Macromedia Reinvents the Web Macromedia's big announcement, Flash MX, gets a scathing review in the O'Reilly Network: "Macromedia's Flash MX seems to be an effort to take over the Web with Flash, and discard the useless bits that Macromedia doesn't happen to control. Remember the scene in Aliens where the baby alien emerges from the guy's stomach? Flash has been tunneling deeply in the innards of browsers and web site development, and its latest iteration (Flash MX) looks like a full-blown attempt to emerge and kill its host in the process." Yeah, but despite that, there may be something to the rich browser, if only we can get a handle on it... By Simon St. Laurent, O'Reilly Network, March 11, 2002.[Refer]

Fighting (with) Hierarchies - Part I: Basics No, this item is not about resisting the bureaucracy (even though that's what attracted me to the item in the first place). But it is about something we have been discussing in the office recently: how best to present (and navigate through) a hierarchical menu structure. This article, part one of a series, looks at the nature of hierarchies and hierarchical data organization and offers some initial suggestions about how to deal with hierarchies - flatten the organization, filter the data, choose quality category names, use examples, and more. If this article tweaks your fancy, Part 2 is available along with an appendix about half way down the left hand menu. By Gerd Waloszek, SAP, March 9, 2001.[Refer]

User-Centered Design for Different Project Types, Part 1 How the pros do it: two senior engineers from IBM discuss features of user centered design, providing a core set of design and evaluation activities useful across a broad range of application development projects. Their list includes audience definition, task analysis, heuristic review, use case modeling, iterative design and evaluation, design specification, and usability validation testing. By Jack Scanlon and Lynn Percival, IBM developerWorks, March, 2002.[Refer]

E-Moderating and In Good Company: The Secrets to Successful Learning Communities This article reviews two books, E-Moderating: The Key to Teaching and Learning Online, by Gilly Salmon, and In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work, by Don Cohen and Laurence Prusak, drawing out similarities in their underlying approach: "Why do people share knowledge online? Why do humans work together in new corporate situations? These questions can get boiled down to more essential ones: When and why do humans share knowledge in general?" Goof article, lots of detail. By Michael Feldstein, eLearn Magazine, March, 2002.[Refer]

Handhelds Go to Class Cheap, portable and connected, handhelds are finding their way into the classroom - and right out again as students take their learning from the community as a whole. "Students do science experiments outdoors with computerized probes and watch graphs come alive on the spot as they enter spreadsheet data." Short article and a video. By Diane Curtis, George Lucas Educational Foundation, March 12, 2002.[Refer]

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