More multi-disciplinarity

One of the sessions from last month’s Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco featured a discussion of cloud computing with Padmasree Warrior of Cisco and Shane Robinson of HP.

It’s a fairly extensive discussion, but with more people in the tech community talking about the reality of a federal-level CTO, one of the questions posed to them was what advice they would offer to the person who would assume such a post. Warrior approached this question from an educational platform and mentioned that she would encourage more multi-disciplinary collaboration; in essence, problems are too complex to cordon off as solvable only by this or that department. Fortunately, there have been many universities who have been (or are) moving in this direction. A few examples that come to mind are MIT’s Media Lab, Penn State’s College of Information Sciences & Technology and Carnegie Mellon’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

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Cisco, HP, Web 2.0

Filed under: Collaboration, Teaching, Tech

Cellular learning

Liz Kolb over at Cell Phones in Learning relays a new and interesting development on the Louisiana community college system’s plan to begin offering courses via cell phone next year. Among other things, she explains that registration will require students to have touch screens and keyboards to participate. Once they register, they will be able to download e-books.

I often hear from students who are frustrated by the high price of conventional textbooks and one of the solutions typically proposed is e-books. Will students see greater cost savings with e-books? Will their experience equal that of what they get with a hard-copy textbook? On the CMS front, what is the quality of the UX? Will the college use Blackboard or another platform? Is there one generally considered to be the most cell-phone-friendly?

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Liz Kolb, Louisiana

Filed under: Design, Distance Education, Teaching, Tech

BuddyBuzz

BuddyBuzz is described as the fastest way to read news on your cellphone. Created by the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, it gives you access to tech news luminaries such as Gizmodo, Boing Boing, Slashdot, Ross Mayfield as well as various others. You can also create your own collections with My Buzzbox, and upload and share articles. In Digg-like style, BuddyBuzz predicts the articles you’ll prefer based on how you’ve ranked previous articles. I haven’t had much time to play around with it, but in my first experiments, here are a few off-the-top impressions:

Pretty cool …
Clean, simple interface – after you activate it, the interface appears somewhat similar to a news ticker except instead of a horizontal stream that runs along the bottom of the screen, it simply displays one word at a time in quick succession. If you want to pause, then you simply hit the pause button.

Look Ma, no scrolling – one nice advantage to this simple word-stream is that it requires no scrolling; this can be a real advantage when you consider how reading news with the typical, small cellphone screen can be pretty scroll-heavy.

Perhaps, less than ideal …
Lack of speed control – because the word-stream moves at a pretty rapid clip, some users might prefer to adjust the speed settings and still feel like they’re getting all the speedy advantages that BuddyBuzz aims to deliver.

No visuals – one disadvantage of the simple, word-stream display is that you won’t see the graphs, images, or photos that would typically accompany a news piece (unless it’s hidden under some menu option that I didn’t see in my initial experiments with it). But maybe the BuddyBuzz creators figure that if speed is the primary draw, then visuals is something that users can easily and logically expect to do without.

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Ross Mayfield, BuddyBuzz, Stanford University, Persuasive Technology Lab

Filed under: Design, Tech, Usability

Visual feasts

Who would have ever thought that producing annual reports of how you spend your personal time would garner all kinds of accolades among the digerati? Well, that’s what’s happened to Nicholas Felton after presenting at the Future of Web Design conference and he talks a little bit about this in a recent interview with web design guru, Paul Boag. But as you might guess from the context, it’s not the content that’s causing the buzz, but the way in which he displays it. After perusing some of the pages, I get the feeling that this would be the way a cartographer would approach an annual report, … where lines, numbers, and plotted points have been substituted for sentences and paragraphs. He has visual displays for such mundane activities as the number of subway routes he’s taken, the number of analog and digital photos he’s snapped, and the restaurant he’s most frequently eaten at. While the activities may be mundane, the depiction is not. For the design geek, it’s a visual feast.

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Nicholas Felton, Paul Boag, Future of Web Design

Filed under: Design

Drafts vs. Outbox

My Nokia (6x) went down for a bit today and when it came back online, I went to my txt message drafts folder to re-send those that I presume didn’t transmit. Interestingly, these unsent messages weren’t in the Drafts folder, but in the Outbox folder.

Maybe I’m too accustomed to the Mac Mail interface, but it seems like the Drafts folder would be the better place to store unsent messages, rather than the Outbox. I wonder what testing would reveal? Would more users first check the Drafts or the Outbox? Let the testing begin …

Filed under: Design, Uncategorized , Apple, Nokia

Activating the peripheries

One of my favorite blogs, Web Worker Daily summarizes an interview they recently did with Ross Mayfield of Socialtext. While the occasion was for the launch of 3.0, the general focus of the conversation is on collaborative networks and how they relate to enterprise-level wikis.

In laying the groundwork for talking about the specific details of Socialtext, he emphasizes the value of weak ties or dynamic peripheries. Traditionally, old-school groupware mostly served the needs of the core (e.g., the group’s executive leadership ranks) or the strong ties, but Mayfield’s Socialtext focuses on activating those dynamic peripheries.

Mayfield also explained how Socialtext allows workers to customize their dashboards similar to the way in which they would customize a Facebook page (e.g., images, audio, video, slides, personal info). He goes on to point out that this can be very useful for giving people a greater sense of connectedness especially in those virtual team contexts where members can be spread out widely across time zones and continents with very little, if any, opportunity for F2F interaction. This emphasis on personalizing or customizing virtual work spaces intersects with research such as that by Sarah Hurlburt in the Journal of Online Learning & Teaching where she discusses it in the context of using blogs in her online courses — Personalization of the blog environment is necessary to create the private space effect …).

For anyone interested in reading more about collaboration/network theory and distributed cognition, there’s a hefty volume out there (Latour’s Reassembling the Social; Hutchins’ Cognition in the Wild). One of the more recent entries is Clay Spinuzzi’s Network: Theorizing Knowledge Work in Telecommunications. I haven’t had a chance to read Spinuzzi’s but definitely plan to add it to the ever-expanding reading list.

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wiki, Socialtext, Ross Mayfield, Web Worker Daily

Filed under: Collaboration, Design, Online learning

Kaltura

The Creative Commons blog recently described an interesting video sharing and production tool called Kaltura.

Kaltura, an “open-source platform for video creation, management, interaction, and collaboration”, boasts a robust platform uncommon among web-apps that includes the ability to annotate, remix, edit, and share video collaboratively over the web.

One of the distinctive features is its focus on collaboration. In an educational context, it would be interesting to see how well students would take to this (e.g., produce an instructional video). After quickly skimming the site, the standouts for me are:

• the remixing and annotating capabilities
• a video player that allows you to import content directly into it
• Plugins for Word Press bloggers, an extension for MediaWiki, and later on, one for Drupal

If you’re not quite ready to take the full plunge, they’ve got a Sandbox under the User Zone tab.

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Kaltura, Drupal, Creative Commons, WordPress, MediaWiki

Filed under: Collaboration, Distance Education, Tech

Search-less

As those who follow the distance education technology scene know, the dominant LMSs (e.g., Blackboard/WebCT) have their share of detractors. One of the most common threads of criticism is its lack of currency not only in terms of tool-related technologies (e.g., RSS, mobile phone integration), but usability as well. Today, I was reminded again of why usability remains an issue. When I needed to do a quick search of the Discussion forums today, I found no search box. It seems to me that a readily identifiable Search box is a fundamental element for an LMS. Even if BB/Wct developers haven’t received a critical mass of feedback regarding this, it should be one of those default features added to the design specs.

Filed under: Design, Online learning , Blackboard, LMS, WebCT