This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Sakai Austin
Wow, the draft agenda for the 4th Sakai Conference is up and it is packed with interesting sessions. I'm going to help lead a BOF meeting on 'Trends in Social Computing' and we'll have a table at the technical demonstrations to discuss Stellar 2 and Stellar Images.
Tags: sakai sakaiaustin stellar conference
Jean Foster
One of the earliest members of the Stellar team left MIT today. While I was still working on the user interface for the initial release of Stellar, Jean told me we'd be doing usability testing, which I'd only vaguely heard of, and handed me a copy of Jakob Nielsen's book to read. Over the following months (and years) I observed a great number of occasionally excruciating user tests. The design crits I'd had at the Museum School were nothing compared to the horror of watching a stranger sit down and fail to understand how to do add a document with the user interface you'd built.
I've learned a ton from Jean. Those tests changed the course of my career, and even the way I see the world. Thanks, Jean!
Jean Foster is now going to help make websites useful at InContext Design.
Tags: usability stellar incontext mit
Stellar discussion board
The current installation of the Stellar discussion board needs to be replaced. It is slow, and seems to be taking a significant performance hit as more and more Stellar courses come on line.
What we have now is an old version of Jive Forums. We identified 3 contenders to replace it, based on their technical compatibility with Stellar.
- The newer version of Jive
- JForums, which is being adapted to Sakai by Foothills College
- A custom Sakai discussion board being developed at Indiana
By comparing the published feature list and screenshots of each product with the feature list for forums that came out of the LPAG meetings and other input, I created a grid to show how each product lined up with our needs
I wound up recommending the tool Indiana is developing. That tool is still under development, with an expected release in December. Indiana is pretty good about being on time, though, so it will probably work for us as a new forum tool for Fall 2006.
By the way of you are JForums or Jive developer or user, and you want to contradict my conclusions, please do! This was a quick study, and there a lot of 'maybes' in my diagram.
Tags: stellar forums jive jforums sakai
Building 9¾
When we came into work this morning, we were amused to find that all of our room numbers had been changed to read building 9¾ instead of the usual plain old 9, and our offices had been reassigned, so that my room is now Professor Flitwick's office. Also the old Men's and Women's bathrooms are now marked for "Witches" and "Wizards." I guess some MIT students are pretty enthused about the new Harry Potter movie opening tonight.
Tags: MIT hack harrypotter flitwick
MITblogs.com
I just noticed that the MIT admissions office has set up a whole bunch of blogs over at a site called MITblogs.com. There's even a ben.mitblogs.com, with no relation to me. This is part of the MIT Admissions website at the highly desirable URL my.mit.edu.
People from outside MIT assume we're all working in the same office as part of some large coordinated strategy, but there are so many web projects, and we techies are so busy with our own, that we're lucky if we know half of what is going on.
Tags: MIT
Fresh links available
I've decided to add a little 'mini-blog' to the footer of this website, provided to you by one of this website's sponsors, linkwalla. Special thanks to Feed2JS
Google print ego surfing
I saw a reference on Caveat Lector to ego surfing Google print. I decided to give it a try even though I've written anything scholarly, so I imagine there would be precious little to for anyone to cite. But lo and behold there I am, and three of the four are actually me.
Tags: Google
World Usability Day
I celebrated World Usability Day by spending an hour combing through a recent usability test of the Sakai Gradebook, and puling out the problem reports that were related to the Sakai's OOTB Style Sheet. I sketched out my comments by drawing on a screen shot which I posted on the Sakai User Interface wiki.
Tags: usability sakai worldusabilityday
PHP and XML class
I'm thinking of offering a class for IAP: Easy web development: Build a simple web app with PHP and XML. I'll be doing sessions on Stellar as well, but at IAP it is traditional for people teach classes about their hobbies.
I'd do one two-hour session. The intended audience is people who know how to make a web page and want to take it to the next level by learning a little PHP.
- Linkwalla, an example of a simple PHP/XML application (10 min)
- Quick intro to XML (20 min)
- Quick intro to using PHP (20 min)
- How to turn your XML into a web page (20 min)
- How to edit a 'node' in the XML (20 min)
- How to add a new 'node' in the XML (10 min)
- How to delete a 'node' in the XML (10 min)
- How to publish your new tool (10 min)
Now that's all kind of rushed, of course. So I'd provide a nice juicy handout full of notes about how to do it, plus links to more information about installing PHP, picking webhosts, getting help, recomended books and all that. I'd also add links to download all of the code demoed in class.
What do you think? Would anyone sign up for this class?