Knowledge Work

Blogging will be light for the next day or two and likely “lumpy” afterwards; my usual posting schedule (before and after working hours, East Coast time) will be way off, as I’m heading to London for a week on a business trip, and Internet access (and time to write) will have to adjust to that new schedule.

Although I’m going to be kept pretty busy with work, I’m really looking forward to visiting some old friends (Carrie and I both have childhood friends now living and working in London) and drinking some real ale. Hopefully I’ll also manage a trip to Brick Lane for a cheap, fiery curry or two while I’m in town… London has it all over New York when it comes to Indian food.

StopBadware.org is a “Neighborhood Watch” campaign aimed at fighting badware. We will seek to provide reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help consumers to make better choices about what they download on to their computers. We aim to become a central clearinghouse for research on badware and the bad actors who spread it, and to become a focal point for developing collaborative, community-minded approaches to stopping badware.

Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Oxford University’s Oxford Internet Institute are leading this initiative with the support of several prominent tech companies, including Google, Lenovo, and Sun Microsystems. Consumer Reports WebWatch is serving as an unpaid special advisor.

StopBadware.org

Hiding confidential information with black marks works on printed copy, but not with electronic documents, the National Security Agency has warned government officials.

The agency makes the point in a guidance paper on editing documents for release, published last month following several embarrassing incidents in which sensitive data was unintentionally included in computer documents and exposed. The 13-page paper is called: “Redacting with confidence: How to safely publish sanitized reports converted from Word to PDF.”

Instead of covering up digital text with black boxes, it is better to delete any information you don’t want to share, the NSA suggested.

Editing tips from the NSA: CNET News.com

Update: On the TECHWR-L mailing list, user Sue Gallagher points us to a very useful redaction tool for users of Microsoft Word 2003:

The Microsoft Office Word 2003 Redaction Add-in makes it easy for you to mark sections of a document for redaction. You can then redact the document so that the sections you specified are blacked out. You can either print the redacted document or use it electronically. In the redacted version of the document, the redacted text is replaced with a black bar and cannot be converted back to text or retrieved.

Sensitive government documents, confidential legal documents, insurance contracts, and other sensitive documents are often redacted before being made available to the public. With the Word 2003 Redaction Add-in, users of Microsoft Office Word 2003 now have an effective, user-friendly tool to help them redact confidential text in Word documents.

Microsoft Word 2003 Redaction Add-In

Here’s a good overview of how to avoid some all-too-common mistakes when constructing a PowerPoint presentation: 8 mistakes when creating PowerPoint presentations (SympleByte.)

I have long been a fan of O’Reilly Media’s technical books, and a happy subscriber to “Safari Bookshelf,” their online library; in its most basic form, for about $10 a month the Safari plan entitles you to read up to five O’Reilly books on-screen at the same time. It’s a tremendous bargain and value.

Safari is about to get a lot more interesting. O’Reilly has just announced “Rough Cuts,” a way to gain access to very early editions of books on emerging technologies as they are being developed.

Safari Books Online is pleased to announce the launch of the new Rough Cuts service. Rough Cuts gives you early access to content on cutting-edge technologies — before it’s published. It lets you literally read the book as it is being written.

The four inaugural Rough Cuts titles come from O’Reilly Media and share our focus on hot emerging technologies: Ajax Hacks, Flickr Hacks, Ruby on Rails: Up and Running, and Ruby Cookbook. In February, O’Reilly will follow up with Ubuntu Hacks, Ajax Design Patterns, and Perl Hacks. The Pearson Technology Group will join the Rough Cuts service later this quarter with: Macs on the Go, Real World Adobe Creative Suite 2, Secrets of Videoblogging, Imagination Challenge and ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed.

This is a great idea and should prove to be an interesting experiment; O’Reilly has consistently found ways to remain relevant as a print publisher in an increasingly Web-based world, and this idea shows a lot of promise.

Socrates. He would be a very simple person… who should leave in writing or receive in writing any art under the idea that the written word would be intelligible or certain; or who deemed that writing was at all better than knowledge and recollection of the same matters?

Phaedrus. That is most true.

Socrates. I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.

(Plato, Phaedrus - translated by B. Jowett)

If you ever have to teach anyone anything–as part of your job, on a volunteer basis, for any reason at all–or if you ever give presentations, or write user documentation, you could do worse than spend fifteen minutes with this blog post:

…[H]ere’s a crash course on some of our favorite learning techniques gleaned from cognitive science, learning theory, neuroscience, psychology, and entertainment (including game design). Much of it is based around courses I designed and taught at UCLA Extension’s New Media/Entertainment Studies department…

This is not a comprehensive look at the state of learning theory today, but it does include almost everything we think about in creating our books. And although it’s geared toward blogs/writing virtually everything in here applies regardless of how you deliver the learning–you can easily adapt it to presentations, user documentation, or classroom learning.

Creating Passionate Users: Crash course in learning theory

Related:

• Crash Course in Learning - Summary
• (Summary PDF file - 500K)