Friday, March 7, 2003

Have some software vendors been sowing the seeds of their own demise? It certainly seems so. Case in point: Course Management Systems. Through a combination of factors, including: significant price increases, lack of interoperability, fears of vendor "lock-in", software bugs, poor support, and sheer arrogance the giants in this field managed to alienate a lot of people in the academic world, especially people responsible for choosing and implementing course management systems on their campuses. There is now a discernible backlash against proprietary CMS and growing advocacy for more flexible, less costly, open-source solutions.

The really bad news for the software vendors is that several important initiatives are getting very close to producing viable alternatives to such undeniably sophisticated and mature products as Blackboard or WebCT. Perhaps the most serious - certainly closest to "fruition" - of these initiatives is the CHEF Project at the University of Michigan, aimed at developing "a flexible environment for supporting distance learning and collaborative work, and doing research on distance learning and collaborative work". The core of this environment, more a framework than a tool, is already available freely to educational institutions wanting to use, customize, or extend it. It has been deployed - in limited fashion, under the name CourseTools Next Generation - at the University of Michigan, where it is supporting several courses this semester. A demo of CHEF (in its current stage of development) is available to all visitors.

Thursday, March 6, 2003

Kubi Client

Having been brought up in a big city in a (formerly) socialist country I had plenty of occasions to witness the following lesson in "user-driven" design (or lack thereof): a new subdivision, consisting of multi-story apartment complexes is being built. Not long after the occupants start moving in, concrete sidewalks connecting the houses and nearby bus stops are poured. In the summer it becomes visibly clear that these sidewalks - nice, clean, and connecting at well-designed angles - are not being used that much. Instead, people have created their own paths through the lawns and spaces between the sidewalks. Why? Because these "wild" paths provide shorter, straighter routes to their destinations.

People are like that: always (well, almost) choosing the easiest, quickest route. Strangely, this is true both in the physical and the virtual world. Many wonderful tools have been invented to allow people to collaborate online in "virtual teamspaces" with schedules, discussion boards, document repositories, chat rooms, etc. Yet many of these tools, having generated some initial excitement, soon become underutilized or abandoned and people go back to doing everything through e-mail, no matter how inefficient this is. (Have you ever tried to schedule a meeting between 6 or more busy people via e-mail? If you have, you know what I'm talking about.)

One way of dealing with this phonomenon is to fight it, and that's how the bureaucrats in the socialist country mentioned above reacted: signs "Keep off grass!" and decorative barriers appeared, the paths were sodded with new grass... only to reappear a few weeks later. Another way is to give in and build new sidewalks along those paths, or build collaboration tools right into e-mail, so that people will never have to leave their Inboxes in order to have rich collaboration with their peers.

That's what Kubi Software decided to do and their solution is nothing if not brilliant. The Kubi Client is an add-on to Outlook 2000 and 2002 that turns this e-mail client into an impressively versatile collaboration tool by allowing users to setup project teams, create discussion groups, share documents and schedules, etc, all in the "comfort" and familiarity of the Outlook Interface. Kubi Client is not, I'd like to add, a "fake", whose integration with Outlook means merely that its icon positions itself among other icons of Outlook, but when clicked, it launches its own interface. Oh, no - this thing is so tightly integrated with Outlook that, if it weren't so simple to use, one would start to suspect that it was developed by Microsoft. ;-)

Kubi does not require a server (except an e-mail account, of course) to work, but the company is working on Kubi Server, which will remove the redundancy of placing a copy of every group message and document into members' mailboxes. Unfortunately, Kubi Client is still in beta, with the final release expected in the 2nd quarter of 2003. There is no pricing set and no way to try it out. However, you should definitely take a look at the demo of Kubi Client (in Flash) - you'll be impressed.

Wednesday, March 5, 2003

Building New Communities: Learning from Weblogs by Tom Coates, Plasticbag.org, June 2002

Presentation slides (in PDF format) from the Fifth International Conference on Virtual Communities. Too bad there is no audio recording of Tom Coates' talk to accompany the slides, but they are pretty informative and fun to read on their own.

Tuesday, March 4, 2003

An interesting conference: Virtual Communities 2003

• International Conference on Virtual Communities and Online Communities of Practice
• Held June 16-17, 2003 in London, England
• Here are some titles of talks from the program:
1. Guerrilla-KM: Six Steps to Creating Successful Communities of Practice Online
2. Communities of Practice: the Rolls-Royce Experience
3. Supporting and Visualising Communities of Practice
4. What Makes a Successful Virtual Community?
5. Collaborative Technology Solutions
6. What the Grid means for Virtual Communities
7. Consolidation in the Collaborative Software Industry

Monday, March 3, 2003

I have yet to make up my mind as to whether this is a tool or a toy, but Grokker is definitely novel and interesting enough to warrant keeping an eye on it to see what happens. Developed by a startup (is "startup" a dirty word now? I hope not) called Groxis, Grokker is a "knowledge mapping" device. What this means here is that it produces visual representations of Web search results by showing relevance as colors (from "cold" to "hot"), material type as shapes, grouping similar concepts into shape clusters, etc. Thankfully, the Groxis site provides quite a few screenshots and QuickTime movies demonstrating the features of Grokker, so I won't have to write five more paragraphs trying to explain all the zooming in, filtering, color and shape adjustments, and other visual tricks that Grokker has up its sleeve.

Also innovative is the fact that the software, currently in "Second Preview Release", is not available for trial download. What is essentially a beta release has to be purchased for $99.95 - something that only Microsoft had the chutzpah to pull off before... True, the buyers of the preview version will get the "full" release 1.0 for free, but it still requires quite a leap of faith, especially with no mention of money back guarantee on the site...

This release is certified to work on Windows 2000 and XP. Version 1.0 will add Windows 98/ME and MacOS 10.2 to the list of compatible platforms. The company promises a Pro version with collaboration features, e.g. ability to share Grokker-generated "knowledge maps". I'm certainly keen to see that.