This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Sent to a colleague in Brazil late this evening
Hi Rosangela,
I'm at a sakai meeting in california. Today the programmers announced they would have their final meeting in cambridge, England.
The designers need to respond, so over dinner we brainstormed. At first Florence, Italy led the nominations. But Europe has already started picking up Sakai. Asia is just too too these days, so we decided South America had to be our destination. At first Chile and Argentina were proposed because of their wine growing regions and skiing.
But Brazil! The open source capital of the world! It must be Brazil! Since the people around the table were 40% from California, 40% from the American Midwest and 20% from Massachusetts, we had only hazy knowledge of Brazil's cities so we had to limit it to the country in general.
It was only the wine talking. We'll probably meet somewhere dull (like Baltimore). But interaction designers agree, Brazil is just the coolest place in the world these days. Thought you should know.
Ben
I heart wireless
I am sitting at a cafe on Satnford's campus, drinking my latte and wriing this entry. I'll then publish it here from my table, using Stanford's pervasive wireless network. I've been able to do this for year, but I still think it is just so cool.
I've been thinking of going to the next meeting of the Boston Wireless Advocacy Group because I do think Boston has some progress to make in this area.
Serious Competitor for iPod
I'm not much of a gadget hound, but I've been reading about the The Nokia N91 and it seems like the first serious competitor of the iPod I've looked at. It's also a phone and has email and web capabilities and a 2 megapixel camera.
The killer feature to me though, is that is allows you to swap music files with other people using bluetooth. It would be like siting your iPod next to some one else's and getting a copy of that song they were telling you about. Brilliant.
I just wonder if they will really be brave and make bluetooth file sharing easy to use and unlimited. Apple has limited the usefulness of the iPod and iTunes in order to make their music store more atractive to the industry. You can only connect your iPod to one computer, for example, and there is no way to access your music files on it's hard drive except through iTunes. I think a company that offers a multi-gig music player, but without those limitations, making it even easier to share music, would have a hit product on their hands.
Sakai Notepad
There are some tools in Sakai that can work as stand alone tools, but are in many ways a service available to any other tools. The gradebook, for example, works by itself, you can add new assignments and enter grades for them, but it really comes alive when used with other tools like Exams & Quizzes. A student taking a quiz gets a score that is sent to the gradebook to be stored and used for calculating the course grade.
Other tools work this way. Dates could be scored from any tool to the Schedule, materials from Resources should be available to attach to any announcement, discussion post, homework assignment, etc. Yesterday we scoped the sectioning tool and agreed that a list of sections should be available to any tool that might use them. In the Announcement tool it might be possible to only share the announcement with sections meeting on Thursday for example.
Well I thought of possible tool that would work mainly as a service to other tools early this morning. This year is the 25th anniversary of the post-it note. The post it note's real potential showed when the engineer working on it decided to take one and stick it on some one elses report, write a question on it, and return to the author. The note was attached to the report, but also seperable.
In teaching, instructors often leave notes for students. My teachers have often left notes jotted on top of papers, for example, which in big class might be the most meaningful contact I have with the teacher. Instructors also take take notes about students that aren't shared - in the gradebook we'd like include a way for TAs to leave a note explaining their rational for changing a grade. There are shared notes describing the value of reading (the description field of a resource), or a private notes about how well questions on an assessment worked. Maybe it would be interesting for a CMS to keep track of all these notes.
A notepad tool could be used on it's own, a place to jot notes about the course. But it's real power would be to collect an organize all the notes taken about students and materials and the course in one place, where they could be viewable by date or by topic, where they are indexed and searchable. You'd have a log of the course with little to no additional effort form the instructors.
IBM joins Sakai Project
Wow. I just saw the news that IBM is joining the Sakai project. From the press release:
Patrick Carey, IBM Business Consulting Services' higher education leader, said, "IBM believes the Sakai Project holds great promise for higher education. We believe in Sakai's vision and want to help build the community or 'ecosystem' as we like to call it, that will enable the long-term success of Sakai."
It also mentioned that IBM will contribute developers and work on open standards for Sakai. I can't wait to see how this impacts Sakai development. I've just arrived in California for a Sakai meeting, I'm sure we'll hear more in the next few days.
The Gunning Fog Index
Check out the Readability Test offerred by Juicy Studio. The Gunning Fog Index for "Inline Comments" here is 8.80 - slightly more complex than Reader's Digest, way more simple than the Wall Street Journal or even Newsweek. Either I'm doing a great got at keeping it simple for busy readers, or I don't know any big words.
Flying with wires
I'm going to be spending most of the week in California, traveling for Sakai. I've done a lot of traveling in the past year, and recently I've come to sort of enjoy it again. I travel with a lot of electronics, and have fun working on my laptop, listening to my iPod, etc. I get some good work done when I'm flying.
I'm a pretty obsessive light packer, but still about a third of my small bag is devoted to my laptop and selected peripherals. I also end up with quite a few cables, (iPod, cellphone, iSight, the monitor adaptor, headphones) plus the small peripherals themselves. Here's a tip I have if you are a nerd traveller like me.
I pack all of cables and little gadgets in a small zippered bag with a mesh top. When I get to the x-ray machine I take it out of my big bag and let it run through the machine on it's own. That way if I get pulled over for having a suspicious mass of metal and wires (which happened to me on my last flight out of Detroit), I've got the suspicious bag out already, available for inspection. Given the ritualistic insanity of airport security rules, they only search the small suspicious bag. If I keep in with everything, they are required to pull my whole bag apart. If it's all by its lonesome they just look at it, maybe do a couple swabs for suspicious chemical, and I'm on my way.
Infinite Mile
I'm happy to say I'm being given an Infinite Mile Award. When I received the notice I'd received the award I bareley glanced at it before deleting. With all the travelling I've been doing I get notes about Delta Sky Miles, United Milage Plus, AAdvantage Miles and WorldPerks Bonus Miles, so something about "Infinite Mile" just went in the bin with the rest of 'em.
I didn't realize what it was until someone sent me a congratulations note. Now I'm very honored and excited, especially knowing that people went to the trouble to nominate me and write up a proposal and follow through with the process, without me even knowing about it.
Minimalist Presentation
I made a presentation about Stellar to the MIT Libraries on Wednesday. There was a really strong turnout, and I got a lot of questions, a couple of invites to meet with teams in the Libraries, and several Librarians requesting Stellar sites to experiment with. That's just the kind of results I'd hoped for.
I have a sort of canned Stellar presentation that I have used in a lot of places. Maybe it's just because I'd done it so often, but it was starting to really feel boring. There are some graphs (which I like) and there lots of slides with bullets (which seemed dull). So I changed the slides so that with the exception of the agenda and a couple of graphs, they are all titles only. Sometimes I had to break bulleted one slide into two or three, some times I just kept the title and moved the bullets into the notes. Plus i added some new slides just for this audience. Here's the presentation as a Flash movie.
I think the titles-only style worked quite well. It freed me up to walk away from my laptop during a slide. I know what I'm talking about so I just use the slide that's up as topic, and improvised based on the topic. I think this let me pay more attention to the people listening, so I could get a better sense if they were following along, bored, confused, excited, whatever. I also suspect it meant the audience could focus on what I was saying rather than reading the slides.
I give demos when I speak, and I wish had an easier way to switch between my presentation and the demo. My plan for the future is to save the presentation as a flash file and open it in a browser. Then I can keep the presentation in one tab, and the sites I'm demoing in other tabs. Using keyboard shortcuts to move between tabs I'll be able to move fluidly between presentation and demo.
Digital Repositories and Course Management
What's the first easy step we could do to integrate an digital repository like MetaMedia or DSpace with a course management system like Stellar or Sakai?
Start by just going one way
I'd suggest that you start by being able to pull materials in from the repository. Repositories ten to demand a bit of work before something is added in, because the want good metadata since they will be storing these materials for a long time. Course management systems are designed s that instructors can add materials as quickly as possible. So start moving materials in the easier direction: Repository → Course management.
Use whatever metadata exists
There's no reason an instructor looking for materials for their course should be confronted with a black screen. We know quite a bit about the class they are teaching. It's title, it's department, whether it's for undergraduates, etc. Use that to make suggestions. So as soon as an instructor clicks "search the repository" they get a page with the traditional search box, but also a list of suggestions. "You are teaching the course Ancient Rome so you might find these resources handy."
Encourage instructors to add more metadata to their class, so they'll get better suggestions. Then when they day comes that we're ready to add materials from the course management system to the repository, we'll have a lot class metadata to plug in.
Once that initial step is done there are many more possibilities (creating special collections, student collections, federated searches and on and on) but this simple way to pull course materials from repository would be a great first step.
Blink UI
I listened to an MP3 or Malcom Gladwell's keynote at SXSW during my lunch break today. He was talking about his book, Blink, specificaly about how people make quick decisions, and how we could do it better.
One conclusion was that people make better decisions when given less information. This is in direct opposition to our cultural assumption that we do better gathering all possible information before deciding something. He gave an example of ER doctors who need to quickly decide whether some one suffering from chest pains is having a heart attack. Researchers discovered that Doctor's accuracy is much higher if they are only given 4 pieces of information - EKG, whether the pain is persistant or intermittent, and a couple others. All other information - the patient's history of heart failure, if the patient is obese, if they'd been up all night smoking crack, etc - only clouded their success rate.
So I wonder if this has a good equivalent in UI design. In most projects I work on the people using the tool are generally busy and speeding through the use of this tool or website as quickly as possible. So my job is to show them as little information as possible for them to pick which link they will click next, or for them to get accomplish their current goal. In the case of the grade book, we need to show a teacher the right amount of information for them to judge the performance of their class or an individual student. Should they give student X an A- or a B+? Was the midterm too hard?
How will I know if I'm providing the right info? Should I show them photos of the students, or does that introduce a possibility of unintended bias? It's pretty intimidating, especially since I honestly make my decisions on what include in the UI based on my own 'blink' judgements. I draw on my experience, and the information we gathered form the requirements gathering process. Is that information too much or too little?
I just convinced myself to read that book.
One Big Company
I'm off for Marathon Patriot's Day, I just had to comment on today's big news. Adobe has purchased Macromedia. I was so shocked when I heard that on NPR this morning.
I don't really use Macromedia products any more. I haven't touched Dreamweaver in over year, since I decided that templating should be built into the code,not controlled by a designer's application. I used to love Flash, but we weren't getting a lot of work in that area, so I moved away from it.
I use Adobe Photoshop quite a bit and Illustrator occasionally. But even there, I feel no need to upgrade, what I've got works fine. I have to use Acrobat, but use it as little as possible because it is an ugly bloated beast of an application.
So the merger doesn't impact me immediately. But it does effect the industry - I think there was something to gain from the competition between these cpmpanies. Neither seems to have innovated much in the past few years, so maybe their competition had run it's course. Still, it's wierd to have one superpower in multimedia creation software.
Some companies don't get basic UI design
I just installed a Thule roof rack. I saw a card in the package saying they'd send me a couple free issues to Backpacker magazine if I went to Thule.com to register my rack.
Once I found the product registration page I had a problem. All of their questions use radio buttons. It is as if the designer didn't know about checkboxes. For example here is one question:
For which activities will you use your THULE rack?
Hello? It says activities plural, and I plan to use this rack for both kayaking and camping. But I had to pick one. There were tons of little errors like this. I mean if they are going to the effort to exploit personal information, they could at least get all of it. I guess they'll never know a lot of wonderful things about me.
Situated Software
I re-read Clay Shirky's piece on Situated Software on my way into work today. It echoes my interest in small software projects. This interest of mine is ironic because I spend most of my work life working on a huge multi-instituiton course management system, designed for hundreds of thousands of users I'll never meet.
But I still love the projects we do in EDDG for smaller clients like SMA and CRE which have an intended audience of a few hundred. They are nice products, that people really use and enjoy. And the projects end - it's really nice when a project ends.
I bore my colleagues with this mantra, but I continually wish we could do these smaller projects using "LAMP" (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP[or Python maybe])as a platform instead of "STOJ" (as in "stodgy" - Solaris + Tomcat + Oracle + Java[it's probably not rally solaris any more - but changing that would ruin my acronym]). It would be a lot esier for less supremely skilled web developers (like myself) to work on these projects, they'd be easier to maintain and faster and cheaper to build.
Sakai Style Guide examples
I moved the the Sakai style guide examples to a new home in Sakai's CVS repository. They had been living in the tools team's Sakai website.
There are many advanages to having the Sakai style guide examples in CVS.
- Sakai developers will get them delivered fresh to their development machines periodically
- The tools team members working on them can take advantage of versioning
- Sakai kept messing up the HTML in the files
- I find it much easier to add things to CVS on the command line than to go into a website, download a file, edit it, go back to the website, and filling out a form to replace the file.
Northwestern's Sakai style
I just saw this blog entry showing off a new Sakai 'skin' for NorthWestern University.
In the future we're planning to change the way the style sheets work. We'd have 3 levels of style sheet.
- Default - The default styles that come with Sakai. You shouldn't edit it, and it's required.
- Tool - Individual tools (e.g the announcement tool, the gradebook tool, etc) will have their own style sheets. These are optional, but it allows the tool developers to add new styles if they need to.
- Institution - This is the institutional style sheet. It is linked after the default and tool style sheets, which means that following the CSS rules for precedence, you can override any styles in in default that you want to change. This is where an institution's (or a departments, or whatever) designer would do their work.
The nice thing is it gives the institution complete flexibility, without having to touch the main style sheet. We use a similar approach in Stellar.
Later: Gonzalo Silverio just pointed me to the instructions for skinning Sakai in case you want you try it yourself.
Pin Oaks on Mass Ave
I just saw an email going around about the Cambridge Public Works project to improve Mass Ave from the river to the beginning of Central Square.
The email was about trees. They plan to rip out the trees the trees now in place (this being Cambridge the email noted that healthy trees will be replanted, so we need not worry about cruelty to flora) and replace them by planting 100 Pin Oak trees. Why Pin Oak's I wonder? They get really big, so maybe that would be nice, but I'd be worried about them getting crowded against the buildings. And all those acorns. And you have to hope they aren't using southern saplings (the quote below is from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources
In urban areas, Pin Oak suffers from a quirk of commercial nursery production, in that most trees originate from southern sources with very acidic soils, and when transplanted to neutral or alkaline soils, suffer tremendously from leaf chlorosis with a resulting loss of vigor. The lesson still not learned is to use local seed sources for growing trees, when there will be a problem of any type.
I just hope these trees are tough. I know from my own childhood that life on Mass Ave can be evil.
USB is like duct tape
I recently purchased a USB cell phone charger from Zip-Linq. I'm constantly running out of phone chargers at inopportune moments, mostly because I forget to charge it when I'm at home. And I realized I am more likely to be near my laptop than near an outlet. After all I'm within 50 feet of my laptop 95% of the time. It's always ready to give my cell phone a quick jump. The cable is so compact it's no problem carrying it around.
Because of the modular design of the cable, I can also use it to charge my iPod. And it came with an adaptor for a car's power source. So I can charge my iPod and phone when I'm in the car (which is about 0.5% of the time, but still).
It's just a little a cable, but it's really making me happy.
Talk to the people who use your website
We learned that students wanted to 'shop' for classes on Stellar through some advisory group meetings and through the support logs. So the development team got the mandate to find a way to make it easier to shop for classes. There some early ideas being shopped around. We could make the syllabus, the first assignment world readable for the first couple weeks of the semester, for example.
Jean Foster arranged interviews with a couple of the students who had asked us to make shopping easier. She asked them an open question: "How do you shop for classes now?" And what we found was that they were looking for classes much earlier than we'd expected, and they are of course looking at the class as it was taught in earlier semesters.
See, we'd been focussed on how to help students look at the class in the semester they will take it. But they know materials aren't in place early enough (something we'd worried about too) so they already tend to look at archived courses.
Suddenly we have all sorts of new options. We can look at how to open access to archived courses. Even better, we can find ways to link our content to Open Course Ware. OCW is basically an archive of classes, and they've got about 1100 in place now. So there's a pretty good chance that we can point people shopping for a particular course over to OCW. If an archived course is limited access, and most of them are, we can dynamically generate a link to the appropriate OCW class.
I'm not sure what we'll end up doing, but talking to the students has opened up some more elegant solutions. Imagine if we'd developed a nice new technique to look at what little material is available for new classes, only to find after launching that the students weren't looking there. Interviewing users is such an obvious and easy thing to do - but it's amazing how often it doesn't happen.
Google Sattelite maps
Just heard about Google satellite maps.
- Enter your street address,
- Click Search
- Click Satellite in the upper right corner
You can drag the map around with your mouse, zoom in, zoom in out, etc just like with the regular google maps. Amazing.
Gathering Student Input Through a Weblog
The ofice of the Dean od Undergraduate Edication is using a Movable Type weblog (which I've set up for them) to gather input from students. Student Discussion on the Undergraduate Educational Commons was set up back in December. The point was to understand how students felt about the changes they are proposing MIT's curriculum.
I'm not sure how they advertised it, but their calls for input received scores of replies. The comments are eally interesting to read, you get a real impressions of how MIT students feel about the required subjects list.
Next week the committees report will be psted, and more comments requested. this time the page will be spotlighted from the MIT homepage, so there will sure to be a lot of response.
BBEdit 8.1 (Now with theme song!)
I just installed BBEdit 8.1 which now includes SubVersion. I have no use for Subversion, but I wish i did. i still would like to set up my own repository to keep track of various projects I'm working on.
The other weird thing. I looked at the About BBEdit screen and if you let it scoll all the way to the bottom, there is a link to the BBEdit Theme Song which is just the dorkiest folk song every recorded.
That was worth the price of the upgrade all on it's own.
Pretty Stellar RSS Feeds
I used the approach I used here to prettify Stellar's RSS feeds. For example here's the RSS feed for 9.036: The Visual System.
RSS feeds are turned on for all current Stellar sites now. I can't wait to see the usage stats at the end of the semester. My instinct tells me they'll be pretty popular.