Design: December 2003 Archive Page

The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has been awarded a knighthood for his pioneering work. --Web's Inventor Gets a Knighthood (BBC)

Definitely one of the good guys. If he had tried to keep control over his invention, of course it wouldn't have worked, since the web depends upon the contributions of thousands and millions of user-authors.

--WebWord Returning Soon! (WebWord)

John S. Rhodes, whose WebWord.com has been down for several months, is planning to bring it back early in 2004. Hurrah!

I thought I was busy as a graduate student, and I was.... As long as I showed up at the right place -- the library, the classroom, the data-entry warehouse -- I got through. Being a faculty member lumps the hours and the tasks all together, and there is little immediate feedback on what's important to complete. Yes, you have to prepare for class, but how well? No, you don't have to write the article right away; there's no deadline on it. As for skipping the weekly meeting of a pointless committee well, who really knows it will matter? | Managing time as an assistant professor is something for which few new faculty members are fully prepared, but it's crucial to your long-term success. -- Lee Tobin McClain --Lessons in Time Management (Chronicle)

Note to self: print out this article and read it a week or two before every semester.

I tend to over-prepare for workshop classes, often coming in with stacks of handouts that I never pass out and overheads that I never use.

Teaching a literature course requires much less prep time on a week-to-week basis (reading a dozen short poems or a hundred pages in a novel) than teaching a writing course (where you have to mark student exercises, checking their revisions against what you wrote in the margins of their earlier drafts, taking note of recurring problems and constructing new handouts for next week or next year, etc.). As long as I've refreshed my memory on the assigned texts, I can "wing it" and lead a pretty good discussion of readings in a literature class. A few students did request more structure when discussing readings in my journalism and "Seminar in Thinking in Writing" class, so I'll have to keep that in mind as I plan my courses. (I haven't had the formal meeting to discuss official course evaluations with my division chair -- I'm referring now to what I learned from short end-of-term reflection papers.)

I've got a five-column spreadsheet, on which I'm listing all the assigned readings and due dates for the four courses I'm teaching and the production schedule of The Setonian. I should probably add a sixth column and add my research/professional goals.

And by the way, I started blogging this article before I noticed who wrote it! (Lee's office is two doors down from mine.)

Sites are getting better at using minimalist design, maintaining archives, and offering comprehensive services. However, these advances entail their own usability problems, as several prominent mistakes from 2003 show. --Jakob Nielsen --Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003 (Alertbox)

Usually Nielsen's blurbs are more informative... the "summary" on his site reads more like a marketing tease. To give you a sense of what the page is like, I'll have to collect the first 5 subheadings: "1. Unclear Statement of Purpopse," "2. New URLs for Archived Content," "3. Undated Content," "4. Small Thumbnail Images of Big, Detailed Photos," and "5. Overly detailed ALT Text."

Since archived content, thumbnails and alt text (that's the descriptive text that sometimes pops up near your mouse pointer, usually in a yellow box) are all good things, Nielsen's observations are helpful for those who have implemented these good things in a less-than-optimal way. Observations six through nine are about information architecture, and thus not something my own students are likely to need; while the last item (warning designers about pages that link to themselves) is very relevant to my teaching of newbie web authors.

His full-time job is to keep software-loving scientists and engineers from burying their "whats" in their "hows." It's not easy, because PowerPoint's "hows" get more numerous and distracting with each new release. MORE, the original presentation software, was a 300k program that turned outlines into "bullet charts," its two-word noun for slides. The latest versions of PowerPoint want 10 megs of RAM and come with 25 megs worth of files. Nearly all of it is about "how" rather than "what." --Doc Searles --It's the Story, Stupid: Don't Let Presentation Software Keep You from Getting Your Story Across (Doc Searles)

From 1998, but very appropriate in light of all the PowerPoint links I've recently come across. Near the bottom I found this gem: "Edit aggressively. Less is more. Create a market for your next presentation by leaving the sequel out of this one." Of course, that assumes the speaker wants to present.

Hmm... much of the best advice on giving presentations doesn't address the needs of students, who aren't experts in the subjects they are asked to present on, and who are often not particularly interested in the course. I suppose from a marketing perspective that's not an audience that will pay for a book of presentation tips... but still, I'm interested in anything that will make canned presentations more bearable and educational for the other 29 students in the class (at least some of whom may, possibly, be interested...)

Found this one via Scott Adams (the Arkansas Tech University faculty member -- neither the cartoonist nor the programmer).

I love the 10 minute presentation. You have enough time to get your points across to the audience without boring them. There is enough time, but it concentrates your mind on cutting out the waffle and making it snappy. Remember nobody ever complained about a presentation being too short. --Jonty Pearce --Ten Minute Presentations (Presentation Helper)

Site suggested via an e-mail from Jonty Pearce. Some great tips on Jonty's site, though I notice with its references to testosterone and advice about bringing a spare tie, the advice isn't exactly gender-netural. The site is focused on business speeches and has some tips on social speeches (particularly those at weddings), but none of the resources seem focused on academic presentations, in which the presenter is being forced, as part of an educational experience, to present on a topic that may be brand new to the presenter, to a mixed audience of mostly peers (who need to be entertained and, one hopes, at least somewhat enlightened) and one expert (the instructor, who already knows the subject matter, and who must needs to be convinced you did your homework).

I showed my freshman comp class a video and then asked them to speak for four minutes about the video, as a dry run for a later six-minute presentation. A few students over-prepared and read from papers (zzzzzz), but most students were underprepared, tried to "wing it", and ended up finishing a minute or two early. They all did much better for their six-minute presentation, but even then, my main goal was to just to expose them to the amount of preparation a speech requires. Next term we'll spend a lot more time on the genre of oral presentations.

Hmm... I really ought to add a "Rhetoric" category to my blog.

Same color palette: greens, blues, and reds on a synthetic base of white. Same kinds of curves and contours, same balance and proportions. Whereas once upon a time toothbrushes were made from a single plastic cast, contemporary models, like contemporary athletic shoes, are built up out of inscrutable deposits of layers and sediment that speak to some elsuive yet exquisitely refined ergonomic principle. --Matt Kirschenbaum --Of Sneakers and Toothbrushes (MGK)

This one made me smile. Does the target audience for Nike ads actually call them "sneakers" these days? Just curious.

You could dismiss this as nostalgia, GenX-ers pining for the simpler pleasures of their Cold War youth. But that doesn't really explain it, because half the people buying these games are teenagers at Urban Outfitters.

No, these Jurassic games are popular for a more powerful reason: They're the canon of video games, and they prove that keeping it simple still works. Chunky, low-fi games like Pac-Man show us why so many of today's more advanced games can be so paradoxically dull. --Clive Thompson --Blasts From the Past (Microsoft/Slate)

A good application of a few basic elements of game theory to current consumer trends. (His earlier article on videogames as editorals was more trend-spottingly illuminating.)

Don't miss the final line: "Video games turn out to be just like sonnets and pop songs. Often it's restrictions, not freedoms, that inspire creativity."

Look at the room you're in. Chances are it has thousands of objects in it. Imagine having to write a description of every single one of those objects and its relationship to every other. Eeeagh! Instead, you winnow it down to the objects you'll actually need, plus a bit of scenery. In other words, the author does for the player what the autistic person is incapable of doing for himself. No wonder there seems to be a disproportionate number of autistic-spectrum folk in IF fandom: it must be wonderful to wander around a virtual world where surroundings can be completely apprehended without being overwhelming (which isn't guaranteed even for graphical adventures). --Adam Cadre --Autism and Interactive Fiction (adamcadre.ac)

Via Grand Text Auto.

Beneath the arena's grandeur lay a netherworld of gladiatorial schools and storerooms, all linked by corridors filled with pulleys and levers, animal cages and gladiators. | The system was run by teams of slaves who faced being fed to the animals themselves if their timing went awry.-Michael Leidig --Animal magic of Rome's Colosseum underworld (Sydney Morning Herald)

Well, that's one way to motivate your techies.

This bibliography was originally compiled by Scott Stebelman from 1996-2000. Scott, a librarian at Gelman Library at George Washington University from 1986 until 2000, retired recently. The page is currently being updated and enhanced by Dr. Seth Katz and Jim Bonnett at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. --Hypertext and Hypermedia: A Select Bibliography (Bradley University)

The pages I checked focus mainly on print resources published in the mid 90s, and the index page hasn't been updated since 2001, but it still looks very impressive. It led me to a site with much of Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies online.

The pleasures of videogames are frequently enjoyed by those that commonsense might encourage us to consider as non-players -- "onlookers" that exert no direct control via the game controls. In this article, I want to suggest that videogame players need not actually touch a joypad, mouse or keyboard and that our definition needs to accommodate these non-controlling roles.

[...]

Many a great game has poor visuals -- an entire generation of players grew up with blips of light, @ signs and even text-only games -- but there are few good game with bad controls. --James Newman --The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame: Some thoughts on player-character relationships in videogames (Game Studies)

Some good observations on the complexity of the player's identification with elements within the game world.

When my son Peter was about 2, he was spooked by one of those little coin-operated riding machines. He still enjoys sitting in them, but he never wants us to put in any money. The employee at the arcade near the shopping mall food court in Wisconsin got to recognize my face, and noticed that I never spent anything; at one point he would drop two or three tokens into a machine where Peter was happily watching the demo loop. When the familiar sequence was replaced with a "get ready to play" screen, Peter would put up with the interruption, or say "You play, Daddy." After the game was over, he would resume his enjoyment of the demo loop.

During the coin-operated videogame craze of the late 70s and early 80s, I spent about two dollars on Asteriods, but I would often go to arcades to watch. Often, after having watched somebody play two or three games, the gamer would invite me to push the fire button, so that he (always a he) could concentrate on moving and accelerating.

Looking back, I wonder whether maybe I should have reciprocated; I never did, and I never recall getting glared at for my stinginess. It was my perception at the time that the paying player was, at least in part, rewarding me for being such an attentive audience.

Moveable Types of Information Literacy: Emerging Electronic Genres and the Deconstruction of Peer ReviewLiteracy Weblog)

Vannevar Bush, writing in 1945, lamented that the volume of scientific knowledge being published each year forced researchers to spend unprecedented time and energy searching for relevant information (and choosing what to ignore). His solution, the Memex, was a photocopier crossed with a microfilm storage and access device. A Memex user would theoretically create links between documents, annotating those links, add those annotations to the filing system, and share the resulting "trails" with other researchers. In some sense, what Vannevar Bush was trying to accomplish with his annotated "trails" has been implemented through the weblog genre (specifically, the research blog or "edublog").

Traditional textual scholarship aims to construct a specific, ideal, "correct" text. But computer science -- the discipline that generates the technology that drives (or hampers) information literacy -- aims instead for abstraction. In the open source software development model, particularly as described by Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," individual programmers contribute their labor freely to a common project made available to the general public for free.

Given the financial pressures publishers of journals exert upon libraries, and the brewing rebellion against what some activists characterize as a cabal of print publishers, some emerging electronic forms have radically altered the dynamics of the scholar-publisher relationship, without necessarily reducing the filtering value provided by peer-review. Electronic journals such as First Monday offer cutting-edge, peer-reviewed scholarship on a timeline of weeks. Even more radical is the Wiki, a form of electronic authorship that decentralizes authority and encourages all readers to annotate, expand, edit, or completely revise a common text.

In such genres, peer-review (in the form of inbound links, e-mailed or posted corrections/refutations, revision, or even deletion) is expected to happen after a text is published, thus making the process of peer review visible, instead of simply the product. Popularly-edited texts online typically summarize general knowledge, rather than offer a forum for the presentation of new knowledge or controversial opinion; further, emerging electronic genres also typically over-represent particular opinions espoused by technorati who manipulate the system (an effect which inspired the term "Googlewashing," and illustrated by the recent online prank that now causes a Google search for "miserable failure" to point first to George Bush's official biography on the White House web site). Developing strategies to compensate for these anomalous effects is a vital skill for 21st Century information literacy.

If there's a problem with PowerPoint, it's not that it makes you dumb, it's that Microsoft has never taken the time to show us how it can make you smart. --Mike Gunderloy --PowerPoint Doesn't Make You Dumb (ADT Mag)

Enough people responded ethusiastically to the NY Times article dissing PowerPoint that I thought it worthwhile to link to an opposing viewpoint.

What's that on the home page of ADT Magazine -- is that an ad for Microsoft? And what's that on the main menu bar -- a link to a whole section devoted to Microsoft's .NET?

While Gunderloy is critical of Microsoft, his claim that people simply haven't been trained to unlock the power of a piece of software is consistent with a marketing policy to sell training sessions (or books, or magazines) so that people will be better able to use Microsoft products.

Of course, the subject of the NYT article, Edward Tufte, is also selling his anti-PowerPoint brochure, so what's my point?

I'm not sure... I must've missed that slide.

Back to my grading.

On another note... I realized that I just used the word "dissing" without quotation marks or self-conscious irony, which probably means that what coolness it once had is now officially over.

The machine's inventors are somewhat vague about what the food simulator will actually be used for, but they suggest that it will be helpful in designing new foods... --Lawrence Osborne --Food Simulator, The (NY Times (will expire))

Here's the PowerPoint business plan these guys must have followed.

Step 1. Invent a device that can simulate the sensation of chewing food.
Step 2. ?
Step 3. Profit.

BTW, I don't know why the NYT puts "The" at the end of the headline.

In order to compose this piece, I had to depend on a circular way of thinking. Initially, my plot was linear, but that did not work well. Rather than use a traditional pyramid plot structure, I outlined plot points, and wrote something for each. Then, I added more pages under some plot points and linked it all together. I linked absolutely everything to anything at first, and then gradually deleted links and added new to get rid of infinite loops or excessive backtracking. --Julie Young, a student in my "Writing for the Internet" course. --Rationale for 'La Tour Eiffel' (A Work in Progess)

For her term project, Julie started writing a hypertext travellogue, but soon realized that a hypertext document defies traditional notions of time (and space). Since Julie came into the course as an experienced blogger, I encouraged her to challenge herself for her final project. There wasn't time for me to offer a unit on hypertext literature, so Julie was pretty much on her own.

She conducted usability testing on a rough draft, and adjusted her linking technique and added more material after she observed what her test subjects did or didn't like about her work. As is the case with most literary hypertext, the brevity of each individual node can convey the false notion that the text itself is insubstantial, when in truth the amount of planning and fine-tuning that a mutipath story requires means that even a brief creative hypertext generally takes far more brain power than a traditional short story of the same length.

I like how she used devices such as a journal to take us back in time, and a suitcase full of brochures to take us forward. Have a look at "La Tour Eiffel."

Weblog TweakingJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've made a few very minor tweaks to the blog, as I re-familiarize myself with JSP. Will is planning on making some changes to the site soon, and I want to be up to speed so I can more fully understand what he's accomplished for me.

The underlying code that he created for me is beyond my fathoming at this point, but Will has very wisely separated the guts of the program from the display, which is what I'm fiddling with.

Now the comments display the date. (That info had always been collected, I just didn't get around to figuring out how to display it until now.) I've also changed a few things about the editing screen that I use, mostly to reduce the amount of scrolling I have to do when creating a new blog entry.

My next project will be creating an RSS feed.

The increased adoption of blogging, citizen journalism, Flash presentations and the like portend a different season of political coverage than what we've seen in the past. These aren't new developments, but they've been used more frequently in the last year by the online-news industry, and will likely be incorporated into upcoming electoral coverage. --Steve Outing --Prepare Now for Better Online Election Coverage (Editor and Publisher)

I'll be teaching "Writing for the Internet" next fall, during the presidential election. Plenty of my students have professed their utter boredom with politics (outside of their particular hobbyhorse, if any). So I'm reluctant to tie a major online project to political current events; still, there will be a lot happening in cyberspace, particularly on the Thursday before election day, when scandals are strategically the most damaging to candidates. I'll have to think about this one.

Anyway, here's a great suggestion from the article: "Candidates were asked to give their stands on a variety of issues. In the print edition, candidate responses were sorted into grids, so readers could see who thinks what with a quick glance. But online, the approach was different: Web readers decided what their own stands are, then discovered who agreed with them the most at the end of the quiz."

Unless the population of a state is dispersed evenly in proportion to the size of each county, there is no direct relationship between the physical area of a county and the number of people, registered voters, or votes cast within it. | Which is why I was surprised to see an analyst from a leading all-news television network point to a map of California and single out San Bernadino county, California'slargest county by area, as a significant reason for Arnold Schwarzenegger'svictory. --Jonathan Corum --Mapping Votes by County: County maps and the 2003 California Statewide Special Election. (Style.org)

Note: The above images come from a screen capture of the original site; the cubist design on the left is, of course, a map of California with the counties adusted in size to represent population. I erased some text that would have been illegible at this size, in order to increase the comprssion rate.

Fascinating study of maps that distort the public perception of Arnold Schwartzenegger's political mandate in California. Very reminiscent of the maps showing George W. Bush winning huge tracts of land, with Al Gore winning in tiny, highly-populated spots.

Via Sylvie's HCI Weblog.

No matter how digital the electronics got, the companies that made the gadgets were still stovepiped; suites of devices worked in perfect harmony - as long as they all wore the same corporate logo. If you managed to force a Sony receiver to work with a Panasonic TV, you lived in a rat's nest of cables with a coffee table covered in remotes and a spouse who couldn't turn on the television without a briefing. | Why didn't consumer electronics firms compromise on standards for interoperability? Because they're jerks.... This is where the PC industry comes in and the golden age begins. --Sonia Zjawinski --The Golden Age of Gadgets (Wired)

Mmmm... gadgets.