This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
PHP Markdown
I offer my unadulterated praise to PHP Markdown. Markdown is a way of writing that can be converted to HTML. I use the BBEdit Markdown Plugin from Daring Fireballto write XHTML (including these blog posts) and it saves loads and loads of time.
I decided to add the ability to use markdown to linkwalla, to make it easy to add HTML to the link descriptions. I was able to get every thing working in about 20 minutes, I downloaded PHP Markdown and edited one file in linkwalla. Suddenly linkwalla is feeling much richer. That's some nice modularity right there.
So the when the next update of linkwalla come out, and that will be real soon, you'll be able to use Markdown. The only downside is the 40k markdown.php file is about the same size as all the rest of linkwalla combined, so I'll have doubled the download size of linkwalla. But sub 100k is still pretty lightweight.
Linkwalla 0.7 is live
A new version of linkwalla is available for download this morning. This is the first release since August.
What is linkwalla? Linkwalla is way to share interesting web pages you see, or just to keep track of them for yourself. It's sort of a mini-blog for links. You generate an RSS feed of the links you've saved, that includes the link and a short description. It's also compatible with del.icio.us, so you can save your links to del.icio.us at the same time as adding them to your site.
What's new in linkwalla 0.7? Monthly archives are now created. Previous versions of linkwalla saved your links in one big list. This works for a while, but at time goes on the list gets unwieldy. With monthly archives the front page shows your last 20 links, and there links to monthly archives, so I can see all of the links I added in September, for example, on one page.
The other reason for moving to monthly archives, is that the links are saved in monthly XML files, instead of one big honking XML file. This means linkwalla won't slow down over time. I hadn't experienced any slowness in 0.7, but I knew that eventually as added hundreds of links, the file would slow down.
One downside to changing the way files are saved is that this release is not backwards compatible with linkwalla 0.6. I guess that's why it's not a 1.0 release yet. However converting the old linkwalla.xml file into monthly archives is pretty easy - it took me about 5 minutes.
It's been great using PHP again, I love being able to figure out how this stuff works.
Tags: linkwalla del.icio.us simplexml php xml sourceforge
Small college liberal arts students speak out on Tech
As an alumni I have been participating in an experimental class at Earlham College called "Social Impact of computer technology." The class members blogged their way through the class, with their blog entries the primary means of being assessed. Then at the end of class each of the 13 students recorded their thoughts on class and the technologies they'd learned about.
I was pretty interested to hear a small sample of undergrads had to say on these topics.
- Blogging: Mixed reviews. Students didn't like the tendency for rants and impolite comments, and many felt exposed by putting their work out for the whole world to see. On the other hand they said it was easy, and many liked getting feedback via comments. Trackback technology was universally held in contempt. It did seem that people thought blogging was the most interesting part of the class.
- Moodle: Pretty poor review. Apparently some bug around submitting homework seemed to have soured the class on Moodle. People did seem to enjoy at as a shared reference work.
- Social software: The only thing anyone had to say about social software was about del.icio.us. del.icio.us seemed to be new to everyone in the class, and nearly all liked it a lot and planned to continue using it. Flickr, et.al. didn't even rate a mention.
- Podcasting: Sounds like the general consensus is that it's interesting but hard and probably not worth the effort. Many people said podcasting is a good way find grammar errors in your writing, so I guess their assignment was to read their paper out-loud and record it as a podcast.
I decided not to link to the studnet blogs, because I'm not sure how long they will be around and reading some of those comments, I'm not sure the students would all welcome me doing that.
The Stellar News Site
I just updated the Stellar homepage so that the latest Stellar news article is linked as the 'spotlight.' This is good because we've been pretty slow about replacing those spotlight, while our communications person, Margaret Meehan, posts news and information about Stellar at least once a week.
User controlled design
This note is reposted from an email I sent to the Sakai UI discussion group
Someone at MIT asked me to provide more information about what complications I see with the plan "to provide maximum flexibility for institutions who were keen to implement their own look & feel on the interface." This was a follow up to the recent "Do you support moving toward a flexible or adaptable UI approach in Sakai?" thread on the Sakai design mailing lists.
Unless I'm misunderstanding the plan from Toronto is not "to provide maximum flexibility for institutions who were keen to implement their own look & feel on the interface." It is to provide maximum flexibility for INDIVIDUAL USERS to implement their own look & feel on the interface.
I think everyone wants to make the UI flexible for institutions, there's no debate there.
Here are some issues with asking users to set their own interface preferences:
Help desk support
If every users' interface is different, it is much harder for the help desk staff to tell user how to do something, because they have no way of knowing what the user is seeing. Even if they if can see what the user is seeing it means they help desk staff need to know all of the possible configurations of any given tool.
Added complexity to the UI
A lot of UI design is centered around understanding user goals and making it easy to accomplish those goals with as little interference as possible. Adding additional forms that let users tweak the interface is more interference.
Easy to make bad choices
We also don't want to make it easy for people to shoot themselves in the foot. People messing around with the settings might think setting their link style to pink italics is fun for now, but it can cause them to not see links they need to work with in the future. People really do make some bad choices in this area, you can be a smart and talented person and not know a thing about UI design.
Not a great track record
Someone on the list pointed out (I lost the email unfortunately) that many portals have tried this, and found that users don't tend to be all that interested in personalizing the UI. So a lot of effort towards this might be misdirected when there are so many features more important to teaching and learning.
Let browsers do it
Many browsers have the power to overrule website CSS styles. So users who are keenly interested always having white text on a black background can use this method already - we just need to make sure Sakai uses web standards behaves well with supported browsers.
It may break the goal of loosely connected modular tools
It may well make tool development in Sakai closely tied to a particular technology (JSF or RSF or JSTL or whatever). This will make much harder to bring tools that were not explicitly designed as a part of Sakai into Sakai. By forcing all developers to use a set of shared JSF tags you've closed Sakai to most 3rd party application, and all applications written in PHP, Ruby, etc. New Sakai developers will have to learn an obscure method of coding in order to contribute a Sakai tool. This could really impact the future prospects for Sakai.
The accessibility argument
The strongest argument for this approach is that is supports accessibility, but there may be better ways to make accessibility work.
- In addition browser feature, operating systems now have features for magnifying screens or forcing high contrast.
- Make this explicitly a mater of accessibility by offering simple presets in the user preferences that do things like increase font size or increase contrast.
- Best of all do rigorous accessibility testing to ensure that the UI works for all users right out of the box.
Sorry for the long note! I was afraid I hadn't written clearly before, and I wanted to break it down a little. I also want to be clear that the work demoed by Toronto is really strong, especially in the area of working with multimedia in the LMS. I think there is an important place for it in the content authoring space.
Award nomination
This here website, inline comments, is a finalist for a "Best designed/most beautiful edublog" award. And anyone can go vote. Vote now! You don't need to vote in all categories.
I describe my blog as Ònotes about my workÓ and Òthe life support system for an RSS feed.Ó The notes get automatically uploaded my a script on my laptop, allowing me to keep it fresh with little distraction from my other work. The aesthetic of the site aims to make the most of sites minimal mission. I think it could use some work of course, especially the archive pages, but I'm having fun working with the fairly extreme constraints of blogging this way.
Yahoo del.icio.us
Not satisfied with Flickr, Yahoo purchased del.icio.us, and now own the majority of the tags on the web. Good for del.icio.us and good for Yahoo really, they seem to be really on top of this Web 2.0 thing.
But I can't help feeling weird about it. I mean, at the Sakai Social Software BOF lots of people were talking excitedly about mixing flickr, delicious, and google into their course websites. I think it's worth doing, but somehow i don't like the idea of having those two companies hold all of that data for us, using it all as the fertilizer for ad farming.
Why are all the big Web 2.0 hits owned by only 2 companies?
Sakai Austin Highlights
In addition to the vigorous UI discussions I mentioned in my previous post, there were several other highlights to the conference
Social Computing BOF
I presented at this session, and here's the proof.
Hot topics
- Back channels (IRC, jokes, comments, google searches being added by students as the presentation goes on)
- Is it better to create more functionality in Sakai, or extend Sakai with external (commercial) services like Google, Flickr and del.icio.us?
- How do you keep the fun in social software when it is institutionally supported?
- Digital divide between students use of this tech and faculty use.
Faculty led pedagogy sessions
In particular Course Management Tools for the Humanities and Wouldn't it be great if.. - Exploring instructional methods using Sakai. I would love to see a conference based entirely around how instructors want to teach, and their ideas about what they would like educational technology to do.
Hearing about other schools' work
I'm thinking in particular of the oddly titled Is Linking Thinking? Web Pedagogies and Tools for Teaching and Learning in which Paul Bergen (Harvard), Tom Lewis (U Wash), and Dirk Herr-Hoyman (U Wisc.) described the homegrown non-Sakai (and non-Java) tools they use to help people teach and learn. It was the most persuasive thing I saw for showing the reasons Sakai should take 'loosely coupled' approach to technology that makes it easy for schools to mix and match in the tools they like with Sakai tools.
Sharing Stellar Images at the Technical Demos
I loved showing off the work we've done to date on Stellar Images and having the chance to talk to so many people from so many schools about it over just 90 minutes. It was absolutely exhausting.
Austin
I just love Austin, in a way I haven't quite defined. This was my third visit, and it just keeps growing on me.
Tags: sakaiaustin05 sakai
How flexible is too flexible?
After the Sakai conference in Austin, the wires are humming with mesages about how to move forward with an overhaul of the Sakai UI. This is great. Part of that discussion has revolved around the ideas that Jutta Teverianus and Anastasia Cheetham presented at "We don't all have to agree:" Flexible UI Design.
"Even if we go no deeper than simple style transformations, one implication of this approach is that we would transition from a style guide to a design guide accompanied by default style sheets or other styling mechanisms. Unlike the style guide the design guide would not make any recommendations regarding the specific presentation of the UI if it is possible to restyle that presentation characteristic. The design guide would require that the tools have a replaceable presentation. The recommendations regarding styling would in effect be communicated through the default styling mechanisms. This would also aid in achieving commitments to accessibility and internationalization."
I've been re-reading the Sakai style guide, and there is very little that relates to appearance or graphic design. The bulk of the style guide is describes common views and the elements used in those views.
An example from page 6.:
3 - Column Header (required)
A meaningful label for information contained in column that displays at the top of each column. Users can change the sort order of columns by clicking the header. When using column headers, indicate the following:
- Users can change the sort order
- The column that controls the current sort order (bold heading with triangle)
- How the column is sorted
There is a parenthetical reference to "bold heading with triangle" but otherwise this entry is about interaction. Anastasia pointed out at the Friday UI BOF that the user might prefer to sort tables using a drop down menu, and hence the style guide was being to strict.
You can go too far with user preferences. Few people will want to go so far as filling out a form that allows them to choose details like what mechanism they use to change their table sort order. Even having the option of making sort order headers italicized rather than bold is a bit obscure. Institutions may make this choice, but they can do that already in the CSS.
As far as user-driven CSS overrides go, I think it's an OK idea if kept fairly minimal. I am concerned that it could add complexity to the UI that most users will not need, and that it creates support difficulty (Help desk: "Click the my workspace link. That may be on the top left, top right, bottom left or bottom right of your screen depending how you set your preferences."). Many browsers offer this functionality already, so building into the application seems odd. If I prefer white text on a black screen won't I want all my websites to look like that, not just Sakai? A browser-based solution seems more suitable for those users. We just need to make sure Sakai's front end coding plays nicely with those browsers, and issue for the accessibility team I think.
We can't make the mistake of thinking that our users will design for us, we need to make choices about what works well based on research and experience.
A couple more questions:
Is this modular functionality? It is a plugin for Sakai that people can take or leave, or is it hardwired in? If we decide this level of configuration is confusing our users, can we turn it off easily?
How much additional work does this approach create for new tool developers. It is already seen as being a fairly complex task to create or adapt a web tool to work with Sakai. Does this make it harder or easier? If was adapting something like JForums to work in Sakai, what would it take to make the presentation layer this flexible?
Tags: Sakai ui sakaiaustin05
Sakai Austin: Open Source Portfolio
I showed up for the wrong Open Source Portfolio (OSP) presentation . I came because I have little concept for what the tool does. The presenters are talking a lot about what it will do in 2.1. I have no concept of what 2.0 can do, so it's not to enlightening. They are using the metaphor of starting at 30,000 feet and moving down, so hopefully at the end they will show the actual tool and I'll be able to see what it does.
Tags: sakaiaustin05 sakai osp
Sakai Austin
I'm here at the conference - it's packed as usual about 550 people. Just saw a good talk from Missouri State about how to get departments to move over to using Sakai, by targeting early adopters and focusing on Sakai's ability to work with custom discipline-specific tools.
No hearing about Portland States move to Sakai and OSP.
I'm taking the occasional cameraphone photo while I'm here. You can see all the Sakai Austin photos on Flickr.
Tags: sakaiaustin05
Ready for Austin
I'm ready for my trip to Austin tomorrow. I pulled to gether a couple of 2x3 Stellar Images posters (pdf-950k) for our technical demo on Thursday.
The gadget bag will be full as usual. I have have been practicing sending my camera phone photos to Flickr with nifty new cell phone.
Boston expects a big snow storm tomorrow so I'm just hoping I get out of the airport.
Tags: sakaiaustin stellar sakai