Information Architecture for Designers.

 "Information Architecture For Designers is low on theory, high on practice. It contains practical examples, how-to's, do's and don'ts and ready-to-use templates, illustrating concepts, tools and deliverables that can be used immediately in real-life by anyone responsible for designing web sites. Practical explanations and tips are illustrated with case studies from industry leaders like IBM and Microsoft, and clear explanations of the latest cutting-edge research from the academic world." [xBlog: The visual thinking weblog | XPLANE]

Posted as an item of possible interest to e-Learning designers.

10:52:42 AM    

I had heard talk recently of Blackboard entering the 'content management' marketplace, and the speaker was puzzled why they would want to do this. From the looks of there announcement, they are not necessarily trying to compete with your standard web content management system that serves your public web presence (thought it's not clear that it couldn't do that too) but instead taking the step to add learning content management in behind the course management and portal systems. Interesting to me, they seem to have made the move to consider students as just another potential set of content authors, and so the proposed technology to manage learning content also serves your e-portfolio and virtual hard drives for learners. Interesting strategy. - SWL

(As an aside, their attempts to 'eat their own cooking' are perhaps leaving them with indigestion - clicking on the 'standards' link on the  right-hand side of the page reveals perhaps more than they wanted to of the content management structure. At least at 9:40 am PST)

[EdTechPost]

I am also unclear about the functionality of Blackboard's LMS offering, but the reasoning behind it is pretty clear: stay ahead of WebCT in the education marketplace. Education has been "underserved" (if you want to look at it that way) by the mainstream LMS vendors, whose products are often priced too high for the educators' budgets. Offering an LMS serves as a differentiator -- that's the value to Blackboard as a vendor. Whether Blackboard's LMS actually offers any value to the users is another question that the marketplace will answer for us pretty quickly. There seems to be quite a backlash going now against LMS, a lot like the backlash against knowledge management last year -- too much cost, not enough useful functionality, not enough value. Or so it seems to me.

10:29:21 AM