Design: October 2008 Archive Page

From Wired:

Blogging this to assign for my students to read when the current unit is over.

Not surprisingly, the Web serves the first function of a local paper exceptionally well. They deliver information instantly, and articles can be updated and corrected in real time. What is surprising, though, is the unfortunate and neglected condition of most student papers' Web sites. The average site has a clunky layout, sloppy design and little-to-no attention to color schemes or aesthetics. Many sites are a muddled array of hyperlinks, with uncategorized articles strewn every which way. Graphics are poorly sized. Fonts are dull. Multimedia is ignored.

All of these flaws are shocking when one realizes that Generation Y, the most tech-savvy ever born, maintains and codes these sites. Yet their designs are, excuse my snarkiness, very 1990s. But worse than my aesthetic objections is my philosophical gripe: Most student papers' online content essentially mirrors the print content. They are updated daily or weekly, only in conjunction with the print paper. Such an organization suggests a clear prioritizing of the physical newspaper -- a mistake that the professional news media, by and large, began to correct a decade ago. -- Brian Farkas, Inside Higher Ed

My provost just sent this link to me and some faculty from computer science and theater, all of whom I've already spoken with, very informally, about some kind of collaboration.

Game design has helped rekindle interest in computer science and become a hot new major at more than 200 schools across the country, according to the Entertainment Software Assn., a trade group. Because making games crosses several disciplines, the diversity of programs that offer such courses is staggering: Fine arts colleges, engineering schools, film schools, music schools and even drama programs are sending graduates into the fast-growing industry.

"Some programs throw a drama guy together with a programming guy to see what they come up with," said Bing Gordon, a venture capitalist and former chief creative officer for industry powerhouse Electronic Arts Inc. "Games is the ultimate interdisciplinary art." (Alex Pham, LA Times)

I logged onto Yahoo and found that my profile had been changed. The first of Yahoo's "Top Questions" is "What happened to my profile?" but the link just goes to the aggressively cheerful "Welcome to the Profiles Tutorials!" page, which does not actually answer the question.

Another question is "What happened to my alias profile?", which includes this heap of committee-spawned obfuscatory hooey:

If you had a profile page associated with your alias prior to migration to your new profile on Yahoo!, it will not be viewable moving forward.

I'm not sure that "migration" would be a good way to describe what happens if millions of birds are pulled from their nests and moved to a another location without warning, but whatever. And I suppose that being given a pretty much profile sort of counts as getting a "new profile," in the same way that if a bunch of pirates looted the house you rented, you'd end up with a "new house" because it no longer resembles the old one.  Because the auxiliary verb "will" already conveys "in the future," I wonder what someone thought the adverbial phrase "moving forward" would add to this linguistic mush.  It seems to be a euphemism for something like "anymore" or "ever again."

Many of the comments on Slashdot point out that Yahoo! is a free service, so it's not like we should really expect much of them.

Another writes, "Yahoo please die already, noone has liked you since '96."

http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

I'd like to be able to link to specific details on the map, but I don't think it's possible.

I'd never heard of the "Argument Slide" before.  The "concept visualization" cluster is probably most useful for teaching my freshman writing students.  I'm taking a quick break from marking midterms, and I only glanced at this. Filing it for later. (Via Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, where Lisa Spiro also introduces me to the term "slow blogging").

During play, the screen background was solid black with a white border, with one color line representing each player.  We displayed the game score in a horizontal strip at the bottom of the screen.  It wasn't the most graphically advanced program, but it was simple and fun.  It looked something like this:

[...]

"Both the AI and the humans had three missiles they could use during the course of the game. When a missile hit a wall, it would create a mini 'explosion' that would erase the color on the background back to black as it faded out - thereby eliminating sections of the trail left by previous cycles."

Soon we had players and computers firing missiles to shoot their way out of tight situations. Nonetheless, Tron purists may scoff, since the movie programs didn't have such luxuries as missiles to get them out of a bind.

[...]

One day, when Marco and I were playing against two computer opponents, we forced one of the AI cycles to trap itself between its own walls and the bottom game border.  Sensing an impending crash, it fired a missile, just like it always did whenever it was trapped.  But this time was different - instead of firing at another trail, it fired at the game border, which looked like any other light cycle trail as far as the computer was concerned.  The missile impacted with the border, leaving a cycle-sized hole, and the computer promptly took the exit and left the main playing field.  Puzzled, we watched as the cycle drove through the scoring display at the bottom of the screen.  It easily avoided the score digits and then drove off the screen altogether.

Shortly after, the system crashed.

Our minds reeled as we tried to understand what we had just seen.  The computer had found a way to get out of the game.  When a cycle left the game screen, it escaped into computer memory - just like in the movie.

Our jaws dropped when we realized what had happened.  (Real Life Tron on an Apple IIgs)

A few weeks ago, one of my local papers, the Tribune-Review, implemented a little JavaScript magic to try to hide its advertisements from the ad-blocking software I use. That means my ad-blocker didn't recognize some of the advertising cruft, so it let it pass through the filter, and the news pages suddenly started skipping and cavorting, blinking and wiggling in throes of mercantile ecstasy. 

It took me about five minutes to see their new trick. So I looked around and found a more aggressive ad blocker, which, fortunately for me, blocks even more of the non-intrusive ads that I had been willing to put up with.

On Gameshelf, Andrew Plotkin offers a great discussion of flash ads. This line sums it up pretty nicely:

You cannot get me to start watching ads by making them more intrusive; you can only make me hate you more.

I will put up with text ads, or graphic ads that don't blink. I won't put up with things that reach across into the content area, that add paid hyperlinks in the content area, or that otherwise interfere with my ability to use my browser (popups, disabling the "go back" button, etc.). 

There are millions and millions of pages on the internet, and if yours annoys me, I will leave.

In a Ph.D. thesis called "The Paradox of the Guided User," a dutch researcher examined the productivity of users who were dependent on computers, and users who had a pen-and-paper alternative. The article doesn't link to the full dissertation, so it's risky to extrapolate beyond the quotes in the article, so I'll just repeat a few here:

"Present-day software must be user-friendly. Indeed, train ticket machines at railway stations should be simple and provide us with a ticket quickly," van Nimwegen told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

"But in other situations, I think we should not be assisted as much as graphic software interfaces like Microsoft Windows or Apple OSX are doing today," he added.

Van Nimwegen says much software turns us into passive beings, subjected to the whims of computers, randomly clicking on icons and menu options. In the long run, this hinders our creativity and memory, he says. --eNews 2.0

This article meshes nicely with a unit I'm preparing to spring on my Writing for the Internet students later this week.  I'm trying to get them past the "creative hypertext is confusing and boring" attitude that sometimes prevents experienced 'net users from appreciating the hyperauthor's use of a medium that can, in fact, be disorienting and alienating. 

Next, I'm going to introduce them to the command line, in order to prepare my English majors to appreciate the lesson I'm trying to teach them when I ask them to do some elementary programming and game-creation tasks.

That's the story that's been set up for the player to experience, and he travels along that path like a tourist on a Disneyland ride. However much choice the player seems to have in between these story checkpoints, the overall path of the game is geometrically equivalent to those of film or theater or books. We choose to ignore the fundamental quality that makes games different and so compelling-- their interactivity.

The other approach is to "open up" Moby Dick, to allow the player real, significant choices in the course of events and their outcomes. In this configuration, an especially skillful player might be so good at the game that he does indeed catch and kill Moby Dick, triumphantly achieving Captain Ahab's revenge-- and along with it, destroying the whole point of Melville's story. Allowing such an alternate ending robs the work of its power; the story of Moby Dick is engaging precisely because Captain Ahab cannot find extra lives, rewind time or load an old save for a second chance, and the story of his obsession and undoing is fixed over time, a static sculpture in four dimensions.

The issue of these changeable outcomes is what the critic Roger Ebert infamously identified as the central problem with games-as-art, and despite the emotional flurries and dismissive grumblings from the gaming community, it is actually a good point without a clear answer. If Melville had so much as allowed for any possibility at all where Captain Ahab "wins," no matter how remote, the work's message and its interpretation of the world completely changes. Instead of destiny and fate, we would now speak of probability and chance. Work hard enough, get lucky enough, and anything is possible -- Matthew Wasteland, GameSetWatch

Beautiful, beautiful 1980s introduction to "sophisticated word-processor" technology.

'Hi YouTube, it's me, Kiki,'' the teenager said to the camera as she swiveled in her chair to jazzy background music. ''And today I'm going to show you how to cheat on a test - the effective way.''

She demonstrates her technique, slipping a small piece of paper with the answers in a clear-tubed pen as she rationalizes her reasons for cheating. (Chicago Sun-Times)

Kiki's video includes a link to her blog, where we learn she is a community college student who wrote a few weeks ago, "I think I want to start being in the media right now. You know, being seen in movies and television."  Well, you've got part of your wish, Kiki.

It's hard for me to imagine what's going through the head of someone who posts a video like this, but at the same time, I can't help but feel amused. First of all, there's a lot of stuff on YouTube, so it's not surprising to find someone has posted a video about cheating.

Second, how many words can you put inside a clear plastic pen tube?  We're talking about filling up the inside diameter, not the outside diameter.  Even if you have really good eyes, and can discern two lines of text, we're talking about 20 words.  In the time it takes to watch Kiki's video, you could say those 20 words to yourself 20 times over, or spend a minute making up an acronym to help you memorize key terms. (The YouTube article on how to cheat on a test with a fake Coke bottle label actually describes something that requires some forethought and talent, and users have rated it much higher than Kiki's method.)

Since I teach small classes where each student is expected to contribute during class, and because most of my classes are writing classes, I can de-emphasize the "memorize facts and spit them back" activities, and instead focus on process. 

When I gave a vocabulary quiz last semester, I let my students bring in a one-page cheat sheet.  I figured that the benefit the student would gain from having to filter the material and decide what was important enough to go onto the cheat sheet would be more beneficial to their learning than cramming. But in that case, I wasn't intersted in getting them to memorize any particular vocabulary words. Rather, I was calling attention to the process of deducing the meanings of unfamiliar words by having them break a word down into its components (prefix, root, suffix).  I also had them invent new words. (Examples I included were "post-cardiofractal" and "circumvore".)

Along the same lines, I let students in Writing for the Internet consult their textbooks and even look on their classmates' computers while they were doing an in-class HTML exercise. (My only stipulation was I didn't want them to ask each other for answers.)  Again, I wasn't asking student to memorize HTML, but rather asking them to internalize the technical steps that go into creating and uploading a web site, so that we can move on to the much more important issues of content and audience.

For my second time teaching "New Media Projects," I have replaced routine "prove you can use this tool" quizzes with peer-focused screencasts.  Rather than have students prove to me that they can perform certain design and programming skills in class, I am asking them to use Cam Studio to record a video of them talking a novice through some steps that demonstrate their skills.  So far we have screencasts on Blender 3D (a modeling and animation tool), Inform 7 (a programming environment for text-based games, which I don't think had been covered on YouTube before), and an open topic that's simply supposed to be interesting to Seton Hill University students.  This phase of the course is designed to get students familiar with various unfamiliar tools. Of course there's only so much they can learn in the two or three weeks we spend on each tool, but when each time they watch and comment on a peer's screencasts, they'll get a slightly different approach to using the tool.

(BTW, also quoted in the Sun-Times article is Liz Losh, whose path I cross on the blogosphere from time to time.)