iterativelearning

Hardware like the MacBookPro and iPhone have begun to mainstream gesture interfaces.

I was kind of thinking about this at a recent visit to my regular bus stop. More specifically, while waiting for the bus to show up, I killed a little time by checking out the readerboard that displays all the different routes and corresponding arrival and departure times. As I looked at this, I started to think about how someone new to the bus system would decipher it. While the layout was pretty intuitive and logical, the font on the timetables and maps was very small; perhaps so small that a new, prospective rider would simply give up trying to figure out the best route to their destination. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could design these readerboards with gesture interfaces so people could zoom in on those parts of the map or timetables where they wanted more details? The bus system folks could look to CNN as their model.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybkidUnbjcE&hl=en&fs=1]

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Interface, iPhone, CNN

Interesting development in my WTW class … A couple of weeks back, I had my students do some informal usability testing of a wiki tool. Although, they identified some problems, a few of them mentioned, perhaps not surprisingly, that they would much rather use this tool as a forum for web authoring assignments than the common default (Dreamweaver). Why? It wasn’t just price, but it was also ease of use. This ease of use is one of the points that Stewart Mader emphasizes in his inspiring book, Wikipatterns.

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wiki, Mader

I gave a presentation at a conference recently where, unfortunately, the rooms had no internet connection, so presenters had to use static screenshots of webpages. While there are plenty of tools out there for snapping screenshots (e.g., Paparazzi, Grab for Mac users), I recently happened to come across another one that comes as an add-on for Flock; it even offers three options: copy, upload, and save. Pretty nifty.

I’m already a big fan of Flock, but here’s another reason to keep up the love.

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Flock

In a meeting today, we were talking about ideas for a workshop on DE pedagogy. During one part of our discussion, we were sharing stories about how we use the various tools to support our teaching strategies, when one of the faculty shared an interesting detail about the Announcements tool.

With our LMS tool, WebCT, you can configure an announcement to appear as a pop-up window when the user logs into the site. Of course, this is designed to make it practically impossible for students to miss the announcement, which in theory, is a good thing, especially if you want to alert them to something important like a change in deadline or crucial assignment detail. But here’s the interesting usability angle: this colleague mentioned that some students had indicated to her that they ignore pop-up windows because they view them in the same way they view pop-up ads in all other websites — spam. I wonder if this was really the case or if the students were just using it as an escape hatch for avoiding responsibility for whatever the announcement may have obligated them to. If legit, it would be interesting to know what the rough percentage is out there of student users who ignore them? Has ignoring pop-up windows become such an ingrained user behavior that it’s applied even if they’re in a LMS? Based on a recent study at NC State

students seemed to find any dialog box a distraction from their assigned task; nearly half said that all they cared about was getting rid of these dialogs.

maybe …

Image credit: Swiss Bones

David Pogue is one of my favorite tech writers when it comes to software and gadget reviews. He brings humor and clear language to an industry that can sometimes take itself too seriously and speak in strings of acronyms. In fact, I often point my tech writing students to some of his reviews and videos because they stand out as such stellar examples of communicating tech stuff to non-experts.

Anyway, in one of his recent postings, he issues a clarion call of sorts to tech writers on tech terms to avoid. Two of my favorites that appear in his list of offenders are enable and functionality.

• Enable. Who on earth says, “Enable the GPS function”? Only user-manual writers and computer-book authors. Say “Turn on GPS” instead.
• * Functionality. WOW, do I despise this pretentious word. Five syllables–ooh, what a knowledgeable person you must be!

  It means “feature.” Say “feature.”

DE faculty periodically write about using blogs as a complement to a CMS/LMS because of its easy scalability. WordPress recently announced the addition of a polling feature, PollDaddy!. To set it up, all you need to do is click an icon, enter your questions, and follow the prompts.

Many people are familiar with Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons as a reasonable and constructive way to address copyright concerns in a digital age. In perhaps a nod to Lessig, Bryan Sinclair describes the notion of a Commons 2.0 from an academic library’s perspective. He sees it as something that

brings together a wide range of elements to foster student learning in new and creative ways. It is not a static computer lab; rather, it incorporates the freedom of wireless communication, flexible workspace clusters that promote interaction and collaboration, and comfortable furnishings, art, and design to make users feel relaxed, encourage creativity, and support peer-learning.

Besides collaboration, another element that catches my eye in this description is his phrase, flexible workplace clusters. As mobile technology adoption continues to grow, flexibility seems central to any plans for designing academic work spaces. For him, this means moving away from a hardware-centric approach that relies on rigid rows of desktop computers to a more flexible, modular approach that features things like kidney-shaped tables to promote collaboration and docking stations to accommodate laptops and mobile devices. And not to downplay the theoretical, he notes how this kind of design applies constructivist principles where learning is decentered and co-constructed.

Image credit: Brandy Shaul

Twit gave some positive reviews to Neal Stephenson’s new book, Anathem so I decided to take a quick look at it. On Stephenson’s page, there’s a link to the publisher’s site where you can view some basic information about the book and read a couple sample chapters. What’s interesting from a UX standpoint is that you can’t enlarge or adjust the size of the text. On my MacBook Pro, visibility isn’t a problem, but I’d be curious to see the experience on the Kindle, iPhone, or other device. The text also looks like it’s been OCR’d rather than being transferred as a straight digital file, because the font serifs seem more blurry than they should otherwise be. This is still a beta version, though, and the Feedback tab is very visible.

Came across an interesting report in CIO in which Abilene Christian University offered all its incoming Freshman a choice of iPhone or iPod Touch. One rather interesting detail is the pivotal role of an English professor in helping this project become a reality. Apparently inspired by the pedagogical possibilities, he wrote a 40-page white paper on what he and others thought a campus populated with students and faculty who all had iPhone-like-devices would look like. Also kind of interesting is that ACU uses Google to power its webmail and calendar services; similarly, these are the two most popular uses that these lucky, first-year students are using their iPhones or iPod Touches for.

In the last year or so, I’ve read increasingly about faculty either trying or implementing Google Docs as an alternative to MS. Last month, Google added a bibliography tool and English faculty will be glad to see that it includes MLA, as well as APA, AMA, and Chicago. So here’s another reason to give GDocs the ol’ college try.