The product development process that I have the most experience with is a software engineering process developed at IBM called RUP (Rational Unified Process). This process is the backbone of the business outsourcing movement. It isn't a general design process, but rather the process one would start when creating a piece of software. Since I think we are ultimately talking about software development as the outcome of our design meetings, I think it is worthwhile to mention. The benefit of RUP is that it is iterative, meaning that you don't have to fully spec-out a system ahead of time (wh...

Has anyone had time to review any literature on what makes a group effective if the task requires new solutions? I think of it as deriving from the field of social psychology and I know it is vast and, to me, fascinating. The most recent thing I have read on the subject is _The Wisdom of Crowds_. It's a book that argues that the many are smarter than the few, but only under certain conditions. The purest form of group smarts is when a very heterogenous group makes independent judgments about a very concrete question -- the weight of a bull at a county fair -- so one of the conditions of a work...

It is now clear that Scott Adams is somehow monitoring our edLab meetings. See for yourself.

Another way to begin to determine the kind of collaborative process we might develop for edLab projects is to list some examples and then consider what would be required to work our way through these projects. Here is an initial list: TCR Planning — individual and institutional Display Panels Room Booking/Support System Archiving and Publishing Support System Virtual R&D Center edLab website Library website Library store It seems that each of these projects will require some initial written document/proposal that outlines the project requirements. So, two questions: 1) A...

What can we do to be more service-oriented? I was at Starbucks this weekend, and someone got their drink before me, even though they were behind me in line. When the Starbucks employee realized her mistake, she immediately gave me my four dollar drink for free, even though I didn't express any indignation at having to wait an extra thirty seconds for my latte. Will this make me choose Starbucks in the future if I can get the same drink at Wal-Mart for one dollar? I don't know. Even though I don't really have anything to support this claim, I feel that service and design are going to become ...

EdWeek announced that they will begin charging (non-print subscribers) for their content and their daily news section. It will be interesting to see what develops. A competitor EducationNews.org will not charge members. Which model will be more successful? This may provide some interesting data for looking at our own low cost publishing model.

I read the beginning of a poorly written book: "The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, & Consciousness" by Virginia Postrel. The thesis of the book was interesting: People care about design; style is essential to being human. She argues: Though it is important that a product is cheap, and that a product functions, consumers take how an object is designed more and more seriously. Thus she concludes: 2000-2010 was going to be the design decade. The book was terrible to read, and I only got past the first 15 pages. But, within the opening pages, the...

The conference that Anthony and I attended this week in Baltimore, MA was about the open-source software project/product called Sakai. Sakai is the open-source equivalent of Blackboard or Web CT. It is an enterprise-level course platform. Anthony and I were hoping that we might be able to leverage the work of the Sakai project so that it might function as a foundation for our future work on SocialScholar and Pathways Learning. We have concluded that this is not possible. It turns out that while Sakai goes to great lengths to offer flexibility, that flexibility is constrained within ...

Miller's "Is Persuasion Dead?" op-ed in the New York Times (although a bit overstated?) caputured a worry from some recent conversations around these library haunts. One can substitute a few words here and there and it's about the role of education on habits of mind in general, and not just politics.