Internet Literacy in Education
Wanted to share a pretty great video about internet media literacy, and higher education. For someone finishing up a Masters, some of the points he makes ring very loudly. From the YouTube video:
Recently Dr. Wesch spoke at the University of Manitoba where he explained the the basis of this video in a talk entitled, “Michael Wesch and the Future of Education.” I found it fascinating! He describes how he so naturally incorporates emerging technologies into his courses from the smallest seminar type class to the largest lecture theatre filled class.
More importantly he not only talks about the technologies but how he encourages extraordinary participation and collaboration from his students by engaging them in meaningful learning activities.
[...]
During his presentation, the Kansas State University professor breaks down his attempts to integrate Facebook, Netvibes, Diigo, Google Apps, Jott, Twitter, and other emerging technologies to create an education portal of the future.
An actually useful poster from the UPA
This has to be one of the most functional and relevant posters I’ve ever put up on a wall. It’s from the UPA (Usability Professionals Association) and it briefly goes over and organises the process of designing software for the user. I got one mailed to me when I joined the UPA as a free gift.
The poster is incredibly rich with information. It goes through analysis, field studies, creating user profiles, documenting requirements, designing, verifying with users, prototyping, implementation, heuristics, usability testing, and the rest of the steps.
The 11×17″ poster [PDF] is just as detailed as the full-sized one.
As found on mprove.de.
Lost in Transition
A lot of stuff has been happening in the last couple of weeks. For those in the know, I started a new job: Product Designer with Desire2Learn in Kitchener. I complain about the commute from Toronto, but really I’m just fighting the idea of embracing something new. So far, the office has been great: receptive, interesting, and the training program is keeping me busy.
To help me with this commute, I bought a new vehicle, a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I did this the last time I got a new job as well – it’s becoming a bit of tradition. So far I’ve been extremely happy with the new truck! Overthinking a purchase ruins the magic; I still managed to get a great deal, didn’t have to take out any new loans, and feel pretty gangsta’ driving real slow.
Ode to Guelph
With this new job, a new car, a new wake-up time, and being on the verge of finishing my thesis, the life of last summer seems like a distant memory. Even the close relationships I had are changing, or in some cases, ending.
Guelph felt like home for a little while. Living on Waterloo Avenue, stumbling distance from the all-too-convenient downtown, with 6 other amazing people really helped me redefine my social existence. If you’ve never lived with a bunch of guys in their mid-20’s without full-time jobs and a penchant for life, love, and liquor, I highly recommend it. But expect to have something go terribly, terribly wrong at least once.
Anyways, I guess this is my eulogy to the student life. It’s been a blast, the parties were fun, the girls were pretty, the readings were interesting … but it’s time to move on to different things. Wish me luck!
First draft of my thesis, done! Kinda.
So as many of you know, I’ve been trying to get my Master’s thesis done soon so I can graduate this May. Today I reached a bit of a milestone: the first draft. It’s not all I want it to be: it’s still missing a few figures, mostly screenshots to explain what’s going on. That’s funny because the thesis is partly about how difficult it is to comprehensively describe pictures. But I wanted to fire something reasonable off to my advisor so he can start editing it / tearing it to pieces.
If you’re interested, you can download it here [PDF, 4MB]. Only 58 pages 1.25 spacing. Booyah.
The dude even looks like me :(
Broken Alt-Tab and Web Applications
One thing that has recently become a problem for me is the loss of usefulness of Alt-Tab. For those of you who don’t know, Alt-Tab in the Windows world and beyond is the shortcut to quickly switch your active application (task switch). But what happens when I can’t switch to my active applications, because they’re buried in my web browser?
The Problem – It’s not uncommon for someone who does real work with the corporate intranet to have several tabs open within their web browser with data sources, and a webmail tab. Add to that desktop applications like Microsoft Excel, and an instant messaging client, and we have broken workflow in Alt-Tab.
This effect will become more pronounced as more and more applications that we use daily sneak into the web browser – unless we launch everything from Adobe Air or Gears shortcuts on the desktop. That is not the case, since I’m much more likely to get to Google Calendar by clicking an Add this GCal link, than I am to launch it from my desktop.
User Solution – If the user wants to correct this workflow problem, they can open all of their working tabs as new windows. The major issue with that is pre-loading the cognition of the task. Odds are the user navigated to their document in an exploratory way, and didn’t precede that activity with the thought “I better open this in a new window just in case I find something I need to task-switch to.”
Last I checked (Firefox 3.0.8), there is no easy way to turn a tab into a new window in Firefox. At least not without the Tab Mix Plus! add-on (via How-To Geek). Though I understand “tab tearing” will be included in Firefox 3.1, and is already a standard feature in Google Chrome and Safari 4 (video link).
Potential Solution - The major web browsers that support tabs already support quickly rotating through the tabs using Ctrl-Tab. Integrating the tab switching functionality (including preview screenshots, tab titles, and all of that) into Alt-Tab would be good. The specific details of how that would look, feel, and interact would make a great little M.Sc. topic. :-)
As a side note: The default built-in Alt-Tab application in Windows XP is fine (Vista Flip is even nicer), but there are a handful of better free replacements: one from the Microsoft PowerToys team, and an even richer one from Alex Avdonin.
Don Mills Road at Earth Hour
Don Mills Road, Earth Hour at OSC. Originally uploaded by grabka dot org.
We went to the Ontario Science Centre for Earth Hour; lots of fun, free hot chocolate, $1 popcorn, instructions for star-gazing, and some passionate African drumming.
I guess nobody told the apartments across the street to turn their lights off for that hour as well. It was really unfortunate, but made for an interesting contrast.
Earth Hour @ the Ontario Science Centre
To anyone who is looking for something to do on Saturday afternoon, it’s Earth Hour (shut off everything electronic for an hour, @ 8:30pm). The Ontario Science Centre is running a bit of an event.
The Google calendar event for the Toronto Activity Club (TACKY) calendar.
For anyone who’s interested, I’ll be there at 7:30pm!
Earth Hour at the OSC
Techno-update: Feedly, Twt.fm, and Super-Cache
Newsfeeds were all the rage a few years ago when the news agencies and blog platforms started syndicating content this way. For the most part any blog, newspaper, TV station, or anyone who needs to syndicate a stream of information (articles, posts, comments, scores, etc.) has done so using RSS or Atom. This is great, but there is a lot of concern about how useful and usable newsfeeds are to the average web citizen.
Feedly: A great news aggregator
Like most people I find myself going to the same six or so places on the Internet for news every day: Digg, Yahoo Sports, IHT, CSMonitor, Globe and Mail, and so on (BAM, roasted Sarah Palin) All of them have RSS feeds (the little orange icon 
). Rather than having to visit page individually to decide if I want to read the articles, I can aggregate their newsfeeds to a single place. As far as what that “single place” is, there has been a LOT of competition: My Yahoo!, Google Reader, Sage, etc.
Of all of these tools, my favourite by far is Feedly. It’s an add-on for Firefox (sorry Internet Explorer users, you have other options I’m sure). It allows you to (with a single click within Firefox) to add a feed to your own custom little magazine landing page. Usually RSS readers make your landing page look like an email inbox. The layout makes it very readable, and the simple category support is easy to use. From their website:
Feedly weaves your favorite content into a magazine-like start page. Based on Google Reader, Twitter and Firefox. Insanely Well Integrated.
Feedly Screenshot
As a side note, I love when developers of software have really interesting developer blogs, especially with posts about use cases and new features.
Twitter Music
I’ve been twittering up a storm, kinda. On Monday, some people participate in #Musicmonday, which means they twitter about a song they would like to share with the world. This is great, but in order to listen to the song you’d have to track it down. So as a courtesy, the good people at twt.fm have built a web app to tweet your #musicmonday song with a link to either the complete track or a preview (whichever is available on imeem). There are alternatives to this setup, some much more established.
twt.fm (it's a little prettier now ..)
WP Caching (after 2005)
Now something for those of you who run your own blogs on your own servers. Wordpress has been a wonderful blogging platform, especially since they added automatic downloading and installing of plugins! One of the plugins I’ve battled with in the past has been WP-Cache. No new version since 2005.
Nobody told me, but now there is WP-Super-Cache, and it fixes much of the disagreements I had with WP-Cache. From the authors blog:
WP Super Cache version 0.9.1 is now available. WP Super Cache is a page caching plugin for WordPress that will significantly speed up your website. Major changes under the hood in this release, and many bugfixes.