“When you spend a decade working in Knowledge Management, you can’t help thinking a lot about how people learn. The book that first helped me understand the learning process was Nancy Dixon’s The Organizational Learning Cycle. Nancy was writing about ‘collective learning’, a subject I was already skeptical about even then: I was, and remain convinced that learning is an intensely personal, individual experience, and that we all learn differently.”

“This is the definitive guide to selling your music in the iTunes Music Store and earning income from music downloads. Finding out how to do this can be a painful and time-consuming process, but all the information you need is in this guide. Written primarily for existing (and fledgling) independent record labels, this guide will also be useful for producers, engineers, artists, managers, and attorneys who are handling band and label affairs. Covering the entire process from initially approaching Apple to encoding and submitting your music to the iTunes Music Store, it illustrates the major requirements for getting your music into the iTunes Music Store and shows you where the pitfalls are in the process.” ($20 + s/h)

“MAPublisher 6.0 is the newest version of this powerful suite of plug-ins for Adobe Illustrator 10 and CS that bridges the gap between Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and high-end graphic design for high quality creation, high resolution printing and electronic publishing of maps. Cartographic quality map production is now faster, easier and better.” (Thanks The Map Room)

“Intuition is a name that we give to knowledge structures that are so well ‘routinized’ that they occur subconsciously ó but intuition is something that requires a tremendous amount of learning. But give me any new phenomenon ó ask me about some topic on which I am not an expert and I will take whatever knowledge I have and derive a conceptual model to predict the behavior. That conceptual model is in my head ó it is mental ó hence the name, mental model. Basically, we take whatever we know and we expand it.”

“This is the place where houses are planted, chairs are watered, tables are pruned and fences grow taller and stronger as the years sail past. Extreme trees planted and shaped by Arborsculptor Richard Reames. Arborsculpture is a unique art form that has been called the ultimate branch of topiary with the potential to save the environment. Their are other words and terms that are used to describe this art. Pleaching, permaculture, tree trunk topiary, botanical art, botanical architecture, biotechture, living art, visionary art, and really weird.”

“Itís been said that personas have a limited value when it comes to design. I can see the validity in some of those arguments. I personally see them as very helpful in helping to get some visibility to your users to stakeholders and clients. They can also be excellent discussion tools, but outside of that Iíve realized that their usefulness in the design process is fairly limited. Although, now that I think about it, I do find the actual creation of personas to be helpful in other ways. It forces you to connect with your readers and users and that is always a good thing. The personas themselves, well, they might be a bit over-rated. I use a bit of a scaled down technique I call persona sketching and that seems to be a bit more practical than the use of full blown personas. Where I find them the most useful, personally anyway, is as a writing tool.”