Invisible Fist

Recently I wrote of a bottom-up approach to bringing Universal Design for Learning (UDL) into the classroom. I happy to share a fantastic blog by Lisa Parisi which provided a teacher’s perspective  of UDL. As she describes in her blog, she feels that for successful outcomes the following classroom requirements must be met:

• Educators must believe that they are responsible for teaching every child
• Educators must teach students how to access tools and then allow them the access
• Educators must give up that position of power to allow students the freedom to do what they need to be successful

I can’t do justice to Lisa’s blog, by describing it again here.  I urge you (parents, teachers, administrators, school board members…) to read her post. If you have already read it, forward it to your peers, and your school board.

Today,  I wanted to call attention to some resources for UDL content tools. First,  the amazing UDL Toolkit site. This site is a massive resource of content tools, fact sheets, guidelines, etc. that help to facilitate the universal design of learning content.  The creators of this site are teachers, Karen Janowski and Joyce Kasman Valenza, PhD.

I happened upon this site some time ago, but hadn’t really spent much time there until I began pondering summer learning activities for my son, who will soon complete  kindergarten. Upon revisiting this site a few days ago, I realized what an excellent repository this is. Many thanks to Karen, Joyce and all of the wiki’s contributors for making this site possible.

In addition to learning more about the tools in that wiki, I also discovered this blog entry by Ira Socal which describes 10 UDL tools that are freely available.

And of course, there are great tools available from CAST, the UDL mothership. At the CAST site you’ll find tools that will enable you to create digital books, provide scaffolding to your students’ learning, or to check your curriculum to promote flexibility in your learning materials.

Accessibility, Content Management, Educational Technology, Universal Design for Learning Accessibility, UDL, Universal Design for Learning

A Plea For Your Patience

Please bear with me. This blog is about content management, though due to references to education, architecture, etc.,  I must ask that content-management practitioners suspend disbelief for at least a few paragraphs. It should become evident on why the Universal Design of Content is important to you.

Mr. Smith Goes To Kalamazoo

Several years ago, I entered a graduate program in educational technology in which I chose special education as my minor. Due to my background in publishing and Web consulting, I became enchanted (obsessed) with server-side solutions for the delivery of learning materials in accessible formats. A key point was that the assistive devices should be place a minimal cost-burden on the end user. I later termed this criterion, “The Best Buy Test”.

Discovering Universal Design

Early on, I learned about the principles of universal design (rooted in architecture) for planning planning physical environments. The key premise of universal design is that products, environments, (’stuff’ in general) should be designed in a manner that benefits all users. There are numerous occurrences of design that accommodates users with disabilities, but are commonly used by the general populations. An example is the curb cut in a sidewalk. This was conceived to provide access to wheelchair users, but is also beneficial to bicyclists and parents pushing stroller and many other users.

UDL

I had just  started pondering the universal design framework for delivery of content when I became acquainted with the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST), a Boston-area research organization that had developed an educational framework known as the Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

CAST’s neurological research has shown that learning occurs in three primary networks in the brain:

Recognition networks
This is where we gather facts. We identify and categorize what we see, hear, and read. Identifying letters, words, or an author’s style are recognition tasks. This the “what” of learning.

Strategic networks
How  we plan and perform tasks. How we organize and express our ideas. Writing an essay or solving a math problem are strategic tasks. This the “how” of learning.

Affective networks
How they are challenged, excited, or interested in learning… are dimension of affective learning. This is the “why” we learn.

Furthermore, CAST saw that traditional educational practices placed a heavy burden on the learners to adapt to the content.

Thus, in the spirit of the universal design,  CAST developed the Universal Design for Learning framework. CAST’s  findings were  that in order for content  to benefit the greatest number of learners,  then learning materials should adhere to  three primary principles :

Multiple means of representation to give diverse learners options for acquiring information and knowledge (“What” ).

Multiple means of action and expression to provide learners options for demonstrating what they know (“How”)

Multiple means of engagement to tap into learners’ interests, offer appropriate challenges, and increase motivation (“Why”).

That’s Nice But Why Are You Telling Me This?

If these learning  principles above don’t immediately seem relevant to your organization, then swap the word “learners” with a term  (employees, constituents, customers…) that is more appropriate  to your context.

Now you have the beginning of a universally-designed content strategy. Is your content universally designed?

Is your content available in multiple formats?

• Have you ever looked at your content?  No really, have you looked at in a browser besides Internet Exlorer? Or without your glasses?
• Have you ever viewed your content on a smart phone? What about a smartphone of different platform?
• Have you ever clicked on an interesting link and found yourself in an area that was not in your native language?
• With the release iPad a few days ago, there are over 1/4 million new copies of Safari out in the world. Wouldn’t it be nice if these users could access your content?

Are there multiple means by which your users can act on the content?

• If you’re selling widgets, is it clear to the users on how they can buy those widgets?
• The shopping cart is just a click away, but what if the consumers want to actually speak to a sales person? Will the users be able locate a phone number, or a chat window?
• What if the customer prefers “try before they buy” ? Are locations for physical stores and resellers going to be clear to them?

Are you engaging your customers?

• Every moment of the day there is an opportunity for a user to be enticed away from your content; are you doing enough to ensure that users gravitate toward your content?
• Is you content compelling enough that users will return to it?
• It is possible to learn without being engaged (penmanship class?), but who wants to learn that way?

Going Forward

If you can honestly say that your content strategy includes “the multiple means” (of representation, expression and engagement) then congratulations, go have a long lunch and enjoy the spring weather! When you return get to thee to a whiteboard and think about how you can reach more users and how you can do so more effectively.

If you’re content strategy does not include “the multiple means,” then you also need to post up in front of a white board, digital collaborative space, etc and start thinking about your goals for you organization’s content.

Accessibility, Content Management, Universal Design for Learning Universal Design for Learning

Please see my SharePoint article on The Content Wrangler site.

Content Management, SharePoint Content Management, MOSS, SharePoint

About two weeks ago, I joined a project that is  already fairly close to its go-live date.  When I start a project at a client’s office, I ask these questions:

• Where is the coffee?
• I think I mentioned that I drink coffee; where is the bathroom?
• Any peanut allergies here? (If so, I am prepared to eat my snacks outside, shivering alongside the smokers)
• Is this thing that I’m working on backed up?
• Where can I find Post-It Notes?

It turns out that, yes, their thing was being backed up. Their particular thing is a forthcoming re-lease of their public Web site. Good thing, too; let’s just say I have a history.

I remember what happened on previous projects when I didn’t ask all those questions.  Like the time I located the coffee, but found myself lost in an unfamiliar building, seemingly miles from a bathroom.

Or the time I deleted a client’s SharePoint portal (forever) within 1/2 hour of joining the project.

About a year ago, I learned something intriguing about SharePoint. You can delete a site collection from WITHIN that site collection. I know this, because I accidentally did this upon starting the project.

My client had asked about a styling problem. He asked that I not touch the current style sheet because people were going to be reviewing the site that day. So to work beneath their radar, I created a sub site–three levels down in the hieararchy–to do some testing.

I soon learned that the problem was actually with a mal-formed custom layout template and took the following steps:

1. Informed my client of the issue
2. Fixed the problem on the layout template
3. Applied my changes
4. Performed a quick round of QA
5. Deleted my 3rd-level test site, in SharePoint Manage Content and Structure view

Actually……I deleted the top-level site–the site collection–and subsequently EVERYTHING that lay beneath. Buh-Bye, sub-sites, document libraries, calendars…..

I asked my client who was taking care of the SharePoint backups and was given some phone numbers of DBAs and system administrators. The answers to my question about backups  were reminiscent of that  recurring  Family Circus theme when the parents asked “Who did this?” and received one of these answers from the children:

• “Not Me”
• “Ida Know”

No backup. All the content that had been there at 8:00 am that day was gone by 8:25. My fingerprints were all over the mouse button that clicked the “OK” button in the dialogue box to authorize the deletion.

My colleague, who had been with the project for a few weeks, was able to recreate the few changes he had made to the cascading style sheet and layout templates fairly quickly.  A bigger problem was ressurecting the SharePoint libraries and lists.

My client recognized that it wasn’t my fault that the sites were not being backed up. Still, I felt like a dolt, not just because I whacked the site collection (could happen to anybody) but because I didn’t ask about backups. Bad business analyst! BAD!

I’ve since taken the won’t-get-fooled again approach. In subsequent projects, I recognized that I need to enquire about backups BEFORE touching the site (and after ensuring continuity of caffeination).

Content Management, SharePoint, Uncategorized backup and recovery, MOSS, SharePoint

Is that 1-2 Tablespoons, or 12 Tablespoons?
Here’s my problem: I can’t see the damn dosage recommendations on a bottle of children’s pain reliever or any other pharmaceutical packaging for that matter. Worse still, I can’t see the active ingredients, or the disclaimer copy. Regardless of your age, or acuity, I’m sure you have experienced similar frustration.

The Larger Issue
I am in my mid 40’s, and wear progressive lenses (polite word for bifocals) which provide me with otherwise, pretty good vision. I can make out the ingredients list on most food packages, I’m usually befuddled by contents on pharmaceuticals.

While the inabiliy to read packaging is a chronic annoyance, it does presents huge levels of risk when dosage levels, or allergies are concerned. Why are we allowing such a violation of usability principles when there are such potentially dire consequence?

That is the question I have asked myself every cold and flu season and sometimes spent a few moments mapping out potential solutions. Then I’d get distracted–the cat had a hairball, or there’s a good rerun of “Seinfeld” on cable–you know the feeling.

People-Compliant Content
I am former ad guy, working on a graduate degree in educational technology with a minor in special ed. Thus, it’s been something of a crusade of mine to explore accessibility options in all forms of communication.

I believe that the focus of assistive technology should be geared to allowing for flexible content that can be more easily adapted for the needs of the end user. In short, content should be designed such that it is people-compliant. Traditional print vehicles present and accessibility challenge because they are fixed and lack flexibility.

Death of Print Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
Despite what you may heard about the decline of newspapers, print is not dead. Until we get to a point where digital product labels are practical, we live with printed labels that are fixed, crowded and hard to read. Print is not especially people-compliant, thus necessitating the need for assistive technology.

Affordable Assistive Devices
My view is that assistive hardware should pass the “Best Buy test” That is, content should be accessible on devices (personal computers, cell phones, etc.) that you are likely to be found in many homes. This relieves the burden of the user with disability from having to spring for a costly specialized device.

With regard to packaging-usability, I had been toying with some assistive technology scenarios for making packaging more accessible, beginning with RFID technology.

I soon realized many problems with RFID, but most importantly: I would fail the Best Buy test. A consumer-grade RFID scanner? Every see one of those at Best Buy? I eventually circled back to optical-recognition. Most cell phones already had cameras, why couldn’t the phones become scanners?

I have recently learned that the solution has probably been been gathering around me in the development of apps for “smartphones.” All this, while I muddle through the days with “intellectually-challenged phone” (funny that we now complain when the phone ‘only’ has a video camera, calendar, calculator… on it).

Phones That See
As a dumphone user, I had to be made aware of 21st century technology by my printed edition of Newsweek. In the article, I learned about an innovative company , Occipital, that has developed the means of turning an iPhone into a barcode scanner for the purpose of comparison shopping and nutritional planning.

I also learned that they have developed another application that will scan a bar code and compare it against a database of 200,000 products for nutritional planning.
Yesterday, I learned of a Google’s mobile phone app for reading barcodes.

How Can These Solutions Promote Accessibility?
As they used to say in the Six Million Dollar Man, “We have the technology.” Though it’s unclear what these companies are planning in the area of accessibility with their applications.

In looking at my original problem statement, in light of this smartphone technology, the question becomes how do we leverage existing technology to make inflexible media (such as packaging) more accessible to consumers?

Here is a high-level description, of what the smartphones could offer:

• A consumer would to be able to use a device that will allow the consumer to understand the composition, and risks of what is contained inside the package. Real simply: a user would be given option to view/hear dosage level, disclaimers and ingredients in enlarged text, or audio-video formats.
• A consumer should be able to set up a profile that will be able to compare their needs, or restrictions, against specific ingredients in packaged foods or drugs. For example: if my profile shows that I am allergic to peanuts I should be able to know immediately if a product contains peanuts (ingredients) or if there is risk to exposure to peanuts during the manufacturing process (disclaimer).
• A consumer should have the ability to see, or hear, the ingredients, dosages and disclaimer in languages other than the one in which packaging is written.

Benefits to the consumer
Well, being able to read package with the intent of avoiding lethal dosages, or allergic reactions is enough for me.

Moving forward
The technology is here, though there is still much to ponder:

• What are other opportunities are there to make print vehicle more accessible? I can think of a few. (Don’t limit the thinking to UPC, there are other types of barcodes. And while you’re at it, don’t limit the thinking to barcodes. Think about character- and picture-recognition opportunities as well).
• What non-technical challenges (information architecture, content management, training…) lie ahead? I can think of a lot, though the payoff will be well worth it.

Accessibility, Content Management, Universal Design for Learning Apple, Assistive Technology, Google, Occipital

Content Management, Digital Asset Management, Uncategorized DAM, Instructional Design

Is your organization providing content in accessible formats? I’m going to go out on a limb and guess probably not. If you’re answer is yes, then it’s likely that you are required to be 508-compliant by a government agency

I’ve long held that the delivery of accessible content makes business sense. There are many statistics that show the purchasing power of users with disabilities and what an under-served market this is. Note the US’s Americans with disabilities site.

With that in mind, think of the time and energy expended trying to ensure that your site is compliant with Firefox, Safari, or various mobile devices. Doesn’t it make business sense to ensure that content is “people-compliant” as well?

As the population ages, users with disabilities will become more prevalent. It’s likely that current economic conditions will cause people to delay retirements, the work force in the coming years is to be a lot grayer than economists had ever anticipated (I imagine the fashion industry will contend that “72 is the new 55″). Furthermore, people who were members of 18-to-34 demographic when e-commerce first got a foothold now roughly fall into the “30-to-46″ demographic; I am at the older edge of that group.

Recently my eye doctor was kind enough to use the euphemism “progressive lenses” in describing my new prescription, but there is no denying that I now wear bifocals. My vision is diminishing. The number of users with visual, auditory mobility and cognitive impairments will continue to grow as the population ages; businesses would do well to have a strategy to capture this market.

However, I think the impetus for change is more likely to come from legal decisions like this In summary Target lost a suit against the National Federation for the Blind was forced to pay $6 million and to adhere to federal accessibility guidelines.

It seems likely that organizations will suddenly find time and money to make content accessible rather than write a check for $6 million (plus legal costs and diminished reputation…. ).

Is this legal decision a tipping point for accessible content in the commercial space? If so, what solutions will be at the forefront of managing and delivering people-compliant content?

Accessibility, Content Management 508, Target

Let me begin with the parsimonious edition of this blog: Content management is defined as who gets what, when and how in an organization. Have a great week!

That’s really all you need to know to help you to move away from analysis paralysis and begin managing your content. The rest of this post is optional

In the past few days, I’ve seen numerous Tweets and Linkedin updates, etc. pointing to definitions of enterprise content management, digital asset management, media asset management. learning management systems…. (also known as ECM, DAM, MAM, LMS respectively).

I know the authors mean well, but I think that another wave of overlapping and competing definitions, just further distracts from the real mission of putting content in front of appropriate eyes at appropriate times. We need fewer definitions not more.

Whatever manufacturers, integrators, bloggers, etc. might call their solutions (ECM, LMS…) they are all managing content. This is something I alluded to in a recent blog.

Any content management (….DAM, DM, ECM…) system shoud provide:

• Security
• Content Repurposing
• Workflow
• Fulfillment

Several years ago, I read a paper  by Frank Gilbane that contained some timeless comments about content management, most notably that content management is:

“….a relatively recent term that has emerged coincident with the web….”

and

“It would be nice to think that the industry realized we needed a useable term that didn’t discriminate between content types and chose “content” to fill the gap we described above. But of course that isn’t what happened. Instead there continues to be a slow evolution of what we understand content management to be.”

That still hasn’t happened, we are still very discriminatory against content types.

Content management is a great descriptive (robust , extensible, scaleable…) term. However, its usage is rooted in the description of the late 20th century tools (Vignette, Interwoven…) that helped to facilitate management of Web content. I don’t think that people really considered that products that were bearing the DAM (Cumulus, Telescope….) or DM (Documentum, Filenet…) labels had been managing content all along. As were the staff members at your downtown library.

That being said we can continue to argue about the acronyms. Or we can ask really smart person, I defer to the noted content management expert Harold Lasswell, who said that content management ( including DAM, ECM, DM…) “is who gets what, when, and how.”

OK that was a bit of a reality distortion. Lasswell was a political scholar, and he never said that; he was talking about…politics. The quote was “Politics is who gets what, when and how in a society.”

Still, we can apply Lasswell’s adage to the area of content management:

Content Management is who gets what, when and how in an organization. All content management systems should help to facilitate the following:

Who Gets The content? (Security)

• Content consumers — students, customers, employees…
• Content contributors — artists, writers…
• Content Approvers—editors, managers…

What Content Do They Get? (Content Creation and Repurposing Rules)

• Word Documents
• Web Pages
• PDFs
• MPEGs
• Braille
• Voice

When Do They Get The Content? (Workflow)

• When they browse (content consumers)
• When they’re working on it (content producers)
• When its ready to be published (content approvers)

How Do They Get The Content? (Fulfillment)

• Download to desktop
• E-mail
• FTP
• iPhone

Get it?

We can continue bicker over definitions and parsing the three-letter acronyms, or we can defer to Dr. Lasswell. Stop mulling over acronyms and go solve your  organization’s (or your clients’ ) content problems.

Content Management, Digital Asset Management CM, DAM, ECM, Lasswellian, Parsimony

Several months ago, one of my professional contacts recently sent me an article about digital asset management (DAM) trends. In addition to providing a layer of validation about my predictions for DAM opportunities in 2009, the article gave me a reason to review a blog I published a few weeks ago about SharePoint-as-DAM.

I think that the message of my original post might have been obfuscated in the discussion of SharePoint and DAM products. If so, here is my point: interoperability. There will be fewer full-scale implementations of content systems in 2009 than in 2008 (or 2007…). The opportunities to enable peaceful co-existence of legacy systems are still there.

I’ve gotten a lot of mileage from this map. And I feel a need to extend CMS Watch’s transit metaphor: How do you establish a bus route between your portal (SharePoint, Interwoven, …) and your DAM (Telescope, Artesia..). How can you build a bike path between your Web site (Vignette, IBM…) and your WordPress blog? (Many thanks to Tony Byrne et al for creating and maintaining this great visual representation).

I will write more on the larger topic of interoperability in the near future, In the meantime here is a refreshed edition of SharePoint-as-DAM blog:

I have been having conversations about SharePoint and digital asset management with software developers and prospective clients for several weeks. I had been meaning to pencil down some of my thoughts, but had not gotten around to it. Fortunately, Michael Moon had posed a SharePoint-as-DAM question on Linkedin’s Masters of Digital Assets discussion forum. My response is below:
SharePoint certainly has its merits. It’s actually relatively painless to set up a web site or an intranet with SharePoint. Its document and picture libraries allow for storage, versioning, metadata-customization and simple workflow for file management. Furthermore, SharePoint provides the means to add wikis, blogs and social networking to an organization’s portal. So, in the sense that any content that adds to organizational value is an asset…SharePoint does offer DAM capabilities.

However, my background is in publishing and advertising, so I’m something a DAM snob. I don’t think that SharePoint provides adequate functionality to be used as a DAM solution. A few strong opinions ahead:

SharePoint is Microsoft-centric (Surprise!). You can save file metadata directly from a document….as long as it’s an Office document. This a great thing considering that most organizations use Office documents. However—I’m going to go out an limb here– some organizations evaluating DAM solution might be working with Adobe products, or other tools such as Quark Xpress.

SharePoint has inadequate file-conversion options. SharePoint can be configured to convert things like Word and Excel to HTML; but there is no built-in functionality to convert images (.psd to jpeg……ai to png, etc.).  Anybody who is talking about DAM is talking about images! On-the-fly conversions of image are a must in a DAM solution.

SharePoint offers no sophisticated integration with compound-content tools. Remember the term “desktop publishing” from the last millennium? Well, organizations still print. Layout tools such as Quark and InDesign are still prevalent. Mature DAM tools (such as Telescope, Artesia, MediaBecaon..) offer sophisticated drag-and-drop capabilities for adding images to layout documents. SharePoint does not.

Color Management is not on SharePoint’s radar. Did I mention that organizations still print? The demise of the CMYK world has been greatly exaggerated. And while the volume of print production may drop, the importance of color-fidelity is constant. Brand-conscious organizations are inflexible when it comes to color, and they should be. SharePoint idoes not support color-profiling as do industry-leading DAM tools.

I could go on. I have not even addressed SharePoint’s support for video files. Perhaps in another blog.

To be clear, the inadequacies that I have described are in reference to an out-of-the-box SharePoint implementations. It’s possible to add some DAM-specific functionality to SharePoint with customization. However, I think the answer is more likely in third-party add-ons to SharePoint, or perhaps integrating SharePoint with a traditional DAM solution.

There are some third-party tools that can help SharePoint towards DAM. When I first started working with SharePoint a while back, I demo’d some SharePoint add-ons (Web Parts) ADAM and Equilibirum among others. These Web Parts allow SharePoint to have a more-traditional DAM flavor by offering functionality to convert images, or add items to a shopping cart.

In the past few months, I have had several conversations about the prospect of integrating SharePoint with DAM solutions (happy to talk your ear off about such things you want to reply privately . I know of a former client that implemented a robust DAM solution many years ago and is in the midst of integrating that with SharePoint, which they are using for web content management. I think such integrations with SharePoint will be hot area for the DAM industry.

One of the problems I’ve seen with SharePoint user acceptance is the ‘like factor”. People hear about SharePoint’s social networking, enterprise search and other features and are expecting it to be be ‘like Facebook’, “like Google” etc. Users have inflated expectations of certain features and may be somewhat disappointed when SharePoint is implemented.

I think when DAM is mentioned with respect to SharePoint, assumptions seemed to be that SharePoint is “like Artesia” “like Telescope” or “like Mediabeacon.” An out-of-the-box SharePoint implementation will fall short on this front, too.

SharePoint ain’t like DAM.

To reiterate: SharePoint has many strengths, but in my admittedly-snobbish opinion, DAM isn’t among them. Still, I think there are numerous opportunities for SharePoint to work in conjunction with established DAM technology. As the previously-cited CMSWire article contends, DAM vendors will ignore SharePoint at their own peril.

Content Management, Digital Asset Management, SharePoint CMS, DAM, MOSS

During my time in the creative services and Web technology industries, a point of frustration has been that a lot of potentially productive energy is squandered as practitioners argue about whether a solution is one or more of the following:

• Web Content Management (WCM) or
• Digital Asset Management (DAM) or
• Enterprise Content Management (ECM) or
• Learning Content Management (LCM) or
• Some Other Acronym

So that we may bypass such distractions, let me say the following:

• All digital assets are content; however…
• Not all content can be considered an asset.
• Content must provide organizational value to be considered digital asset.

That being said, my question is what makes a digital liability?

There many attributes about a content item that can diminish its value. These are a few that come to mind:

• Digital master is of insufficient resolution, improper color space, or inadequate frame rate (for video).
• Content is improperly described by metadata.
• Multiple replicas (or approximations) of a content item are stored many different locations. This can include copies nested in files system directories or stored in offline media.
• Organizational technologies or processes don’t provide adequate reuse/repurposing opportunities.
• Inconsistent modifications among language derivatives of content items.
• Orphaned files where renditions, or proxies become detached from their source files
• Inadequate archival policy
• Compound content (from Quark, InDesign, etc.) that is ‘unaware’ of the locations of its supporting files such as photos and illustrations.
• Bit Rot. This is the case where the storage medium (tape, optical disk, etc.) starts to degrade over time causing data loss.

In short, if you content can’t be found, used, transformed, or shared then it is a digital liability.

Content Management, Digital Asset Management Digital Liability