iterativelearning

I’m using VoiceThread in the EdTec class I’m teaching this summer and was curious about students’ perceptions of this tool versus the more text-oriented medium of the blog. I wasn’t looking for anything scientific, just some informal, preliminary feedback, but one of the more interesting comments had to do with how our blog was organized. For this student, she found the standard chronological sequence problematic because it didn’t allow her to follow a thread by topic, which made reviewing the conversation that took place there a more disjointed experience.

As anyone who has taught online already knows, blogs certainly have solid potential as a platform for facilitating discussions, but as blogs mature, students can perceive them as just another assignment-box to check. Aware of this reality, teachers then don their creativity caps with the hope of designing blog assignments that encourage discussions to flow more organically, where students are participating in more self-directed styles. Who knows, maybe a more topically organized interface would allow for better usability, and therefore help faculty with meeting this goal? Perhaps the topics could be arranged in one or more circles with each topic being click-able. And to add a little more usability sugar to the mix, maybe topics could be named (e.g., folksonomy) and managed by assigned student-facilitators. Perhaps it’s time to think about alternative designs for the education blog.

Flickr image credit: cogdogblog

On the research front, 2011 marked the introduction of a new version of ProQuest; unfortunately, I recently found out that it doesn’t play friendly with Macs.

Here’s a quick synopsis of my experience.

After doing my usual university-credential login, I went to download a pdf and was greeted with a message to install missing plugins.

Initially, I tried skipping over the plugin-install prompt (figuring it was to install Adobe Reader which I already had), but ran into a dead end. So even though I have the full Adobe CS Suite, I went ahead and complied on the second go-round and clicked the button to install the plugin. I was hoping my plugin acquiescence would solve the problem, but that was not to be the case as I was then greeted with this sad output:

Feeling it was time to take it to the next level, I shot off a quick email query to my university library and got a very prompt and helpful reply explaining that the problem was with ProQuest, and they were aware of it, but didn’t have a timeline for fixing it.

So what’s a Mac-research-geek to do? Start a support group? (Marginalized Macs?) I thought that with all the massive popularity of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad that this compatibility problem would disappear. But apparently not. Up until now, I’ve had no problem with ProQuest whatsoever. I understand that these things take time, but it would be nice if they at least gave us Mac users the option of using an older, more compatible version. They could even spice it up with a clever little marketing tagline: Old School.

Despite Twitter, I’m still a frequent user of RSS, and when it comes to readers, I’m a big fan of NetNewsWire (both the desktop and iPhone versions). It’s got that Mac look-and-feel and the 3-pane capability (folders, titles, posts) that saves me the hassle of launching full posts in a separate browser.

But recently the desktop version has been giving me troubles with what should be a very routine function: deleting folders. For some strange reason, every time I delete one, it magically reappears.

Apparently, there are others who had the same problem and they had good luck with a clean reinstall, so I tried that. But as a likely omen of things to come, quick and easy success was not to be had.

So, on to other options … Because I sync it with Google Reader, I thought that might be the culprit, so I turned off the syncing. But no luck there either. Then I tried unsubscribing on the odd chance that the problem was one of semantics (especially since the current version of the NetNewsWire UI no longer included a simple drop-down menu option for deleting folders). But still, no dice. So that left with me checking out some CTRL-Click options. The Show Info option kind of surprised me with its depth; it displayed five layers: Name, Refreshing, Persistence, Exporting, and Enclosures & Podcasts. Refreshing seemed to be the most relevant to my problem, so I ticked the Don’t Refresh option thinking that maybe the reason the folder kept reappearing was that the system kept wanting to refresh it as long as it had a connection to the Net. But I struck out there as well.

The Columbo-like detail in this puzzle is why they removed the Delete Folder option from their previous UI. It seems like a pretty standard option to me and one that wouldn’t really add much bloat.

Technorati Tags:
Apple, NetNewsWire

I’m probably missing something, but when I’m scrolling a long web page on my iPhone (like a news article), it would seem that there should be a quick and easy way to jump back to the top (e.g., double-tap). As it is right now, I have to manually scroll, which is kind of a pain when it’s a long news article. But maybe instead of having to tweak the code for double-tapping, there needs to be more commitment to coding for the mobile experience. I was reminded of this when reading a recent post from Six Revisions:

If you’re working on an existing site’s mobile web interface, only the essential elements should be brought over to the mobile web. Mobile users don’t want to have to look for information or scroll through multiple pages to find what they are looking; they want their needs to be met quickly.

TechCrunch has a post post on a company called Time-to-Know that's moving to push school systems in alignment with 21st century learning demands. Of course, the EdTech market has lots of players working on this front, and Time-to-Know looks like they're aiming to do some pretty interesting things, but the part that caught my eye (for writing this post anyway) was the section on infrastructure requirements:

Schools committing to Time To Know's curriculum must be able to provide on-premises technical support. This means that if a student’s netbook experiences technical problems, it will dealt with immediately, rather than having to wait for an IT support professional to make a call days after

With the iPad hubbub still fresh in my mind, I couldn't help but substitute the word netbook with iPad. Given Apple's solid track record on platform stability (e.g, no viruses) and ease-of-use, this could be a pretty good scenario for a test run.

I was using netLibrary a couple of days ago in preparation for one of my instructional design classes and thought about how nice it would be if there were more robust annotation tools (e.g., text highlighting). It appears that there might be a version that allows for this, but I’m guessing that this option comes with a pretty hefty price tag. There’s also no date on this press release so it’s not clear how current (i.e., applicable) this information is. Along these same lines, it would be even better if the ebooks could be published in the open ePub standard so students could read it on all different kinds of mobile devices.

Technorati Tags:
netLibrary, ePub, Kindle

A couple of days ago, I was skimming the headlines in Fast Company, and read about a new search engine called Duck Duck Go. So I gave it a try and after a few successful preliminary searches was impressed enough to try it out as my default engine for a couple of days.

Here are just a few, initial impressions …

• Clean, simple interface
• Easy one-click step for adding it to your favorite browser (e.g., Firefox, Flock)
• A Zero-click Info box that gives you a concise description of your search term at the top of your search results. For example, if you entered the search term Bioinformatics, you would see a concise, one-sentence description set off at the top of the page inside a red border.
• A clever and very simple way to filter your search results (e.g., YouTube, Flickr, Twitter) by clustering all your options as tight box of more than 25 icons in the upper-right of the page.

So after two solid days of Duck Duck Go as my default, I’m leaning towards Fast Company’s conclusion. Okay, maybe it’s got a bit of a silly name, but maybe that’s what people thought when they first heard the name Google way back in the 90s.

Technorati Tags:
Flock, Duck Duck Go, Fast Company

In my technical writing class, my students recently finished a Documentation module by writing instructions for a video creation software (Animoto). In reviewing and testing their instructions, I was reminded of how easy this tool is to use. In a few short steps, you can create a video, add text, and even a soundtrack. It’s also easy to distribute and share across platforms like YouTube.

This kind of tool-simplicity allows students to focus on what they want to do with it, rather than worrying about the intricacies of how to use it. When I think about the future look of learning systems, I’d like to see more attention paid to ease of use and cross-platform sharing. Ideally, learning systems should be able to incorporate an Animoto-like tool where, in the case of my tech writing class, it would be easy for them to create instructional videos. In Alan Cooper’s well-known work on Interaction Design, he mentions that the best interface is none at all, meaning, of course, that the interface is so helpful that the user isn’t even conscious of its presence. Now there’s an ideal worth remembering.

Technorati Tags:
Alan Cooper, Animoto

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.

Technorati Tags:
Amazon, iPhone, Kindle, Nielsen

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?

Technorati Tags:
Cooper, Norman