 Negotiating Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Present your work carefully and with style!

Blog posts and websites are highly-structured and sophisticated. My most recent post on post and sit design is Multidimensional WordPress, and next to that you do well to read Tips from the Blogging Experts. You may also profit by reading my earlier Blog Design post.

Connecting

As John Seely Brown explains in his Learning in a Digital Age and as you will read in Richard Light’s Making the Most of College, perhaps the single most decisive factor in student academic success is the ability to form and participate in groups.

For this reason, I am inviting you look for, report on, and connect to the professional conversations in your field — something the web nowadays is uniquely able to offer. In addition to finding relevant conversations on the web, your task is to comment freely on the blog posts of your classmates (as well as welcome such comments on your own posts).

In addition, your task is to form a working group of 4-6 members and where you and your group members will create and contribute to a WordPress blog, and in this way, learn how to see your work as part of a collective activity, share your work and comments with others, and enjoy knowledge transfer and support in a community of peers.

While we are at it, we will talk a lot about being forward-looking, engaging with the “state-of-the-art” discussions, and learning how to keep track of emerging trends. We will explore how to fashion ourselves as problem-solvers and how to find others on the web and link to them.

The best general resource for understanding how this works might well be the short, highly-accessible Blogging In Plain English video by Commoncraft. I’ve also written up a discussion of how we sometimes use twitter in my classes, How We Twitter.

Web Work is a Weekly Thing

Of course, you are expected to arrive in class on time, participate actively, and completely your homework assignments when they are due. Abuse of these requirements may result in a reduction of your final grade. And while students in pass/fail courses are allowed to miss up to two classes without direct penalty, and it remains your responsibility to find out what went on in class from your classmates and proceed accordingly. But the most important reason you should plan on attending class and posting to the web EVERY week is because you will likely need 12 weeks of continuous work if you are to fullfill the course requirements. Consider the following scenario:

• Search. It will take you about three weeks to define your topic, for the simple reason that you are likely new to the field, or at least this class, and so your record for this time will likely include false starts and difficulties (and eventual success!).
• Survey Topic. We will assume that your next 3-4 posts will appear as a survey of the relevant issues as you probe 2-3 different aspects of your topic.
• Understanding in Depth. We will assume that during the final 3-4 weeks you will begin to write as an “insider” familiar with your topic and develop sufficient depth of understanding.

Apprenticeship Patterns by Dave H. Hoover and Adewale Oshineye is the book I am presently using in one of my classes, and this link takes you to an interview with one of the authors.

The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander, is the book that first worked out the pattern approach (in the field of architecture).

Design Patterns, by the “Gang of Four”, is the great work applying the pattern approach to software design.

The Reflective Practitioner by Donald A. Schön describes the architecture studio at MIT that I became familiar with in my year as a staff assistant there in 1975, and in particular, where I got to know Maurice Smith, who I believe is the professor Schön describes.

John Seely Brown Lecture on Learning in the Digital Age, offers a sophisticated model of collaborative work on the web that I believe has been developed directly on Donald A. Schön’s work (and discussed in more detail by Brown and Duguid in “The Social Life of Information”): this is the model I am presently developing at the HWR.

The Craftsman, Richard Sennett, is a more philosophical discussion by the famous sociologist in dialogue with his great teacher, Hannah Arendt.

The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, Twyla Tharp. The famous dancer and her editor offer a practical guide to the furthering of listening, learning, memory, discipline, courage, etc., that while nominally based in dance and choreography readily applies to professional training more generally. A more phenomenological account offering the wisdom of the skilled practitioner.

More

YouTube – Blogs in Plain English, Commoncraft

23 Essential Elements of Sharable Blog Posts, Chris Brogan

What We’re Doing When We Blog – O’Reilly Media, Meg Hourihan

Why do I Blog? « Blog Archive « (Altes) Weblog der HWR Berlin, Sophie Bonczyk

Marc Prensky’s Essential 21st Century Skills, Marc Prensky

10 Tips on Writing the Living Web, Mark Bernstein, A List Apart

Blogging Tip Blogs

The Art of Blogging – Part 1, George Siemens

Frauenhfer, BointGointNet.pdf, Mark Frauenfelder

Shirky_ Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing.pdf, Clay Shirky

The world’s 50 most powerful blogs, The Guardian/Observer

All the Internet’s a Stage. Why Don’t C.E.O.’s Use It?, Randall Stross, New York Times

Effective Blogging, IBM

Social Computing Guidelines, IBM

Gartner, 2009 Hype Cycle Report.webarchive, Gartner

Deutsche Bank on Corp Blogs.pdf, Deutsche Bank

The easiest way to share your work and solicit feedback is to paste your writing in an email, send it to post@posterous.com, claim the site they will build and maintain for you, and invite your friends to subscribe.

Posterous is a web service designed to make web publishing as easy as sending an email. When you send them an email, they will create a blog and blog post and invite you to claim the site they have made by choosing a password: from then on, any emails that post@posterous.com receives from your email account will be recognized and posted to your blog.

Not only that, but if you drag photos or groups of photos into your email, Posterous will create a clickable album for you, including thumbnails. Emailing a url for a Youtube video, and Posterous will build a flash player into your post with the selected video in it all ready to play. Ditto Slideshare. Web publishing doesn’t get any simpler than email.

Please avoid sending .pdf files, because Posterous will first post them to an account on ScribD and then embed the Scribd viewer: for your mindmaps and other images, it is better to send .jpeg files. For YouTube, the easiest way to embed Youtube is to insert the Youtube video’s url into your email when posting; otherwise, from the web interface, you will have to paste the video’s embed code.

Posterous is Social Software. With a Posterous account, you will be immediately notified of new posts by your friends once you visit their Posterous websites and click the “subscribe” button. Once you do this, any posting they make will automatically “trigger” a notification to you, an email including a notice of the new blog post with a link that returns you to their site and their new post. Wow! This means that your friends will know of your new posts immediately and be invited to respond, and vice versa.

For this purpose, we have created a wiki page on our mixxt.de class blogs. You have then only to join your mixxt.de class, which they call a “network”, click the Wiki page, then click “edit”, move your cursor to your group links (or start one if you are the first), then click the “link” button and paste your blog’s url where they instruct, replace “text” with your website name, click “save”, and you are done.

Connecting to your existing social networking groups is even easier. Visit the “Autopost” page in your Posterous website’s “Settings” panel, enter your Facebook, Twitter, or other network login information and give each website permission to connect automatically, and your posts to Posterous will be relayed in seconds. In this way, blogging is no longer “Me! Me! Me!”, but “We!” Weeeee!

Finally, you can customize your website’s design, its’ “theme”, and select and look and feel that you feel comfortable with.

Outline helps order pencil work, Freemind encourages flexibility, but best is reality-based, iterative, collaborative, Waterfall Bad, Washing Machine Good design thinking using post-it notes. Doodle arranges meetings, Etherpad offers unbelievable fun collaborating in real time, and we use mixxt.de to hide some stuff behind a firewall. Zotero helps with surfing, clipping, saving, and finding web stuff (or maybe you’ll prefer Evernote or have a Mac and $$$ and can buy Circus Ponies Notebook or DevonThink). Jing is great for making and sharing screenshots and videos. Picasa Web Albums is great for storing and sharing photos you make or steal. TheKodak Zi8 is a cheap camera for sharing on Youtube. SlideShare puts powerpoints in public, but Prezi is a whole lot snazzier.Oryx makes impressive business process model diagrams more impressive. Posterous makes blogging easy via email. Tumblr is more fun than Posterous because of its design and friends. Twitter (and Tweetdeck) often prove that less is more. And for the big time, signup at WordPress.com.

Also, Passwords

Now is a good time to develop a system for creating your own sufficiently complex and memorable passwords. Find an online password generator by typing “password generator” or “strong password generator” in Google, and choose a generator, such as strongpasswordgenerator.com that creates complex passwords that you might nonetheless remember with phonetics, like “36V=!g”, which would be easily remembered as: 3 6 VIRGIN = ! google. To learn more about the science behind such passwords, you might visit the Password Strength Wikipedia article.

Make Backups

You have no way of knowing precisely when your computer will crash, burn, or be lost or stolen — it could happen in the next hour — so please develop the habit, starting today, of saving your work EVERY day on a memory stick, an external hard drive, or an online service such as Dropbox.

RSS, really simple syndication, is the glue holding the web together.

The short version is: using Google Reader, or such news readers as Blogbridge, you can “subscribe” to websites (like blogs) that have the “rss” logo in the navigation box so that every time you start up the reader it will update your “newspaper” with the latest post, which you can then skim until you find interesting news.

In addition to searching for relevant blogs on your topic, you might surf the following collections:

• http://oreilly.com/
• http://alltop.com/
• http://technorati.com/

Self-Hosted WordPress

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