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Wednesday, June 26, 2002
Here's a good nail in the coffin of e-learning, as if it needed one. Although the author clearly understands learning, he's in denial about what cranked up "interactivity bandwagon": "Why did we all jump on the interactivity bandwagon? The answer is thought provoking. We did it because we don't fully understand the human learning system." Wrong-o. I sat at meetings at UT where consultants spoke about monetizing every class offered at the University by putting syllabi and readings online. When educators in the audience complained of the crass foolishness of that attitude, they were told "that's the kind of old-fashioned attitude we need to do away with."
I'm looking for examples of the over-hyping of XML in the last year or so in articles, press releases, ads, whatever. If you know of any URLs, please send them.
Monday, June 24, 2002
Check it out:
That's Dreamweaver MX installing 12,000+ files. Look, a spacer gif!
Sunday, June 23, 2002
The other day at work:
Project Manager: hey, we're pitching this new client {name of famous interesting German company with years and years of wonderful content}
Me: Really? Great, what's the project?
PM: Well, they want an intranet, with complex user management, knowledge management system, document archive, CMS that publishes both to the intranet and internet, and a complete visual redesign of the public website, including streaming video archives and lots of Flash animation.
Me: and naturally the budget and schedule is...?
PM: 75k, including software purchase costs, and two months.
Me: (reeling like I've been shot with a tranquilizer dart)
In looking at some of the project brief documents, I notice that they weren't even able to write a few pages of What We Think We Want in two months. This is a client with many years of managing and pricing large complex media projects, they know that their numbers are absurd; this bullshit proposal is just to see if an agency is desperate enough to bite. This kind of project just makes me sick of this work.
Tuesday, June 18, 2002
On Friday I finished up four days of teaching at the Academy of Converging Media. You can find my syllabus (and a picture of me lookin goofy) if you dig deeply into the frames: click "english" (unless you want the german version...), then "view the sitemap", then in the list click "trainers" then my name. The Abstract that's there isn't actually the course I taught; I changed it substantially so that it was evenly split between an Introduction to Information Architecture and the Introduction to Programming. Stuff we did and talked about: IA goals and methods, card sorting, creatíng page wireframes, sitemaps and other deliverables, writing spec documents, why programming is a good thing to know about. In the programming section we looked at variables, if/then constructions, and repeat loops. Then we spent half a day looking at examples of good IA to see how variables, conditional structures, and repeat loops are used in the presentation of content, particularly when the data and content lives in a database. I think I managed to fit just about everything I'm interested in into those four very long days.
Wednesday, June 12, 2002
Interesting: the NYT (here via Jon Udell), points out that the FBI's search engine, used for "the retrieval of the full text of case reports" (like "this guy's learning how to fly, but not land"), is "devised for the quick retrieval of the names of known suspects, the network can be searched for terms like "aviation" or "schools, " but not "aviation schools"." Smaarrt. Cause you know, showing lightning fast results is more important than making search engines that work properly. On SIGIA today, someone asked if any of us are working on any security-oriented, government-level IA problems. I bet not. Udell's right: if the FBI search engine can't yet understand compound terms, it's pretty unlikely that they'll be able to get up to Google quality anytime soon, which means they certainly won't be asking for the help of IAs anytime soon.
Tuesday, June 11, 2002
An interesting thread on CHI-WEB lately: first, a message from Christina Wodke pointing out some new and interesting interfaces, and an great response by Jared Spool, describing the evolution he's seen in UI technology since 3270 green-screen interfaces. I always preferred the green-screen terminals at the UT library. Fast and ugly.
Monday, June 10, 2002
Posting today from above Potzdamer Plaz, where I'm teaching four days of introductory IA and programming. Outside there are crowds watching the World Cup very noisily. Four days is a lot of material to prepare...
Friday, June 07, 2002
This is nice: a page of OSX "scenarios", showing typical desktop screenshots of OSX being used by "casual users," "admin hackers", and "business users", as well as several other screen shots of OSX setups and features I haven't read about elsewhere.
Thursday, June 06, 2002
Blast from the past today: installing a new Netscape browser. Well, ok, it's Mozilla, whatever. It's still the little things that annoy me: no application icon, so you get the old Macintosh hand-writing-with-a-pencil icon; the pointless display of the page load time to the thousandth of a second; the overwhelming focus in the bookmarks on stuff that only Mozilla developers care about (latest builds, bug reports, etc.)
And you know, I just can't get behind something that has a flaming logo, for pete's sake.
Matt Haugey found out that Netscape 4 was released June 11, 1997, so it's almost exactly five years old.
Here's a short list of other software-related stuff from around June 1997. Which of these could I still expect to run on current computers?
Tuesday, June 04, 2002
omigod omigod! John Maeda has made available for download all his old (Macintosh) reactive graphics applications. I'm so excited. Watch out for the funky "Quit" requirements, though, and assign memory as needed to avoid Type 2 crashes. Not exactly the most reliable little things, but pretty cool to see this old stuff.
