This STC 2008 session reported findings of an STC-funded study of distance education and a case study for producing online courses from nothing (no materials or experience). The first study (by Rensselaer Polytechnic and New York Life) offered concrete tips for improving distance learning:

• Tag team: Use a course host/MC for every class, to set up, manage chat channels, direct group exercises, and record/archive, offloading the instructor.
• Plan for pain: Expect a third of the problems to be technical (media technology) and another third to be poor use of interactive channels.
• Control eyeballs: Best results come from 100% participation, by preventing/discouraging multi-tasking.
• Be fair: Use round-robin technique to ensure onsite and remote participants are equally involved (fear also heightens attention).
• Use the best: Use media in this order of effectiveness (ease and reliability): conference call (best), video conference, chat, whiteboard.
• Avoid all-in-1: Tools that bundle teleconferencing with video and more prove unreliable; move voice to Skype or similar, and push video to YouTube or similar services.
• Peer power: Seek technology that makes it easy for learners to help each other and interact -- it's effective and they want it.

The case study shows how Credence System jumped into remote learning, to meet customer demands for training when and where they need it. They tackled it with risk-management in the driver's seat:

Mike Wethington posted Martin Fowler's article on lessons learned in doing agile with overseas teams. Many of the points struck me as relevant for the problem of telecommuting teams as well:

• Bring distributed developers onsite for critical first iterations of new projects, to get going
• Expect to need more documents than with a collocated team: it's the price of being virtual 
• Extend conference calls with video, especially for project background lectures 
• Extend instant messaging to group-based messaging, such as with Campfire

Our family made a road trip to west Texas for the Open Source Symposium, held on Saturday April 26 at Angelo State University, in San Angelo. Its mission is to introduce open source to those working in college environments, which was why UT Austin was pleased to have my husband, Adam attend and report back to them. STC Austin's own Janet Swisher presented on how to participate in OS projects.

Last night at the STC Austin program, Dr. John Morkes (of Expero, which hosts Free Usability Advice) argued that the next stage in User Experience would be "Joy of Use", which follows [1] Usefulness and [2] Ease of Use. That is, the emotions experienced by use of software or sites become the powerful differentiator among otherwise comparable offerings. Reminding me of Maslo's hierarchy of needs, Morkes ranked UX needs like this, from "must have" to "nice to have":

• useful > easy to use > code quality > trust/security > pretty > stimulating > fun

• (Me, I'd tweak it a bit: useful > code quality > trust/security > easy to use > pretty > stimulating > fun)

Research: Studies in psychology, marketing, and education clearly nail the benefits of humor, for improving likeability, social glue, trust, cooperation, sociability, and lowering fear and stress. Adding humor did not cost extra time in the completion of tasks. MRI studies of the effects of humor show that it activates the brain's reward centers, exactly as occurs when we see a pretty face, receive money, or take drugs.

YouTube is massing and hosting far more educational content than how-tos and demos. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill now has a dedicated portal for lectures, talks, and interviews: http://www.youtube.com/uncchapelhill.

Videos range from professors giving intimate talks, prominent speakers presenting large lectures, and interviews that probe scholars’ research and teaching. UNC's recordings and some simple metadata are uploaded to YouTube and appear on the UNC “channel.” The volume is impressive: There are now more than 250 videos in different playlists on the UNC channel. I read in a press release (posted to the ASIS list, http://mail.asis.org/mailman/listinfo/asis-l) that the UNC/YouTube relationship proved so successful that channel management is transitioning to the Dept. of University Relations, although colleges will continue to add lectures. The interesting twist to me is the University's generosity with this content: the videos are free and available for use classrooms, home-schooling, research, and more, and the school encourages use and reuse of the materials. Times are a-changing!

My first experience of Silverlight was pulse.sxsw.com, which covered everything going on at SXSW. Pulse offers a media wall of photos and video, where (reportedly) the smaller 1×1 blocks are flickr images, the 2×2 blocks are user-uploaded photos or video, and the larger blocks are official SXSW content. Microsoft attended SXSW Interactive in force, to push its Silverlight technology (what's with the logo that looks like crumpled contact lenses?). From what I gather, it's not only a direct challenge to Adobe Flash (they've unbundled the Flash plug-in from IE7) but also a bid to become the new platform for rich Internet applications, in combination with their Live services (APIs for search, Virtual Earth, messaging, plus other resources). Silverlight streams huge and high-def media files, and Microsoft will host Silverlight media files and applications (for a fee). Where Flash apps were notoriously opaque to search engines, Silverlight apps travel as text-based markup (XAML) that's Google-able, with no extra work by developers (as Flash requires). Silverlight also offers eye candy: it can reskin the user interface of a browser while the app is running, which can make it look more like desktop software. If they can get the performance up -- oh, my!

Anne Gentle and I attended two popular panels devoted to the challenges facing non-profits, and there was urgent talk about how to increase this to a distinct track in future conferences. The attendees seemed evenly split between those working in non-profits and those providing technology and support to those organizations.

The Future of Volunteers: Adapt or Die!

The first panel tackled how non-profits must harness the new social web to attract and maintain volunteers and donors. From accepting inspiring user-generated content to high-tech recruiting technology in the classroom, these non-profits shared how they're adapting to today's volunteers and donors.

The Age of Engage: Reinventing Marketing for Today's Connected, Collaborative, and Hyperinteractive Culture, by Denise Shiffman

Marketing is hugely impacted by how the web landscape has changed: the static web has become a real-time, interactive web that's social and user-powered. Marketers must distribute messages but then let go, allowing others to manipulate, add to, and pass them along. To engage, we must fundamentally change our messaging: it's more than merely adding blogs, podcasts, and social networking. Age of Engage covers both marketing and product planning.

Advice from her presentation:

Sarah Lacy interviewed Facebook’s young founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, at the keynote on Sunday. Started as a college networking tool, the site (valued at $15 billion!) is now used by over 60 million users of all ages, with over 50% using the site every day. With the new Facebook Platform, the site is transforming into a new entity, one in which third-party developers will create a torrent of applications and utilities to serve their own communities and advance their own agendas (such as the Brooklyn Museum's app that lets patrons showcase its art collection on their pages). Facebook's goal is to support super-efficient communication and connection, with semi-public/semi-private information that members post in trust; key in the strategy churn now is how best to monetize it, particularly when their 3-year contract with Microsoft expires.

Last night I attended the STC Austin program "Four Candles - Just What is Simplified Technical English?", presented by Alan Porter of Quadralay and the 4J's Group. (Do watch the Four Candles video if you don't know this famous skit!)

Simplified Technical English is a writing standard created for aerospace/defense maintenance documentation, born of a deadly need for clarity (such as the worker who obediently "cut the power" with loppers and died). It's a controlled language because it restricts grammar, style, and vocabulary. Its goal is to stamp out ambiguity (one word = one meaning) and present technical complexity in the easiest language possible, to support users of diverse ages, abilities, and familiarity with English. If this sounds like the Plain Language movement to you, you're right: there's significant overlap. Boiling it down, Simplified Technical English has two parts: