iterativelearning

This year was my first year at the Southwest Texas Popular Culture & American Culture Association (SW TX PCA) conference. I heard about their Technical Writing area through a posting on the ATTW listserv. In the panel I was on, the focus was primarily pedagogical issues and enjoyed some really solid papers on using wikis in the classroom, measuring the time commitment for online teaching, and mine, which looked at scaffolding digital learning environments. Another track I really enjoyed was one that explored genre theory in video games and community building with micro-blogging tools such as Twitter. An added bonus was that the conference was right here in Albuquerque and the weather was wonderfully cooperative (sunny, high 60s, low 70s).

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ATTW, SWTXPCA

I’ve blogged about Zotero before (1, 2, 3) and think it’s a great tool for researchers. A couple of recent enhancements they’ve added that make it even better for my workflow are

• Syncing across computers
• Saved searches

Syncing of course, is ideal for those instances in which you’re doing research on a machine other than the one you normally use. And for most academics this happens quite a bit (e.g., one machine at the office and one at home).

I find the saved searches to be a huge time-saver because it saves me from documenting it in a separate note or word-processing app.

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Zotero

I don’t know much about tea, but I do like Morning Thunder and have been a fan of for a bunch of years. For whatever reason, as I was getting ready to make myself a cup this morning, my eye caught an interesting detail on the inside of one of the flaps of the box: Ever wonder why no string and bag?

Unlike many of those other teas out there, I presume anyway (maybe I’m way off), each bag comes with a string and tag attached to the bag. The tag, of course, is the most important element in this duo as it shoulders the responsibility of marketing and promotion (logo/brand). But I wonder how many consumers actually pay attention to that logo on the tag? Does it make a difference if they’ve already decided to buy it? Is it worth 3.5 million pounds of waste [according to the little blurb on the inside of the box] that ends up in the landfill? Certainly, there’s marketing at work here, but it nevertheless shows the connection between our buying decisions and consequences on the environment. Are other tea companies being inspired to go sans string and tag?

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Celestial Seasonings

As readers of this blog may remember, I’m a big fan of Flock. Besides solid stability and extensions, its real distinguishing feature is smooth integration of a wide variety of social media tools (e.g., Facebook, Flickr, Digg, YouTube, WordPress.com). Of course, the more I use it, I think about little things that might make it better. Yesterday when I accessed my YouTube account, I thought of how web video has been around for quite a while, and with that age and maturity, we’ve seen other good video tools emerge such as Blip and Vimeo.

I first heard about Blip through Creative Commons and Vimeo has sessions from such notable events as the Future of Web Applications (FOWA) annual conference. It would be nice to see the Flock dev team add these to their already impressive array of tools.

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Flock, Blip, Vimeo

Some interesting sessions at the Southern California Linux Expo this weekend

• Open Source Textbooks
• Open Source Software in Education
• College and Open Source

The current economic crisis perhaps accelerates the interest level in the whole sphere of textbook economics. (From the abstract, it looks like there is some philosophical overlap with Negroponte’s well-known One Laptop Per Child Initiative. Since I teach tech writing, I like the inclusion of FLOSS Manuals — the documentation that ideally makes open source software intelligible to more than just those who speak the language of command line. The other two look good for keeping up on changes related to developments in rapidly maturing alternative learning management systems such as Moodle and Drupal.

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Learning Management Systems, Linux, Open Source, One Laptop Per Child

Matthew Kirschenbaum has a thought-provoking essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Why humanities students should learn to program.

A key part of his argument lies in doing away with the stereotype of programming as little more than cubicle-bound nerds hunched over keyboards and engrossed in incessant, tedious cycles of debugging software. He analogizes this to the same way that English Department faculty are often viewed by many on the outside as doing nothing more than correcting grammar. The push here then is to see programming as fundamentally a creative act.

But why? How? He points us to Donald Knuth’s famous tome (The Art of Computer Programming), and draws from his own experience to explain that programming is about model-making and that the rich variety of programming languages gives the writers of these programs more than one way to construct these different models in much the same way that novelists, for example, have many different ways of constructing a story line. So in programming, there are different ways to envision the model of a word-processing program or spreadsheet program (hence the historical battles between Microsoft and all its open source and proprietary competitors). Then, of course, there’s also the increasing popularity of that epitome of digital, model-making, namely, virtual words (Second Life).

Understanding these virtual worlds, he explains, requires a “procedural rhetoric, or procedural literacy.” For me, this procedural rhetoric seems like a descriptive chronology of choices and movements, or a script, made by game-players, or characters, in the virtual world. Terms like rhetoric, characters, and scripts are, of course, very familiar to those of us in English and the Humanities. And so some initial questions that spring to mind are, What are the scripts being constructed by the characters in these virtual worlds? How are these scripts being influenced by rhetorical situations within these virtual domains? How is our understanding or perception of the real and virtual influenced by the shifting back and forth between these two spaces? These questions don’t seem like the sole purview of geeks.

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Second Life, Chronicle of Higher Education, Matthew Kirschenbaum

For a city its size, Albuquerque has a pretty lively digital arts scene (Arts Lab, Albuquerque Web Geeks, Webuquerque). Another exciting development here is a thriving Linux group that is already in the process of planning a conference for next fall. The conference website is up and so if you’re in the area or plan to be, it’s definitely worth a look.

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Linux, Albuquerque

A recent trip to the copy room got me thinking about Donald Norman’s usability classic The Design of Everyday Things (DOET). As one of the larger departments on campus, we’ve got an industrial-sized copier that sees pretty heavy use. Like most copiers at this level, they have all kinds of features and functions. One of these many functions is email (e.g., emailing copied documents to yourself or another person).

A couple of days ago, I happened to be in the copy room when a colleague asked if I could help him with this email feature. I was glad to help, but at the same time, mentioned to him that I rarely use this copier and have never used the email feature. Still, the interface was reasonably intuitive and as far as I could tell, it looked like he had correctly input all the necessary information. The only interface detail that seemed to be causing confusion was that the system hadn’t given him any visible confirmation of these correct inputs. More specifically, it hadn’t given him a confirmation message and so he didn’t know if the email had been sent. There was no signifier. So together we carefully searched the touch-screen interface for any hint that the email had been successfully sent, but to no avail. Pressed for time, he shrugged and moved on to more important things. As Norman illustrates in DOET, this type of user frustration is all too common.

So why didn’t the designers include a confirmation message? Did they look to Cooper and design for intermediates? Did they see this user scenario as equivalent to email? Obviously for heavily used interfaces, such as email, confirmation messages are redundant and unnecessary (and it’s got a “Sent” box if the user feels the slightest bit uncertain). But what about situations such as this, where a tool is used only sporadically at best? Does the novice muddle through or hope to find someone nearby who can tell him? Is there or should there be a quasi-decisive metric for including a confirmation message? 50% usage? 60%? Or should it be something simpler (e.g., if it has a Sent box, then no, but if it doesn’t, then yes)? Perhaps some help with this confirmation conundrum can be found with academic research databases in which there are definitely some that still include confirmation messages (i.e., for those instances in which a researcher wants to email article to him or herself). How do the designers of these research databases decide whether or not to include a confirmation message? Do they lean more towards Cooper or Norman?

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Cooper, Norman

In case Drupal fans missed it, last month, the modules page enjoyed a UI upgrade so that they’re now much easier to find. The Finder now appears prominently at the top-center of the main page. You can also restrict your searches by version. As a quick experiment, I ran a few sample searches for Version 6 modules (e.g., blog, calendar, wiki) and got a list of good, solid results.

Credit: Reintroducing Module Finder

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Drupal

Wiggio has updated its online collaboration space to include capabilities such as group email addresses, real-time file editing, and photo and video sharing. Although there are many other online collaboration tools (e.g., Basecamp, Zoho Projects), Wiggio primarily targets education and academics. Like these others, it has a pretty expansive array of solid features, but a couple that stand out for me are texting and voice notes.

As someone who teaches online, when I think about collaboration, ease of use is an important factor. With most of the traditional LMSs I’m aware of, texting hasn’t yet been built in, so whenever students want to participate they need to login to the site and then navigate through at least a couple of layers until they reach the place where they share thoughts, ideas, feedback, and so forth. Texting leapfrogs these layers.

The voice notes feature offers the potential to enhance the media richness of the collaborative experience. Again, here too, Wiggio makes it easy (i.e., click and record). When collaborators can not only see and read what another person has written, but also hear him or her, it introduces another dimension that expands it from essentially a monochromatic to polychromatic experience.

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Wiggio, Learning Management Systems