Usability: May 2007 Archive Page

For the functions that people use most often, the 1986 vintage Mac Plus beats the 2007 AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+: 9 tests to 8! Out of the 17 tests, the antique Mac won 53% of the time! Including a jaw-dropping 52 second whipping of the AMD from the time the Power button is pushed to the time the Desktop is up and useable. --Hal Licino --86 Mac Plus Vs. 07 AMD DualCore. You Won't Believe Who Wins (Hub Pages)

Don Woods is acknowledged to have the Right Stuff. With long, stringy black hair and a bearish grin, he looks somewhat older than his twenty-nine years. He works at Xerox and wears a dark GAMES T-shirt that contrasts with his almost chalk-colored skin. Pinned next to the Xerox employee badge on his shirt is a button that reads question authority. Wood is known as a classic, or canonical, hacker. "Here's a quick hack I've been working on," he says. He types a few characters on his keyboard, and from the computer come the calliopelike sounds of a rousing, Sousa-style marching song. "I put it together in a couple of days," he says.

One of the results of Woods' epic hacks is Adventure, a collaboration with Will Crowther. Ostensibly a game, Adventure is a metaphor for hacking. When you begin Adventure, the computer tells you your location: at a stream, near a forest, within sight of a small brick building. From there you embark on a Tolkeinesque journey through the caverns and glens of a medieval land, encountering murderous midgets, poisonous snakes, treacherous rapids, thieving pirates and magazines written in dwarf language. By telling the computer the direction you wish to move (typing n for north or u for up, for example), the computer calculates where, on the unseen map created in Woods' imagination, you will wind up next, and displays a written description of your next location. You go deeper and deeper into this netherworld, hoping to emerge by the same path with treasure in hand. There are almost 200 rooms you pass through on your way to the treasure, many dotted with hazards, and the path crosses and intertwines in ways impossible to divine without hours of exploration. Adventure is the most popular game at LOTS, and indeed it is a national craze among those with access to computers. "I would show it to people on a Friday afternoon," Woods says, "and they wouldn't leave their terminals until they finished it, maybe on Monday."

Adventure is a kind of litmus test for hackers: if you can lose yourself in the gullies and misty caverns, you might be susceptible to computer addiction. Just as the plot of Adventure is a world unto itself, the vast memory and operating system of a mainframe computer is a gigantic landscape, seeming impenetrable but eventually accessible to the most devoted seekers. Just as everything in the physical world is constructed of atoms, everything a computer processes or reads is ultimately reduced to bits of either one or zero. Like treasure seekers in the subterranean Adventure world, hackers are electronic spelunkers who have developed the skill to burrow down from the more superficial programming languages to the bedrock machine language of digits. Woods call this "going down and doing the grudgies." To get involved this deeply, you must be able to think in dizzyingly abstract terms. Your mental concentration is so intense that your consciousness is subsumed by the computer. --Steven Levy --Hackers in ParadiseRolling Stone 1982)

Levy expanded the theme of this article into the excellent book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

God forbid we manage to think about the phone as a learning device. I guarantee you that none of the sponsors of the bill have ever typed "define insipid" (or any other word, for that matter) into a text message on their phone and sent it to 46645? (Try it sometime.) I know I mention this a lot in my presentations, but I'm wondering why cell phones aren't a part of my kids' curriculum between now and the time they graduate from high school. I'm wondering why teachers aren't picking up their cell phones and finding answers to the questions they're asking, modeling the technology for their students. Why they aren't talking about ethical and effective use instead of making sure kids check them at the door. --Will Richardson --It Takes a Vision  (weblogg-ed)

A well-phrased response to Pennsylvania House Bill 1245 P.N. 1570 bill that would prohibit electronic devices from schools:

The possession by students of telephone paging devices, commonly referred to as beepers, cellular telephones and portable electronic devices that record or play audio or video material shall be prohibited on school grounds, at school sponsored activities and on buses or other vehicles provided by the school district.

Yes, it's annoying when students use their cell phones instead of pay attention during class. Now, this bill applies to children, not college students, so I have the luxury of saying that when one of my students wishes to pay attention to a gadget instead of class, I try to think of that as the student's way of sending me a message. That message may be "This part of class has become boring... move on to something else," or it may be "No matter what you do today, I am more interested in my gadget than in learning." Either way, it's information that I can use.

I don't really get that annoyed when a student's phone starts vibrating, though it is kind of ironic when a phone shifts from vibrate to some silly tune because the student has momentarily left the phone at his or her desk in order to give a formal report. I never have to say anything in such cases, because the student is usually embarrassed enough.

Even in the paper-and-pencil classroom, instructional technology has the potential to be abused. Once during a class discussion, a student kept tearing pages out of a notebook and crumpling them up quite dramatically. At first, it seemed as if the student was responding negatively to a new turn in the discussion -- as if to say, "The notes I took in the past few minutes aren't worth anything of that's where you're going with this discussion," and I could see the behavior was distracting the other students. But as this continued, I could tell the student wasn't even listening to the discussion -- I was witnessing a wild brainstorming session, in which the student was trying to nail down a thesis.

Possessing and using the paper wasn't the problem -- there are times when the ideas are flowing and you've just got to work them out. Yet the student was not aware of the effect the noisy crumpling was having on the class discussion. The solution is not to ban paper simply because it can be disruptive if a student noisily crumples it during a classroom. The solution is instead to create a supportive culture where students think of each other as resources, not cogs in the "listen/take notes/memorize/spit back" educational machine. And once again, because I teach students who choose to be in the classroom, I realize that school teachers have to spend a lot more energy on maintaining discipline, since they are expected to teach all students, not just the ones who want to be there.

A couple years ago, my dean asked me in passing if I thought the new media journalism students should be required to have laptops. I said no, and I still feel that way. I don't think all liberal arts students NEED laptops. A few students who rely exclusively on computer labs do complain about the amount of time they have to spend online for my classes, and I have adjusted the way I teach with blogs in order to make it possible for a student to log in once, rather than follow a thread as it develops. SHU is considering a program in which students sign up for PDAs; that would really open up the classroom to some new possibilities.

Yes, I would like to teach students the kind of sustained, penetrating critical thinking skills that are necessary to comprehend and produce traditional vehicles of knowledge and inquiry, such as the lecture and the essay. But gadget-loving teens come into the classroom with a huge set of experiences and strengths that the traditional classroom does not tap.

Tools for Teaching Basic Programming Concepts

Alice and Scratch. Filing for future reference.

Will you, won't you... Blackwell's Quadrille (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

"Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?" -- Lewis Carroll's "Lobster Quadrille"

I just tried to order an examination copy of a book from Blackwell Publishing, and when I got what looked like an error message on the final screen (or was it the final screen? I couldn't tell.) I sent feedback to the web designer. In so doing, I noticed that on the pages you fill out when you want to get a free book, you have to opt out of being contacted -- ticking a box if you do NOT want to be contacted in a certain medium.



I noticed that, and thought it was obnoxious, but I chalked it up to ignorance on the part of the marketers. Naturally they want to collect your contact information, and perhaps they thought they were being kind by letting people opt out.

On the webmaster's feedback form, you tick a box if you DO want to be contacted in a certain medium.


Now it looks like the marketing page is set up deliberately, in order to harvest information as quickly as possible. It makes me suspicious of the publisher, which -- along with the four-page ordering form that choked on the fourth page and wouldn't let me use the "go back" button to try again -- is not for customer relations.

--The civil war in four minutes (YouTube)

Open source software makes podcasting easy -- too easy. Listening to a playlist of first-timer podcasts can leave your ears ringing from sudden changes in playback volume. The problem is audio mastering. Recording sound is simple, but mastering that sound -- compressing volume differences, maintaining a decibel ceiling, and similar operations -- is anything but. Fortunately, an open source tool offers everything you need for mastering podcasts and other spoken-word recordings. Audacity is well-known among podcasters on all platforms for its ability as an editor; here are some tips and tools for mastering and adjusting volume, aimed at podcasters, but they could apply to anyone who needs to produce a spoken-word recording under less-than-perfect conditions. --Johnathon Williams --Mastering podcasts with Audacity (News Forge)

I wish I knew about this argument a few months ago, when I was just starting to introduce podcasting to my "Media Lab" class.

The podcasting was one unit in a one-credit course that also includes working on the student paper and a term project, and of course we talked about the culture of podcasting and the nature of radio journalism, so I didn't spend a whole lot of time on technical excellence.

But maybe if I had known about this article, I would have been able to be a little pickier about the sound quality.

--Atari Candleholder (Wonderland | Mixko)

Wonderland credits a designer called Mixko, but I couldn't find it on that site. (And even I did find it there, I couldn't link to it, because the site uses Flash in a horribly user-hostile way.)