Clayton M. Christensen brings product improvement down to a simple statement in his presentation at the ECS National Forum on Education Policy: “Understanding the job rather than understanding the customer is the critical insight” (at about 8:30 min in the video).
His example is the buying of milk shakes. Collecting data on who buys milk shakes is not enough. A company also needs to understand why the people buy milk shakes at that particular time. In his example, people buy milk shakes before starting their long commute to have something to do while driving. Thus, the company would do good to bring the shake dispenser to the counter and equip it with a pre-paid swipe card system so that customers – who are in a hurry in the morning – can get their milk shake without having to wait in line. Customers who buy milk shakes in the afternoon will most likely have very different needs and thus the company needs to think about a different strategy to get them to buy more milk shakes.
It is nice that I am reminded to renew my membership in the library by January 2, 2010. But why the heck can’t I get into the interlibrary loan form when I am already logged in? I do need to renew my membership immediately though it is not up for another 54 days. It is just “approaching”. When I called the library, the renewal was done within seconds and the friendly person from the interlibrary loan department (he’s a gem getting articles really quickly and being helpful all the time) said there was nothing I could do besides the renewal.
Expiration is approaching
Fortunately, the library did not leave a paper trail that would rival Alan’s experiences.
Oh my gosh. No comments? When I do get some, even two on one post within a really short time, I’m told I don’t have comments? Come on. That’s not fair to the commenters at all.
I will have to take a closer look at my installation over the weekend as I could not approve the comments in the dashboard but only by going into the database itself.
Since last Thursday I have picked up snippets of buzz around Google Wave and finished watching the demo video today (had kept it for my workout to have that pass more quickly ). I am just speechless and can’t wait for it to be publically available.
Wave is a new communication tool that is email, instant messenger, microblog, blog, collaborative writing tool, and some more all in one. It redefines the way online communication is done because you do not have to think about whether you want to write an email, send a Twitter message or start a chat. You just do it all in Wave.
The Wave team from Australia demonstrated so many features and extensions of Wave that your head spins (not in a particular order):
email
instant messenger
embed waves into a blog
wiki
drag and drop photos and links
embed videos
spellchecker
instant translator (I think that one got the biggest applause)
add people to an ongoing conversation
connect waves
inline commenting
collaborative gaming
linking other services, e.g. Twitter, bug tracker, and be able to either update from within Wave or these other services
federation: communication between different Wave installations
playback of the development of a Wave conversation
I think the only things that are missing are audio and video chat. I could imagine audio comments to show up like text comments or have an audio conversation be recorded while working on a document.
Now, how can some of these features be used for learning and for research? The one point that jumps to mind instantly is the possibility of collaborative writing (including using visual media). You see instantly what the others type and do not have to wait until changes are committed. That is similar to EtherPad. You can add comments to a document which can be hidden or displayed which is easier to detect them and to deal with them than in Google Docs where you write them inline with the text. Parts of a current wave can be opened as a new wave to branch conversations.
When you want to research the flow of communication, for example how people interact when writing collaboratively on a document, all you have to do is hit “playback” and the wave unfolds in front of your eyes. I already liked the “playback” feature when I discovered it in the concept mapping software CmapTools. Even though I have not used it yet beyond testing purposes, it has a ton of potential if you are involved in that kind of research because you do not need an additional program to record what has been done, but you can have all actions recorded automatically.
Another great thing about Wave is that it can run on any server and does not have to sit on a Google server. The GUI is also changeable. This is great news because Google is often accused of listening in on conversations, using it all to their own benefit. When the Wave runs on a server different from the Google one, there is no information exchange. However, Wave communications can take place across different servers so that Wave users do not necessarily have to create accounts on all Waves. They then form a federation. According to the developers, only the content that is meant for the Wave users across the systems will be sent to the federation Waves. If a private comment is made between two users of one Wave, the other server does not see that comment at all. That makes Wave attractive to companies, institutions etc. that want to use it, but do not want to put their communication and documents out there on a Google server for confidentiality reasons.
The demo made it all look so simple, but the Wave team spent two years on getting this far and they have pooled resources from other Google programming teams. Google opened the code and invited programmers to get busy on extensions and gadgets for Google Wave to make it more powerful even before the official launch. Let’s see when the Wave will hit our keyboards.
The result is that all the noise is either turned off by the light dimmer or not shown when you open the video in a new window.
Reducing the noise
Having the lights dimmed around online videos is nothing new. A lot of services do that. On Reddit I read that this feature has been around for some months. I did check a few other videos, but did not see the features there. I got the impression, that only Google videos had these added possibilities.
Sure, there is a light bulb beneath all videos with which you can turn the entire screen either darker or completely dark. However, the video is darkened as well which the dimming feature does not do. It only blocks out the noise.
I like to dim the background because if the quality of the video is not sufficient to blow it up to fill the screen, I can still focus on the video only and not be distracted by all the other things around it.
