Jeremy Zawodny with an interesting post about the return of client side web programming. I did my diploma with heavy use of DHTML in 1997. I wanted to do it cross-platform and I stopped to support anything but Internet Explorer after my doctor told me I should try to back-off from whatever I currently do. It wasn’t just a nightmare – it was practically impossible to do and you could become seriously sick trying.
Many years have passed and things look different. The support of DHTML inside the browsers is much better – but that obviously did not really help too much: advanced technical concepts still require a lot of skill to be developed.
Published on
March 29, 2005 in
Design.
I just came across the NextD site – an organisation located in New York – with some interesting interviews – the latest with Richard Saul Wurman.
NextDesign Leadership Institute was created as an experiment in innovation acceleration. We wondered if it might be possible for a small team of practicing designers to help speed the rate of adaptation, by graduate design education, to the radical events unfolding at the leading edge of the marketplace, that are impacting design leadership today. We optimistically guessed that it might be possible and if it wasn’t, finding out seemed like interesting research! To undertake that experiment, we created the NextD initiative and the NextDesign Leadership Institute.
In the »mindscape« section they offer some introduction about what has changed for designers in the 21st century. The Flash slideshow resonates a lot of things that inspired me to compare the “classic” and the “novel” way in design education two days ago. Most documents have been created by GK VanPatter (e.g. a comment about PhD education in design: »What matters?«). He has been recently interviewed by Peter J. Bogaards.
I recently had to think about design education again. I sense some divide between approaches of design education. The devide is to some degree a difference between classical and novel ways. I try to identify the differences in these two conceptions:
The classical way
- all theoretical implications are researched in the moment they are required through the practice of work
- designs situations that are supposed to be simulations of working life: assignments are seemingly similar to the kind of jobs you are supposed to do as job starter
- suggests that design methodology and practice basically is fully understood and only tools changes from time to time
- sees success as question of structuring the curriculum into staged levels of increased difficulty
- argues that students start from a very limited base of competences and usually would need to acquire a defined set of competences in a consecutive way
- claims that experiences have shown that students will not be able to identify their lack of knowledge and therefore would not be able to select wise learning goals
- defines professionalism as something that can be reached by affirmation and “learning through observation”
- educational topics are often recruited from mainstream media
- counts high quality results more than the quality of processes
The novel way
- does not necessarily disqualify the classical approach but it strongly questions that this alone will not lead to good design or skillful designers
- regards theoretical implications and practical implications as equally important areas of research
- locates design competence not primarily in the domain of talent, creativity and skills but rather in the cognitive domain
- argues that design and methodology itself is changing (not only the tools) or has yet to be discovered
- says it would be practically impossible or useless to “just” simulate the working life because it would not create the intellect and personality required
- claims that students would not learn to deconstruct, recontextualize, rethink or transfer if only challenged the classical way
- argues that learning strategies that assimilate research strategies play a crucial role (experiment, critical thinking)
- suggests that there needs to be a quest for new questions and not only new answers to known questions
- says that students start with a broad set of competences and experiences and first and foremost need help to be able to reframe their knowledge to foster design processes and attach any useful new experiences
- argues that professionalism can only be reached by a combination of affirmation and inventive thinking
- encourages students to autonomously define their own learning agenda if possible
- suggests that educational topics should not only be recruited from mainstream media but also to great extend from science topics
- counts the quality of the process and the quality of the results as equally important
The problem is that proponents of the “classical way” disqualify the “novel way” as a waste of time, not very effective, anti-disciplinary and over-demanding for students. Usually neither party has to offer empirical data beyond personal experience to support the claims. The same few statistical data about employment rates are often used to support contradicting arguments. There does not seem to be a consensus.
I lost the wiki on this site due to hackers. I didn’t have a recent backup so I am trying to recover as much as possible from Google cache. The wiki wasn’t a wiki anymore anyway: i needed to close it for public editing due to spam bots.
The best solution I have seen for fighting this kind of automated spam is a small Turing test. Ingo Hinterding has good experiences with it and it seems to protect is comments quite well. It may also be easier to implement that captchas. Here is a german article about the issue. It contains a quote by Stephan Mosel:
Open wikis are so 2004!
Well, I’d add that closed wikis aren’t anything beyond 2004 as well. The open editing of wiki pages is a key for success of wiki sites. I don’t want to contact the site maintainer or subscribe to an account when coming across a wiki page that I feel needs some refinement.
Through Clark MacLeods blog I found this site about study skills from James Cook University in Australia. It containes some helpful links and it appears to be fine input for the course about “PIM strategies” I was contemplating about some days ago.
I really like this weblog of Clark MacLeod from Taiwan (he is very much into sound and interaction design). In addition to common blog post keywords. He categorizes his posts in three domains: work, life and play. I think this is a good way to separate social roles and personal motivation in blog posts. I just need to come to a conclusion about this. It would be very easy to add with Tinderbox.
Mark Bernstein writes that Tinderbox is perfectly well suited for structured blogging. It’s basically a concept to add metadata to blog posts. Tinderbox originally was designed with personal content management and hypertext authoring in mind – not blogging. It could be a push for Eastgate if structured blogging is recieving wider attention. Dave Winer also points to data blogging which he says takes the idea further.
I am somewhat sceptical about data blogging. There are too many implementation details involved: weblog software developers would have a hard time to come up with simple solutions that users will like. Some power bloggers may anhance their HTML pages with this, but the real secret to success is syndication. I can’t imagine a simple way of how such meta data enriched blog posts will be aggregated and presented to users in a consistent way.
Paolo Valdemarin thinks similar.
My prediction for podcasting & weblogging: It will remain as a method for distributing files via RSS-style subscription. But I don’t think it will have much impact in the blogging area. Most podcasts created by bloggers are simply too boring. They can’t be indexed. Passages can’t be quoted. Most of all: you have to invest a lot more time to get the messages – there are no headlines you could scan.
Update: Somone (no name on site) posted a concept for bookmarking into audio files.
My server was hacked and the provider decided to completely eliminate the whole system without confirmation. Lot’s of reconfiguration and updating needed. Most functionality is gone. Comments are lost. The wiki as well. ARRGH! Shouldn’t a provider call to negotiate further actions? This is really weird.
Published on
March 15, 2005 in
Tools.
I remeber well Brent Simmons’ proposal of a“Law of CMS URLs”:
The more expensive the CMS, the crappier the URLs.
Today I had the chance to work as editor with the WebDB portal platform from Oracle 10g Application Server. It is pretty modular, but it is a pain in the a** to really get to editing content fluently. The system might be powerful – but the front end makes a lot of that power vanish.
Yet, nothing I have seen comes close to structured editing a page with the outliner of RadioUserland + Manila + metaRenderer Plug-In + docRenderer3. It is the most elegant way to have layouted pages without touching HTML. And it is unbeaten for some years now.
My second favorite combination is Zope + ExternalEdit + ReStructuredText (and maybe with Plone or ZWiki). This allows click-editing any content in any local favorite editor. The ReStructuredText is an equisite ACSII-to-HTML converter. It doesn’t get first rank in my view because editing an outline still beats the ASCII-editor. You need to know slightly more formatting rules to get beautiful HTML.
Published on
March 13, 2005 in
Business.
This is an very interesting collection of questions for job interviews. Very good to be prepared for those in case you plan to have one.
I am going to present about weblogs in higher education at an event at the Univeristy of Hagen next week. I am not quite sure what the audience is expecting and what how this topic is going to fit into the day. I think the (german) presentations will be video taped and published online. In the afternoon there will be a roundtable about the assessment of curricular structures and the role e-learning activities could play.
I was thinking yesterday about playing some radical mindgames and sketch some speculative scenarios. But I reverted these thoughts, because they do not help the main topic of my presentation too much. It is more important to really get the idea across what kind of new quality weblogs are and to offer a good framing of the corresponding questions.
My intention is to approach the topic of “learning through authorship” from a different angle. The usual approaches have been to ask what changes might occur to the current situation. So if it would be possible to sketch out a completely arbitrary and utopic scenario then I hope it could help to come to research questions, that target some concepts ebout higher education that many of use take for granted. The weblog topic is an interesting jump start for this because in turns the role of learners from receiving ends into potential network nodes. My understanding is that this changes the rules of the game and we need to ask in which way it canges and if we could design and implement certain outcome.
Published on
March 12, 2005 in
Design.
I decided to repeat a seminar from a couple of years ago: Information Mapping. This time I want to suggest two optional research topics that I think might be very intersting to work upon: the first is “60 years Hiroshima” and the second is “Deforestation“.
I got interested in the Hiroshima topic last year when I accdidentally crossed a website of the “Children of the Manhatten Project”. It kicked of a long web research that really totally amazed me.
The Deforestation topic is a tribute to two things: a) the famous Knowledge Navigator video by Apple and b) the software EarthBrowser which I recently obtained and which was improved with stunning high-res images of the earth surface. Here is are two samples – the second shows a zoom to the center of the first view:
Anyway I am convinced that both topics serve perfectly as context for exploring data visualization and information mapping experiments. Generally I am not sticking to topics like these, if students want to work on things to explore that have more appeal to them.
The course starts on March, 23rd. See course weblog.
Published on
March 12, 2005 in
Tools.
Eastgate released Version 2.4.0 of their fabulous Tinderbox tool. A number of enhancments – most of them very interestig to advanced users. There has been quite some time since the first announcement of a Windows version of Tinderbox. I am sure the release is not too far ahead in future. Keep an eye on the Eastgate site if you are a Windows user and you’d like to use Tinderbox one day!
If Tinderbox is available for both platforms I am willing to use it in a course about “personal information management strategies”. The course has yet to be developed and I am hoping it is going to be a new kind of skill that can be tought as an introductory course that could prepare students to have a better grip at project management, conceptual brainstorming and knowledge work. I wonder if anybody has heard of such a course. I’d love to talk with people that have already some kind of experience with that.
I am not getting tired of Flickr. If you love photos you got to read the flickr blog from time to time. It contains wonderful posts to astonishing photos or services based on Flickr content. There are so many stories captured in Flickr sets and the way users can comment, annotate and group is really a big plus. And there are very handy tools available to make uploading images a snap. Even though I haven’t been uploading many images yet I was willing to support Flickr by buying a Pro account today. Let’s see if that will increase my motivation to take more pictures and upload them there…
Martin Röll and Robert Basic point to an interview with Euan Semple, head of knowledge management solutions for the BBC (unfortunatly the link to the interview seems to be broken at the moment). Semple reports BBC is using bulletin boards, weblogs, wikis and some kind of social network tool.
The points raised by Martin and Robert deals with the loyality and motivation of employees to use these tools in effective and productive ways. Martin even points to a press release of Clearswift, a company that provides security solutions and content filtering applications, which suggests an eminent danger coming from weblogs in corporate context.
There is a danger that iloyal eployees start to send interna to the public. The german site dotcomtod.com is an example of a news site consisting to a large part of rumours from internal sources. Companies have good reason to consider options to stop this. But the BBC example shows that there may also be good reason to handle employees respectfully and trust in their loyality. The other side of this story: like the public relations offices of big companies in future will potentially need to by accompanied by an internal relations office, that deals with these issues and generates loyalty among unhappy employees (even though there is probably already an employment contract that demands this).
