What Makes a Design Seem 'Intuitive'
Early adopters just want something COOL and NEW and are intrigued if something is complicated and half-formed. They're most likely hack a half-finished linux program and MAKE it work, and they'll be proud that they're first on the block to have it and to have it set up just for THEM.
Most folks wait until it's doable with a minimal amount of instruction with an outcome that matters to them.
Luddites will only learn when they have NO alternative and their need for the outcome outweighs their personal reluctance.
Every group has all three types of people, and identifying and responding to the needs of all three groups is what seperates technology that moves forward from technology that dies on the vine.
The world is littered with GREAT ideas that can't get past the early-adopter stage.
Charles Lowe gave a fabulous talk today about blogging as a knowledge publishing platform for the non-techie publisher.
I was all there and with him, and then he said it: the "J" word.
"Journal"
I get nervous when people bandy about the word "journal." I don't EVER link to think of myself as a journaler, and I don't want my students to think of our blog spaces as journals.
If I was teaching composition this semester, maybe I could be more comfortable with the idea, but my my students have such a hard time distinguishing between the personal and the professional that using "Journal" to describe what we do together online just seems to invite some of the LiveJournal-type correpondance that, while valuable, is suitable for an entirely different audience.
In the same panel, Tara suggested that using both a personal blog and a community blog together would allow students to toggle between a professional space and a personal space. I think there would be a lot of value in that, since there is this difficulty in perceiving audience.
Yes, I know; BIG news. But really, it's important and someone is studying the problem.
The Women in IT Education project at RIT has received an NSF grant to study women's attrition from Computer Science classes (via Misbehaving.net)
Also interesting: CISE project at NSF.
The article "(Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything..." explains the increasingly distributed nature of creative works of all kinds. Used to be, big media outlets like book publishers and television producers were the gatekeepers for what was smart and/or entertaining.
Increasingly, the public decides for themselves what is interesting and what is not. Anyone can publish a book, put up a website or blog like this one, or make a digital movie and have it distributed online for peanuts. That pulls quite a bit of power away from mainstream media outlets and they're forced to play catch-up. They've gone from being gatekeepers to being me-toos.
The MoveableType folks are topping the Daypop chart with their announcement of a hosting option for MT called TypePad put out by SixApart.
What this does is allow an even broader segment of the public to blog easily and quickly, with a robust toolkit behind them that they don't have to configure and work with themselves. If you're a do-it-yourselfer, you can still download the software for free at www.moveabletype.org
I hope they make a pile of money. They've earned it.
Megnut's powerpoint presentation defining blogs to the initiated. She also details how they pull writing out of the book metaphor and well on our way towards content creation free of wordcount worries (via Plasticbag.org)
Some of these points are very similar to ones I would make to a classroom full of 102 teachers.
This article from The Register traces the co-opting of the term "second superpower" by A-list bloggers in about three weeks time. In a short time, bloggers altered the perception of the phrase in the public arena to the point where media uses the term to mean "global public opinion" and googlesearches now make it the primary definition of the phrase (this is called googlewashing). It is another illustration of the power that language has in shaping the thoughts and actions of the public. Politics and media have used to this advantage since forever. Blogging gave a small community that has tremendous reach the ability to spin the phrase to focus on the mass of public voice.
This is an old article, but a great description of blogging in its many forms "What we do when we blog" brings together some of the varied blog formats and describes them in great detail.
So the rhetoric professors on Rhetorica are all really interested in political rhetoric. The Professors who blog use their sites as pundit sites, which is interesting, but not what I'm interested in for Comp. They do have a rhetoric primer that could be quite useful for 102, however.
Polling is one way in which journalists and politicians take the pulse of their constituencies. Daypop directly and constantly points out what bloggers see in the news, write about and link to.
An American looking at Daypop's scores today, for example, would learn that Cricket is on the world's mind today while American football isn't. Cool, no?
The divide between students and faculty may be deeper then most teachers realize. 'Screen Language': The New Currency for Learning examines ways in which students are more well-versed in digital culture and technology then their instructors, and how instructors may use their students knowledge to inform traditional English coursework.
Someday, I'm going to publish a manual of how to really get through graduate school. How to choose a committe, how to prepare for a thesis, how to try to frame your experience before you graduate, and how to articulate your goals before you get out.
Just as soon as I figure these things out, I'm going to put it somewhere for others to read. I might end up publishing it under the name Alan Smithee to assure that I'm not firebombed while blogging one day.
Since saturday, I've been watching the discussion about the Google/Blogger deal streaming accross the blogosphere. Fully 1/4 of Daypop's Top 40 relates to it. There seems to be an aggregate opinion that this purchase can only be a good thing. It helps that more blogging folks realize that Google is such a great search engine because they have the sheer raw data, and that more data can only make Google better.
The underbelly of that is that Google collects and keeps huge amounts of data about the web. In the wrong hands, that information is a huge privacy violation waiting to happen. And god help you if you put up some embarassing post and remove it, thinking it's all over. Google's cache means that old posts never die...