iterativelearning

Jakob Nielsen has some thoughts on the most recent Amazon Kindle. Part of his review discusses the Kindle app for the iPhone; he finds the Help a little wanting. Specifically, he mentions that it doesn’t include an embedded help file, but simply directs people to the general Amazon help site, which is optimized for PC display rather than for a mobile viewing context. Not surprisingly, the W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices extensive guidelines helps designers and writers better meet the challenges of mobile contexts.

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Amazon, iPhone, Kindle, Nielsen

Twitter has become all the rage with even late-night comics like Jon Stewart parodying it. With this immense popularity comes a wide variety of third-party clients. Two of my favorites are TweetDeck and Twhirl.

I’ve been thinking a bit about the user interface of each of these. TweetDeck has been my go-to of late with its nifty 3-column layout, and sorting and searching options. Twhirl does a lot of great things too, but one feature I like better than TweetDeck is the nofification feature because it displays the name of the tweet-er and the tweet, whereas TweetDeck just shows a generic notification message. With Twhirl, I can know right away who the tweet is from and what it’s about just by quickly glancing at the notification window and this makes it much easier to prioritize and multi-task.

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Twitter, Tweetdeck, Twhirl

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

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

In yesterday’s W4W class, I talked a little bit about mash-ups and today noticed the Seattle Times has an interesting twist on the popular Google Maps-Traffic data mashup; instead of traffic data, they mash it with a global news feed so that the map then automatically shifts every few seconds to the specific geographical location of that story. They call it Live Maps.

In another line of the ongoing thread of discussion surrounding e-book readers, David Rothman at TeleRead responds to a piece by Christine Rosen. What I like about his post as well as Rosen’s is that they look at the question of concentration, namely, does an e-book reader undermine it, especially if it’s networked to the Web?

The role of concentration plays an important role in educational contexts, which is what grabs my interest. Anecdotally, what I hear from students is that they want good screen clarity that allows for sustained viewing (e.g., no eye strain or headaches) and the ability to annotate. There have certainly been progressions on the screen front, as well as on the annotation front. (Amazon’s Kindle is one device that has annotation capabilities even though it’s demo video doesn’t mention it.)

Going back to the Rothman post, most of what I’ve read to-date on e-book readers has been polemic: either the writer is for or against them. Taking a lead from Steve Krug, this seems like a prime opportunity for user testing, so that the conversation can be based less on ideology and more on actual user experiences.

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Krug, Tele-Read, e-book, Amazon