James Wanless

Customizing menus and widgets for my new WordPress theme

James — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 05:33:12 +0000

I have a history of somewhat routinely tweaking or fully redesigning my theme, but it’s usually just a matter of moving some elements around, changing a colour here and there and calling it a day. With the release of WordPress 3.0, I took a slightly different approach this time. This release brings with it some major changes and I decided to begin digging into WordPress a little more deeply than I usually do this time.

In particular, I decided it was high time I really began grokking widgets to a degree I hadn’t before and I was determined that the new WordPress menu system would be my friend. This meant a different approach to the usual. I’ve built a number of sites with WordPress where I presently work, and for clients in the past. As we move more deeply into WordPress for blogs and other projects at BCIT, I felt that leveraging the platform’s features for my personal use would be useful.

Simple menus – different mindset

I’ve always written custom menu code in the past. For the most part, I did this because I could ensure that I maintained states for styling on families of pages and I could include exactly what I wanted to in various areas of page real estate. However, I’ve always been bothered by this to some degree because, once I’ve finished designing a theme, I’m still opening up my code editor and FTP-ing something or other to the server as I make a tweak here and a tweak there, as opposed to simply updating my site through the admin panel.

Taking a look at the two menus in the header area above, the upper-most menu contains the core static pages of the site. Originally when styling this theme on my test server I was worried that I’d have a hard time preserving parent menu styling when on a child page of that page. However, with the automatic generation of current_page_parent and current_page_ancestor classes, I can easily make my menus behave just the way I want and not write a single line of conditional PHP menu code. The ability to build any number of custom menus and use them wherever you want, is a game-changer.

While I’ve usually implemented journal categories and archives in drop-down or bullet sidebar lists for all blog and archive pages, I decided I would reduce the number of categories significantly and implement them as the lower of the two header menus above. I don’t use tags and this also helps ensure that I use a few key categories or topics for my writing, and that those categories are always on top for visitors to find. I couldn’t find an easy way to implement a label for this menu, even looking closely at the parameters and arguments for the wp_nav_menu function.

My hardcoded category menu label

What I ended up doing was placing a margin on the menu code and wrapping it in another div, with which I hardcoded the label for the menu (pictured at left). Imperfect I admit, but perhaps I’ll be able to figure out how to do it with only the menu code, as I know I can set the wrapper div for the menu, but just haven’t found a label argument so far.

For a simple explanation of how to implement 3.0 menus in your theme, check out Digging Into WordPress’s explanation.

The trouble with widgets

Even when widgets first came out, I resisted the urge to use them on my personal site because I like more contextual elements on my pages and have generally preferred to control things with PHP. The difficult-to-style/control markup generated by functional widgets, coupled with the fact that widgets would be site-wide once implemented, turned me off using them. I was also a little unclear about how to widget-ize various areas of my theme without screwing things up.

If you’re looking for a simple explanation of how to add widgets to your WordPress theme, the guys at Digging Into WordPress have done it again. I found this article simple and to-the-point. It allowed me to enable widgets in my existing theme through the functions.php file and then place the widget code in the various places in my theme where I want them to appear. I addressed most of my issues around styling widget markup by trial and error. Where the WordPress default or plugin widgets I tried didn’t produce the markup I wanted I often got around this by inserting WordPress functions directly in the widgets, just as if they were coded into my theme’s sidebar.php file.

You may be saying, “That’s all well and good, but you can’t run PHP code in your widgets.” You’d be right, unless you first enabled the handy little ExecPHP plugin, which I’d recommend being careful with, as it allows you to execute PHP in posts, pages and widgets.

Contexutalizing widgets

While this fixed most of the issues I had with how widgets worked and styling their markup, the concept still posed a significant issue for me, as I couldn’t control where they appeared and where they didn’t appear. It turns out that there are a few options that allow you more granular control of where widgets will appear on your site. In my case, I wanted a fat footer with some Flickr photos and couple of my external feeds to appear only on my homepage, while I generally have a different sidebar for posts, archives, static pages, pages with children and my homepage, to name a few.

When I first started looking for ways to make widgets appear conditionally, I stumbled upon what I thought was the perfect solution in the Widget Context plugin. When editing a widget, a large second panel appears below the widget content which allows you to include (or exclude) the widget in any or all of your theme’s templates via checkboxes, or to select pages on your site by URL (see below).

The Widget Context plugin editing panel

This implementation makes sense to me, as setting the options as you create or edit the widget works well and so does the plugin, provided you only use the checkboxes. The real power in the plugin is the ability to use specific URLs for widgets on your site, if it worked. I’m not sure if it’s due to the fact that this plugin has not been updated since before the release of WordPress 3.0, but implementing by URL doesn’t work, and having to live with templates as the deepest level of widget granularity doesn’t allow you to override widget appearance on a page-by-page basis if needed.

As I did a little more searching, I came across Kyle’s post about Shiba’s Custom Widgets plugin. That led me to make my way to Shiba’s own site, where I found a lot of good WordPress plugin work happening.

In large part, it does just what Widget Context does, but through a different type of implementation. It adds new widget creation, management and options links and, frankly, having duplicate widget panels (and several instances of the same widget in them) is a little confusing until you get used to the concept. What I really like about it, though, is that the granularity of widget control is perfect and, when you want to override the template settings you do so through the post, page or category editing panel. In other words, using Shiba’s Custom Widgets, you can place widgets exactly where you want them on your site, provided you’ve enabled widgets in that part of your theme and factored the widget into your CSS.

In closing and next steps

I still have a few pages to whip up, but most of the work is done. What I like is that I finally dug into a few things I wanted to and found that, with a little sleuthing, I was able to do pretty much exactly what I wanted despite my old-school attitude that I needed to hand-code all the custom stuff. I can build the menus I want with the styling I want, and I can build the widgets I want, styled as I want and placed where I want. I’m really looking forward to exploring more menu and widget customizations as we start using WordPress more and more at work.

Persona non grata in the United States of America

James — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 02:30:08 +0000

I’m just trying to come to terms with what can only be described as one of the single largest fusterclucks I have ever experienced in my 45 years on this planet. Even with a day to digest what happened, I really can’t get my head around the magnitude of the absurdity, nor just how significant the long-term impacts may end up being. Upon a little reading and thinking back 27 years, it’s entirely possible that bad luck, a mispoken word or two, and complete honesty on my part, has rendered me inadmissible to the U.S. I should note at the outset that I have traveled to the U.S. several times a year throughout most of my life without so much as a sideways look.

I have provided a couple pieces of information below from a paralegal business web site that assists inadmissibles to obtain waivers. It’s a comprehensive page that essentially agrees with and summarizes information I’ve found in various locations.

An expensive shopping trip

Saturday morning we headed down to the Seattle outlets to do a day of shopping. We were planning to save the big shopping for our time in Hawaii, which was to start two weeks today, but is now going to be canceled thanks to Saturday’s events. After two hours in the lineup at the border, our turn came to answer the obligatory questions regarding our reason for traveling to the US, where we were from and whatever else the border guard felt like asking.

As is sometimes the case, on this trip we were asked if anyone in the car had ever been arrested and, as always the case, I answered honestly that I had been arrested for what I will simply refer to as a minor infraction, in 1983. Unfortunately, this infraction, no matter how tiny, falls within an area that is subject to zero tolerance in the U.S. We were then pulled aside for a closer inspection – something that occurs hundreds of times a day at every border crossing, but which I had never experienced before. Usually when I say that it occurred 27 years ago and that I received a pardon 24 years ago, that’s where it ends and I’m allowed on my way into the US. Not Saturday.

Self-incrimination

Once we snaked through another hour-long lineup inside the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) building, I was asked exactly the same questions again, with a twist. I was asked what happened with the arrest and …. I drew a blank. When I again said that I’d been pardoned in 1986, I was informed that the U.S. does not recognize foreign pardons and the CBP agent wanted to know whether the arrest had ended in conviction. Frankly, I hadn’t even thought of the disposition of my infraction in probably twenty years, only that I’d been pardoned. Even when I obtained a top-secret security clearance from the RCMP to work in their E Division Strategic Communications section in 2006, my teenaged transgression didn’t pose any kind of issue or very much discussion at all. Unfortunately, the RCMP isn’t in the U.S. and that fact meant exactly squat when I relayed it to the CBP agent.

I was on the spot and responded that I wasn’t sure what had happened with the arrest. When pressed for an answer I said that I thought I may have been convicted but, again, had been pardoned. That was all it took and, after another hour for the interaction to be processed, and for me to be fingerprinted and photographed so that it could be entered into the CBP database and presumably correlated with my S.I.N., we were turned around and sent on our way back home. To get my passport and driver’s license back I had to sign a copy of the report the CBP agent entered and when I asked for a copy, was told that I could only obtain it through a FOI request.

I was told that, despite CBP running a check which turned up nothing on me, my admission of a conviction rendered me inadmissible to the U.S. I was given a form to apply for a temporary waiver to cross the border, one which includes several attachments, requires I obtain several more official documents and include $545 U.S. My understanding of the aforementioned form is that I would have to apply in advance each and every time I wanted to go to the U.S. I was also told that if I could produce court documents indicating that my charge did not end in conviction, it is possible that I could have this new record expunged. However, there’s a chance that file may not even exist any more.

From the Canadian Legal Resource Centre, Inc.:
However, it is possible that old pardoned files and court documents may eventually be destroyed (usually this only occurs when the criminal record is small, minor and very old).

Upon further reflection

When I got home and cleared my head a little, I did some research and reading of various resources on the net to figure out what my next course of action might be. As I had time to think a little I realized that I had, in fact, not been convicted but had received a discharge, as I now recall at the time my parents were concerned about how a conviction might impact my ability to travel abroad. The fact that I misspoke, as it turns out, may not matter though. Apparently, a conditional discharge (which is what I recall I received) ‘may’ be viewed the same as a conviction.

From the Canadian Legal Resource Centre, Inc.:
Even though a discharge is not a conviction, it is still evidence of guilt, and may still render a person inadmissible to the United States.

Unfortunately, the only documentation I’ve ever had is a copy of the Federal Solicitor General’s letter and the pardon I received, both of which mean nothing to U.S. authorities. To unearth court documents regarding my charge, I’m guessing my search may need to begin with Public Safety Canada (the Solicitor General’s role was abolished in 2005), but that accessing what are likely only paper records from nearly three decades ago will be a time consuming process. Even if I can acquire such documents, what they say may not help me much.

There are also apparently circumstances under which I may be able to apply for a waiver to my inadmissibility if I can’t prove I was discharged to CBP’s satisfaction, but I am not sure of what they are and will need to speak to a lawyer first. Some sources I’ve read suggest these waivers are for 1-5 years, but I’m unclear as to their duration right now. I don’t like to muse and second-guess too much when this is so fresh and I’m not really in possession of enough facts. The notion that I could now salvage the family trip to Hawaii in two weeks is pure fantasy. Did I mention that attempting to cross the border when you know you are inadmissible to the U.S. can be punishable by anything from vehicle impound all the way up to being taken into custody?

As I’ve been thinking about what I’ve read on various legal sites and on the U.S. CBP site, it’s entirely possible that I’ve always been inadmissible to the U.S. and have simply been lucky for almost three decades. In particular, the following applies to me:

From the U.S. Embassy Consular Services web site:
If you have any criminal record, no matter how minor or how long ago the offense, you may be refused a visa or entry to the United States. There may also be problems in traveling through U.S. airports. Under U.S. law, a pardon issued by Canadian authorities is not recognized for purposes of entry into the United States. Even though you may have entered the United States without hindrance in the past, you may be denied entry at a future date based upon disclosure/discovery of your criminality.

It seems to me that for cases where this much time has passed and where a person can demonstrate that they are no risk whatsoever to the U.S., some sort of mitigating factor could come into play. The word ‘wrong-headed’ doesn’t begin to cover the application of this law to cases like mine.

If only that’s where it ended

The Hawaiian trip is the second piece of this puzzle, which is only adding more salt to the open sore. We’ve been trying in vain to confirm our trip cancellation insurance through both Expedia and the insurance provider, Mondial, since we booked the trip in April. Expedia has the money and has given us a policy number, but Mondial has never received the order and has no record of the policy being issued. I’d bet we’ve contacted each of them between six and ten times, escalated our issue past the customer service reps and gotten nowhere. While the policy number and our payment probably gives us legal grounds, getting the money back may well take some doing. Expedia stipulates that claims must be made directly through the insurance provider – the one that presently has no record of the policy.

Since we hadn’t received the actual policy we had only looked over the conditions provided by Expedia in a cursory fashion. After yesterday’s ordeal, a closer look suggests that the hotel may be subject to neither cancellation nor refund. Again, this is early and I’m not going to over react without first going through the process of trying to cancel the trip. In the end we’ll likely end up in cyclical conversations with Expedia, Mondial and perhaps even the Hilton Hawaiian Village and Westjet. At this point where it will end is anyone’s guess.

Regardless of this new, major wrinkle, we had already decided that we would never use Expedia or Mondial for anything again, and will use in-person travel agents only from now on. Online agents do not provide particularly good deals any more and you’ve got no real person who’s accountable to you as a paying client.

Moving forward

While I take full responsibility for being a teen who made the type of mistake that thousands of teens do, and realize that not being in possession of specific details regarding that mistake as I crossed the border clearly didn’t help matters, I’m having a little trouble with the premise of the whole thing. I do cut myself a little slack for a fuzzy memory given the amount of time that has passed. This has me wondering just how many people have very old issues come back to bite them in this way and, further, how many people inadvertently phrase something in such a way as to incriminate themselves?

If the zero tolerance nature of these grounds for inadmissibility to U.S. soil is designed to keep risky people out of their country, it’s done the exact opposite in this case. That the CBP agent wasn’t prepared (or perhaps even able to) consider the lack of anything incriminating against me, my dozens upon dozens of trips to the U.S. over nearly three decades, nor my suitability to be employed with Canada’s national police force in a sensitive role as mitigating factors, suggests that this particular law/policy is inherently flawed. This doesn’t even take into account what I would be dealing with if, say, my job depended on routine travel to the U.S.

What is, perhaps, the most difficult to understand in all of this is how, at 45 years of age, almost thirty years after my incident, with decades of U.S. travel and a history of numerous complete disclosures of my past to U.S. border security, I am now considered a threat because one conversation happened in a way that it never had before. Unbelievable. Unfortunately, I’m at the very early stages of understanding just how screwed I may end up being as a result of Saturday’s events. Unless an option I’m not presently aware of appears once I’ve consulted with a lawyer, what I’m left with is either providing evidence of my discharge from a file that may well no longer exist or applying on a regular basis for expensive waivers to cross the U.S. border.

Is it Cancer or Walmart?

Vancouver Marathon half marathon race report

James — Sun, 02 May 2010 18:56:40 +0000

This will be a pretty short recap. The weather was pretty unpredictable. Forecasts this week ranged from sunny and 18 celsius to rainy and 10 celsius. At 5am, when I got out of bed, it was overcast and a mild 10 celsius. The latest forecast suggested it would stay cloudy for the morning and rain in the afternoon, but the rain came early and, at certain points in the race, it dumped. I took a number of different layers, but opted not for a rain jacket, as I hate wearing jackets. While I got wet, my compression shirt and overlaid T, was pretty much just right. If you click the green start pin on the embed below, you can actually go to Garmin Connect and playback my race GPS data.

This race was really pretty uneventful. My typical pre-race meal of granola, yogurt and banana seemed to take a long time to digest and so it was still sitting in my gut like a stone 1:45 after eating. Beyond that, not a bad race. Given the past few years of many life issues, injury, surgery and the like, I was pretty happy with my 1:37:26 (official time). Oddly enough, that still puts me in the top 10% for gender and age cat, and top 5% overall. Garmin measured the distance as 13.3 miles, but I’m sure it was a more accurate course than that.

I had hoped to be sub-1:35, but with virtually no speedwork or hills under my belt, I can’t really complain. I seemed to time my gels well and I felt solid and consistent throughout. In typical fashion I went out a bit too fast, but settled into a 7:12-7:15 per mile pace after the first couple. In fact, the only thing that actually stopped me from getting my 1:35 was Prospect Point. Not sure why the halfers got treated to that intense little half mile climb, but I probably lost about eight seconds per mile overall going up and only recovered about four seconds per mile for the rest of the race. While I’d hoped to keep my pace below 7:10 per mile, Garmin tells me it was 7:18.

The whole purpose of this race was to give me a reason to get back to Sunday mid-to-long runs and have a focus while completing my thesis. Just gotta get through the Sun Run next weekend and then I’ll be in a position to plan out the rest of my season. More cycle commuting, speed and hills and getting my mileage up to a regular 30+ miles per week is all on the agenda. Depending on how the next couple months go and how my body reacts to what will absolutely be my last season of Ultimate, a fall marathon may be in the works. Given that my Boston qualifier is now 3:30, a return trip next April should be quite doable.

Rush: Beyond the lighted stage

James — Sat, 01 May 2010 06:54:06 +0000

This looks like it will be awesome. I’ll let the trailer speak for itself.

You can get more on the background from the CBC.

No related posts.

February fitness in review

James — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 07:29:23 +0000

Found via http://www.jasonclark.ws/

I guess the best I can do in blogging is to write an entry once a month tracking my fitness progress this year. After all, the last entry was in early February, showing better progress for January than I did for February. It sort of goes with the territory of completing my thesis. The entire past month has pretty much been given over to the task of qualitative data analysis and, as such, mental capacity for doing much else is pretty low. Much like the match to the right, I’m pretty burnt out these days.

I’d like to think the writing frequency and subject matter will improve here soon, but with the first draft of my thesis paper due one month from now, it may not improve much in the short term. I do, however, think I have a post in me coming shortly about the process I’ve gone through doing my data analysis. It’s been such an utter slog that I feel the need to unload.

Totals for the month

I saw some good improvements in running. My average pace and number of runs was the same, but my mileage went up and the amount of time went down. Cycling saw a drop in rides, pace and distance, but the aforementioned commuting reduction and some wacky GPS/cadence stuff on my Garmin basically screwed with my measurements. I spent considerably less time in the gym, too. It’s entirely possible I missed logging a couple workouts, but whatever. I had one particularly bad week and my overall weight drop of only one pound would seem to back that up.

Totals: 27 Activities (10 runs, 13 bike rides, 4 gym visits), 138.39 miles, 18:06:07 h:m:s, dropped 1.0 lbs.

Running

Count: 10 Activities
Distance: 64.49 mi
Time: 7:57:42 h:m:s
Avg Pace: 7:24 min/mile
Avg HR: 154 bpm

Cycling

Count: 13 Activities
Distance: 73.90 mi
Time: 4:58:25 h:m:s
Avg Speed: 14.9 mph
Avg HR: 136 bpm
Avg Bike Cadence: 91 rpm

Gym

Count: 4 Activities
Time: 5:10:00 h:m:s

Back on the fitness horse – January in review

James — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 18:00:56 +0000

Beyond my sub-standard 2009 Boston Marathon, my training and fitness has been spotty at best for the past 1.5+ years, due in part to the MA degree I’m doing, and some significant left groin and right knee issues that are mostly gone now. Throw a little inguinal hernia surgery into the mix last August and you can get a sense of where I am. While I finish the MA through June, I’ll be doing a slow build back to decent endurance and speed, while getting back to a weight I’m happy with.

Below is the first monthly post tracking my journey back to reasonable fitness, focusing only on broad monthly averages for now. I’d like to see the average monthly mileage slowly go up, while the average paces and heart rates go down. The numbers below are only approximations, as some of the trainer rides have GPS screwing with speed/distance sensor data and some of the stationary bike and treadmill runs lacking HR or accurate pace/distance number. Since most workouts include accurate GPS and HR data, the overall averages are good enough to see general trends.

For the month

I got a couple days of bike commuting in and that number will definitely increase. Even though the round trip is only eight miles, that equals up to 176 miles of cycling without a lot of extra effort. I’ve agreed to captain a Vancouver Sun Run team so I’d imagine I’ll be motivated to pick up the pace a little and test a few speed and hill workouts going forward too.

Totals: 29 Activities (10 runs, 11 bikes, 8 gym visits), 122.19 miles, 19:11:34 h:m:s, dropped 4.8 lbs.

Running

Count: 10 Activities
Distance: 44.22 mi
Time: 5:26:42 h:m:s
Avg Pace: 7:24 min/mile
Avg HR: 151 bpm

Cycling

Count: 11 Activities
Distance: 77.98 mi
Time: 4:34:51 h:m:s
Avg Speed: 17.0 mph
Max Speed: 21.5 mph
Avg HR: 130 bpm
Avg Bike Cadence: 92 rpm

Gym

Count: 8 Activities
Time: 9:10:00 h:m:s

Turning the corner on a new decade and year

James — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 05:31:14 +0000

This was originally going to be a post about beginning to track my workouts again, tackling a new year by getting fit and all that kind of crap. The workouts have been a bit haphazard though, so I thought I’d just reflect on the past few weeks and where things are going in the next while.

My ability to sit down and write anything meaningful has generally been hampered for some time by the MA I’m doing. Reading and writing a lot of very focused material so you can prepare another paper or do a literature review doesn’t leave much brain power for updating your journal online. Sometimes it’s two months or more between posts right now. I’m going to try to change that by just doing a little reflection. I think it will help me as I head into the crunch period of my thesis. Future reflections will be shorter and more focused, but what follows is akin to taking out the mental trash that’s been sitting at my cerebral curb for the past bit.

In no particular order

The things that sustain me and probably bore you my dear reader …

Fitness

A lot of my usual activity has been curtailed by the injuries and surgery I’ve sustained over the past year or two. I’m pretty healthy now, but do still suffer from a little left groin tightness if I run hard or long. I’m still exploring options on that, but I may just have to deal with it. It’s a lot better than it was while training for Boston, my inguinal hernia is all healed up and even my right knee is behaving with the right exercises and a couple daily glucosamine dosages. For the longest time the effect was essentially to stop getting out with my running friends, stop playing ultimate, stop going for road rides, etc, etc, etc. Given the amount of coursework I was doing during this, I felt that the timing was OK.

Now that I’m feeling well enough to train again and I’m keeping track of my workouts through Garmin Connect, I’m in the throes of data analysis and have absolutely no time to anything other than my job, my thesis and some forced workouts. Group runs and a possible return to ultimate will have to wait until I’m past the data analysis stage and strictly working on the never-ending writing and revision process that will begin in a few weeks.

Haiti

I can’t help but thinking right now, about two events at polar opposite ends of the spectrum. Due to my particular circumstances I’m not able to do much about or with either but they strike an odd juxtaposition in my mind. The Haiti quake of nearly three weeks ago still is present in my mind almost constantly. My wife and I donated some time ago and I’m dumbfounded by the generosity of Canadians. Some $90 million and counting. When you think of how many people don’t or can’t give and we’ve still give roughly $3 for every man, woman and child, it’s quite astonishing. The suffering and need is immense and I am hopeful that progress begins to escalate soon, as infrastructure is hampering aid getting to those who need it.

The Olympics

Then there’s the Olympics. Polls show that British Columbians are more pessimistic than anyone else in Canada. I know that the mildest January on record is giving John Furlong and his ilk convulsions and, as a taxpayer bound to foot the bill, I am very hopeful for a finanically successful games. What gnaws at me, however, is that locally most of us care more about that than the death toll and human suffering in Haiti (and many other places around the world). While the human ideals embodied in the original Olympic movement should be what international athletic competition is all about, what it has become about is money. Corporate money, government money and the economic spin-off we’ve been told is to come, but which may ultimately not, due to the lagging world economy. The timing of the warm weather and financial meltdown has been a bitch for Vanoc, but then again I bet the mild nights are nice for the homeless folks that Vanoc promised would get all kinds of help as a result of the games. I have a feeling we’ll be waiting a while to see that one.

Work

My brain doesn’t stop there. When not occupied with thesis research, international sport or disaster, I come back to what takes up 40+ hours of my week. Two big projects on the front burners mean there’s not much space for reflection during the day either. Rolling SharePoint 2010 out to BCIT is finally taking shape and I’m beginning to do needs analysis on a new Part-Time Studies course catalogue for the BCIT web site.

While finally settled into my new role doing my old work, the trailer I call home during the day gets no better. It’s a difficult physical space in which to work, with bad lighting, bad furniture and a persistent faint chemical smell emanating from the carpet or floor. It is what it is, but a creative or productive space, it is not.

Going forward

The training break I’ll be taking for five weeks to do a big chunk of my first thesis writing draft is coming in two. What probably gives me my fair share of stress right now is that I likely won’t have either my work projects or my thesis data analysis to the point where I’ll be productively writing the first draft of my paper right off the bat. It’s not due until the beginning of April, but that time will come more quickly than I expect.

I don’t expect most of my reflective posts to be rambling like this one and in a perfect world each of the ideas above would have been a more timely created piece of well-crafted prose. That’s the hope for future bits of mental flotsam but for now this one will have to do.

Clearing cobwebs and groinal eggplants

Images of Haiti – please donate

James — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 07:36:40 +0000

From the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies on Flickr …

Or, from nj.com …

The CBC has put together a micro-site with regular updates on the status of the Haiti quake. Please take the time to donate to this terrible tragedy. There are a number of organizations that do exceptional work on the ground, who are accepting donations. Following are just a few:

The Humanitarian Coalition (Oxfam, Care and Save the Children
Medicin Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders)
Plan Canada (formerly Foster Parents Plan)

No related posts.

Getting to the thesis research

James — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 23:47:40 +0000

Here I am, about a third of the way through my thesis year and I’m finally getting to the fun stuff, in that I’m actually doing research interviews as we hit the Christmas season. I’ll admit that, from the end of summer when I was really beginning to finalize my thesis proposal until now, I’ve felt disconnected from most things while doing this. I chose this road, so I’m not complaining, but it was a disconcerting change from year one.

In the Royal Roads University (RRU) MALAT program you bang through six courses in your first year, two of which happen during a six week pressure cooker that includes a two week residency. This is followed by four more courses over roughly another forty weeks, which include a lot of collaborative group work and enough discussion forum posts to choke a horse. While groups will use a variety of tools of mostly their own choosing to get through it, the lifeblood of the coursework are the Moodle discussion forums. Due to the schedule and pacing, you don’t have much time to think in year one and there’s always some assignment or activity coming up, which forces you to stay focused.

Contrast that with a year two thesis route, which is really all about how well you can determine what you need to do and when. While I always felt the thesis route would probably give me a more useful artefact after it was over, and I felt that doing a thesis would help me get better at research (my big goal for doing an MA in the first place), fatigue with what I view as an over-dependence on coursework discussion forums was the tipping point for me – I’m kind of self-directed and very much an autonomous learner. However, back to the disconnect.

Approvals

Getting to the point that I could actually begin research was no small task. In late summer I started revisiting the research proposal I’d done during my coursework last year, to round it into shape as an actual thesis proposal. It was probably a little heavy on lit review, compared with a proposal from a more seasoned researcher, but it was also extremely light on operational details and virtually devoid of anything that made it look like a case study, which is what I’ve chosen to do for my thesis research. This necessitated really getting familiar with case study methodology and a better understanding of qualitative research techniques. I’d say my actual research proposal was a very different document from the one I produced for marks last spring.

By the time I had a proposal that met with approval from the RRU program head it was well into October. That was approval one, but there was still the small issue of Research Ethics Board (REB) approval at both RRU and BCIT, as my research is situated in a department there. While RRU turned my application around in 1-2 weeks, the same cannot be said for BCIT. It’s somewhat immaterial now, but a ball was dropped somewhere along the way, as an expedited approval request took well over a month. In the big scheme of things it’s not the end of the world, but conducting interviews is considerably more involved than running a survey or other quantitative research. I view the process of recruitment as still another approval of sorts, as interview subjects have to want to do it and be genuinely interested in helping you do your research.

Instead of conducting interviews mid-term, what this has all meant is that I’ve had to try and get faculty interested in, and booked to do interviews at one of the worst possible times of the year. With a Christmas break looming, papers to mark, final exams and some serious fiscal and budget issues at BCIT, this piece has been challenging. Most interviews have been rescheduled at least once and I’ve still got one remaining after the Christmas break. More importantly, the idea of having my interviews transcribed before Christmas so I could start doing some data analysis over the break has given way to transcripts in January and data analysis well into February. The saving grace is that I should be able to take some Professional Development time off to do the bulk of my writing.

This period has been the big disconnect of which I spoke earlier. Other than some back-and-forth with my thesis supervisor and the RRU program head, I’ve really been cut loose and on my own. No second residency, no assignments, no timeline for posting to a blog or forum, no group Skype sessions, no writing with others in a synchronous Google Docs session. Just me, my books, my laptop and lots of uncertainty. Lots and lots of uncertainty.

A budding social researcher?

Now that I’m actually conducting interviews, though, I’m finding it very enjoyable. Prior to beginning I was on edge a bit. Will my interviews go well? Will I get the data that gets at my questions? Will my research fall flat on its face? I’m happy to say that I think my fears are dissipating. What I’m discovering is that my enjoyment of conversation is holding me in good stead as an interviewer. I’m sure my technique could use a lot of improvement, but as I’ve listened a couple times to each of my first two pilot interviews, I’ve found that the data is covering my questions and even in just three interviews I’m getting the sense that patterns I hadn’t anticipated will emerge. Each interview I’ve done has built on my previous one and the guide I’m using changes a bit each time. The direction one interview takes actually helps you ask better questions in subsequent interviews.

I’ve always been the kind of guy who wants to know why things happen, how people feel about them, and I feel that the experiences we have can tell us a lot about how to do things better. It’s been a large part of my work to this point as I build and design web sites and applications and I’m beginning to think that moving my career in more social research directions will suit me. Truth is, web usability and user experience research tends to be ethnographic in nature and I could really see qualitative research becoming more and more important to me personally and professionally.

I won’t get to the in-depth analysis until after all seven interviews are complete. In addition to the transcripts that I have by mid-January, there’s a fair bit of BCIT documentation I’ll have to acquire for both background and triangulation purposes. I may even need to look at a little more data collection, but I’m not sure yet.

What I am fairly certain of now, though, which I wasn’t as recently as a month ago, is that I will successfully complete this thing and that I will get what I expected out of the process. I’ll have a piece of research of which I’ll be proud, I’ll be better at analysis, I’ll be better at research and I’ll be a better writer. I’m pretty sure that’s what graduate studies are all about.

Olympic indoctrination a matter of perspective

James — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:04:39 +0000

The dust-up about The Olympic Resistance Network (ORN) providing an Olympics protest workshop for a local of the British Columbia Teacher’s Federation (BCTF) began at the end of last week. I’m not big on political statements being made to children by teachers in classrooms, but I’m not sure that’s necessarily going on here. A look around the various web sites associated with this group certainly shows some political rhetoric, but also a lot of information focused on thinking critically about the effects of the Olympics, historically and in Vancouver 2010 specifically.

The ORN also suggests that they could come in and do workshops for students at the secondary level. I’d be hesitant to go there as I think there are some real risks about rhetorical opinion being presented as fact, and we’ve already had enough broken financial promises about the Olympics from government. I’d want to make sure that what the ORN was offering students directly was prepared with appropriate levels of research, and was presented in accordance with prescribed curriculum and in a way that allowed students to make informed decisions for themselves. What I’m focusing on here is the workshop for teachers.

Since it was reported that this workshop was to take place in Lord Strathcona Elementary on October 28th, the event has been moved to SFU Harbour Centre, due to media coverage and the reaction of Lord Strathcona PAC chair, Angelia Ellis. According to an article by reporter John Colebourn in the October 13 Vancouver Province, all parties are distancing themselves from each other and the event is now being held off school grounds. In my mind, the debate ends there, as teachers can attend anything they like on their own time and they’ve likely heard more political rhetoric at the average BCTF AGM, than they will at this workshop.

A little balance

… on this issue might be a good idea. News1130′s radio spot about it was far more circumspect:

A local with the B.C. Teachers Federation, the Vancouver Elementary School Teachers Association, is encouraging an event later this month called Teaching 2010 Resistance. It’s meant to help teachers raise critical questions about the Olympics by considering issues like homelessness and poverty.

However, Colebourn’s article veered dangerously close to editorial rather than journalism when he used words like “radical” twice, and “zealots” to describe the ORN. Zealots they may be, but wouldn’t a journalist (as opposed to an editorialist) leave labels like those to the reader to apply? Oddly enough, he gives many more column lines to PAC chair Ellis, Solicitor General Kash Heed and even Premier Gordon Campbell to support his bias, than he does to ORN member Marla Renn in providing the other side of the story. If supporting quotes were going to be solicited, then how about finding some from 2010 Olympic Games Watch or the Impact on Communities Coalition (IOCC) for a bit more balance?

The cheerleading that the major media are doing on the Olympics is nothing new, and an article like this might as well have been written by Vanoc, themselves. However, what I don’t understand is the article’s underlying idea that naysayers are necessarily zealots, or that since the Olympics are here in four months, no critical analysis or debate about the social and economic effects of the games should make its way into classrooms. Don’t we want children to grow up questioning the world around them and trying to understand at more than a surface level? Do we want them blindly accepting government promotion as fact, without something a little deeper? The ORN is probably guilty of no worse zealotry than anyone on the government or Vanoc side of the equation.

PAC chair Ellis was mostly concerned about the lack of communication and that the workshop was to happen in the school without official permission, and I can understand that concern. However, what about the traveling photo ops going to elementary schools all over the place in the guise of educational programs, with Olympic mascot costumed actors, ensuring that all school kids will have a glowing mental image of something that’s not so cut and dried? Apparently, according to Ellis government funded propaganda is just fine, but opposing viewpoints have no place in the minds of impressionable children:

With the 2010 Olympics so close, nothing anti-Olympic should be happening at the school …. Critical thinking is one thing, but not if it’s going to be a political platform.

The difference, of course, is that the photo ops are all part of Vanoc’s education programs; no fewer than 27 separate educational promotion opportunities, funded by your tax dollars and mine. There is no shortage of edutainment supplies and lesson plans, with none of it seeming to ask critical questions. I won’t even go into the notion that, while some of the material rightly promotes the healthy living effects of sport, this runs in stark contrast to the BC provincial government’s continual cutting of physical education programs, including mandating 80 hours of exercise as a graduation requirement but not funding it in school.

Where’s the real concern?

While Colebourn’s article also suggests that the local of the BCTF is now distancing themselves from the ORN, the quotes he used simply clarify that media reports that the two groups were associated were inaccurate. In other words there was never something for the BCTF local to be distanced from. The ORN’s Marla Renn also confirms that the two groups have never been associated.

BC Premier Gordon Campbell feels that children shouldn’t be pawns in the debate … that is, unless it’s at the hands of government classroom edutainment:

I don’t think it was right taking all the enthusiasm for the Games away from the children.

Let’s not forget that the enthusiasm Campbell refers to is, in part, whipped up by the government in the first place in using the classroom for their own biased information.

What’s not clear is what actually had everyone up in arms. There’s a lot of stuff on the Teach2010 web site and some of it undoubtedly draws a very long bow, like connecting the racial issues associated with the 1936 Berlin Olympics with what the ORN perceive as present-day aboriginal racial issues. Most of it is suggestive of lessons and materials that teachers can target at secondary children. Of the couple dozens links from the main page, only one is focused on primary school aged children. Maybe, with the negative media coverage, some previously available material was taken down, but if not, then the comments of Solicitor General Heed seem to draw an equally long bow:

You know, encouraging teachers to recruit kids to break the law, to commit acts of vandalism, or to occupy private property, you know even to the extent of sabotaging children’s food, is absolutely and completely unacceptable.

Heed may have seen some material I haven’t, but vandalism and food sabotage doesn’t seem to be part of the Teach2010 agenda. Frankly, even if that kind of material is part of the workshop for teachers, let’s have a little trust in them to not only speak out against it, but to certainly not present it to school kids.

Engage kids on what really matters

As a fan of international athletic competition, I hope to see some great events on TV. As a taxpayer who accepts that the Olympics are coming in four months, I hope they succeed financially so that any debt associated with them does not get passed on to my kids. As a concerned citizen, I have many questions. Particularly when we continually watch the Campbell government do the following in the name of the games:

continue to downplay homelessness and drug problems in downtown Vancouver and other communities while throwing tons of cash at the games;
run a provincial deficit that could hit close to $3 billion and a ‘published’ games deficit of $60 million;
cut grants and programs in light of the provincial deficit;
let Vanoc run out of money while paying up to $30 million in staff bonuses;
leave Vancouver taxpayers at the whim of market forces to deal with athlete’s village cost overruns.

Financial questions alone should be cause for grave concern and the next generation of citizens shouldn’t be sheltered from as many perspectives as possible in considering their government and what something like the Olympics may actually cost us, financially and socially.

When delivery method and subject matter are the same

Epic fail of the day, Microsoft style

James — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:57:47 +0000

I love opening files sent around work in our Windows-centric environment. In particular, when I think of the Microsoft promise to embrace standards and then see these kinds of dialogue boxes, I get shivers up and down my spine. Hey Microsoft, if you’re gonna port your crappy software over to other operating systems, the level of suck should be the same, not a little extra for good measure.

No related posts.

250,000 gainers can’t be wrong

James — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:09:28 +0000

Ewan McGregor - cheeky devil?

Imagine my amazement. In Sunday’s Vancouver Province I saw a double-page spread that said I could get a free sample of the “Rolls Royce of male enlargement.” Say no more and sign me up.

What really caught my eye was the ad, pictured at left, showing a curious looking Ewan McGregor with the headline beside it, “What Celebrities Had To Say!” If this thing is endorsed by Ewan, how can I go wrong? It’s also “already tested with success by GQ Magazine” so it must be for real.

The JesExtender is apparently the latest in a slew of penis stretching devices. Upon reading the tiny details, Ewan was actually among three guests on the same UK show in which this device was also featured. What, you mean this isn’t a real endorsement? A major motion picture star at the height of his career isn’t coming out in support of a set of penis stretching weights? The celebs were apparently quoted as saying they’d try it if they needed it. So what if one of them was also Michelle Pfeiffer. Maybe it stretches other stuff too.

According to the ad, “the numbers are impressive” …

Backed by more than 1200 doctors, scientific studies, the FDA, Health Canada, and already tested with success by more than 250,000 people in 78 country … [sic]

Hell, even with only an implied or ‘flaccid’ endorsement from Ewan or Michelle, with other endorsements like these, I really can’t go wrong.

The jaws of life?

And then I saw it, at the very end of the article, and I decided I’d better forego this purchase for now. The box, pictured at right, has a number of different sized weights, two pieces of rubber tubing and a couple of pieces of plastic that look kind of like a pair of jaws. While the low introductory price of $79.95 is still damned enticing, and the offer of a free set of comfort pads and unlimited VIP access to a forum for the exchange of ‘tips’ with other men around the world suffering a similar affliction only sweetens the deal, I’m just not ready to strap weighted plastic jaws onto my tiny willie just yet.

Maybe if Michelle Pfeiffer also came with the package, I’d have to reconsider.

No related posts.

Getting social media for CRM right

James — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:30:35 +0000

How do you use social media for CRM?

This issue has been percolating just under my skin for a while now. I often hear it said where I work that we still haven’t figured out how to use social media and I’d guess that’s probably true of many places. I think, though, that most folks who are charged with figuring out how to use social media to their advantage are simply looking at it the wrong way.

Often, it’s about setting up Facebook groups or fan pages, or making sure their organization is tweeting announcements from corporate accounts. Some build networks to try and drive traffic to their web sites. I’m not saying any of these efforts is necessarily wrong. Ineffective for the most part? Yes. If, to you, social media is about getting followers, becoming a guru or simply driving traffic to another site, it’s likely not going to be effective for long-term benefit.

External social networks like Twitter and Facebook allow limited conversations but not ones which are contextually centered on your business or organization. In truth they are more about broadcast than social. Try having a real conversation with someone on Twitter sometime. It’s not impossible, but support and issue resolution will likely need to move to another forum to be completed. A good conversation happens because there’s a two-way dialogue and it’s at least somewhat intimate.

Where should you do it?

I’d argue that the best social media CRM implementations happen right on your own interactive properties. Where do your constituents interact with you? If I’ve got an issue with a product or service, I usually start by conducting a web search, then refining it down to a search in a knowledge base or FAQ at the site of the organization of interest to me. An external social network is not a comfortable or intimate enough environment for this. Plus, it may just be a personal preference, but I don’t follow corporate tweets and I don’t join corporate Facebook groups or pages. Frankly, I update Facebook through ping.fm or another service and rarely directly visit the site any more.

A colleague recently recounted an experience in which his son was purchasing something from a site halfway around the world. He had a question that couldn’t be answered without some help, and was very impressed when he could have a live chat with a customer service representative via an on-page box. He had to input his name and issue and wait in a short queue. The question was answered quickly and the purchase completed. By contrast, think about the same situation but one where the customer is forced to leave a voice message or send an email after hours and wait a few days or longer, or sometimes not receive a response at all. The opportunity is lost and the customer has likely gone to a competitor.

Think about the Amazon.com model. Not only can users review books and publish wish-lists for their purchases, but reviews can then be subject to ratings. The system continually provides more and more information of relevance to a potential customer within Amazon’s own context, not via external networks. While a post-secondary institution like the one where I work is hesitant to allow customer reviews of courses for myriad reasons, opening your organization up to external feedback and publishing relevant information to assist potential customers in their decision-making process will continue to become increasingly important in order to compete.

How should you do it?

ReadWriteWeb has some solid thoughts on how you need to think about a social media CRM strategy. While I still think the features need to be part of what you do on the web, IBM’s thinking is to extend an external network like Facebook to connect students and mentors in a more meaningful way:

“Facebook and MySpace are great places for social networking, but they don’t really have a goal. They don’t make the kind of connections you need to move forward,” Mr. Vogt said. “This platform is helping students say, Here are my ideas, and IBM is saying, Come work with us and we’ll help you.”

Even if you think I’m wrong and an external network is your solution, you’ve still got to choose the right one to reach your audience. A big chunk of BCIT’s student demographic is older and looking at applied skills to improve their job prospects or is upgrading, mid-career. Twitter might reach some of that target for push communications, but not so much for a traditional post-secondary trying to reach mostly students who are still in high school:

In June 2009, only 16 percent of Twitter.com website users were under the age of 25. Bear in mind persons under 25 make up nearly one quarter of the active US Internet universe, which means that Twitter.com effectively under-indexes on the youth market by 36 percent.

What about employee collaboration?

Intel published a white paper documenting their approach to developing a social computing intranet strategy. They did wide consultation across the enterprise and engaged with key stakeholders, developed usage policies upfront, performed user and proof-of-concept testing and outlined a solid architecture and phased approach to rollout. In short, they took a user-centred design philosophy and set measurable goals and objectives. This is something that any organization should do whether their implementation is internally or customer focused.

Based on my own experience at large organizations, the measurable objectives are often missing. The desire to use a cool tool often seems to trump a problem-solving approach, where the right tool is used to solve a business problem. Post-secondary institutions, in particular, are caught between the desire to leverage the web more effectively for employee productivity, while they grapple internally with labyrinthine policies and rules and red herring privacy concerns about how employees use web technologies.

Perhaps I’ll leave the last word on social media on intranets to Jakob Nielsen’s findings:

Underground efforts yield big results. Companies are turning a blind eye to underground social software efforts until they prove their worth, and then sanctioning them within the enterprise.

Frontline workers are driving the vision. Often, senior managers aren’t open to the possibilities for enterprise 2.0 innovation because they’re not actively using these tools outside of work. Indeed, many senior managers still consider such tools as something their kids do. One of the dirty secrets of enterprise 2.0 is that you don’t have to teach or convince younger workers to use these tools; they expect them and integrate them as easily into their work lives as they do in their personal lives.

Communities are self-policing. When left to their own devices, communities police themselves, leaving very little need for tight organizational control. And such peer-to-peer policing is often more effective than a big brother approach. Companies that we studied said abuse was rare in their communities.

Business need is the big driver. Although our report discusses specific tools (blogs, wikis, and such), enterprise 2.0′s power is not about tools, it’s about the communication shift that those tools enable.

Organizations must cede power. Using Web 2.0 technologies to communicate with customers has taught many companies that they can no longer control the message. This also rings true when using Web 2.0 tools for internal communication. Companies that once held to a command-and-control paradigm for corporate messaging are finding it hard to maintain that stance.

Clearing cobwebs and groinal eggplants

James — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:06:29 +0000

So, when I finally sit down to write my first journal entry in more than a month, what do I write about? Why, my recent sports hernia operation, of course – and getting out of holiday mode and back to job work and thesis work. Truth is, I’ve got two or three partially written posts floating around, but they need more time. I just couldn’t bring myself to write over the past few weeks due to a number of issues, so I’ll just do some reflective personal catching up, starting with my gut.

Puffy abs

This past Monday, I finally had surgery which has been a long time coming. I felt the first lower abdominal pop close to a year and a half ago now on a tempo run, and have been through a complete 2008 cessation of my racing and ultimate seasons and a reduced and less effective version for 2009. After countless examinations, x-rays, physio sessions and running with lower abdominal and groin discomfort for a long time, I had sports hernia surgery Monday. The illustration at left shows a typical sports hernia location, though what I ended up with a day after the surgery was not dissimilar to a small eggplant jutting out of my lower abdomen with a two inch incision on top. The swelling and bruising is finally reducing and I’ve been able to stop taking the Tylenol 3s (thankfully, as pain is not the only thing they stop). I would post a photo, but there’s no way to not make it pornographic.

The surgeon actually found two weaknesses/ruptures and dealt with them both by placing the obligatory mesh patches (but not these ones) across them. I’ll spend the next week or so still only walking and will move to light cycling the week after, with very light short jogging the week after that. I should be mostly back to normal within about another 5-6 weeks. Only then will I really know if the surgery was effective. There are no guarantees but it works about 85% of the time. And, truth be told, the surgery itself was a breeze. 30 minutes on the table with a sedative and local anesthetic. I was drinking coffee 3 hours after they began cutting me open.

Since they don’t really know what causes sports hernias (and they aren’t actual hernias either), I’m lucky enough to be taking part in a study examining the role the hip may play in their cause. I feel there is some connection because for some time before I felt the full rupture in the abs, I was having some hip problems. I had an MRI the day before the surgery and should get some idea if anything is going on in my hip, along with whatever they publish as a result of the study. By the way … I think the experience of the MRI was worse than the surgery. Never had one before and not in a big rush to have one again.

Other distractions

While I just finished three weeks vacation, you’d not really know it. I spent a good chunk of the time repainting all room and closet doors in my home … in our garage, in the middle of the worst heat wave Vancouver has ever had.

Between painting days were car shopping days and plunked down in the middle of it all was a four day stay at the Galiano Inn for a very quiet getaway. A beautiful room and stellar view was a little marred on the last evening by a sub-par meal, but it was a really beautiful space to unwind and my wife had a wonderful spa treatment.

Back to the grind

After three and a half weeks away from work, it can be a bit of a challenge to get your clock back into early weekday rising and following someone else’s schedule. While I’ve been doing edits here and there on my thesis proposal, this ‘mostly ready’ document still needs a few tweaks and the nod from both my supervisor and the program head, before I get into ethical review processes at both RRU and BCIT in September.

I feel kind of guilty because, while I’ll be on my own through the next 9-10 months in completing my thesis, this summer the cohort in my program (the rest of whom chose more coursework and a smaller project) have been going straight through their second residency and moving into the remaining four courses before undertaking their 6 credit research project. Later on I’m sure the guilt will be assuaged, when I’m so busy I can hardly see.

If doing the thesis weren’t enough for the next while, I’ll be moving into a slightly different role – and desk – at work, and I can already see four or five significant projects beginning to pile up to hold me over well past Christmas.

No related posts.

Is cloud computing still blue sky?

James — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:43:51 +0000

As I lurch through this summer trying to finalize the thesis proposal which will frame a large part of my life for the next year, collaborative tools for learning are never far from front of mind with me. A real interest of mine is the use of collaborative writing tools for learning in higher education. In particular, I am interested in learning more about why adoption is so weak – certainly where I work, anyway. Where I get to with my thesis research on that front is another post for another time.

A big clue as to why some post secondary institutions are so jittery about Open Educational Resources (OER) might be contained in the news this past week that Twitter suffered a substantial security breach perpetrated a second time by the same French hacker. An institution’s specific approach to open computing will also have a lot to do with how jittery they should be about it. For example, are we talking about true cloud computing or just using open tools, but hosting them? There’s a big difference from a data ownership and access control perspective in each approach. For the sake of argument, I’ll stick to using the cloud.

Over the past week or so, my feeds were all-a-twitter (and so was Twitter) with news that Microsoft Office’s cloud offering might be imminent. Given the success of Google’s office suite in the cloud, it stands to reason that Microsoft needs to make a me-too play and quickly. Not to be left behind, cloud computing provider Zoho announced a plug-in to migrate their DBs to web apps, either on Zoho or as Google Apps. The big players are pretty certain about the move from the desktop to the cloud. Google’s announcement that Apps could now translate uploaded documents paled in comparison to their bigger one.

Chrome OS is the next Google play in moving everything to the cloud. The idea that you can seamlessly move your desktop work to the browser would still seem to be a ways off, given the weaknesses in some of the Google Apps feature set:

But there are still a variety of applications that simply can’t be replicated within a browser, and consumers have had a mixed reaction to Google’s own apps, embracing Gmail but finding its presentation software to be severely limited compared to its desktop app counterparts.

As Chrome OS will ship with netbooks at first, full desktop replacement at this stage may not actually be on Google’s mind:

The Chrome OS will be appearing first on netbooks, which can’t handle some of the more heavyweight desktop applications in the first place. And the new offering has the potential to drive users to rely on Google’s online offerings, which certainly would further the company’s goals.

This probably spells the end of long-term Android development, as a single, more robust OS from Google to be run on all devices would make the most sense.

While the happenings in cloud computing show the big players are clearly making a push in that direction, moving everyone there will be no small task. For post-secondary institutions, there are many concerns including ownership of data, privacy and, as Twitter just showed us, the risk of a complete breach of authentication data. However, these issues are just the tip of the iceberg.

Technical, SLA and business solvency also pose extreme risks for organizations, let alone individuals, in trusting their data to Google or Microsoft and hosting it in the cloud.

What about power outages?

In the last week alone, there have been several high profile outages at data centers that host sites, such as video site DailyMotion, credit card authorization service Authorize.net, and Microsoft’s Bing Travel. Even the Google App Engine—a platform for third-parties to run their own cloud services—experienced performance issues that resulted in high latency and even data loss.

Or uptime guarantees?

Many large companies are used to having control over and responsibility for all of the servers that the business uses, so the idea of putting parts of their business on rented, “black box”-style cloud services makes them uneasy.

When it comes to education, we often think of OER in terms of access to scholarly journals, tools to help learners and instuctors, social software for social learning activities, repositories of objects, and the value that opening your work up to a wider audience brings. If enough instructors use OER journals, the story goes that more academic publishing will be placed in open, peer reviewed journals. Demand drives innovation and change, after all.

All of this is great in theory and I’m certainly a big proponent of social computing. However, I’d stop short of putting all my eggs in the cloud basket just yet, and maybe ever. I much prefer open source software, but hosting it, where I own the data and support the servers. There’s nothing wrong with using online office suites to help share collaborative work and tools like blogs, wikis, Skype, IM and chat are wonderful for bridging the distance gap. However, I always want to keep my core data, or at the very least backups of everything I’m doing there, locally stored. If I always have to do that anyway, then it starts to dilute the value of cloud computing as a way of providing cheap storage and persistent access.

Frankly, I’d never want to be the one to have to tell a class full of students or anyone else for that matter, that they couldn’t get at that assignment that was due because Google had a server farm meltdown. Or, that institutional data like student numbers, grades, addresses, credit card numbers and the like had just disappeared into a cloud because they were housed there in the first place.

Severing the Telus umbilical cord

James — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:57:45 +0000

: Image by Darren Hester via Flickr

The first move was finally made last night. It’s been long overdue and I’m happy to be on the path. I’ve taken the first step to getting Telus hands out of my pockets – and they’ve been pretty deeply in there for a long time. Complete disclosure forces me to say that I was a Telus manager for five years and my wife has now been an employee for 11. We met while working there, so not all my associations with the recursive T are bad. However, most of my customer service associations with them are horrific. This could be a very long post, so I’ll endeavour to keep it short.

I’ve been a cash cow for them. Particularly as my sons are now 19 and 16, we have four mobile accounts, our home landline and high speed internet. That’s too many eggs in one basket anyway, but since we’ve had four accounts they’ve been able to count on me for a minimum of $220 in revenue every month. Unlike our US friends who can usually add a new number and pool voice/data in a family cellular plan for a few bucks, now that Telus doesn’t offer family plans (and never did affordably), four accounts with reasonable data/voice runs well over $150 a month. Add another $60 for landline and high speed internet and that’s just shy of $2700 a year. When you look at it that way, the costs are nothing short of obscene. They don’t blend mobility and landline billing and good bundles for being a good customer are pretty much non-existent.

Earth to Telus: you’re not a monopoly

We’ve been having a battle with them for the past few weeks. My son had to change a handset and they transferred his faves (for free texting) for him, only from what we can tell they got one of the numbers wrong and he incurred probably $30-40 in charges that we feel were not right. My wife has been on the phone with them several times trying to get them to go back a few months and determine the error. Most calls end abruptly with the reps refusing to do enough to clarify the issue. So, they can’t look enough at the big picture that they’re willing to risk a good customer over a $40 bill reversal. Brilliant. Maybe someone forgot to tell them they’re not a monopoly any more because they’re as arrogant as one. Based on this, the expensive voice/data packages and getting locked into long contracts to get decent phones, we’d already decided that as our contracts rolled we’d be looking elsewhere for wireless.

Since the feds auctioned off some wireless spectrum last year, my understanding is that Canada may finally have competition more like the US in the next 6-12 months. There are already options to go without contracts and system access fees but the voice/data is still pricey and the three carriers who offer these are simply subsidiaries of Telus, Rogers or Bell. You can’t get away from the monoliths as it stands right now. I think things will be looking very different in a year.

I don’t need no stinkin’ landline

I’d always operated under the assumption that cable was still slower than ADSL, but Shaw has been making steady improvements with their cable service while Telus hasn’t been keeping pace. Their high speed internet is generally rated as faster now, while their customer service consistently blows Telus out of the water. A little research yesterday told me I was probably with the wrong ISP. What really sealed the deal for me was when I thought about our home phone use. I can count the calls we get in a week on one hand as most of us use our cells for our voice. While Telus very much needs that wireline connection to try and sell me high speed or, gawd forbid, Telus TV, I don’t need it at all, thank you very much. Decision made.

I had committed to two years with Telus high speed just before Christmas for the privilege of getting a lower price, so I knew I’d have to swallow a cancellation fee to move to Shaw. I’d already accepted that I’d be paying more with Shaw, but for faster high speed and way better customer service, it seemed like a fair trade off. What I didn’t realize is that Shaw’s current promotional offer would more than make up for it. Two months for free, six more for $20 and then $43 a month after that when bundled with my HD digital TV service. I’ll save $200 in the first eight months with Shaw and cover my $120 cancellation fee with Telus. My home phone will be gone and so will my copper connection with Telus.

The best part

Aside from severing the umbilical cord with the Local Incumbent Carrier (telecom lingo for former monopoly), the best part of this is that my Shaw bundle for TV and ISP will run me about $122 + tax after the eight month promotional period is done. Right now, when I add up TV, landline and ISP with Telus and Shaw blended I’m paying about $140 + tax. By the end of this month I’ll be taking about $720 a year before tax out of Telus hands. Sure I’m putting it somewhere else, but I’m going to make sure I get satisfaction with my dollars. As our wireless accounts roll over the next 18 months or so, we’ll be pulling another $500 a year at a time more out of Telus hands.

The worst thing that could happen to Bell now

Anticipating intentions and meeting expectations

James — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:58:53 +0000

This week was a frustrating and interesting experience at work. At the end of the week prior, I finally launched the new design of our program catalogue. It’s a little hard to explain or show what this means. It’s a new interface for a specific kind of site that will blend two sources of program data together once program staff update their content, which used to be displayed in different places on our site. One particular design feature has caused significant amounts of both elation and consternation. Would you have thought it would be the addition of a contact form? Me neither, but I’m oversimplifying and that’s not really what this post is about.

What I’m really getting at here is a fundamental design truism. Whether it’s learning, marketing or consumer products, a successful design is predicated on the quality of a user’s experience with it. In my mind, the two absolute most important elements of that are the user’s intentions and expectations and how well you anticipate the first and meet the second.

A little background

A main requirement for this project was to ensure we drew attention to the key calls to action. The image at right shows the actual size of the main calls to action on the new program UI. They are the single largest text elements on the page and speak to the issue of anticipating user intentions.

If we know or can surmise what it is our users want to do (particularly to meet our business goals), we should make those tasks easy for them. If they’re considering applying to a post-secondary program, it should be simple to request more information, get in touch with us or to simply submit an application. Making these obvious and placing them on good page real estate has increased contact requests roughly ten-fold and requests for more information by roughly six times

Anticipating intentions

Does this mean we made the best decision we could have? It’s hard to know. We can’t accurately track program applications through the web (don’t ask), so I don’t know if we’ve had a significant spike, but clearly there was a previously unmet need for our site visitors to communicate with us about programs.

However, we’re somewhat a victim of our own success. At launch we had to send all contact inquiries to our program advising group, who’d never seen a tenth the volume they suddenly got. Where possible since launch, I’ve been pointing those forms directly to program staff in the schools (who’d been the prime point of contact on half our 420 programs anyway) and am currently about halfway through, so the flood is beginning to disperse. Of the feedback I’ve received from the schools, some are ecstatic with the increased interest and some are naturally worried about response standards.

The ‘request more info’ link requires them to provide a certain amount of demographic data and we tell them up front that this will generate a follow-up contact and some snail mail. With the ‘contact us’ link, the requests which previously went through program advising, were met with a form which asked for a fair bit of information upfront. Difficulty finding it and then having to answer a few questions probably disuaded a good number of users from filling it out. The new form by contrast automatically picks up the program from which it came, and asks for a name, email address and comment. Couple that with how prominent it is and I think we did a good job of anticipating needs with the redesign.

Meeting expectations

This is where we now need to move quickly on number of fronts. If you decide you want to apply to a program, you’ll end up here. This is legacy content, which will then drive users into one of four longer pages, most of which ask them to go search for the program they want to apply to. We need to provide them that information if they came from a program and clicked ‘apply now’ and make it fast for them to get to our Banner application process. As we can’t do much to improve that piece (and we are upgrading Banner fairly soon), the most important thing we can do is meet expectations for a useful thing to happen if our users decide to apply.

Similarly, with the contact form. We may have to temporarily send users through the form with the multiple questions while we build a slightly better process for our contact forms, and I’m worried about doing so. The end user isn’t worried about where their query went – they just want a timely answer that helps them make a decision. Since, like all post-secondaries, we ultimately want course registrations and program applications, we want to do everything we can to answer their question. The problem we need to solve is, with a severe increase in queries, due to simple design improvements, how do we ensure our internal process meets the expectations that result from anticipating intentions.

No related posts.

Grokking the literature review

James — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 06:40:08 +0000

I have to admit that I’m liking the literature review process, the more I understand the right approach. Having said that, I’ve not really done what could be classified as a real literature review yet. I did a very surface one (which could only really be called a minor literature summary) when I did my preliminary thesis proposal a couple months ago to get my topic approved. I am presently starting with that version to flesh out a better one for my official thesis proposal in the last of my cohort classes. When I launch into my full thesis phase in July, I’ll build on the version I’m doing now yet again.

I realize now that I had been thinking wrongly when I approached the literature review as a general reading of related literature, tying it together so as to quote things I thought were relevant, but without what I would really consider any kind of critical analysis. As I’ve been reading journal articles and relevant chapters of a couple research texts, it’s becoming much clearer to me how to read more effectively and how to understand why the process is so important to situating and contextualizing the research I will be performing myself. In fact, I’m now understanding how I’ll be able to finalize my topic and questions ONLY if I do a decent literature review.

Boote and Beile (2005, p.4) state that the literature review should:

set the broad context of the study, clearly demarcate what is and is not within the scope of the investigation, and justify those decisions.

They go on to say that it should also:

report the claims made in the existing literature and examine critically the research methods used to better understand whether the claims are warranted.

Similarly, Knopf (2006, p.127) suggests that, when determining whether a particular approach to some problem has been successful, one can:

focus on the ‘lessons learned’ from a previous effort to deal with a certain problem (and those lessons learned might have been proposed by outside scholars or by practitioners themselves).

Developing a topic and questions

Getting to the point of a really good research topic and questions which truly operationalize it is no small task. In particular, I’ve come to the realization that you won’t land on the final versions until you’ve concluded the literature review for your proposal. It’s also clear that the topic and questions may easily get revised again when further literature review is done for my thesis. This is because, provided you look at the literature critically, you’ll start to really see where the gaps exist and what methods were used to produce the various findings – exactly what you need to determine what you want to look at. If something has been studied to death, you have a lower chance of adding much value to existing knowledge, whereas figuring out that some aspect of a topic has been poorly analyzed may actually give you a better way to approach your research.

In getting to the point of being able to move forward with a researchable topic, Rugg and Petre (2007, p.55), have a good bullet list of the things you should be able to do when you’ve conducted your initial search of the literature. You should be able to answer the following questions:

What is the problem you are tackling?

What is it academically significant?

What are the main things that have been tried before?

Who tried them?

Why didn’t those approaches work?

What are you going to do that’s different?

Where did you get that idea from?

What evidence is there to suggest that this might work better?

If it doesn’t work, will the finding be useful or just make you look like an idiot?

In particular, I like the last question. I’d have to say the biggest risk I’m feeling as I read a ton of articles this week (other than that of not getting my proposal literature review done by Sunday), is that of doing something that hasn’t got the academic merit I’m hoping for.

I’d really rather that the next year of my life isn’t spent on something that makes me look foolish. I can do that easily in many other areas of my life.

References

Boote, D.N., & Beile, P. (2005). Scholars before researchers: On the centrality of the dissertation literature review in research preparation. Educational Researcher, (34)6.
Knopf, J.W. (2006). Doing a literature review. Political Science & Politics, 39(1).
Rugg, G., & Petre, M. (2007). A gentle guide to research methods. Birkshire: McGraw-Hill/Open University Press.

The worst customer service I’ve ever had

James — Sun, 24 May 2009 02:29:48 +0000

Who’d have thought getting new glasses could be this complicated? I’ve had a customer experience that I am still finding hard to grasp. I’ll make this short, but writing about it is a bit therapeutic too, I guess. I got an eye exam a few weeks ago with my normal optometrist, who also runs a small optical store in the same office. It’s close to home and convenient. However, I also find it difficult to find frames I like, so I did a bit of shopping around before settling on a pair at my optometrist’s office about a week and a half ago.

I paid $308 in full upfront for glasses that were to arrive this past Tuesday (after the $85 it cost me for my exam). When I went in to pick up the glasses and tried them on, I could see nothing clearly past about 12 feet, though they were great for anything within six feet. They originally gave me two prescriptions; an extended wear one and a close-up one, with an option for progressive lenses. My eyes are still pretty good so we opted to ‘tweak’ the extended wear prescription to make it a little stronger to aid in reading and computer use.

The owner does all the fitting and purchasing recommendations and, when I told the receptionist that the glasses were not acceptable and left them there, the owner called me back within about a day and we arranged that I’d come in yesterday to look at options. He indicated that his notes suggested I had decided not to use them for extended wear and only for close-up, while my recollection was that they were for extended wear but would be adjusted to make them a bit stronger. If not, why would we make adjustments and not just use the close-up prescription?

Yesterday was a day off work that I arranged specifically so that I’d be in between 12:30 and 1:30, when he committed he’d also be there. Arriving at almost exactly 12:30, he’d apparently forgotten the appointment altogether because he’d just left to do some errands. I was pretty unhappy and indicated to the receptionist that it would probably be a couple of weeks before I could get into the store again and that I simply wanted a refund (I’m not good when a business stands me up, and has my money to boot). I was informed that he’d have to cut the cheque, so I said I wanted to be called.

I heard nothing the rest of the day yesterday and left a voicemail for them this morning, recounting my issue, providing two phone numbers and asking for a call again. When I hadn’t heard anything by 2pm, I called them. The receptionist said that he was with a customer and would call me back. When I asked why no one had called me, she said that the dial tone hadn’t indicated there was a message so she hadn’t checked their voicemail.

Fast-forward to 4pm:

Me: Hello, is Derek there?

Receptionist: Is this Mr. Wanless?

Me: Yes …

Receptionist: I’m sorry, but he had to go out to his other clinic. He said a cheque will be available for pick-up some time next week.

Me: But I asked to have him call back.

Receptionist: Yeah, he’s sorry but he had to leave.

Me: You mean he’s had three opportunities to return a requested call and he couldn’t even be bothered? Hmmm, is he aware that he’ll be losing four customers by this treatment?

Receptionist: Why?

Me: Because my whole family are patients/customers and none of us will be spending another dime there. Please tell him that.

She also confirmed that she had, indeed, got the earlier voicemail. After a long pause of stunned silence, we had a bit of back and forth and I assured her that while I was annoyed, it was not with her. She understood my frustration, however, I was also getting a lot of vagaries with regard to when a cheque would be available and it took a bit of work to make her understand that I wanted to be called Monday and told exactly when my refund would be there. Given that I was previously told that he writes the cheques, I’m not sure why he couldn’t have simply done it today.

I fully expect he’ll make me wait and also try and deduct some kind of fee. All the while I get to keep hunting for frames and go through the whole process again. I guess it’s the lack of foresight that gets me here. Even as late as yesterday afternoon, a simple apology and assurance that he would fix the issue probably would have saved my business. That he couldn’t bother calling, apologizing for missing the appointment, or simply had the guts to deal with an unsatisfied customer is inexcusable.

The worst thing that could happen to Bell now

Defining thesis research questions

James — Thu, 21 May 2009 07:43:06 +0000

Getting down to the right research topic and asking the right questions to address it is a pretty challenging process. About the only thing I can say for certain is that I’ll be looking at blogs at BCIT. My preliminary proposal sought to understand the institute’s experience with blogs and wikis for learning and teaching in the more than five years since they were introduced as part of the Technology Enabled Knowledge (TEK) initiative.

We’re in the early stages of the last first-year course of our MA, which deals with developing a detailed research proposal. What I’ve got to do is focus on a detailed enough topic that it will be worthy of a thesis. It has to be something that is a significant problem, the answer to which will add to the body of knowledge on the topic. The literature seems pretty weak on evaluating blogs as teaching tools and I’m pretty sure this is what got the topic in principle approved.

Through a number of discussions and feedback, it’s become clear to me that researching on only blogs, as opposed to blogs and wikis, will allow me a tighter focus. The fact that very little evaluation of these tools specifically at BCIT has been done also makes it a good topic. Beyond that, though, I’m finding that it’s difficult to decide whether I can hypothesize that adoption of blogs has been weak and attempt to answer why, or that the research be totally inductive and descriptive. There are problems with either approach in terms of framing the research and designing the research vehicle, particularly if I go the survey route.

What follows is probably the second iteration of what will undoubtedly still change somewhat. If you have any thoughts about the this I would welcome comments below.

Description
Web 2.0 is a term encompassing Internet technologies that allow users to collaboratively create and share intellectual property online. Weblogs, or blogs, are writing or journalling web sites that have a number of features for interaction, sharing of content and solicitation of comments/feedback.

Beginning in 2003, the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) implemented blogs for learning and teaching through its TEK (Technology Enabled Knowledge, n.d.) initiative, but there was little strategic oversight or evaluation of the effort. The institute has not made many forays into Web 2.0 for learning, but is beginning to do so with its marketing and communications efforts.

The goal of this research project is to better understand the adoption of blogs at BCIT, and to identify key factors, both positive and negative, in their use as instructional tools at the institute.

Working title
Assessing factors affecting the adoption of blogs as instructional tools at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT).

Draft questions

To what extent are blogs currently being used as instructional tools at BCIT?

What key pedagogical and evaluation issues do blogs present for faculty at BCIT?

What technological and support issues do blogs create for staff at BCIT?

How can BCIT use institute-wide experience thus far with blogs to develop institutional strategies for the future?

Again, if you’ve got any thoughts at all on this topic I’d love to read them, particularly if you have experience with designing research on social media in education.

Pondering the thesis

James — Mon, 11 May 2009 06:36:12 +0000

So, now that I know I’m going to do a thesis for the second year of my Masters degree instead of more coursework and a smaller project, I’m facing a plethora of decisions. I’ve got a very basic concept of what I want to research, but over the course of the next twelve weeks I’ll turn a basic idea into a detailed project proposal. As I’m diving into the research issue it’s becoming clear I have a big year ahead of me.

After the first two weeks of our research course, we’re just getting introduced to the mindset of researching. Is that a verb? Well, we did a brief introduction to research last summer, but this course will actually see us produce the detailed research proposal we will use moving forward. For the rest of my cohort, this will be a roadmap for a six credit paper to come later next year, but for me (as I was deluded enough to actually want to do a thesis) this is what I will use to guide me after July, as I am cut loose from my cohort after this. At this stage it’s mostly about the structure of good research and the pitfalls of what to avoid. We’ve discussed what goes into a thesis or dissertation, read a couple theses and done a rudimentary critique comparing them.

Even in just doing that, I was struck by just how much difference there was in the scope, style and quality between the two. I guess what I really thought about was how they both were accepted by different committees in different institutions, and bare little similarity to each other. While their structure and length were roughly the same, everything else was quite different. A thesis is so unique for so many reasons – topic, institute, supervisor, committee, external readers, researcher – that I guess it’s bound to be different from any other. However, I was thinking that the language and approach would need to be the same to meet core competencies at the Masters level, such as:

communication
leadership and teamwork
critical thinking
analysis
knowledge

In fact, one of the two theses I read was situated at BCIT and deals with a related subject to the one I want to do. It’s also the far better one in my opinion and I just finished a 45 minute phone chat with the researcher tonight. While I’m no more secure at this point that I will pull off a work of academic art when I complete it, she had some really solid advice for me about things that I might consider to avoid wasting time. In particular, obtaining demographic data to prove representativeness of my sample will be a particularly important thing to do upfront, in light of issues specific to BCIT.

During the course of our online discussions of what we felt went constituted a good research topic or proposal, I had indicated that in my experience so far I found the following issues to be key:

the research topic is of personal and professional interest
I have experience with the subject of the research topic
the literature on the topic is weak, so the opportunity exists to add some new knowledge in the area
the research is situated at the institute where I work
the supervisor works where I work (not necessary, but should certainly be helpful)

One of the key things that has also emerged in our readings so far, is to ensure the thesis project is scoped properly. It seems far better to do a small project well, as opposed to doing a large project poorly. The two papers I read bore this fact out. While the other one was not a bad paper by any stretch, because the scope was broader, the researcher was trying to cover more ground. As a result, the data analysis seemed weaker and there was more glossing over of seemingly important information. At the end of each paper, it seemed fairly easy to connect the concreteness of the conclusions to the starting point of the project.

I’m hoping I’ll remember some of these good lessons at this very early stage, when I’m knee-deep in this stuff.

Can you really design experience?

James — Fri, 01 May 2009 06:48:14 +0000

I don’t think so. I often think of the way we phrase things or the terms we use to refer to things. While ‘user experience design’ is actually in my own work title, I don’t think it applies to what I do. Oddly enough, I was reminded of this issue as I was congratulated for my recent completion of the Boston Marathon. I really appreciate support for endurance events and I know that congratulations are nothing but well-intentioned. The issue that comes to mind, which relates to so many things, is that you can’t really understand successful experience from the outside.

For example, my race time was my worst ever. I won’t go into my long layoff from running, the past injury-laden year I’ve had, or that I’m presently nowhere near as fast as I used to be. With regard to Boston, while I had a great time it simply wasn’t a good race for me. When people congratulate you on an awesome race, you accept it as kind words, but in the back of your mind it actually draws attention to the fact you are unhappy with the results. At least in my head, that’s the way things work. A race time only has any meaning when viewed in the context of individual expectations and capabilities – or individual experience.

Experience is individual

What does this have to do with interactive design? In my mind, it’s the X-factor. I can follow all the UCD principles I want and I can probably do a pretty good job for most users of a web site or application. However, experiences are very personal things and I don’t believe I can design those for anyone. I can design quality interactions and build a solid site architecture as a framework for user experience, but that’s as far as it goes in my mind. That is, of course, within the realm of business and politics that exist in large organizations, like the one where I work.

Just like I can’t tell if a given race time is good unless I ask the runner whether they were happy with it, I can’t tell if a user’s experience is good with something I design until after it’s done, and often not even then. Prototyping and user testing will help me move toward the best design I can achieve, but it doesn’t measure the uniqueness of experience for the user. The notion is also applicable to learning. Particularly when referring to online learning, the quality of the interactions in the instructional design goes a very long way to determining the success of the endeavour, but the interactions are not the learning experience, itself. Adult learning is generally seen to be situated, authentic, experiential and both social and individual. Some aspects can be measured against prescribed outcomes, but there are way too many nuances to design a complete learning experience. The best I believe you can do is provide the environment, activities, pacing, tools and support to frame the experience.

Interactions and features frame experiences

Now that I’ve segued nicely from running to web and online learning design, the similarities between the latter two become greater. Social features abound on the web today. I rarely come across any site that doesn’t have a blog component, RSS feeds, and/or discussion forums. Many web applications now publish an open API so that users can build their own functionality on top of the platform and create something new. However, the important thing to remember is that these are all features or interaction capabilities. They are enabled, hopefully made easy to use, and feedback solicited about their use to continually improve them. They are not, though, experience in and of themselves. They are pieces of the framework of the user experience. You do all these things well and your users have a better chance of having a good experience, but there are no guarantees.

Your typical LMS is also a user experience black hole. The complaints one often hears about Blackboard or Desire2Learn are that they are closed systems, difficult to use and manage , have excessive licensing models and are a bit weak on social features. Starting from this place makes a good user experience all the more challenging, but the elements I mentioned earlier, done right, will do a lot to mitigate the problems with the LMS platforms. Again, though, regardless of how good or bad the software, instructional design, community-building efforts or support provided, no one can really design a learning experience. Constructivism tells us that while learning is a social endeavour, it is also highly individualized to each learner. I would have to be able to define the new knowledge that will be acquired to design the experience and that’s simply not possible.

Only one opinion

Web design and online learning are but two of many examples I could use, but they’re the two I have some understanding of and at some point they can up being closely related. When framing interactive experiences, I believe I can only do so much to give the user the best chance of having a good experience. Hey, but that’s only my experience and it may be individual to me.

2009 Boston Marathon race report

James — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:15:03 +0000

I have an odd history with marathons. I took a fairly large break from running up until a couple years ago and endurance races seem to be lumped into pre and post break categories. All my pre-break marathons fell in a fairly consistent range of 3:06 to 3:17. I think I did over ten races in that time range. The three I’ve done in the past couple years (post-break) have varied wildly, at 3:40, 3:20 and now, Boston, the slowest I’ve ever done at 3:41.

While age and more inconsistent training have a role in these results, I have a somewhat inexplicable habit of cramping or locking leg muscles now. Pre-break, not once do I remember my legs cramping significantly. Last year was also marred by a sticky abdominal injury – likely a sports hernia that I’m getting a consultation for in June. However, it doesn’t impact running any more, with just a slight ‘sensation’ in the area at times.

Prior to my recap of the race, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my wife and kids since Christmas. My training was mixed with pretty demanding time constraints as I did MA coursework and some busy project work at my job. I was a little too fractured and a little short of time and temper sometimes. Back to more manageable running demands now.

Pre-race

The hotel we’re in is a bit cramped and poorly soundproofed, so sleeping has been tenuous at best. It’s been pretty good since the race, but all three nights prior to the race were very poor – likely time zone adjustment and too much stuff in my head for the most part. At best I got 12 hours of disjointed shuteye over that time period. This ended up playing itself out quite a bit during the race, as I could never pick my pace up after the initial few miles out of Hopkinton.

This race really is a marvel of organization, though. Everything from package pickup, to the expo, to busing out on race day, to the athlete’s village near the start is top notch. The expo didn’t really have quite the deals I wanted on athletic gear, so I bought the obligatory race jacket and that was pretty much it. However, the lineups were so long to buy official gear that I actually bought it at a running store near my hotel for the very same price and no lineup.

Since I was in wave 1, I got to Hopkinton nice and early and did my final porta-potty thing before most of the 26,000+ runners arrived. By the time I was heading to the bus to drop off my bag and head to my corral, the lineups had to be 50-60 deep. The only thing I really couldn’t determine before heading out, was how much to wear on my upper body. I opted for a long-sleeved compression shirt and light t-shirt over top. I started with running gloves and cap, too, but those were gone within the first quarter of the race.

The race

Race day started pretty cold. While I was watching the local coverage between 5 and 6am, temperatures in Hopkinton were around freezing, but highs were supposed to be clear and about 50 degrees. Pretty decent running weather. However, a storm was coming in for the evening and headwinds were supposed to start up for the race mid-day. These didn’t materialize until I was walking around trying to connect with my wife after the race. The weather was not a factor and what I chose to wear (once I tossed the cap and gloves) worked out pretty well.

I won’t go into endless details about the course, except to say that I have never experienced that much support over 26.2 miles. I can’t remember more than a few meters at any point in the race with no one lining the route. For the most part, spectators were a few to several deep and really cheering. While I’m normally heads-down and don’t notice spectators that much, as my race got tougher later in the second half, I found the crowds very helpful. The girls of Wellesley and the freshly-beered Red Sox fans, in particular. As you run the last four miles into Boston down Beacon Street, into Back Bay and then turn up toward Boylston for the final 600 meters, it’s pretty amazing.

As I wrote in the intro, this was my slowest marathon time, but I can’t say I’m down about it. Since I knew it would be my last one for at least another year and a half AND since my training went pretty well, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t expected something probably 20 minutes faster, but I’m really not going to worry.

The three poor nights of sleep cannot be disregarded for the effect they likely had on my race. I started at a pace that made sense for my race goal of 7:15 per mile. 7:25 per mile was pretty much all you could do at first in my corral anyway and I figured I’d pick things up slowly in the gently sloping first ten miles and be doing something between 7:10 and 7:15 overall by the time the hills started around mile 16. However, even as things thinned out I just couldn’t move my legs much faster. I think I was doing about a 7:20 overall pace after about eight miles, but it leveled off after that. I was pretty consistent through 20k and just slowing down a bit by halfway.

Even with 1:39 at the half, and allowing for my pace to slow somewhat in the second half, I felt I would still be under 3:30, which was the slow end of my goal range. Unfortunately, I ended up with something of a mirror image of Seattle in 2006, where my muscles just did not behave after about mile 16-17. In both cases, as the hills began I felt some tightening in my calf muscles. Pushing too hard uphill made them start to seize a bit and picking it up in the flats and downhills between tightened the thighs. I was forced into alternating fast walking uphill and easy ‘shuffling’ downhill until I crested heartbreak.

I actually got into a bit of a rhythm heading down from heartbreak for the final four miles into Boston and ran until about mile 24. My overall pace at the crest was somewhere close to 7:45 and I still felt I’d be OK if I could just keep moving the rest of the way. Sub 3:30 was unlikely, but I felt I could still be close. I really began to feel the muscles lock in my legs again by the time I was on Beacon Street and found myself stopping to stretch calves and thighs and shuffling in between the stretches.

As I was in the last half mile, turning up toward Boylston, I sucked it up and shuffled my way down the last 600 meters. Walking down Boylston with spectators 15 deep was not an option.

In closing

I could be upset about my time, but why bother? It’s just a race, and when I factor in the amount of time I took off from distance racing, the up and down times on my past three marathons, the ab injury last year that killed at least one half iron triathlon, road running AND a season of ultimate … well, I’m OK with this. I didn’t get injured during training, I didn’t get injured during the race and I not only qualified for Boston, but I completed it.

I used to take Boston qualifiers for granted, as I missed a qualifier in my very first Vancouver Marathon in 1998 by two minutes, when I needed 3:10. I qualified in probably my next four or five and assumed there was no rush. Since I barely squeaked a qualifier in the California International Marathon in 2007, I thought I’d better use it. I can always qualify again.

Through summer 2010, I won’t be running or training for any endurance events, as I have to focus on completing the MA I am doing, while working a busy job and keeping a family together. I found the balance pretty tough to get all my mileage in during the past four and a half months. In the meantime, I’m going to try to get my times for the half marathon and 10k back under 1:30 and 40 minutes respectively. I’m not sure a PB is possible, but you never know.

If I can get my short and mid-distance running where I want it, and get the MA done, then I’ll probably feel better about pushing myself for a respectable marathon again.

The week before Boston: taper, travel and hotel woes

James — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 02:20:20 +0000

The week prior to April 20th was a real doozy. Not only did I have to finish off a final paper for my present MA course, but in addition to getting ready to fly to Boston I also had to shore up several details for my current big work project. I’m glad it was a few easy runs as a taper for the race. It’s a little bit anti-climactic, since I’m writing this a couple days after the race, and as such, I know how it went. I’ll cover that in a race report I write shortly after this.

I’m also going to document my travels here, as getting to Boston ended up taking a little longer than expected and rest prior to the race was almost non-existent. The travel day to Boston is all part of the pre-race week, so I’ll include it here. Since my taper is so mundane, you can find the details at the end of this post, below the travel log and hotel woes.

Getting to Boston

We left Friday, April 17th on a Continental Flight at 8am PST to Houston. Yes, I said Houston, Continental’s main hub. While not the most efficient routing from Vancouver to Boston, we redeemed Air Miles and this was the flight that best suited our time frame, particularly given that I wanted to be in Boston at least a couple days ahead of the race. Two hours at the airport, a four and a half hour flight to Houston, a three hour layover and another four hours to Boston, plus at least an hour getting our bags and cabbing it to the hotel added up to about 14 hours of expected travel time.

Leaving on an 8am flight meant getting up at 5am to leave for the airport at 6am. We arrived about 6:20, which was probably a little tight for an international flight. However, while we didn’t have much time between customs and boarding, it all worked out pretty well. Everything was fine until we were about an hour out of Houston. Heavy rain and a coming thunder storm meant we had to circle south to San Antonio and then circle a little more as we were re-routed twice. We finally arrived about an hour late and were the last plane allowed to land as they waited for the storm to pass. Apparently this does happen quickly near the Gulf of Mexico and we ended up delayed about three hours in total.

We were supposed to arrive in Boston at about 10pm last Friday. With the delay, it was more like 1:30am Saturday morning. By the time we got to the hotel, it was 2:30am and checking in and settling meant we fell asleep around 3:30 or 4am. I won’t go into details about our cab ride, but imagine getting a driver who can’t speak English and doesn’t know about the road closures on one of the main downtown thoroughfares for the race. He wasn’t even sure where the street we were going to was located and the ride probably cost us $10 more than it should have by the time he did an extra circle to get us further away from our destination that we had been when we first hit Boylston.

When he first tried to let us off two blocks from our hotel at 2:30 in the morning in a city we’ve never been to, I made him get us closer and refused to get out. We got a bargain because we didn’t pay for that extra few minutes of driving. Good times.

Hotel woes

We are staying at the Charlesmark Hotel, located right at the marathon finish line on Boylston Street – and I mean behind the bleachers right at the finish line. The location and appearance of the rooms on the web were significant selling points.

Getting to sleep at 4am and expecting a solid few hours of shut eye (as perhaps the best night of sleep prior to the race), it was more than a little upsetting to be awakened by a semi truck in the back alley at 7am, as it slammed doors, raised and lowered its hydraulic lift and left its motor running for about 45 minutes, just below our third floor room. I started to drift back asleep sometime after 8am and was awakened another two times by 11am by housekeeping tapping on my door, asking if we wanted our room turned. Yeah, please clean the room before we’re even up when we just checked in at 2:30am.

To the hotel’s credit, when I called management after this, they did credit us $25 on the first night (only 1/8 of a night’s stay, mind you), moved us to the fifth floor and bought us lunch on Saturday. $25 doesn’t go very far for two people in Boston’s Back Bay for a decent meal.

Other issues that have become clearer since we’ve stayed here for a few days …. While there’s a ton of satellite TV listed you can only get less than half the channels and they are not set up for guests to order PPV movies and sports games. There are no phone books in the rooms and the nice leather chair is pretty much useless without a table. Mind you, the room (not including the bathroom) would have to be larger than 9 x 12 to fit a double bed, chair, TV/stereo AND a table.

The spaces look nice but are very cramped. That’s apparently where they put their budget because it certainly wasn’t in soundproofing when they refurbished the building. Anything happening in the hall or in rooms that share a wall are pretty easy to hear. Footsteps in the room above are fairly loud and the joists creak a fair bit. As a light sleeper, I’ve been using earplugs for safety. Beyond looking nice, I will say the wireless internet is nice and fast. If only I had a table for my laptop …

Since Connie did the inaugural BAA 5k on Sunday morning, I didn’t sleep much on Saturday night either. History told me that the night before the marathon would be a sleeping gong show and I wasn’t wrong. All three nights in Boston prior to the race might have netted me 12 hours sleep, total, and that’s being generous I think. As I’ll note in the race report, this lack of sleep was probably significant for the marathon.

Taper training details

No weigh-in this week
Pre-race weekly mileage: 10.68

Tuesday

The first of three short planned runs leading up to Boston. I ended up doing it on the treadmill out of convenience and split it into two 1.55 mile splits with a walking break between. No HR or actual distance data. BCIT’s treadmills are ‘fairly’ accurate, based on how I feel at displayed paces. Wanted to keep it easy for the first half and go harder than anticipated race pace for the second.

Workout: 3.10 miles
Split 1: 1.55 miles @ 11:30 … 7:24 pace, 2:00 walk between
Split 2: 1.55 miles @ 10:40 … 6:52 pace

Wednesday

My second taper run the week before Boston was another planned to be about 5k. Went a little longer until I had a good turnaround point and also didn’t have my Garmin, so no HR, speed and distance data again. This one is measured via gmap-pedometer.com.

Workout: 3.44 miles @ 23:30 … 6:50 pace
Split 1: 1.72 miles @ 12:00 … 6:59 pace
Split 2: 1.72 miles @ 11:30 … 6:41 pace

Saturday

Did a final pre-race run along the river in Boston on the Saturday before the race. Beautiful location and a nice, easy run. Mild weather, to boot. Didn’t use my Garmin here either, so data is courtesy of gmap-pedometer.com.

Workout: 4.14 miles @ 30:07 … 7:15

1 week to Boston – home stretch

James — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:08:17 +0000

I’ve decided for this race to really pull back and taper as well as I can, particularly since my last big week was late in the game. You always go through this mental game during the taper of worrying about losing fitness prior to the race. Cutting back a lot will always deliver better race results than too much mileage too late. I decided to drop down to 20 miles this week, doing two five milers and a 10 on the Sunday. This is not going to be spectacularly fast, but feels as though it might be a solid one. I’m avoiding time goals, but expect to be 3:15-3:30.

I also kept my weight at just over 163 for two weeks, but I expect it to rise tomorrow when I do the weigh-in due to a week of lower mileage and Easter weekend snacking. I’d hoped to get down under 160 for the race, but unless I really keep the calories low while I finish tapering, it’s not likely. However, I do expect to set up a good training program with cycle commuting, core strengthening and weights, and about 30 miles a week of running ongoing. The only race I’ve got coming up is a late June half marathon and my focus after Boston will be to get a little faster for that.

This week was complicated by the need to spend the majority of it doing a final paper for my current course and a facilitation exercise, so I’m glad I wasn’t doing a big run on the Sunday. I had intended to hook up with running folks I haven’t seen in a while, but brutally wet, cold weather coupled with a desire to get that final paper done, saw me put off the final mid-distance run before the marathon until Monday. That gave me a full week until the race, so that’s fine.

All in all, I found myself a bit lethargic this week. Not awful, but things were a bit uninspired and a tiny bit slow, but not to worry at this point. Pretty much all runs have solid negative splits again. This coming week is really easy stuff, with a 20-30 of easy running on Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday, with probably a few strides and a bit of race pace stuff in the mix. It’s all about low mileage and race specific timing.

Details

Mileage: 20.79 miles
Monday weigh-in: 163.2

Wednesday

I gave my legs three days to recover from the last long run and did a brisk 5 miles on a nice, cool night. Went to the Burnaby Lake boathouse and back from work, which is almost five miles on the nose. Good negative split too.

Workout: 5.06 miles @ 35:25 … 7:00 pace, Avg HR 149, Max HR 164
Split 1: 2.50 miles @ 17:49 … 7:07 pace, Avg HR 144
Split 2: 2.56 miles @ 17:35 … 6:52 pace, Avg HR 154

Friday

The second of my mid-week five milers was pretty bad. I left it until 7pm after a whole day of paper writing and no food for some time. The run also started uphill and I just never got a good pace back. Both splits were about :20 per mile slower than I expected. This IS a taper week, right?

Workout: 5.90 miles @ 43:52 … 7:26 pace, Avg HR 150
Split 1: 2.50 miles @ 19:08 … 7:39 pace
Split 2: 3.40 miles @ 24:43 … 7:16 pace

Monday

Sunday came around, it was pissing rain and I figured I was better off to finish my paper as much as possible, so I put the run off until Monday. It worked out very well, as I had a crisp, sunny morning. The Easter holiday allowed me to do that. This wasn’t a really long run anyway. It started slowly with a long, gradual uphill, but did pick up a bit and ended up being OK.

Workout: 9.83 miles @ 1:11:43 … 7:17 pace, Avg HR 150
Split 1: 4.67 miles @ 34:54 … 7:28 pace, Avg HR 148
Split 2: 5.16 miles @ 36:49 … 7:08 pace, Avg HR 152

Web trends interactive map

James — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:57:57 +0000

This came by way of a couple intermediaries, but it’s cool nonetheless. In the embed above, you can zoom in as deep as you want and pan and drag to see web domain trends and more. A great way of visualizing the state of the web. The embed above is a little clunky, but if you click the arrows to start and then click within the animation, you should be able to zoom in and out (at least I can with my scroll wheel).

From Flowing Data:

Information Architects, a design firm with offices in Japan and Zurich, release their annual web trends map. This is the fourth one in the series. Popular domains on the Web are mapped to the Tokyo Metro and organized by how they are most related to the cities. Heights represent success in traffic and branding. Subway lines are colored by area of interest. For example, take the orange line to find the creatives. Notice that there are several colors passing through Apple.

2 weeks to Boston – taper time

James — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 04:19:01 +0000

A pretty good week to close out major training for Boston. I had to skip Tuesday’s run due to unforeseen circumstances, but I wasn’t about to skip the mileage, so I decided to shift everything and do three runs in a row, Wednesday through Friday. I thought it wasn’t a bad challenge anyway, to see if I could do what was going to be three fairly hard workouts in a row and recover for the longest long run of my training two days later.

My legs just didn’t want to do a hilly run on Friday after a pretty intense 16 miles in the previous two days, so it ended up being shorter and easier than I thought it would. I also had some questionable moments in the long run, when I thought I’d timed my morning calories a little early and started to fade. Pushed through and got the miles done I wanted. Most of the weather cooperated pretty well, but Wednesday’s tempo 8.5 was butt-ugly rain, wind and cold.

It’s nice not to think of any really long miles for two weeks now. I’m cutting things to three runs a week for the next two. I anticipate this coming week to hit somewhere around 25-30 miles and then I’ll try and do a couple brisk 4-5 milers in town the week before the race, with an optional shorty in Boston two days before the race. I’ve got the tiniest tightness in my lower right leg, but my ab/groin thing is quite good. I think it’s a really good sign that I felt I could have gone quite a bit longer at the end of the big run today.

Bring on Boston.

Details

Mileage: 42.31 miles
Monday weigh-in: 163.2

Wednesday

Took a longer lunch and did a good tempo run that was slowed somewhat by driving wind, rain and very cold temperatures. A little slower as a result, but still got a negative split so I was happy with it.

Workout: 8.48 miles @ 1:01:51 … 7:17 pace, Avg HR 150
Split 1: 4.00 miles @ 29:20 … 7:19 pace
Split 2: 4.48 miles @ 32:31 … 7:15 pace

Thursday

Track intervals at Burnaby Central after work. Nice weather. Didn’t do as many long intervals but came very close to 6:00 on the mile.

Workout: 8.05 miles @ 1:04:14, Avg HR 146
Warmup: 1.52 miles @ 11:55 … 7:49 pace
Intervals: 800m, 1200m, 1600m, 1200m, 800m { 3:09, 4:41, 6:03, 4:43, 3:05 } 2:00 walk break between
Cooldown: 2.30 miles @17:26 … 7:34 pace

Friday

Wanted this to be another in the range of 8 miles with two repeats of the ugly Royal Oak hill thrown into the middle, but the legs told me no (and slowed me down as I tried the first part once), so it was a much shorter run that was rolling at best in the second half.

Workout: 4.39 miles @ 35:05 … 7:46 pace, Avg HR 142
Split 1: 2.28 miles @ 17:04 … 7:30 pace
Split 2: 2.11 miles @ 15:59 … 7:34 pace

Sunday

I thought I was going to have major problems around 14 miles as I felt cold sweats and light-headed. Calories maybe, but I stopped, took stock of the fact that I absolutely had to do this run, sucked it up and had a pretty good run. The effects of that and a solid headwind heading out to UBC did slow my pace a bit in the second half. Beautiful day in Vancouver.

Workout: 21.39 miles @ 2:43:00 … 7:37 pace, Avg HR 146
Split 1: 10.96 miles @ 1:22:56 … 7:34 pace
Split 2: 10.43 miles @ 1:20:04 … 7:40 pace

Poor experience takes away from nonprofits

James — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 05:34:20 +0000

A couple experiences I’ve had in the past week left me wondering whether a nonprofit would suffer from bad customer/user experience in the same way a business would. I figure that good causes can be cut a bit of slack because they usually operate on very small budgets and, if some process isn’t great, I still feel good helping something important. Both of the problems I encountered were with fairly large endeavours and were either about the security of my data or my ability to raise funds for them.

IMHO, it’s all the more important for NGOs and nonprofits to ensure their constituent relationships are good, with the economic situation undoubtedly impacting donations. In the second example below, I’d think that the CIBC title sponsorship or ownership of Run for the Cure would ensure that the web application is usable and helps runners actually do their fundraising.

What are your thoughts? Is the first dialogue over reactive? What about the second web user experience issue?

Amnesty Canada

I’ve been a monthly supporter of Amnesty for some time. This past week I received the following email:

Your 2008 Income Tax receipt has been returned to us by Canada Post. Please e-mail me your correct mailing. Address so we can re-mail your 2008 receipt.

They had my name and email address right, but I have always updated my information via a secure online form. Since I moved a year and a half ago, and had forwarding on my mailing address for a year, it’s possible they wouldn’t have the correct one.

I went to their secure online form, updated my contact information and then sent them the following reply:

You should never ask customers or subscribers to send personal information by email. From a security and theft identity perspective this is horrendous. You have a secure web site (where I’ve just gone and ensured you have my correct mailing address – but it’s been the same for a year and a half) and you should direct people to update their information through there.

This really makes me question how secure my data is with you. I’ve also sent this to the info email address for Amnesty and I would like a response as to, first, the validity of this note and, second, why this would be a practice for you.

My biggest concern about this one is that I asked for a response, CC’d their official contact email address on my note and haven’t heard a thing in a week.

CIBC Run for the Cure

Far be it from me to say anything negative about this event; my problem is with their web site. My wife’s a cancer survivor who ran an all-woman’s team last year, raising an impressive $12,000. When she decided to do a co-ed team this year, I was definitely on board. I finally got around to signing up to be on her team this past weekend. The experience of, both, signing up and having the slightest clue about making use of the fundraising application afterward, are failures of epic proportions (I will not say EPIC FAIL any more, but if ever it applied …). My wife confirmed that a lot of people had difficulty knowing what to do last year and that she provided considerable feedback on the experience.

What’s the problem with the email invite, below?
It would be nice if ‘Click here’ was actually enabled in this. In other words, I was forwarded the invitation to my wife’s run team, but had no way to sign up without asking her.
Trying to sign up
This small tile was in the middle of the left-hand column. Since everything is pastel and pink hued, it doesn’t stand out, but I still found it.

I then had this page open in a new window, but all that draws my eye is the large form assuming I have a user ID. I still have no idea what to do. A HA! There’s a little pink link to register above the login text inputs. Everything on this site is pink and I can only imagine what this would be like if I was colourblind. Signing up as a new registrant should be the biggest single thing on the page, as returning users have already interacted with the site!

If you can imagine, after self-identifying as a new registrant, I’m taken to another page which still presents a returning user login as the biggest single item and a small pink link at the far right side of the page for me. So far, that’s three different pages and I’m no closer to my objective.
Joining a team
I won’t continue presenting screen captures at this point because, while it was still not great, I got through it and didn’t have another surprise new window open on me. I’m pretty sure it was at least another 5 or 6 clicks and page loads to get to the point where I had an ID on the site and had found my wife’s team. OK, so I joined.
Now what?
You’d think that I’d get some kind of information after that, right? Nope. No email confirmation of my registration, no email notification to my wife that I’d joined her team and absolutely no instructions of any kind as to how to use their site for fundraising, what link to send people to so they can donate – absolutely nothing.

How would either of the above experiences, repeated multiple times, affect the bottom lines of each of these organizations? More than they would understand, I’m willing to bet.

3 weeks to Boston – week two of race prep

James — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 03:30:08 +0000

I had a pretty good week this week and am feeling stronger all the time. I’m not fast again – yet. However, my ab and groin stuff is minor to non-existent now, and my paces and intervals are generally starting to pick up a little bit all the time. The weather this week was pretty good across the board, with a beautiful sunny day for Sunday’s long run. I even got new shoes, which are performing great, and I even managed to scoop a real steal on a new Sugoi jacket that I’m hoping I won’t have to use too much until the fall.

I was going to try and hit 40 miles this week as a bit of a down week before my last really heavy week, but a couple runs were just a mile or two shorter than I planned. However, I felt my paces more than made up for that. The biggest place I lost mileage was that I kept my intervals on Tuesday to 800m repeats instead of the 1600′s I was going to do, and did 16 instead of 18 on Sunday. Probably the coolest thing was that every run had a negative split, with my long run a negative split by :20 per mile. I didn’t do hill repeats this week, but a good dose of hills found their way into three of the runs, including the long slow hill up Moscrop on Sunday.

I’m thinking of trying to bang off five runs this week, or at least do a very substantial interval workout on Tuesday. I should be up in the range of 45 miles if I do everything I’m planning. As long as I do the 22 I’m planning for Sunday, that’s the main thing. Hoping to keep the splits negative, and the paces brisk and improving. If this keeps up I might actually have to keep doing marathons … again.

Details

Mileage: 36.72 miles
Monday weigh-in: 164.8

Tuesday

Track workout at Moscrop, but went shorter on the intervals. It was kind of a weird one, but I forgot my Garmin, so I had to go back to prior measurement of the warmup and cooldown, and have no HR information for this session. Not one of my best, but the legs were still heavy from the previous 20 mile long run.

Workout: 6.12 miles (including walk breaks after intervals)
Warmup: 1.52 miles @ 11:20 … 7:28 pace
Intervals: 4 x 800m (3:21, 3:10, 3:06, 3:05), 1 x 400m (1:38), .1 mile walk between all
Cooldown: 1.75 miles @ 13:09 … 7:30 pace

Thursday

A really solid tempo run, with a good second split. Nice night.

Workout: 8.65 miles @ 1:01:07, Avg HR 151 … 7:03 pace
Split 1: 4.00 miles @ 29:10, Avg HR 144 … 7:17 pace
Split 2: 4.65 miles @ 31:57, Avg HR 157 … 6:52 pace

Friday

Did this shorter tempo run from home and slapped the Argyle Street hill (or is that hell?) into the middle of it. Even with a very steep one mile hill, I kept the overall pace under 7:30. Another nice afternoon.

Workout: 6.10 miles @ 45:34 … 7:28 pace, Avg HR 146
Split 1: 2.59 miles @ 18:47 … 7:15 pace
Hill split: .76 miles @ 6:35 … 8:42 pace
Split 2: 2.76 miles @ 20:12 … 7:20 pace

Sunday

I’d planned 18 miles, but was feeling a bit tired and didn’t want to do the hilly stuff coming back would have required, so I cut it down to a little shy of 16 miles. However, I think that my run was the better for it, as I had a nice negative split of :20 per mile, and I think I’ll be in good shape for one final week of heavy miles before I taper for two through Boston.

Workout: 15.85 miles @ 1:58:50 … 7:29 pace, Avg HR 145
Split 1: 8.00 miles @ 1:01:16 … 7:39 pace
Split 2: 7.85 miles @ 57:33 … 7:19 pace

Is it Cancer or Walmart?

James — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:17:49 +0000

This is actually a still that I pulled from here, but you’ll find it more interesting if you go to the Flash animation showing the spread of Walmart in the United States, starting from one location in 1961 and growing to 3176 in 2006. Very cool.

You can click in as deeply as you want and click ‘n drag the map. I wish it had an embed code, but didn’t want to go as far as trying to pull the SWF and place it here.

This animation is now nearly a year old, and nearly three years past the data currency, so who knows how many stores there are now – and this is only in the US. It really reminded me of a disease or tumours in the way it grew and spread. And, that’s kind an appropriate analogy in my mind.

Learning to write in a changing, digital world

James — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 06:17:07 +0000

A couple of things I read this past week really struck a chord. It occurs to me that we really don’t seem to be teaching people how to write for the emerging world. Over the past few months I’ve been exposed to academic writing. Detailed formatting, citation syntax and references with hanging indents don’t find their way into everyday writing, and for good reason. However, I really think people are not being taught to write for the contexts, nor the formats, needed in our rapidly evolving digital world.

Based on what I see my high school aged son experiencing, public school is doing precious little to help him like writing. Yes, I said like. It is still my belief that to do something well, you have to like something about it, or want to do it. The approach in school for memorizing and regurgitating (no, I won’t call it behaviourist) stuff up onto a page is uninspiring at best. While he’s using a word processor to produce the assignments, just like when I was in public school, it eventually has to be printed and handed in, only to be marked up with red pen, assigned a somewhat arbitrary grade, and handed back. Do you think the marked version is saved for posterity, to be referenced for a later assignment in the hope that he’ll do better? Hardly. It’s in the trash can or somewhere in a bag or pile, never to be seen again.

Even though a few more bells and whistles are employed as people in my Master’s cohort can access scholarly research (mostly through subscription-based academic databases), papers written for our courses follow a similar path. Hopefully, we’ll all build our academic writing chops as we hand in more papers before we finally do a major project or thesis, but we’re still handing in an artifact, getting a grade of some sort and getting the thing back. I’m not sure a digital version with comment tracking turned on is a whole lot different than my son’s paper-based version, but I digress.

What a breath of fresh air it was to read Writing for Wikipedia. In it, Robert Cummings relates his experiences in teaching his composition class to write for Wikipedia. The mere mention of Wikipedia can send academics into a lather and I’ve even heard locally that it is not to be used for reference. Cummings cites a Nature study of the validity of Wikipedia and says …

For those who are interested in that topic, I would refer you to the Nature study which found that while Wikipedia was less accurate that Encyclopædia Britannica online in its science entries, the aggregate difference in accuracy was not so large as to rule out the use of Wikipedia as a valid source for most readers (and there is no debate that Wikipedia is a vastly more comprehensive source and better able to update itself). No matter how counter-intuitive it might seem that an open source which anyone can edit would provide, on the whole, useful information, it is simply the case.

What I’m really getting at is that Cummings uses Wikipedia as an assignment, but first goes through with his class the idea of writing for discourse in a collaborative environment. He touches on some really key issues when he speaks of gaining an understanding of the concept of audience and receiving often immediate feedback with a critical eye. In my mind, it’s the quality that can come from voices of the crowd. He’s also careful to understand why some students need the one-to-one critique which comes from the teacher before venturing into the online world.

What I really think we ought to be giving very significant weight to, is the value of writing in the digital context. In addition to the comments of the crowd and the value of collaborative writing, what about the format in which many, if not most, people will eventually see the writing? Is there any doubt that digital formats accessed over the web will continue to gain prominence? As the realization of the cost benefits of IP networked distribution over print gains hold, it’s pretty much a given.

As we all know, though, writing for the screen is not like writing for print. Paragraphs should be smaller, bullet pointing should be encouraged and active voice should be everywhere. Scholarly writing will still need to exist, but can it adapt, with standards that can easily allow for the screen? Or are we doomed to abstracts that link to 150 page PDFs? That open technologies can help writers learn about audience and value feedback also seems to be logical in my mind, though I don’t see too many theses-in-progress open for comments. Will that come, and should it?

On a final note, I also encountered a wonderful project brought to my attention by Jim Groom, Fredricksburg Academy Blogs. You can easily read about it via the link, and I’d never do it justice here, but the gist is simple. Provide a local high school with a cheap version of your university’s WordPress MU install, complete with plugins and themes, and let students discover for themselves how to just write. No real purpose, no big book of rules … just writing.

By reading the comments by teachers, you can see that it’s not only teaching them about writing online, but about safety, how much of themselves to expose and how to connect with each other and start conversations. Wonderful stuff, really. Perhaps the most telling comment,

My students love that it is their space. They are writing about anything and everything. I am not stifling what they are writing except within the context of “school appropriate”. Because of that they are not only writing, but we are building community. We are learning about each other…and writing at the same time. I am also finding that the engagement of my weaker students has increased. It is as if their voice is valid now.

Wouldn’t it be nice if this marked the beginning of a real journey?

4 weeks to Boston – week one of race prep

James — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 05:07:50 +0000

All things considered, this was a pretty good week. I finally got my mileage up firmly in the low to mid 40′s and did enough of each kind of workout, that I really met my goals for the week. I had intended to get up to 22 miles for the Sunday run, but opted to not do a massive hill at about the 3/4 point and do a shorter hill to end the run.

The weather was generally quite good, but I did encounter some pretty intense headwinds for the westbound waterfront leg of my long run today, which really dropped my pace at that point, but the run felt really strong, as did all my runs this week. If things keep going this well, I might just have to keep up my distance training, though I’ll admit getting in big miles and doing a Master’s degree is pretty challenging, when you factor in family and career.

Also, since last week was so low mileage, the weight did jump back up a pound, too. Looking forward to getting through the next two intense weeks before a two-week taper.

Details

Mileage: 42.82
Monday weigh-in: 166.8

Tuesday

Wicked track workout (at least for me) with the longest intervals I’ve done in some time.

Workout: 7.03 miles, Max HR 175
Warmup: 1.28 miles @ 7:50 pace
Intervals: 4 x 1 mile @ 6:28, 6:17, 6:20, 6:21, 2:00 rest
Cooldown: 1.22 miles @ 7:39 pace

Thursday

This one was a slight variation on a hill workout, with one big-ass half-mile hill right in the middle, which I split into two intervals with a one minute break. A good workout, but my legs were quite fatiqued after the hill.

Workout: 7.17 miles @ 56:21 … 7:51 pace, Avg HR 149
Split 1: 2.17 miles @ 16:02 … 7:22 pace
Hill splits: 2 x .25 miles, :60 rest
Split 2: 4.32 miles @ 31:39 … 7:19 pace

Friday

A nice tempo run with an easy shorter first interval that went largely uphill and a nice quick longer second interval going a bit downhill. A nice evening. Very similar to last week’s Thursday run, but a bit shorter at a slightly faster pace.

Workout: 8.24 miles @ 59:12 … 7:11 pace, Avg HR 148
Split 1: 3.75 miles @ 27:47 … 7:24 pace
Split 2: 4.49 miles @ 31:25 … 6:59 pace

Sunday

While my pace dropped due to an intense headwind for five miles, I was generally really happy with this, particularly the way I felt after the run. I can’t remember a run of over 20 miles that didn’t leave me wiped out afterward. A beautiful sunny day made it all the better. I found I had a little trouble pushing up to the HR I wanted in the second half. I won’t itemize it here, but I did balloon a little more than I wanted.

Workout: 20.38 miles @ 2:39:05 … 7:49 pace, Avg HR 149

A facelift I can probably stay with

James — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 07:10:10 +0000

I’ve always been a little schizophrenic about the designs I slap on my web sites. I really like mucking around with XHTML and CSS, but don’t have time to play with it in my spare time anymore and my work now focuses almost entirely on project management, interaction design and information architecture. So my own sites are really my only opportunity to have a little markup fun. I think I can live with this one for a while, though.

I wanted to make sure I took a slightly different approach this time. While it’s still a blog at it’s core, I wanted to make the static pages stand alone more, to hopefully accommodate a little more professional and academically related content as I move forward. Maybe papers, presentations and other pieces of progress as I go wherever the MA I’m working on, takes me – but a journal on steroids.

My basic strategy was to make the landing page a digital aggregator of most of my online life, while I can easily add and separate more static content and focus the pages a little more. I like trying to bend the WordPress structure a little with a few conditional statements and typography, for the most part. The sparse layout is no accident, focusing on words and the odd image, while allowing it all to breathe. A slight newspaper look was my overall inspiration.

A word or two on WordPress

WordPress makes it very easy to play around with markup and style to your heart’s content. With the various domains, blogs and personal sites I’ve had over the past few years, I’ve experimented with lots of things, including the root for the wanless.info domain, which is there largely for posterity. However, that’s not WordPress, just a hand-coded site that I put together entirely with PHP and flat text files. I gotta remember to retire that at some point.

I’ve built my share of WordPress sites, like the one you’re on, this, or this. At other times I’ve done more interaction and IA while someone else coded, like this and this. Unfortunately, at BCIT we’re doing mostly Drupal for standalone projects like our student blogs, Five Forward, or What Would You Change – let’s just say I’m no big fan.

I’d love to be able to do some more WordPress work at BCIT, but I think I’ll just have to live without it.

Customizing menus and widgets for my new WordPress theme

5 weeks to Boston – recovery and low mileage

James — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:44:30 +0000

The long run this past week was supposed to be shorter, but I had originally wanted to keep the mid-week mileage up. So much for the best-laid plans. The week was weak. It’s not an excuse (well, it is really), but I’d been trying desperately to get a first draft of my thesis proposal done this past week and work was pretty busy, so I was challenged to get all my runs in. With only a very short interval workout on the treadmill and a really good quality middle distance run, I thought I’d at least get a nice, solid 16 miles in on Sunday. My legs were generally fresh and the runs I did were good, but I had nowhere near enough hills.

Well, I chose the absolute worst point in the day to do my run on Sunday and my route had me looping back close to home around the halfway point. We had a freak two-hour windy snowstorm at the exact point I ran – yes, a snowstorm in Vancouver on March 15. I ended up with numb fingers, drenched to the bone and all done at ten miles. So, what I figured would be at least a 32-35 mile week, turned into a 24 mile week.

Looking forward to my next three weeks of race prep before tapering for two, I’m hoping to be vigilant and keep all three at 42-50 miles. These should be pretty intense weeks, with one long run of 18 sandwiched between two runs of over 20. In addition to the planned Sunday mileage, each one will feature track workouts with full mile intervals, hill sessions, and a longer mid-week tempo run. I’m also going to be working hard to keep my paces for all mid and long runs at 7:30 or under.

Details

Mileage: 23.98
Monday weigh-in: 165.8

Tuesday

Like most of the week, I was time challenged so I ended up doing a short interval workout on the treadmill at BCIT with no HR data.

Workout: 4.5 miles
Warmup and cooldown: 1.0 mile @ 7:30 pace
Intervals: 4 x 800 meters @ 3:00, 1:00 rests

Thursday

My best workout of the week by far. I probably would have even gone harder if I’d known my planned hill workout would get scrapped. Since I didn’t do a really hard interval workout, I wanted this one to be a little harder than a race pace middle distance run.

Workout: 9.48 miles @ 1:08:38 … 7:14 pace, Avg HR 158
Split 1: 4.0 miles @ 30:02 … 7:30 pace
Split 2: 5.48 miles @ 38:36 … 7:02 pace

Sunday

I was planning to measure splits on this run since I want to get back to the negative splits I was doing earlier in my training. However, since my second split was only three miles I decided it wasn’t really worth it. There is no question in my mind that these were some of the worst conditions I’ve ever run in. Somewhere around freezing with bitterly cold winds and heavy wet snow. The first three miles were straight into a headwind and by the time I got to ten miles, I couldn’t feel my fingers at all.

Workout: 10.0 miles @ 1:14:50 … 7:29 pace, Avg HR 152

6 weeks to Boston – recovering from a bug

James — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 04:38:42 +0000

After last week, I was pretty sure this past one would be pretty tough going and I was right. I got all my runs in, but found that my aerobic capacity was somewhat diminished and everything was just a little bit tougher. I did, however, notice that my legs didn’t seize up as badly toward the end of my long run, like they did with the 20-miler two weeks ago.

Also, as I suspected, after not running for a week and being sick, my Monday morning weigh-in saw a little bit of weight increase, though I don’t worry too much about a fluctuation of a pound or two over the course of a couple weeks. Since I’m writing this Monday night, I know I am back down a couple pounds again, as of this morning.

Lastly, I am definitely finding that, in trying to stick with my marathon training and do my MA coursework while working full-time, I am burning the candle at both ends and feeling a little run down. While my legs are continually getting stronger in the long stuff, as I’ve been doing 18 and 20 mile runs I’m finding an annoying pattern of positive splits and late run fatigue creeping in on the long stuff. If I can shore that up and get the pace a little more consistent throughout, that would be good.

In the next four weeks before I taper for two, I’ll be trying to work more race pace segments into my longer runs, and trying to do a little longer run on Wednesdays.

Details

Mileage: 37.21
Monday weigh-in: 168.4

Tuesday

Went to the track and did intervals. It was a nice lunchtime workout, but kind of felt like I was blowing sludge out of my lungs after more than a week off. Someone pass the lung-butter please.

Workout: 6.33 miles, Avg HR 152, Max HR 175
Warmup: 1.75 miles @ 13:04 … 7:28 pace
Intervals: .25 (1:35), .50 (3:03), 1.00 (6:13), .50 (3:01), .25 (1:28) – rests of 1:00, 2:00, 2:00, 1:00
Cooldown: 1.52 miles @ 11:20 … 7:28 pace

Thursday

I did this run a little later at night from home and found it really tough. It didn’t end up being awful, but I was hoping I’d be hitting these mid-week tempo runs at about a 7:00 per mile pace. I got stronger as it went on, but really felt gross through the next morning. Apparently mister bug was not gone yet.

Workout: 6.34 miles @ 46:29 … 7:20 pace, Avg HR 149

Friday

I was still feeling rough from the previous evening’s run, but I feel I must have some hills and some speedwork at this stage of my training. Forced myself out at lunch for a warmup around BCIT’s grungy track and then some shorter hills at Moscrop. I had my Garmin for distance but forgot my HR strap. Couldn’t quite keep upping the pace in the last couple repeats.

Workout: 5.40 miles @ 45:29
Warmup: 2.10 miles @ 15:15 … 7:15 pace
Hill repeats: 6 x .14 miles (1:07, 1:04, 1:01, 1:00, 1:02, 1:04) – rests of 1:30
Cooldown: 1.73 miles @12:38 … 7:18 pace

Sunday

Not much to say about this. I ran in the afternoon, it was cold, windy and clear when I started and I miscalculated my distance, going about .8 of a mile short. I try to make my long runs a little hilly and this one had it’s share. Worst of all, it started snowing at about mile 17. While my legs did show improvement since the last 20 miler, I still faded more than I would like in the latter stages.

Workout: 19.14 miles @ 2:30:09 … 7:50 pace, Avg HR 154

Don Norman from TED2003 on design

James — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:23:26 +0000

What makes for good design? Don Norman has an interesting take on what design is. For him, design works (or at least it did in 2003) on three levels – visceral, behavioural and emotional. He argues that we perceive design on almost entirely a subconscious level, as with most things we do. I know one thing. If something I have to use is well-designed and designed for me, then using it should be second-nature, or close to subconscious.

No related posts.

7 weeks to Boston – nothing to see here

James — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:23:57 +0000

OK, so getting really sick isn’t going to do your training any favours, but I had to bail on a whole week of training. That means a 16 mile long run, valuable hills and speed work and about 40 miles of my training overall. I’m pretty choked but I’ve simply moved on. At least I’ve run across a lot of people who are sick right now.

It wasn’t intentional, but my throat, sinuses and cough were still so bad by last weekend, that I couldn’t even just cram my Sunday run in. The risk for having to bail in the middle of it was simply too great. In fact I started to feel pretty good last Friday, thought I’d get my weekend running in and felt progressively worse through Sunday.

I’m actually writing this Wednesday, as I thought I should probably still have a journal entry for last week for posterity. I’ve started the next week out on the right foot, though, as I’ve already got a weight workout and 6+ miler with track intervals under my belt. My intention is to shorten my taper and actually still get the same number of long runs in. Here’s hoping for the best.

Details

Mileage: 0.0
Monday weigh-in: n/a

Low Fi Concept Demos

James — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:19:07 +0000

Originally got this at Konigi. Very effective.

5 weeks to Boston – recovery and low mileage

Avoiding social media spam

James — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 07:07:15 +0000

The web is chalk full of really good social software applications. Some help you connect with friends, share things you find on the web, create and share video, images or thoughts and many of the good ones are accessible from virtually any device, while letting you extend or build upon them through open APIs. The good services are good, usually because they do one thing really well.

Facebook (friends), Flickr (photos), Delicious (bookmarks), WordPress (writing), YouTube (video) and last.fm (music) come to mind as best-of-breed tools for sharing. It’s the ease-of-use that draws people in, while the quality of interaction likely determines adoption and longevity. The really good ones also tend to get bought by a big player, as even with the small list above, the first two are owned by Yahoo, while YouTube is owned by Google and last.fm by CBS.

The psychology of sharing

What are we actually doing when we share? We’re putting a piece of ourselves out there for …. consumption, reaction, response … anything really. I’m convinced, though, that it comes down to people sharing and connecting with other people. We want to connect and discover and, as such, when social media is used to promote products it lacks authenticity. Even in the nonprofit sector, where groups like Tech Soup are remixing the web for social change, it still comes down to a social thing – a person, a problem to fix, or a law to change, for example. The ugly truth about your social network is actually that most people are using it for pretty mundane stuff anyway, so making a marketing channel out of it starts from a point of weakness. It’s not a captive audience like the one staring at one channel during a movie. The internet attention focus is far more limited.

When you replace one of the people in that equation with a service or a product – a thing in essence – the dynamic changes. It’s not a conversation, but an advertisement or a broadcast. The dialogue is replaced by a monologue. As we continue to share, connect, contribute, and re-use, we begin to build what’s being referred to as our social graph, the “map of our global network and how we’re related.” By definition, a thing cannot have a social graph because a thing is not social. Notwithstanding the legal oddity that gives a corporation the rights of a real person, this notion doesn’t extend to social relationships very well. Sure, corporations can have relationships with customers, but not when they make that relationship all about promotion, marketing or selling. I don’t buy the whole Mashable post, but this quote about being human is great advice:

Don’t want the worst day of your life to be played over and over again like Groundhog Day? Then don’t talk, share, Tweet or write about it via social media. That said, no one is happy, or perfect all of the time. It’s okay to let people into the “real” events which happen in your life. Social media for business is about return on engagement. Connect with people, build opportunities through dialogue which would not have otherwise occurred, then connect them with your business.

Make it real

This brings me to the main point I’m trying to make. Marketers are grappling with social media just like many of us are, to make it have value for them. Unfortunately, many of them think of the social web as just another media channel, with the same rules as traditional ones. Product promotion is largely viewed as taking because it’s only about getting money from a customer. Social media is about giving and taking. Sure, you can be a little promotional at times, but you’ve also got to contribute something for no other reason than the act of sharing. That’s the whole point of the ingredients of the social graph – they change, morph and mutate based on user contributions.

If you want to market a product or service via social media, remember one key thing. Connect with other people as a person, put a face on what you promote and make it about real relationships. Just like email, social media spam is bad.

8 weeks to Boston – finally did the 20

James — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 04:25:12 +0000

This was a breakthrough week in a couple of ways. While I didn’t quite hit 40 miles, I got a lot closer and I finally got the 20 miler in I should have done three weeks ago. This week had a bit of everything and I was generally pretty happy with it. While I wish I could have finished the long run a bit stronger, given I was feeling quite sick Sunday morning, I’m very happy to have done it at all, albeit starting early afternoon.

In my quest to toughen my ‘hill’ legs up, I did a very short Saturday run with a big huge hill in it and that may have had something to do with my legs fatiguing badly at 18-19 miles 0n Sunday. I kept the Sunday run fairly flat, with some mid-run rolling stuff, but it’s in the bag and that’s all that matters.

Next week, my long run will dip down to the 14-16 mile range, so I’m going to try to make all three mid-week runs longer. I expect everything, other than the track workout, to have some hilly goodness in it. While there are no guarantees on the marathon and anything (or several things) can go wrong on race day, not being ready for the hills in Boston will not be one of them. I’ve been doing a fair bit of sugar this week and, while this past weigh-in stayed solid, I’m not sure how I’ll be tomorrow morning for this week’s weigh-in.

Details

Mileage: 35.21
Monday weigh-in: 167.4

Tuesday
4.1 miles including the walking rests between. Schedule forced me to use a treadmill, but the ones at work are pretty accurate. Good workout, even though short warmup and cooldown.

.25 mile warmup, cooldown @ 7:30 pace
6×800, 1:00 walk between,
3:15, 3:07, 3:00, 3:00, 3:07, 3:15

Wednesday
Had a really good run. A lot of uphill running in the first half and still ran close to my overall pace from the half marathon on Sunday. I pretty much have to do my mid-week miles at work, but the traffic lights can get in the way of keeping the HR up.

7.92 miles @ 57:44 … 7:17 pace, Avg HR 145

Saturday
A shorty since I had to move it to Saturday and I was doing 20 the next day.

3.34 miles @ 28:19 … 8:28 pace, Max HR 169

1.08 mile warmup @ 7:41 … 7:06 pace
3 X .25 mile intervals up one huge, steep hill, 1:00 rest
1.47 mile cooldown @10:55 … 7:25 pace

Sunday
This one was a little weird. Due to legs seizing up by 19 miles and the last .85 a very intense uphill home, I walked it, as my calf muscles were on the verge of cramping. Due to the length of time since I’ve done anything this long, I did not expect a negative split as with most of my long runs to date. I wasn’t disappointed.

19 miles @ 2:26:48 … 7:44 pace, Avg HR 150
.85 mile walked straight uphill

- out 10:00 miles @ 1:16:05 … 7:36 pace
- back 9.00 miles @ 1:10:43 … 7:51 pace

Ridiculous rollovers add nothing

James — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 01:13:47 +0000

Sometimes a nifty CSS or Javascript trick to provide contextual information or a useful visual cue to your users adds a real touch. The web is full of good examples. Below are not three of them. Sure, Web Designer Wall has some good tutorials, the requisite colourful background, drop shadows and is a nice looking visual piece of art. It seems to suffer from a general lack of focus that often happens (at least for me) when everything is colourful. However, that’s not what I’m driving at here and I’m not picking on this site – it’s just the most recent and blatant example that caught my eye.

The main navigation tabs at the top take site visitors to three main pages, home, about, and a jobs board. Do I really need a rollover effect to tell me that:

Clicking home will ‘go to home’ …

Or clicking about will let me ‘check them out’ …

Or, finally, that the jobs link will actually take me to a ‘job board’ …

If you’re going to bother to code rollovers, whether through CSS pseudo elements or with JS (or both), then make them worthwhile, providing something of value to your users. Contextual information to clarify something, definition of a term on hover, whatever …. just something more than a repetition of the link in almost exactly the same wording.

Slight re-design launched

9 weeks to Boston – First Half half marathon

James — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 01:00:07 +0000

I knew I had a half marathon to race this week as part of my training and, with the heavy legs and lame long run from last week, I decided to keep the mid-week mileage short and fairly brisk and try for some fresh legs come Sunday.

My strategy seems to have worked. Every run, including the race, was a good one, while the weather was really decent. Even though my race won’t go down as one of my faster halfs, I felt solid throughout and had no problems of any kind. Even with the race, I consider this week a recovery week with very short mileage. I feel really good for the halfway point of my training.

As I move into the heavier mileage, I expect the next six weeks to all be 40 miles or heavier. This coming week is supposed to be another good one, weather-wise.

Details

Mileage: 22.83
Monday weigh-in: 167.2

Wednesday

Mild conditions, tempo run but split into two intervals to the far end of Deer Lake and back, with a 2:00 rest.

4.95 miles @ 34:14 … 6:55 pace
- split 2.51 @ 17:41 … 7:03
- 2:00 rest
- split 2.44 @ 16:33 … 6:46

Thursday

Used some hills near BCIT at lunch. First one was a bit longer, then did three more repeats on a quarter mile hill stretch. All repeats had 2:30 rest between.

4.78 miles
Warmup: 1.3 miles @ 9.18
1 x.36, 3 x .28
Cooldown: 1.36 miles @ 10:00

Sunday

My scheduled run would have been 16 miles w/12 @ 1/2 marathon race pace, so I guess a half marathon is a decent substitute. I’ve included my official results, as opposed to my Garmin. While not a stellar race, it was a good solid run and everything felt strong all day. I’d prefer to be racing at a sub 7:00 per mile pace, but at least I’m at least :20 faster per mile than most of my long runs.

Avg HR: 162
Chip time: 1:36:00.7
Pace: 7:16
Place in category: 50/150
Place in gender: 219/913

Siftables, a brilliant interface

James — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 22:50:34 +0000

I already bookmarked and tweeted this, brought to my attention by one of my RRU cohort. However, as I thought about the educational implications for such a usable human-computer interface, the possibilities seem only limited by programming and concept.

David Merrill is my interaction and usability hero at the moment.

No related posts.

Reflection and philosophy

James — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 19:55:56 +0000

The course I’ve just started this week in my MA studies is focused primarily on community-building for online learning. We’ve been posting images that suggest facilitation and community and commenting on them. The literature reading thus far has been – and I’m admittedly only about half way through it – about philosophy of education and developing reflective practice. This got me thinking about a journal post.

As always I come at this as an educational lay-person, but one who has been design-focused for well over a decade, led lots of projects and teams, managed web portal communities, and done his fair share of presentations. As I’ve started to think about the connection between the subject matter of the five courses, it occurs to me that a great deal of the core stuff of education and learning is about philosophy. Whether you’re doing analysis, development, design, implementation or evaluation, you’re constantly (or should be) thinking about your learners, their differences, how your approach needs to accommodate them, and specific to distance and technology-mediated learning, whether things like the LMS/PLE will be affected by issues at their end, of which you are entirely unaware.

After all, philosophy is really about the examined life. As we gain life experience, we (hopefully) develop value systems which guide us. Educational philosophy takes this one step further by examining beliefs and values and applying them to educational issues. It’s interesting that we look at these issues now, because they are probably germane to almost any course we’ve done so far. Program planning, for example, covered elements of the ethical and socio-political domains, core aspects of philosophy. Mind you, in a program which is largely applied and practical, it’s probably difficult to insert philosophy and theory (with the obvious exception of our first course on learning theory) into the curriculum, so I applaud its inclusion at this point.

Reflection is really centred on the time you take to examine what you do. This could be as granular or broad as you like, so long as you are developing a way to evaluate and question yourself, with an effort to improve. Connecting philosophy and reflection then, to me, is really just a question of scale. I liken philosophy to one’s broad roadmap for living and reflection to one’s approach for determining whether or not they’re staying true to it. Put another way, philosophy will (or should) have an impact on the external you, while reflection will be more personal.

On a personal note

Connecting these thoughts to what I do is an interesting exercise. As far as my own project management and design practice is concerned, I don’t worry too much about reflection because I’m in analytical mode pretty much 24/7 and probably err on the side of wanting to do too much analysis, even when the project doesn’t always warrant it. I find I can get frustrated when there is no easy way to collect the data I want on users, for example, or when a marketing imperative says I must get something launched even when I know it shouldn’t be. If there’s an error in my reflection it’s that it is probably a little more externally than internally focused and I’ll see if that’s a shift I can make a bit over time.

In terms of professional philosophy, it’s pretty easy to liken the end-user of a web site or application to a learner. Find out who your target is, understand as much as you reasonably can about them and focus your efforts on meeting their needs. Whether your focus is education or communications, you will always have institutional, political, process or business issues to navigate and they will often force you to make compromises in your work. Accept them and do the best that you can because energy is often finite and better spent on things you CAN change.

One gigantic learning cycle experiment

Instructional design now and in the future: part two

James — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 04:46:18 +0000

This is the second of two parts. Here I talk about factors driving the future of the field. As someone doing this as part of an MA program, what I’m looking for is thoughts on approach from those who may be practicing instructional designers or whose experience is grounded in more than literature review or discussions. Mine are definitely lay opinions in this area, despite my experience in other areas of web development.

Factors driving the evolution of the field

So far, I have identified key issues at play right now in the instructional design field; primarily theoretical and technological. However, these are only springboards for bigger and broader changes to come. What will an instructional designer need as a practitioner and how will that play out for things like F2F or distance learning as technology marches forward? How will learner needs and preferences change as a result? Will open technologies, open access and the evolution of constructivist underpinnings effectively turn instructional design on its head?

What Will Practitioners Need to Do?

While the questions in the introduction to this section might suggest everything will change, this is not so. The skills and attributes an instructional designer brings to the table will have to accommodate external changes out of necessity, “Instructional design is an area in which we should be able to anticipate particularly rapid and significant change (Smith & Ragan, 2005).” However, some things will change and some not so much:

Instructional design issues: “The same instructional design issues are valid for both traditional and eLearning: structure, content, motivation and feedback, interaction and activities (Siragusa, 2000, p.4; as cited by Herridge Group, 2004, p.15).”
ISD process: there is no reason to think the principles of ADDIE or standard ISD will not still apply, with some aspect(s) of Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation always present.
Standards and skills: competencies, standards and skills will continue to change. Emerging international standards for program evaluation and online learning (IPSTIPI, 2006) will become increasingly important. Practitioners will need to develop analytical, project management, technology-oriented media and evaluation / research competencies for business and industry settings (Larson & Lockee, 2007, pp.3, 11-12).

While ID practitioners will have to maintain the skills in sequencing, pacing, content selection and the like, and will still have to choose and use contextually appropriate ID models, business and industry settings may demand more rigour and higher standards in their qualifications, while learners will demand better experiences and expect to use the technology of their choice.

External Factors

While learners, learning theory and technology will largely drive the process of instructional design, trends in society will also play an important role in the kinds of training and instruction required, and delivery method. The explosive growth of purely distance-based graduate-level programs aimed at employed mid-career adults, indicates the need for flexible education. As learning objects and media become increasingly sophisticated, and things like smart objects and expert systems continue to gain prominence in business training, classroom and F2F settings, technology literacy will likely become increasingly important for instructional designers.

Learners and Technology

It is well beyond the scope of this paper to do a detailed analysis of learners and their needs. They will differ significantly based on learning context, demographics, socio-economic and cultural factors. Plus, little detailed knowledge about individual learner needs actually exists. However, based upon the continuing evolution and application of a predominantly constructivist approach to instructional design, learners:

will continue to be more central to the instruction and will require more active, authentic, collaborative learning imbued with multiple perspectives (Karagiorgi & Symeou, 2005);
will need learning experiences more adapted to their individual learning styles, despite the fact that we still require far more systematic knowledge of how different kinds of learners use various media (Miller, 2007), and;
in work-sponsored training, support and professional development – may require more performance technology solutions such as job aids, counselling and on-the-job training (Smith & Ragan, 2005).

While learners ultimately come in all sorts of flavours, those which fit into the broad category of millennials (14-27) make up a large chunk of today’s aggregate learner persona. According to a recent study (Accenture, 2008) of more than 400 U.S. students and employees from this demographic, they show “an increasing demand for high-tech devices to connect with colleagues, peers, friends and family, rather than face-to-face contact,” and that, “they expect to use their own technology and mobile devices for work, increasingly choosing their place of employment based on how accommodating companies are to their personal technology preferences.”

When coupling millennial preferences for high-tech (as opposed to F2F) social interaction, and the desire to use their own technology in the way they best see fit, there is no reason to assume this only holds true for employment. Instructional delivery in all contexts will likely have to progressively and continually accommodate this trend.

Learning and Educational Technology

I have just demonstrated how end-user technology preferences will likely cause significant issues for the planning and delivery of learning, regardless of context. Before discussing the rapidly changing landscape with regard to building and delivering learning online, I feel it is important to highlight broader changes in technology, particularly wireless. As handheld devices and mobile computing continue to gain prominence for learners it is important to have at least a cursory knowledge of the landscape, as it provides important context for how our instruction is being accessed and some of the possibilities for delivering that instruction.

Gartner (2009) has identified eight mobile technologies that will evolve significantly through 2010, impacting short-term mobile strategies and policies. As these take hold, they will undoubtedly affect longer-term technology trends as well, and they are effectively not new issues, regardless. Key trends include improved mobile interfaces, Bluetooth improvements, location awareness, wireless broadband, 802.11n adoption and the mobile web. What is important to note is that these are not new and show that wireless access and mobile computing will continue to improve and become increasingly important to learners, thus making it something instructional designers cannot ignore.

What about delivery frameworks? A Learning Management System (LMS) is a special type of Content Management System (CMS), optimized to deliver instruction online. Examples include Moodle, Desire2Learn and Blackboard. A CMS application is most often a web-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) for managing the content of a web site, as it has become increasingly important to provide access over the Internet. A CMS for updating a web site allows distributed authoring of content by Subject Matter Experts (SME), while centralizing publishing control and design standards through a web management department. LMS software takes the same approach to managing a web-based learning environment, but the end-user features are more tailored to content sequencing, asynchronous/synchronous communication tools, assignment submission and other social learning activities, as opposed to more passive information distribution. Making sense of, and choosing, a particular CMS or LMS is a very contextually specific and technical endeavour, typically well beyond the scope of an individual instructional designer. As I will demonstrate next, though, understanding how these systems work and the features and limitations of the environment for which one is designing, will likely become increasingly important.

The move to open is here to stay. A discussion of LMS software is beyond the scope of this paper and not terribly germane to the specifics of instructional design. However, understanding terms like open source, open standards and open access is very important to the instructional design process. In particular, there has been a very clear development on the web in general, which is now having a significant impact on teaching and learning. Web 2.0 generally describes the move to information democratization, user generated content, socialization, sharing and community-built applications, and is a social change enabled by technology, as opposed being technology-driven. Web 2.0 has also drastically influenced general expectations with regard to functionality and experience and, interestingly, resembles constructivism in many important ways.

Web 2.0 was eloquently described by Stephen Downes (2005) as:

a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into “microcontent” units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways.” In a nutshell, what was happening was that the Web was shifting from being a medium, in which information was transmitted and consumed, into being a platform, in which content was created, shared, remixed, repurposed, and passed along. And what people were doing with the Web was not merely reading books, listening to the radio or watching TV, but having a conversation, with a vocabulary consisting not just of words but of images, video, multimedia and whatever they could get their hands on. And this became, and looked like, and behaved like, a network.

This notion has significant implications for learning. Open content access, sharing and distribution, coupled with the changing face of Millennials and their technology preferences, suggests that while technology is being used to share and communicate like never before, the experience will be very individualistic, tailored to personal preferences and expectations.

Smith & Ragan (2005) recognize some of this when they state, “the single quality that more than any other, seems to set the web apart is the more or less instant and free distribution of interactive multimedia materials.“ Further, that “information infrastructures are becoming able to serve learning in both individual and collaborative modes, making informal, self-directed learning increasingly fused with intentional or formal learning and instruction” (p.364).

Instructional designers will have to understand that learners will be accessing an ever-wider world of information via technology and at times that suits them. They will share, discuss and re-mix content to suit their preferences and they will expect it to be factored into their overall learning experience and objectives.

Beyond Constructivism

What will the continuing evolution of constructivism mean for instructional designers? For example, as I have already indicated the features of many LMS software packages are evolving to accommodate constructivist underpinnings, and learners are becoming much more particular about education suiting their preferences. As LMS applications become more open platforms for accessing content and materials from a number of external sources, and allow learners to have a more active role in creating, structuring and pacing their own learning, how will learning theory change to further affect the instructional design field?

Not everyone feels that constructivism has been that revolutionary. Wilson (2005), for example, calls it “old wine in new bottles.” Further, his four pillars of practice focus more on aspects of instruction than specific theories and include the individual, the outside connection, the value context and the aesthetic. It is difficult to jibe his approach within the broader context of constructivism, but I think it important to make note of the value he places on aesthetic design, something I have long thought was lacking in off-the-shelf user interfaces. Parrish (2005) pushes the aesthetic envelope even further when he suggests that active learning strategies and aesthetic experience share the rhythm of imbalance and balance regained (p.23). Parrish and Wilson both share the notion that the experience of learning is key, and I tend to think that it is an important concept for ID practitioners to be mindful of.

As a developmental approach connectivism is, at once, interesting and extremely hard to quantify. If it is already difficult to design authentic, situated, individual and measurable learning experiences, just try doing so while recognizing chaos, network, complexity and self-organization (Seimens, 2004):

Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing. Connectivism is driven by the understanding that decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical.

I have included the different concepts above not to confuse, but to illuminate how instructional designers will have to think to accommodate the ever-changing landscape of learning theory.

Instructional Design Models and Their Application

With dozens of models available, both rigid and flexible in nature, each designed to address specific learning contexts, model selection will continue to be very personal for ID practitioners. New models, though, will emerge to accommodate shifts in learners, learning theory and technology. Smith & Regan (2005) state, “In the future, we can expect the models that we employ to guide instructional design to become increasingly powerful, sophisticated and efficient.” They indicate key issues in ID model development will include; front-end analysis shaped by anthropological methods, design and delivery shaped by psychology and cognitive science, implementation shaped by market research, evaluation shaped by anthropology and sociology and training programs shaped by real-world jobs (p.365). They also state that models will become more alterable, iterative, layered and graduated, to reflect the need for ‘the quick and dirty’ and the notion of rapid prototyping.

Evaluation

This issue is probably one of the most difficult to anticipate in the coming years. I do not really have a great many insights into evaluation, only that I note it does not fit well with the increasing dominance of social constructivist leanings. Behaviourist methodologies are somewhat easier to evaluate, as measurement often becomes about observing changes in learner behaviour and testing for rote recall. Constructivism and Pavlov’s Dog would seem to have little in common. It is entirely possible that, as learners become more involved in determining their own learning path and experience, instructional designers will have to find ways for them to help determine how they are evaluated.

Conclusions

Instructional designers are faced with a number of significant issues with the changes that are presently taking place. The theoretical nature of knowledge continues to undergo revisions to accommodate how learning is perceived to occur. As technology has moved into a new realm of social capability, with ubiquity of access at speeds that were only a dream a few years ago, almost everything is now a click away, with many social interactions among Millennials just as likely to happen via a laptop or hand-held, as in-person.

The preferences this social technology landscape has created for learners mean instructional design must not only include the traditional activities related to instructional model selection and use, and the steps associated with standard ISD processes, but instructional designers will need to factor in myriad other elements to their design process.

ID practitioners in the coming years will need to consider learners, technology, content and experiences outside their designed environment. The continuing evolution of constructivist theories means learner outcomes will become more individual. While learning environments will still run on specific software platforms, learners will create their own experiences through the open model pervading the web. Everything from planning learner outcomes to determining evaluation approaches will necessitate more direct involvement of the learner.

References

Accenture, (2008). “New-Generation Workers” Want Technology Their Way. Accenture News Room. Retrieved January 29, 2009 from http://newsroom.accenture.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=4767
Bates, A. W., & Poole, G. (2003). Effective teaching with technology in higher education: Foundations for success. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Downes, S., (2005). E-learning 2.0. Retrieved January, 25, 2009 from http://www.downes.ca/post/31741.
Edmonds , G., Branch, R. & Mukherjee, P. (1994). A conceptual framework for comparing instructional design models. Educational Technology Research and Development, 42 (4), 52-72.
Gartner, (2009). Gartner Reveals Eight Mobile Technologies to Watch in 2009 and 2010. Retrieved January 27, 2009 from http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=867012
Hannum, W. (2005). Instructional systems development: A 30-year perspective. Educational Technology, 45 (4), 5-21.
Herridge Group (2004). The Use of Traditional Instructional Systems Design Models for eLearning. Retrieved December, 2008 from http://www.herridgegroup.com/pdfs/The%20use%20of%20Traditional%20ISD%20for%20elearning.pdf
IBSTIPI, (2000). Competencies for instructional design. Retrieved January 17, 2009 from http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper89/ITForumpaper89.pdf
Karagiorgi, Y., & Symeou, L., (2005). Translating Constructivism into Instructional Design: Potential and Limitations. Educational Technology & Society, 8(1), 17-27.
Larson, M.B., & Lockee, B.B. (2007). Preparing Instructional Designers for Different Career Environments: A Case Study. Education Tech Research Dev (2009) 57:1–24.
MacKeracher, D. (2004). Making sense of adult learning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.
Molenda, M. (2003). In search of the elusive ADDIE model. Performance Improvement, 42 (5), 34-36.
Miller, J. L. (2007). The New Education Professionals: The Emerging Specialties of Instructional Designer and Learning Manager. International Journal of Public Administration, Vol. 30, No. 5.
Parrish, P. E. (2005). Embracing the aesthetics of instructional design. Educational Technology, 45 (2), 16-25.
Pew Internet Project, (2009). Generations Online in 2009. Pew Internet and American Life Project. Retrieved January 28, 2009 from http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/275/source/rss/report_display.asp.
Reiser, R. (2001). A history of instructional design and technology: Part II: A history of instructional design. Educational Technology Research and Development, 49 (2), 57-67.
Seimens, G., (2004). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. Elearnspace. Retrieved December, 2008 from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm.
Smith, P. L. & Ragan, T. J. (2005). Chapter 20: Conclusions and future directions. In P. L. Smith & T. J. Ragan (Eds.) Instructional Design, 3rd Edition (pp.355-371). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.
Wikipedia, (2009). Moore’s law. Retrieved January 21st, 2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law.
Wilson, B. G. (1997). Chapter 4: Reflections on constructivism and instructional design. In C. R. Dills & A. A. Romiszowski (Eds.). Instructional Development Paradigms (pp.63-80). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.
Wilson, B. G. (2005). Broadening our foundation for instructional design: Four pillars for practice. Educational Technology, 45 (3), 10-15.

10 weeks to Boston – heavy legs

James — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 04:26:34 +0000

This week promised to be much better than last, and it was in some ways, not so in others. The weather was pretty good and I kept the mid-week mileage a little lower, anticipating my first twenty mile run of this training schedule, with good runs. While Tuesday’s run was not bad, the legs were very heavy the rest of the week and my long run was one of the worst in memory.

My weigh-in held pretty steady despite the previous week’s illness shortened schedule. I think I just cracked the highest weekly mileage thus far, but I’m definitely on the low side of where I should be. Having said that, I’m staying healthy and keeping my expectations modest. This coming week will be short by design, as I have a half marathon race next Sunday. It’s going to be very interesting to see where I’m at on the racing front.

The biggest thing will be that in the remaining nine weeks of training after next week’s half marathon, my Sundays will probably have one 18 miler, two 20′s and one at 22-23, so we’ll see how it goes.

Details

Mileage: 30.69
Monday weigh-in: 167.4

Tuesday
Mild evening, legs felt a little heavy from Sunday, but not bad. Ball of right foot tends to be a little tender after runs these days.

5.38 miles, max HR 171

1.59 mile warmup @ 12:31 … 7:51 pace, 2:00 rest
6 x 400m intervals, 1:00 rest
1:42, 1:42, 1:35, 1:32, 1:28, 1:28, 2:00 rest

1.97 mile cooldown @ 16:15 … 7:44 pace

Thursday
Mild weather run to/from far end of Deer Lake.

4.99 miles @ 36:07 … 7:14 pace, Avg HR 151
- split 2.5 @ 18:12 … 7:17, Avg HR 147
- split 2.49 @ 17:55 … 7:12, Avg HR 155

Friday
Kept this run easy and short, anticipating my Sunday 20-miler.

4.21 miles @ 31:25 … 7:27 pace, Avg HR 145

Sunday
While I’m very disappointed that I didn’t do 20 miles as scheduled and the run was slow, I was pretty happy to get through 16 miles, since I started dehydrated and wondered if I’d even get through 10. I really struggled after 14 miles and can’t remember the last time I had a long interval with a pace over 8:00 per mile.

16.11 miles @ 2:06:27 … 7:50 pace, Avg HR 150
- split 9.93 @ 1:16:26 … 7:42 pace
- split 6:19 @ 50:01 … 8:05 pace

Instructional design now and in the future: part one

James — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 04:37:31 +0000

At the risk of opening myself up to a little mockery, I’m going to post a recent paper I did in two parts. Part one, below, includes an introduction and factors I feel have shaped instructional design to its present state. I will post part two in the next few days. As someone doing this as part of an MA program, what I’m looking for is thoughts on approach from those who may be practicing instructional designers or whose experience is grounded in more than literature review or discussions. Mine are definitely lay opinions in this area, despite my experience in other areas of web development. I’ve included only references for this first part and will do the same when I post the second.

Introduction

Instructional design is changing. Learning theory continually shifts to accommodate our ‘best guesses’ about how learning happens. In parallel to this, technology changes rapidly, in particular web-based applications for social activities and the speed and ubiquity with which we can access them. These aspects all come together to provide a daunting number of issues for instructional design consideration. Juxtapose time-tested key instructional design activities that still need to be present and what does it mean for the future of the profession?

Factors that have shaped the current state of instructional design

In analyzing future directions for the field of Instructional Design (ID), it is important to understand where it came from and its present state. Without a solid grasp of ID history, trying to place context around its future would be very difficult. While the origins of ID go back to World War II (Reiser, 2001, p.58; Herridge Group, 2004, p.6), the precursor of current practice seems to be from post-World War II through to specific training developed in the early 1970’s for the military, by the Center for Educational Technology at Florida State University.

ADDIE – ID Model or Process Acronym?

When you look for the specific origins of an ADDIE model, you will likely come up empty. There appears to be no obvious, authentic source for the term (Molenda, 2003, p.34; Hannum, 2005, p.7) in the literature. In truth, ADDIE is essentially an acronym (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation) for a systematic design and development process, describing the nuts and bolts of Instructional Systems Design (ISD).

One Size Does Not Fit All

One specific ISD methodology could ultimately not accommodate the differences required by different learning contexts, learning styles, delivery mechanisms and learning theories. According to Hannum (2005), a rigid ISD process also did not sit well with those wanting faster ways of developing instruction, particularly in the business world (pp.9-11).
As such, numerous ID models based on a standard ISD structure have emerged in the past few decades (Reiser, 2001) to accommodate not only contextual differences (classroom, systems and product), but also, technological advancements, changes in learning theory and the spread of systematic design processes beyond the military to business and educational sectors.

Instructional designers today need to consider a host of contextual issues in choosing and applying a model for their instructional problem. Knowledge type, expertise required, system structure, learning context and the scope of instruction will all provide further information for model selection (Edmonds, Branch & Mukherjee, 1994). As the field of instructional design has developed over the past thirty to forty years, it has undergone steady and progressive change. Considering the change that is happening now and that which is likely to come in the not-too-distant future, the implications of technology for virtually every orientation and context cannot be underestimated.

Constructivism

Perhaps the idea that ‘one size does indeed not fit all’ might prove to have been the primary impetus for changes in generally accepted learning theory today. Constructivism has been the dominant epistemology for the past decade or so, and is having a significant impact on all aspects of the instructional design process (Karagiorgi & Symeou, 2005). While other learning theories will still be used for instructional design with specific contexts, the pervasiveness of constructivism in the literature – and thus as a theoretical underpinning for instructional design education and professional development – ensures its prominence in program planning and instructional design for some time to come.

What is it, then, that distinguishes constructivism as a learning theory? Constructivism has no single definition, but rather a couple of elements common in much of the literature. It recognizes the importance of consciousness, free will and social influences on learning (Bates & Poole, 2003), and suggests knowledge is constructed by persons and is contextualized, based on real past experiences (MacKeracher, 2004).

If we design instruction with a standard ISD process, doing so within a constructivist framework presents some challenges. In particular, evaluation becomes more difficult, when a standardized way of measuring outcomes against objectives must be tailored to meet the individual’s learning experience. As I look at how instructional designers must grapple with the coming technological advances I will discuss this in more detail.

Technology Today

A few years ago, Bates & Poole (2003) predicted that key developments for teaching with technology would include the development of Learning Management Systems (LMS) to accommodate a broader range of instruction, more broadband Internet access, the rise of mobile computing, real-time communication, web services, portals and advanced user interface developments (pp.253-268). The speed at which these predictions have come true and, in particular, the prominence of social media, was likely beyond what they were thinking at the time.

Moore’s Law essentially says that computing power doubles roughly every two years and that, as that power is produced on increasingly smaller chips, the cost of production decreases at a similar rate (Wikipedia, 2009). This trend is predicted to continue for at least another ten years.

Before even considering where web technology is going in the foreseeable future, the developments in just the past fifteen years have been nothing short of amazing. I recall learning to hand code HTML and build web pages for a fledgling City of Vancouver web site in 1995. At that time, organizational web sites were the exception rather than the norm, content was highly textual, static and tedious to produce, web applications and online software were limited in capabilities, and access speed was still slow, typically over 28kbps or 56kbps modems.

Jump forward to today and you will find a very different landscape. Web sites are sophisticated and often designed with the benefit of cognitive psychology and direct user research, while almost any manner of social interaction or functionality is available from today’s variety of web-based social software. In fact, a whole career field in user experience and interaction design now exists to accommodate the burgeoning complexity of producing ever-more elegant and slick interactive online products. The majority of North Americans will be using high-speed access from home (Pew Internet Project, 2009) with download speeds of between 1.5mbps and 6mbps – an increase of between 50 and 1000 times in roughly 15 years, while high-speed wireless networks are a given on virtually all post-secondary campuses. Mobile devices like the iPhone with full web browsers and countless applications are ensuring that no person – or device – is left behind. When you add to this technology context, something in the neighbourhood of a thousand – and growing – enterprise and open source Content Management System (CMS) and LMS products, the challenge for instructional designers in technology-mediated learning is considerable.

What about today’s learner and their technology? Regardless of the learning and learner context, expectations are high. Access to course materials any time, anywhere is becoming very important, as learners from K-12 forward need to balance school, work and life, often holding down a full-time job while training or upgrading their education. As I shall demonstrate in the remainder of this paper, future developments in learning theory, educational technology and the web, and the effect this will have on learners, their expectations and how we need to approach ID as a result, makes this a very exciting (and somewhat scary) time to be an instructional design practitioner.

References

Bates, A. W., & Poole, G. (2003). Effective teaching with technology in higher education: Foundations for success. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Edmonds , G., Branch, R. & Mukherjee, P. (1994). A conceptual framework for comparing instructional design models. Educational Technology Research and Development, 42 (4), 52-72.
Hannum, W. (2005). Instructional systems development: A 30-year perspective. Educational Technology, 45 (4), 5-21.
Herridge Group (2004). The Use of Traditional Instructional Systems Design Models for eLearning. Retrieved December, 2008 from http://www.herridgegroup.com/pdfs/The%20use%20of%20Traditional%20ISD%20for%20elearning.pdf.
Karagiorgi, Y., & Symeou, L., (2005). Translating Constructivism into Instructional Design: Potential and Limitations. Educational Technology & Society, 8(1), 17-27.
MacKeracher, D. (2004). Making sense of adult learning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.
Molenda, M. (2003). In search of the elusive ADDIE model. Performance Improvement, 42 (5), 34-36.
Pew Internet Project, (2009). Generations Online in 2009. Pew Internet and American Life Project. Retrieved January 28, 2009 from http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/275/source/rss/report_display.asp.
Reiser, R. (2001). A history of instructional design and technology: Part II: A history of instructional design. Educational Technology Research and Development, 49 (2), 57-67.
Wikipedia, (2009). Moore’s law. Retrieved January 21st, 2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law.

11 weeks to Boston – a sick one

James — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 05:28:44 +0000

I didn’t manage to come anywhere near my 34-36 predicted miles this week, but I got sick, was off work for a couple days and was in the throes of finishing a final paper for one of my courses. Not a good week for training, but it ended on a pretty positive note, with a really decent long run. I was a little scared of this one because it meant pushing into pretty long distance and I didn’t know how my lower ab was going to respond.

I only got in two runs, no cross-training and it was too cold in the mornings – with a hint of slickness – making a bike trip too scary. Things are looking up on the cycle commute front this coming week. As of this writing it’s very cold tonight, but it’s supposed to be fairly mild during the day and above zero overnight all week.

Since I really didn’t lose any fitness based on today’s long run, and I was still feeling the symptoms of this week’s bad sinus bug, I’m pretty hopeful for the coming week.

Details

Mileage: 23.82
Monday weigh-in: 167.0

Tuesday

This run was supposed to be 8 miles with 4 at half marathon pace, but had to keep it shorter. I’m not sure what that is for me right now, but I’m sort of arbitrarily picking 1:35 as my target half time. I’ll know in a couple weeks, where I am compared to that. The intervals ended up being a bit odd.

5.96 miles @ 45:05 … 7:33 pace, Avg HR 149

Warm-up: 2.22 @ 17:27 … 7:51 pace, Avg HR 140
Main interval: 3.00 @ 21:49 … 7:16 pace, Avg HR 154
Cool-down: .74 @ 5:49 … 7:51, Avg HR 160

Sunday

Wet and cold, but the run went pretty well, given I can still feel a bit of the mid-week bug. Legs were probably fresh from missing two runs this week. Dead even splits, but considerably higher HR in second. All in all, very happy considering how bad the weather was.

17.86 @ 2:15:19 … 7:34 pace, Avg HR 153

- split 1: 8.98 @ 1:08:02 … 7:34, Avg HR 146
- split 2: 8.89 @ 1:07:17 … 7:34, Avg HR 161

News online – it’s not as far fetched as you might think

James — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 03:24:45 +0000

Saw this courtesy of my pointy-haired manager, somewhere ~~in his twitter-stream~~, ~~on Facebook~~, ~~from ping.fm~~, out there. Absolutely hilarious, and not that long ago for old guys like me.

Twits shouldn’t twitter

The folly of free

James — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:22:54 +0000

I’ll admit that I’m really qualifying the title of this, specific to business critical applications, regardless of what sector that business is in. We now seem to be in pre-bubble-burst 2.0, big-time. How long before the social web balloon pops in favour of more realistic and sobering economics? The social part is clearly here to stay, while the "everything-is-free" part can’t.

As a provider you can’t really offer something of value for free for a very long time. You need to have a business model that includes more than angel funding, venture capitalists or simply being bought by a big player. Particularly the last strategy will make you into a small part of a large ad platform. However, there’s only really probably a handful of services that are valuable enough to survive.

As an end-user, do you want to depend on free tools to deliver business-critical services? It might be nice to use the latest Web 2.0 technology for e-learning, but if you’ve built a nifty mash-up on an open API which suddenly disappears, or becomes not free overnight, how do you factor that into your course or program budget? And what of web services versus hosting an open source tool yourself? The latter makes far more sense than the former, but then you’ve got to have the thing you probably don’t (and the reason you went looking for a free tool in the first place) – technical support and programming/design skills.

The last and, perhaps, most important thing – free cloud applications and data ownership. Can you really manage your data and mitigate security risks?

Building value

While Facebook will clearly be around for a while, it’s not presently making enough money to have staying power. As Peter Schwartz said before Christmas:

Now, as we close the books on 2008, one might wonder if Facebook is actually worth anything. The company has grown rapidly by any measure, with estimated 2008 revenues of nearly $300 million. From zero to $300 million in four years is nothing to sneeze at. But the company is burning through cash much more quickly than it can replenish its coffers. Its electricity, bandwidth, data storage, and personnel costs are immense.

I think the biggest questions here are, other than the social graph, what real value has Facebook created for you? Not much, in an economic sense … and just try to remove your data completely.

Would you pay for news delivery? I’m not sure how to answer that one, except that I know I wouldn’t pay for the news AND the conduit. Maybe a subscription to a number of sources, but then a quick look in the news I get in Google Reader feeds everyday suggests not. BBC, CBC, and a couple local papers cover me pretty well. Everything else is more germain to work, school and personal interests.

For something like this to succeed it will take a good bit of effort. Internet users are used to information being free, and will balk at the idea of having to pay for it. The additional services that make this project compelling and valuable will also have to be easy for the average internet user to understand, and – let’s face it – we’re not there yet.

We can get all kinds of information from the web, lots of it of the opinion or review nature. However, if you’re talking about objective journalism, then I’m not so sure I’d pay for an app that delivers it, but I might pay for online access to the same thing I pay for a newspaper to get, particularly if the paper version disappeared. After all, it looks like online news is taking over print in a big way and the news business models haven’t figured out how to get people to pay for it online. Could an online, totally ad-supported news model work on a big scale? We’re probably about to find out. If you get past the enjoyment of flipping through a newspaper, the strain of the online version on your eyes, and the need to be at a computer, would you pay for a completely online newspaper? Is the value proposition solid?

Depending on the free cloud

Suppose you do find something of value. Let’s take a little app like Twitter. The fact that it presently doesn’t really have a business model isn’t stopping it from becoming useful. Whether you’re using it as a rapid update text service, or perhaps you’re learning to follow the people who are actually tweeting things you find useful, what if it disappeared tomorrow? The uses I’ve just described probably aren’t a big loss, but what if you were using a Twitter stream to keep critical communications happening between connected people in a group. It might seem ridiculous to do that with a free service, but lots of cash-strapped groups and individuals likely depend on it for some pretty important communications.

Beyond information services, what about cloud computing? From Zoho to Google Docs to Adobe Air apps to Live Presentations, you can now do a lot in the cloud, that you used to need a hard drive for. And what of the rumours of a GDrive? On the one hand, we’re seeing unprecedented variety in ways you can work directly on the web, and the power in those applications. These developments are great for productivity, access and democratizing information, but I’m not so sure allowing your data to be stored in the cloud is really completely to your benefit. Google makes a lot of money from selling ads based the content of your searches, mail messages and other intellectual property. What will they do with your data on a GDrive and how much control would you have over it?

A new way of doing business

According to the Chris Anderson from Wired, it’s partly a whole new business model. Quality applications and products, free to the end user and companies which are still making profits. He claims the shrinking cost of tech, coupled with the continual improvements in processing power, means costs continually plummet.

Mr Anderson refers to Moore’s Law, which states that computer power doubles every 18 months. The economic reciprocal of that, he says, is “the cost of a net unit of computer power falls by 50% every 18 months, which means that everything gets cheaper by 50% or more every year and a half.”

“Imagine a factory of the 19th Century where the labour got cheaper, where the steel got cheaper, where coal got cheaper, the real estate got cheaper, every aspect.”

“That’s why there’s such an imperative to make things digital, because you go from an economy where things get more expensive, such as oil and food – the economy of atoms – to an economy where everything gets cheaper, which is the economy of bits.”

However, people still need to eat. I think a little deeper analysis is required when you claim web software companies are making money. Some, yes. Most, no.

His claims about the costs being so low, that they don’t need to make much money doesn’t hold a lot of water in the long run, methinks.

“The new form of cross-subsidy is one where a tiny minority of people who really appreciate the product, really get value from it, can subsidize everybody else, because the underlying cost of doing things online, in digital, is so low that you can give away 90% of it for free.”

Going back to the Facebook example, there’s no long-term stable revenue model and their costs will likely burn anything they do have in reserve. The funding they’ve secured thus far won’t keep replenishing. While Anderson’s arguments about cost are probably true, producers of web services and applications have to make money eventually. Facebook can’t give away 90% of it forever, when they require thousands of servers in the next year to support their growth.

Pragmatism

We can expect some things to be free. We can expect certain bricks and mortar services to continue to move online, and we undoubtedly need to get our heads around new economic models. However, we also need to understand that, ultimately, there still will not be any completely free lunch. Putting your critical eggs in one cloud basket just yet could be a really dangerous thing.

12 weeks to Boston – speeding up

James — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:05:36 +0000

Maybe this past week should have been ‘Recovery Week, part 2′ since I upped my mid-week mileage but reduced my long run. All in all, it’s working well so I won’t fret and I was back up to virtually 30 miles. This was the beginning of phase 2, which sees speedwork and power become a little more important week-by-week over the next 4-6 weeks. Both Tuesday and Friday runs this past week should have had stride sessions. Since I didn’t know what the week held and had to go short on a treadmill on Tuesday, I just made that entire run a fairly brisk interval session.

Beyond that, my weight last Monday was down ever so slightly. I saw a nice dip this morning (I’m usually writing these on Sunday, but I’m late this time) so my weekly weigh-in next week is a bit nicer. I had hoped daily cycle commuting would be playing a larger role, but since we’ve had unusually cold overnight temperatures dipping below zero, I’m not into skidding around on the streets in the mornings. Here’s hoping for a warming trend soon.

My goals this coming week are to hit 34-36 miles overall, weave just a bit more rolling hill stuff into the longer runs, and to begin differentiating my shorter runs by going a little harder and driving the average HR up. If there’s one nice development at the moment it’s that most of my runs, long and short, are coming in with slightly negative splits.

Details

Mileage: 29.91
Monday weigh-in: 168.4

Tuesday

8 miles (w/8X100 strides) scheduled. Had to use a treadmill, so did a shorter run with longer intervals. No HR data.

2 miles @ 7:15 pace
1 mile @ 7:00
1 mile @ 6:45

Thursday

The first part of this route is much harder than the last with about 200 feet of net ascent in the first 6 miles and about 200 feet of net descent in the last 3 miles. Was able to reduce the pace by almost :30 for those last three and do a negative split.

8.61 miles @ 1:06:04
7:33 pace, Avg HR 150

Friday

A cool, clear night without my Garmin. No HR or actual, just gmap pedometer. Negative splits yet again.

5.06 @ 37:43 … 7:26 overall pace
- split 2.53 @ 7:30
- split 2.53 @ 7:24

Sunday

Didn’t quite do the full 14 I’d thought about, but did more than the 12 I scheduled. More negative splits.

12.24 @ 1:33:07
7:36 pace, Avg HR 151
- split 7.00 @ 7:38
- split 5.24 @ 7:34

Could Twitter kill delicious?

James — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 00:13:54 +0000

This is something I’ve been pondering for a little while as I’ve finally settled on my own model for enjoyable and productive (if not slightly distractive) Twitter use.

I’ve become quite accustomed to going through my Google Reader feeds, opening the articles I’m interested in within new Firefox tabs and then, at some point in the day, reading them quickly. If I find them particularly interesting, I bookmark them on delicious. The only real re-purposing I do with that feed is include the last ten on my blog homepage. I don’t refer back to them too often because those things I find of extreme importance – perhaps a reference for a paper I’m writing – will go into Zotero, the research Firefox plugin.

What got me thinking about Twitter and delicious is that I’d been considering taking some of the more interesting bookmarks and quickly tweeting them. However, if I’ve got a Twitter feed, can bookmark a shortened URL with a bit of descriptive text and have roughly the same thing as a delicious bookmark feed, albeit with an entry text length restriction. To me that’s a good thing as it forces my description to be economical (which my delicious descriptions usually are anyway).

I know it runs contrary to the original intent of quick text hits, but since Twitter’s been implementing search enhancements, power features and the like, what about tags? Would one more text field for comma separated tags bulk up the interface? If not, would this effectively have the potential to be a delicious-killer?

Does this make sense, or is it simply feature bloat and not worth considering? Thoughts are welcome.

High hopes on a bar set so low for eight years

James — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 19:51:51 +0000

The camera zooming down on the mall is pretty breathtaking. A couple quotes which stood out for me:

A man 60 years ago who might not have been served in a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

And …

People will judge you on what you build, not what you destroy.

A truly great day and optimism for better things to come south of the 49th.

I have problems so I don’t need manners

13 weeks to Boston – a recovery week

James — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:40:12 +0000

Under normal circumstances I might not have used this week as a recovery. And, I guess it’s hard to call a week where you still increase your long run a recovery week, however, I reduced the mid-week runs to two with a total of a little under twelve miles. It turned out to be a pretty good decisions as my first run of 16 miles felt pretty good.

I got pretty busy with a paper and ended up dropping all cross-training, with only one cycle commute, so I’ll just make sure I ramp things up next week and hit 35-36 miles, beginning to focus a little on speedwork. I held strong at the same weight and would really like to get my cycle commuting regular enough to help me drop a pound or two (or my snacking down a bit).

Details

Mileage: 27.88
Monday weigh-in: 168.8 (again)

Tuesday

Missed the scheduled strides, but did a bit quicker, though not ‘tempo’ run. Nice day, good weather. Started with a big downhill, but timed it at 1 mile intervals anyway. The first two were artificially fast because of the downhill, then settled into a 7:20-ish pace and then picked up the last .66 mile.

4.66 miles @ 33:55
7:16 pace, Avg HR 152
Mile splits at @ 7:03, 7:16, 7:22, 7:23 and .66 @ 7:15 (zipping home bit faster)

Wednesday

No Garmin, so distance is based on gmap-pedometer, with chrono timing. Nice evening.

7.22 miles @ 53:37
7:26 pace
- split 2.94 @ 21:32 … 7:20
- split 4.28 @ 32:05 … 7:30 (this is when I did all the uphills)

Sunday

This one went all along the waterfront from Ontario/2nd to halfway up UBC hill and back. A nice negative split on a beautiful day with a bit of fog and nice weather.

16.00 miles @ 2:01:11
7:34 pace, Avg HR 151
- split 8.00 @ 1:00:49 … 7:36 pace
- split 8.00 @ 1:00:22 … 7:32 pace

14 weeks to Boston

James — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 21:04:25 +0000

The weather keeps improving so that is a very good thing. The first week back after the Christmas break would have been nice for cycle commuting, but the roads weren’t supporting that yet. There’s always the coming week to get that back into gear. While I have no residual pain in my abdominals, I do still have a bit of tightness after the longer stuff and that’s a bit disconcerting because I took so long off, developed a solid regimen of rehab and strengthening, and am being so cautious as to how I get my running back.

While my medical exams and physio consultations had indicated that the lack of swelling and pain to the touch meant it wasn’t a hernia, where the tightness is and some of the reading I’m doing suggests it might be a mild one. I will be getting further medical opinions and considering my options, though I should be able to train for Boston and do the race by being smart and supporting the area properly.

I tried a slightly different strategy this week and did only three runs – 2 eight milers and then my longer 14 on Sunday. While I’m not trying to lose weight per se, I think it would be great if I could drop 10-15 pounds over my training, as it would make the race that much easier and faster. I’m also going to start including a brief note on my weights and cycle-commuting to give a solid weekly activity summary.

Details

Mileage: 30.76
Monday weigh-in: 168.8

Tuesday

Easy upper body weights and core balance/stability workout.

Wednesday

8.35 miles @ 1:02:25
7:28 pace, Avg HR 151
Pace and HR seem a little more accurate with fewer stops and starts.

Thursday

Very thorough core, balance and stability workout, with light full body weight workout.

Friday

8.00 miles @ 1:00:12
7:31 pace, Avg HR 145
Cool, with a bit of light drizzle by the end, still having trouble with some sidewalks and need to change route throughout. HR is probably still artificially low so far throughout training.

Sunday

14.41 miles @ 1:51:06
7:43 pace, Avg HR 150
Took it a bit easier on my longest run in over a year, a much better one than my 11 miler the previous week. Tested wearing a simple hernia/groin support and compression shorts. Having the benefit of writing this on Monday, there seems to be solid evidence to continue use. Weather was very good – cool, cloudy and no precipitation.

Making Twitter more useful to myself

James — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:07:09 +0000

I’ll admit to being a big fence-sitter with Twitter, and micro-blogging in general. I used to see absolutely no value in it whatsoever. My knee-jerk assumption was that I simply didn’t want numerous, routine updates on the minutiae of peoples’ daily lives. However, I’ve also begun to see the bigger picture of real-time quick hits of information, if it could be useful and important to me. From that perspective, I decided to give Twitter a whirl for a while, following a few dozen friends for a few months.

In short order, my initial apprehensions proved pretty much spot on, and the broader Twitter hype is no help to me. I was seeing all manner of updates from friends and co-workers that, while I’m sure were important to them, were utterly irrelevant to me, cluttering up my day with more information when I already suffer from overload in that area. Not to mention, I found myself doing the very same thing – posting inane observations and wasting time I really didn’t have. I even played around with ways to make my tweets, along with last.fm loved tunes, blog posts and delicious bookmarks all show up on my Facebook wall, so it would look like I have activity there, even though I rarely use it.

While I think comparisons between Facebook and Twitter are pretty meaningless due to their completely different purposes, it’s fairly easy to see how micro-blogging and text services can be used to update more fully blown social networking web sites. In fact, it’s probably learning to not only use social web tools in moderation, but to use the right ones in combination with each other, which will allow you to derive some benefit while not losing your mind to social web overload.

Some say Twitter and LinkedIn are the future, while others label them fads or time-sinks and question whether they are of any use whatsoever. Thing is, they may both be right. The debate over the utility of key social media services reared its head again through some recent articles that question the amount of time we spend with them, and whether we’re getting anything in return

I found the experiment with Twitter to be so disappointing, that I canceled my first account, but I couldn’t get over the fact that I see the potential for the service. Then I saw an email from one of the lists I’m subscribed to, where a guy raised $12,000 in a single day on Twitter (and his blog) to help a family in need. The caveat, in my mind, in this story is that this guy is pretty connected online, has over 8,000 followers on Twitter and can engage the kind of audience to help him reach his goals. This doesn’t diminish this very positive story of the social web and giving, just that most of us probably couldn’t leverage an online community to this degree. How about the ways in which news is being twittered where you wouldn’t get it otherwise? Pretty good stuff.

“We saw it happening with the Chinese earthquake, where reports were coming through on Twitter before anyone else had it,” Hermida said. “We saw it during the fires in California.”

A better approach?

Not only could Twitter be a valuable alert distribution channel as above, but following the right people could actually provide valuable information, given a better way of using it. I decided the key was to add selectively, tweet even more selectively, and if the tweets I was seeing were annoying or useless, simply stop following that person. With my newfound strategy, I’ve set up a new account and have embedded my most recent tweet in my homepage, and about page sidebars. I’m not going to automatically use tweets as Facebook status updates, but am going to use ping.fm to update specific kinds of messages to appropriate services. In short, I am going to try to selectively build a useful social web for myself and avoid the mundane. We’ll see how it goes.

15 weeks to Boston

James — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 07:32:15 +0000

This week was probably not as bad as last, weather-wise. However, I’m making sure I ease into higher mileage a little more slowly than I had planned, so my mileage is only a tiny bit longer than last week. I’m paranoid of fragile abs and groin muscles, so I make no apologies for changing my strategy. Still seeking a little more pace consistency and will pop 30 miles next week.

Again, I had to use the treadmill a bit, and my long run was about three miles short due to an inexplicably bad run. All in all, it’s a slow build into the mileage and I’m feeling good so far, so that’s the main thing.

Week’s mileage: 26.93

Tuesday

3.1 miles treadmill @ 22:15
7:10 pace
Solid core and stretch routine, and very short upper body weights afterward

Wednesday

6.81 miles road @ 49:12
7:13 pace, Avg HR 141
- 3.84 @ 7:28 pace
- 2.97 @ 6:53 pace (1/2 marathon roughly)
Should have been 8 miles but roads extremely icy, had to alter route several times

Friday

The weather was again a problem so the last portion of this run, including the strides, was done on a treadmill, while the first 4.6 miles was done on the road. Slushy, icy and somewhat slow conditions.
4.6 miles road @ 34:09
7:24 pace, Avg HR 147
(last part of run, including strides – 1.4 miles @ 11:20)
- 4 x .1 mile
- 1 x .2 mile @ 6:00 pace
- .1 mile walk break between
Solid core and stretch routine, and very short upper body weights afterward

Sunday

An awful run. Most roads were passable, but I simply didn’t have legs or decent cardio today, with a difficulty keeping my HR up. I was considering going shorter than the 14 I’d planned, so the distance wasn’t a huge issue, but my pace was close to :20 off.
11.02 miles @ 1:25:49
7:47 pace, avg HR 143
Roads not too bad, but bitter headwind from the east

When delivery method and subject matter are the same

James — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 00:41:32 +0000

The MA I’m pursuing right now is an interesting beast. One thing that has been very engaging about it is that what I’m studying is actually how I’m studying too. That is to say, while the subject matter of many degrees delivered via distance has nothing to do with how they’re delivered, it’s the exact opposite in this case. The MA in Learning and Technology focuses on learning within technology mediated environments and context.

What I find interesting is that, as I get further through courses in subjects like program planning or, in particular, the course I’m doing now in instructional design, I see the principles that I’m reading about and discussing online being put into practice by our instructors. It’s allowing me to see (at least for my own learning style) the effectiveness of different approaches to instruction and what is working for me … or not.

Design is design

Much of the ground I’ve covered so far (save for learning theory and research courses) is really about project management and design theory and frameworks. A lot of the principles we read about in the textbook for this course – and some of the literature we’re reading – could just as easily be applied to web design (and aren’t really about only learning at their core). Many of them are broad design principles I’ve worked with for some time.

Setting goals and objectives, using those for measurement and evaluation, user/learner analysis, formative evaluation (iterative user testing in the web design world), summative evaluation (metrics analysis and user feedback in the web design world), sequencing, pacing, and on and on. The big difference to me comes down to learning objectives, specific activities and evaluation of outcomes – a big difference from aggregate web sites and applications.

I will delve more into these similarities – and where I’m seeing aesthetics and online learning could be better blended – in future journal entries.

The cognitive aspect

I may be overstating the obvious, but the key things I keep returning to with regard to learning are cognitive and social activities within the web environment. Certain elements that are very specific to learning are becoming clearer to me through experience.

My design and project management practice has not been learning-focused, so perhaps my observations will not be news to anyone working in that field. However, the instructional design material I’m absorbing now is coming to life for me as I equate what I read to what I’m doing in the program. In particular I find that the balance of social and autonomous activities goes a long way to determining my satisfaction with the instructional design of a particular course, while the pacing, step size and cognitive load inherent in the instructional design determines how engaged I remain with the material.

The social-autonomous balance

The first two courses in this program were completed in a residency intensive (and were almost entirely social experiences), so my comments are based on the third and fourth courses. To some degree, both follow the same approach. A number of readings are assigned, which we complete individually, supplemented by a number of small team activities and assignments, along with occasional individual papers and assignments. My preference in this area is coloured heavily by the fact that I’m an autonomous learner.

Not only do I like doing the readings at my own pace, but my enjoyment of writing means I really get into drafting and polishing papers on my own. I find a great deal of value in the online discussions in which we take part, as it provides me perspectives that I would not have encountered working in isolation. It aids greatly in the interpretation of readings and analysis of the literature. However, there’s a limit. These two courses have been in stark contrast to one another.

Where Program Planning was very heavy with group discussions and collaborative assignments (to the point where team members were suffering fatigue by the end), Instructional Design has been comprised primarily of reading and an individual paper, with a couple fairly loose discussion forums thus far, which honestly would have benefited from a little more structure. The overlap and sheer volume of group discussions and assignments in the former course heightened the cognitive load so that learners had difficulty focusing – to the point where we felt the quality of the discourse eroded dramatically by the end of the course. The free-flowing discussion forums of the latter, coupled with the way unmoderated chatter has a way of meandering quite far off-course, has meant that the value of the discussions seems to get quite diluted if they’re not closed off soon enough.

Engaging the mind

I draw strong comparisons between designing information architecture and wireframes on a web project, and things like pacing, step size and cognitive load, which we’re focusing on right now in my present course. The concept of cognitive load is really not new to me, though I’ve usually considered it in light of page clutter or how much information is ‘above the fold’ on a particular web page. How much mental work do you make your learner or user do to complete a required task? It’s all about how you structure your information, visual cues, information scent and userflows. Again, I’ll write more on that at a future time.

When I look at this issue with respect to the past two courses, more contrasts emerge. In Program Planning, while I feel that I certainly came away with a strong foundation in the material, I believe the same result could have been obtained without some of the stresses we encountered. Five units all had different lengths, and while there were two individual papers and one group edited project, each unit had a large volume of reading, a lengthy discussion forum and then a summary of that discussion posted to a course wiki. In at least one case the group discussion/wiki and the group-written project could have been blended and lost nothing. I’d guess this one course probably took at least 15 hours a week most of the time.

Based on what I’m reading about pacing and step size, the course probably suffered the most from slow pacing and small step size. Too many exercises in each unit seemed to result in waning interest, declining quality and a heavy cognitive load. Too much material to focus on and slow movement between units for me. My autonomous learner couldn’t move at the pace I would have liked. Even those who prefer the social online activities (whom I spoke to about it) found the volume of group work to be overwhelming. While one of the unit wiki discussion summaries could have been replaced with the group edited paper in that unit, the wiki exercise was probably unnecessary to some degree, at least for all five units.

By the same token, Instructional Design probably needs a bit more structure to its activities – at least so far. I’ll give this course a very large caveat in that it’s happening over the holidays and, to the instructors’ credit, they’ve kept the workload light over the last two weeks of December. However, in general, I’ve found the quality of the online discussion forums a bit weak this time. To avoid engaging in too much meandering chatter, I decided to stop engaging at the point when the discussion was supposed to end. I say ‘supposed’ because many folks continue discussion forums well past the cut-off, when reading for the next section is to commence. To keep all learners engaged in discussion at the right time, I find the group activity structure better in the Program Planning course, while I found the volume of those activities to be excessive.

My conclusions

Admittedly, my analysis is very personal and only based on a few experiences, but I’m seeing a strong pattern in what does and doesn’t work so far in the realm of online learning. It’s also difficult because one size definitely does not fit all in this area. It seems a balance needs to be struck. The small group activities and the individual work needs to be carefully balanced to allow learners to feel like they are still managing aspects of their education. Social learning is definitely a valid concept in my mind, but not to the point where the work is completely produced as a group effort.

My feeling is that the balance needs to lean a little more to the autonomous side of the scale. I find the group activities and discussions are valuable because you gain insight and perspective you can’t on your own. However, those activities need fairly rigid boundaries and, at least for me, don’t provide nearly as much value in and of themselves as what they can contribute to the work I that I still produce on my own.

No related posts.

16 weeks to Boston

James — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 05:06:12 +0000

This past week was pretty challenging, but I’m rather proud of myself, in that I only managed to miss about three of my 26 miles of running. Plus, everything is feeling pretty strong right now, as long as I stick with my core balance/stability exercises and stretch in all the right places after my run.

While I did have to do some treadmill running, I managed to get out on the road for two of my four runs, including today’s 12 mile slush-fest. I ended up moving a couple workouts, but I didn’t skip them and that’s the main thing.

The picture at right is just south of my house and was taken on Christmas Eve. Needless to say, earlier in the week I was on the treadmill. Click on it to see full-size, and a few other morsels from the worst Vancouver snow in at least a decade.

Planned mileage: 28 | Actual mileage: 25.92

Tuesday
4.5 miles treadmill @ 32:00
7:05 pace, intended to do all together, but a bio break forced intervals:
- 2 miles @ 14:30 … 7:15
- 2.5 miles @ 17:30 … 7:00
Easy upper body weights afterward.

Thursday
5.98 miles road @ 45:54
7:40 pace, average HR: 153
- 3.0 miles @ 23:22 … 7:47
- 2.98 miles @ 22:32 … 7:33
Cool weather run on icy, wet, slushy streets.

Saturday
5k treadmill @ 21:57
7:05 pace
Easy upper body weights afterward.

Sunday
12.34 miles @ 1:32:59
7:32 pace, average HR: 146
Clear and mild, but some slushy roads.

I have problems so I don’t need manners

James — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:38:36 +0000

The following encounter at the mall is, unfortunately, exemplary of public mall etiquette at the holidays – all the more when immersed in gadget chatter. I had quickly met my sons at the mall this morning while they were pondering a gift for their stepmom. As we stood looking at the item, a woman talking on her cellphone proceeded to push past each one of us, making shoulder contact, without so much as an apology or making eye contact. How do you feel about the following? Do you believe that you simply cut the person slack?

Me: Excuse me works really well …

Woman (clearly stressed and raising her voice): Well, I have a sick daughter and I thought it might be her ….

Me: I’m sorry you have personal problems, but manners still help.

Woman (yelling, storming off and still on her phone): Merry Christmas!

I’ve had very stressful times in my life, including when I was on pins and needles as I expected my mom to be passing away, or waiting to find out if my ex-wife would get custody and move my kids across the country. I never have felt that having problems dismissed you from courtesy or a simple excuse me.

Merry Christmas, indeed.

No related posts.

17 weeks until Boston

James — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 08:02:38 +0000

There was nothing remarkable about my running for the first week of training. I’m not sure if I’ll detail future training posts individually or with just a weekly recap like this – likely the latter. I’ve taken a marathon training program and modified it a bit to keep it to four regular days of running per week, to keep the other pieces of my life sane. With the family, the work and the Master’s degree, time is not something I have in abundance. I have the whole 18 weeks scheduled in Google Calendar, fill in actual details in the comments and then use that data to post here.

Background

This past year has been horrific. I suffered a significant lower abdominal strain in the spring which forced me to pull out of the summer season of ultimate, two road races and two triathlons, including my first planned half iron distance tri. I am pretty healthy now, though I will get the odd groin or abdominal ache. I’ve been through a fair bit of rehab and physio in the spring and early summer and have a regimen of core, balance and stretching I do, keeping things pretty good. Other than the deep freeze of the past week or so, I also have returned to regular cycle commuting after a many-year absence and it seems to really strengthen the whole lower body, so it will become a routine. If I can add a Saturday 1-1.5 hour trainer ride throughout the winter, all the better.

Week 1

This week saw the first run over 8.5 miles that I’ve done since April and everything’s OK to this point. However, since I was getting through a nasty bug (that it seems everyone I come in contact with has had) earlier in the week, and this past week has been an unusual stretch of freakish cold weather and snow, I had a couple treadmill runs and a Sunday 10-miler that was very tough in the heavy snow. My running week didn’t start until Thursday, but given the bug, the weather, and how much treadmill running I did I’m OK with it being a bit low.

Planned: 26 miles | Actual: 18.5 miles

Thursday

Broke 4 miles into intervals on the treadmill:
2 mile @ 7:30
1 mile @ 7:10
1 mile @ 6:50
Easy core strengthening routine after

Friday

Another treadmill run. Basic aerobic run (little faster than it should have been):
5 miles – 34:45 (laddered pace up slowly)

Sunday

Brutal snowfall, hard, slow difficult run. I was about 1-1:30 per mile slower than a normal med-long run.
9.5 miles – 8:34 pace
150 avg HR, 169 max

Grappling with the reality of always-on

James — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:20:49 +0000

With every issue for which the previous generation is ill-equipped to deal, the hand wringing begins anew. I recall only a few years ago, prior to the advent of the social media which now dominates the web, internet addiction was a serious issue in the late 90′s according to some. You’d think the sky was going to fall, and that addiction was to a web without a sticky, social component. Before that, TV was going to ruin young minds (OK, so maybe that has merit). Citing primarily internet addiction, The Toronto Star recently published a piece indicating students are putting Facebook before exams. Let me get this straight – college kids enjoying social distractions instead of school? I can’t believe it.

Surprisingly, Perret doesn’t suggest they actually swear off Facebook during exams, “because then they’d start worrying about what they’re missing and that would be even more distracting. I tell them to use it as a treat after, say, each hour of studying. It’s like any addiction; you have to learn to manage it.”

A distraction to be managed? Probably. If it’s actually an addiction, it probably can’t be managed, so categorizing it as such might be a tad alarmist. It’s certainly true that the online options available for distraction are significant. When you consider how services like Twitter or Ping.fm can work with social platforms like Facebook or niche social networks like last.fm, people (and I’m not only referring to post-secondary students) can lose their perspective and assume they have to spend a lot of time polishing their social presence.

Before Facebook and YouTube, there were always things standing in the way of focusing on school. It doesn’t matter much whether you’re talking about a kegger, a weekend at Whistler, or a pub crawl, college kids have always put socializing before studies. The fact that they’re doing it online, too, doesn’t matter. It’s not the tools that are important – they simply facilitate what we do in other contexts already.

Perret’s comments above strike me as naive, and fuel the notion that schools and parents don’t really get how the digital realm is now integrated into the lives of youth (and middle-aged web geeks like me) to such a degree that there’s no separation – Facebooking (yes, it’s becoming a verb) can’t be viewed as a ‘treat’ during breaks. Whether connecting via campus WiFi on their laptops or using a mobile app on their cellphone, constant access to the tools of digital living is a given, and it’s simply an extension of their world – context doesn’t much matter.

This generation uses and communicates with digital media constantly. Whether it’s online discussion, status updates, social networking, listening to music, sharing photos, watching video or gaming – it can’t be stopped. I’m not sure I completely buy the notion of the net generation/digital native, but one thing is for certain – embrace the technology and understand it, or die trying.

What’s really the issue with new media, then?

If you ask me, it’s more about magnifying the human condition. Some people have obsessive personalities and have to learn control and some don’t. Some people will say and do stupid things and some won’t. The only difference with living openly online now, is that employers and others upon whom your future life can partly depend, can easily search for you and find those lapses in judgment and poor choices. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve stopped following on Twitter because I get tired of seeing 20 updates an hour, covering every inconsequential thought which crosses their mind.

Frankly, it magnifies idiocy. Should we really be concerned when others unfriend us on Facebook? Maybe if we’re 15. It’s pretty much like any other parting of ways in my mind. If you have a reason to stop communicating with someone, you might well stop taking their phone calls and ignore their emails. While changing your status to single or unfriending someone on Facebook is a little more of a public demonstration of feelings, it shouldn’t matter all that much. It’s really the same thing as breaking up with someone and then talking with everyone you know about it. Is it worth a lot of analysis?

So, should you ask? It depends. If the worry is consuming you, then just asking might be the best response. But a better first response might just be to interpret positively, and give the other person the benefit of the doubt.

Not bad advice really. If you wonder why someone is displaying poor behaviour, ask them. Groundbreaking concept, don’t you think? Would anyone actually worry if their friends had a little spat or broke up if it weren’t publicly displayed on their Facebook status or in a blog post? Why should we in the online context?

Really though, any kind of social experience on the web is simply that – social experience. It’s a different context where slightly different etiquette or nuances of behaviour might apply, but don’t courtesy, manners and social skills count for something? Being obsessed with your tweets or Facebook updates, or worrying about how frequently you blog is no more or less of an addiction than having to look at yourself in every mirror you see. Instead of treating the internet or social networking like an addiction, if we focus on being healthy, balanced people, it won’t likely be a concern in the first place. It may be that the environment breeds some of this behaviour, but not all of it.

What, if anything, to do?

While the rules of engagement in a digital world seem to be changing, what does that mean for schools, employers, parents and others? Just how much constant access to digital social technology is changing how people learn is the subject of much debate, as some profs bristle at customizing everything heavily for today’s learner. What you are willing to do about it, accept or change in response to it, will be framed in part by how important you think it is. I don’t think there’s a solid answer to that when we can’t even tell how people learn in any given context in the first place.

Connectivism, for example is an emerging learning theory that I think has some merit.

Principles of connectivism:
* Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.
* Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.
* Learning may reside in non-human appliances.
* Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known
* Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.
* Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.
* Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.
* Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision.

However, I’m not sure I confine the notion to that of learning. Since learning theory shares some commonality with other social sciences like communications theory, perhaps it’s more a concept for the broader notion of being, as opposed to only an activity like learning.

If we accept the premise that people do socialize and communicate, and that the digital social tools for these activities aren’t going away any time soon, we must factor them into experiences moving forward. Their immediacy and ubiquity is not to be feared or avoided, nor do they necessarily have to become the be-all and end-all. We do, however, have to meet expectations by accepting the ways in which the present generation interacts, and that includes learning.

Twits shouldn’t twitter

Slight re-design launched

James — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 01:00:57 +0000

It’s not a massive change by any means, but I made some template adjustments over the past couple weeks and published them today. I don’t do a lot of colourful Photoshop work, so that’s not where I focus my efforts. I’ve found the variety of ways I’ve approached my own site design in the past haven’t really leverage my personal domain as a digital hub, so I’m hoping now I’ve done a bit better job of that.

The main changes:

made the homepage more of a live aggregator of my digital life, with feed links for everything
arranged homepage content in order of importance, from left-to-right
moved the global navigation back up to the header and actually used WordPress to list my pages for a change, instead of custom ones
made the header colours a little bolder and more pronounced
made sub-page sidebars contextual to their focus
made it easier to add new site sections or sub-pages
still haven’t given in to widgets and other WYSIWYG Ajax-ification

How to (hopefully) ruin your career

James — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 18:16:59 +0000

It’s par for the course when athletes let their mouths run off – more so when the athlete in question is Sean Avery of the Dallas Stars. What’s kind of amazing about this, aside from the complete lack of class Avery’s comments show, is that everyone – from management on down to his teammates – is pretty much abandoning him.

The big question? What do you do about the remaining $13 million or so on his contract? He’s poisoning the team, not performing up to expectations, and is at least one of the major reasons the Stars are in the Western Conference cellar.

No related posts.

The worst thing that could happen to Bell now

James — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 05:08:14 +0000

Telus. That’s what. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m a former Telus manager and currently have my landline phone service, internet service and a family wireless plan with them. I’m not particularly happy with cellular costs in Canada, but Telus is generally the best of a bad lot of choices in Canada for telephony services. My telephony service is generally good, and my customer service poor, due in large part to limited carrier selection.

Telus was one of the suitors for Bell Canada Enterprises back in 2007, when a different deal was struck with a consortium headed by Ontario teachers. You can read about the deal in Bell’s own words here. At the time I remember thanking my lucky stars that they went in this direction. Frankly, I can hardly stomach the thought of even worse customer service than I currently receive from Telus.

News stories this week are indicating that the chance of the current bid for Bell going through are pretty much nil now. This is a large, bloated company. Telus is smaller, but more nimble, with a strong market capitalization and high customer retention. This is largely due to very little competition in western Canada. The renewed possibility of a Bell-Telus merger makes the limited competitive landscape that much smaller. Unless you happen to be a big Telus stockholder, this possibility should scare the hell out of you.

Many touch points you have with Telus when seeking customer support are in the Philippines, though the reps with the thick Filipino accents are not supposed to admit it. Outsourcing customer service overseas is in wide practice in many industries and further ‘efficiencies’ and ‘economies of scale’ would only exacerbate this stuff under a merged entity.

I’m not going to regurgitate the guts of this stuff here, as you can Google all the Telus and Bell information you can handle. A few things to keep in mind when thinking of what this would mean:

even longer support call waits
a monolithic company in charge of virtually all landline and most wireless service in Canada
reduced competition resulting in even higher costs to the consumer
increased likelihood of continued network throttling and spectrum loss
product offerings based almost entirely on carrier decisions, as opposed to customer demand

I’m not saying this will come to pass, but this development certainly has to have Telus management licking its chops at the possibility. Even with the red herring offer Telus made for Microcell a few years ago, which forced Rogers to acquire the Fido wireless service, there’s only really ever been one competitor that forced Telus to actually, well …. compete for consumer business. Bell.

A deal like this merges things into one massive network that could literally crush Rogers and Shaw. Let’s not even think about the pipe Bell has been building as a result of the $200 million they spent to sponsor the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.

I’d strongly encourage everyone across Canada to watch BCE and Telus carefully. Talk to your MP and the Harper government about just how bad this would be for consumers across Canada.

BC politics and social software platforms

James — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 08:08:59 +0000

I read with some interest this week, that the two dominant political parties are both taking a page out of Obama’s campaign book with their approach to online politicking. The governing BC Liberals open platform is going head-to-head with the BC NDP’s rapid responders to engage the clicking fingers (and hopefully, minds) of British Columbia’s voters, who may have severe election fatigue by the time May – and the next provincial vote – rolls around.

On the surface, there’s very little to distinguish these two sites. The Libs open platform promises that, by joining:

you can share your thoughts and help make an important difference for our province. You can participate in surveys, web panels, social networks, digital “town hall meetings” and policy forums on all sorts of topics. You can also submit videos, photos, art and music that will showcase the beauty, strength and diversity of our province and its people and cultures. Many of those submissions will be selected for use on this website and profiled in various ways throughout the upcoming provincial election campaign.

For their part, NDP’s rapid responders are:

people like you who care about the issues and want to make a difference. Here’s a quick list of the top three things you can do as a Rapid Responder (scroll down the page for more options):
* Write a letter to the editor about a hot topic and help us get our message out.
* Add interactive tools and BC NDP content to your blog or Facebook profile.
* Use social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr to connect with other BC NDP supporters and share information with your friends.

In other words, while both parties have built their own social platform, the NDP are leveraging existing tools more as the Libs want to frame the discussion. It’s hardly surprising that the underlying strategy is that Gordon Campbell wants a little more control over how the content is developed, while the NDP are more about sharing what’s going on on existing sites, including your own. The NDP are tracking issues but want you to take action and share what you’re doing. The Libs want to define what you talk about.

Libs provide a dis-engaging user experience

I can’t tell you what the actual Liberal social platform is like, but signing up was pretty bad. Right on the landing page, it asks me to provide first name, last name, email address, and to choose a user name and password (which wasn’t hidden as I entered it). I obliged and was redirected to the same page with my user name pre-populated. I received no email confirmation, logging in with my password did nothing and I have no idea if I have an account at all. I’m guessing not, because clicking on the topics they’ll let you talk about reveals nothing.

A little advice to the Libs? When you ask for information and presumably provision an account, confirmation pages and/or emails are crucial cues to your audience that something has happened. Worse yet, I couldn’t find anything telling me what to expect and, as of this time, have no idea if there’s an account in the works or not.

NDP don’t seem to really get it either

While I like the fact that the Dippers seem to want the swell to grow organically and not carefully control it, signing up for an account was awful. They offer the ability to do so, built on Drupal, but I can’t tell you what that looks like, either. It threw a bunch of SQL errors my way when I signed up. It gave me the standard Drupal welcome message with the one-time account confirmation link, but because of (I’m guessing) the SQL error, the link wouldn’t allow me to finish signing up. Then again, there’s some conflict in the messaging, so who knows?

Other than that, I can sign up to stay in touch, but most opportunities to engage seem to happen by design off-site. I’m glad they’re giving me lots of places to go and ways to follow them, but a simple discussion forum on the site would turn rapid responders into interactive responders (which I’m hoping the Drupal instance provides). It has to be about more than email and postal mailing lists, if you’re really going to leverage social media. It’s called social for a reason.

Do something with your social capital

Excuse me if I don’t believe Gordon Campbell, when he says, "This is a chance to have your say and help shape the policies that Premier Campbell and your BC Liberal Team will put to the people as part of their election platform on May 12, 2009." Campbell has shown a flagrant disregard for any opinion but his own in his tightly controlled approach to governing. Again, though, I have no idea what the tools look like or how they are possibly being used to develop policy going forward.

In the recent US election, Obama did a marvellous job of engaging his base through a solid online strategy. In his promise of change, he suggested the status quo will no longer do. However, as Charlie Smith of the Georgia Straight says, it’s still about keeping your promises, regardless of how cutting edge you try to be when you make them.

Can we trust Carole James or Gordon Campbell to develop policy in an open and accessible manner and then do what they say they will?

Understanding your audience and the power of social media

James — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 02:04:00 +0000

Since I’m not the target audience, I’m not going to wade into whether I find the ad below offensive or not. The interesting thing here in my mind is twofold:

the makers of Motrin clearly didn’t do enough of the right kind of testing for proof of concept
they didn’t understand how to do a proper mea culpa

I would definitely say, though, that it’s not a stretch to see how the messaging in this piece could offend some people. It has a way of speaking down to moms, specially when it insinuates that some would carry their baby this way so they’d look like an official mommy.

Wonder if they’ve got Motrin tablets big enough for the headache they’ve given themselves with this one.

The original story with video can be found at ReadWriteWeb.

Being too busy can help you focus

James — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 01:03:45 +0000

Apologies to my wife for my lack of social presence notwithstanding, sometimes when you reflect on being overloaded you realize that it made you get things done. My last couple of weeks have been intense, but when I look back I realize I’ve now got about a week with a little breathing room because of meeting multiple overlapping deadlines.

Editing

During that time I ended up doing two large editing jobs and my own final paper. I have to provide a course evaluation before the end of Friday, but let’s just say it was pretty heavy. Since it was all online, in addition to two individual papers, we collaboratively wrote a group paper as well. Each of five units consisted of significant reading, which we discussed via Moodle forums, with group members then taking turns and posting discussion syntheses on a class wiki.

With the group paper, we all worked collaboratively with Skype and Google Docs and then I did a fairly big final edit and turned it in. The last group discussion synthesis also fell to me and both were completed within about a week of each other. On their own that wouldn’t have been too bad.

Work

In the past two weeks, I’ve also been head-down project managing a large social media site which we soft-launched on Monday. Particularly last week, time flew and there were a couple of late days in the mix. There are some ads running and a little traffic coming in, but a few remaining bugs leave it not quite ready for heavy promotion. Given the timeframe and requirements, I think the contractors we worked with did a good job. I’ll do a proper post on that when we get the last few bugs ironed out.

Paper

Even that would have been manageable, but if I wanted a break between the course I finished this week and the next one (starting next Monday), that final paper also had to be done. So, what I ended up with was outlining the paper every night when I got home from the project work. I ended up with most of a four day weekend intact through yesterday, so in big blocks of time, I churned out a paper yesterday afternoon.

Funny how, just when you think you can’t breathe, you suddenly get a huge injection of fresh air. Maybe it’s all about just holding your breath and keeping your head down.

Goodbye W, hello Generation WE

James — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 08:48:39 +0000

It’s all about empowerment and taking back our society. Resonates beautifully with the Obama win though it’s about much more than that.

Are you looking forward to the next four years south of the border as much as I am?

Goodbye W.

High hopes on a bar set so low for eight years

A vision of students today

James — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 05:24:50 +0000

This isn’t new and doesn’t pretend to answer anything, but it’s got a solid, haunting quality and certainly gives you something to think about. Does information overload scare students today? Are too many things competing for their attention? Will their education deliver what they expect?

I know what I’m doing right now can be ovewhelming at times.

No related posts.

Serious barriers to going open

James — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:21:13 +0000

While the title of this post sounds gloomy and might make it appear that I don’t favour opening up the web as much as humanly possible, in truth it’s the exact opposite. However, I like to think I’m also a realist and as I read and think about the move toward more open and accessible content and services on the web, there are significant issues in our way en route to achieving that goal.

It’s not just about cost

If, at its heart, the evolution of the web is dependent on social computing, web platforms, mashable services and bottom-up, user-generated content, then we’ve got a ways to go yet. For example, RRW laments web platform performance, and rightly points out that services without a solid revenue play built in will not succeed:

Our culture of sensation and free makes it much harder for platforms to think deeply and be disciplined. Google felt they had to come out with something to stop Facebook’s momentum. Facebook rushed to create a completely open infrastructure; and it backfired both for users and developers. Having been burnt by Facebook, small and large companies alike will now think twice before investing in a presence on platforms. This is a shame, for we need platforms and we need them to work well.

That’s only part of the story and misses a very Canadian perspective on it. While RRW also links back to a good article on the risks of using free services, we’ve got a little problem with trust called the Patriot Act, which goes way beyond the concerns of a service being free. It’s all about trust – service longevity, data security, ownership and more – I’ve worked extensively in the public sector, and it’s probably their number one issue.

Connecting through open standards

What about connecting people through applications and services, and then in turn, connecting those services to each other? Single sign-on for every web application you use would seem to be a start. OpenID should be a no brainer. Sign up for one account, then any time you want an account on another web application, you should be able to login with something like your OpenID and have access. All your credentials are stored in your OpenID and you simply provide that ID URL on any OpenID-enabled app, confirming your password when you log in. I can probably count on one hand the number of places I can actually use my OpenID. It simply hasn’t caught on yet.

The recently announced Windows implementation of OpenID is much like other web giants, Yahoo! and Google, in that it’s a one-way move aimed at still protecting their walled garden. If you have an ID on one of these sites, then you can use it elsewhere, not the other way around:

Although Open ID is becoming a viable option for independent sites, particularly after this announcement, there’s still a great deal of friction preventing serious uptake. Major Internet hubs that offer Open ID are generally providers only, so a Windows Live user is still going to need a Yahoo account to use any Yahoo service. As long as this is the case, the utility of Open ID will be constrained.

Leading web services are typically providing an open API to allow programmers to extend those services in new ways. It’s another of the key underpinnings of the social web, but means there are as many ways to mash together new applications, as there are applications themselves. Google’s Opensocial promised to change all that by delivering one API for all social applications to use so that they could easily talk to each other. Once you’d built one service on Opensocial, then all other services would work the same way. Much like user IDs, many services see a great deal of value, financial and otherwise, in setting the rules in how you play with them.

Education goes open

Given the purpose of open access, education is probably the most natural fit of all. There are plenty of calls from within the educational sector to open things up for learners and instructors alike. I’m not sure if the move to learner-directed credentials could render traditional credentials worthless, but with the growth of Open and Distance Learning and things like the Open Courseware movement, open and social concepts in learning become more important every day.

For example, MIT is embracing the OCW movement, along with several other institutions worldwide (including Canada’s own Capilano U and Athabasca U), while UCLA is bringing their videos to the web.

There has been a significant push in recent years to look at new licensing models to make textbooks more affordable. This is particularly an issue when a couple chapters change marginally and then university courses prescribe the updated releases each time they come out, complete with a new $100+ pricetag. News that Google has settled with book publishers over their online book indexing should be a model for all publishing, and not just older or out-of-print books. It wouldn’t be hard to embrace the realities of online distribution and develop reflective licensing approaches, but is not likely to happen when it threatens the bread-and-butter of the scam that is the textbook industry:

The agreement doesn’t cover books that are currently in print and therefore making money for publishers. Those books can still be marketed through the book search via Google’s Partners program. Books that have had their copyrights expire are likewise unaffected. What it does cover is what Google’s Chief Legal Counsel, David Drummond, calls “the vast majority of books in existence”: those that are in copyright, but out-of-print.

It’s not just textbooks, but broad access to all content and the flexibility of applications. Boy is Blackboard
going about it all wrong. They know systems like Moodle are giving them a run for their money in the LMS space, so they let their users connect to external and open source tools from one interface. Huh?

Blackboard is still controlling the environment and implementing the features they want. It’s the LMS that needs to be open and flexible in the first place. By providing a secure, flexible tool with easy API extensibility, I’d imagine a better route to choose would be to build upon Moodle to act as the connection framework, allowing users to integrate their tools and academic databases of choice from within the framework. This kind of thing reeks of desperation ploy by Blackboard.

Now, imagine building that LMS on top of solid, ubiquitous authentication and API standards. You want Skype or YouTube or WikiSpaces with that? Just enter your account and your LMS does the rest. Or, how about building a script within Moodle along the lines of Fantastico and implement an instance of your favourite OS tool right with Moodle, with adoption of your CSS styling intact. We’re talking about a lot of coding here, but it’s not hard to imagine a platform that really rocks and serves learners and instructors well.

A better way to go open

Right now, OpenID is all over the place with proprietary services allowing your username to be an OpenID. That’s a start, but think about issues like domain registration, Web Standards or look at more granular technical protocols like HTTP and FTP.

Opensocial is a great concept and Google isn’t going anywhere in the near future, but I’m not sure we want a completely commercial (and obscenely dominant) entity holding the keys and protocol for how a large part of the web might work together.

Eventually ideas catch on, they become ingrained, with broad-based collective management and protection. Standards are the rules by which all developers and providers must play to ensure a better experience for everyone. While we need to stop the walled garden approach to hoarding content and extorting huge license fees for it, what we do need is centrally managed approaches to application integration and user authentication. Things are moving in the right direction, but sort of kicking and screaming. If Microsoft and Blackboard won’t do it the right way, they should just get out of the way.

Writing collaboratively with Skype chat and Google Docs

James — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 20:41:15 +0000

I’d imagine most people find the benefit of Skype to be that of free long distance calls. As long as the person you’re calling is also on Skype you can save airtime or long distance charges. That’s great, but given I do very little long distance calling and use my cell mostly for family chatter, Skype has not typically been my tool of choice to replace the telephone. I’d played with Google Docs a bit for fun, but with no real goals in mind. I’ve always got my MacBook Pro with me so I don’t often need multi-computer access to the same files. Enter the coursework for my MA. We are doing our work in small groups of four or five and, all groups are comprised of geographically dispersed folks.

Skype

While finding times for everyone to meet online is a challenge, I find using Skype chat to reach decisions to be wonderful. It gives you the ability to do public group chats on-the-fly or to set up a more secure public chat by allowing read/write permission by invite only. Promoting the room is done via link which connects them to the chat room instantly. Transcripts are always available as HTML documents written to your hard drive and are cumulative from the time you started the chat – ideal when you need a record going back a couple weeks over multiple sessions. You can send files peer-to-peer and add contacts to the chat at any time, while calling an individual for a quick conversation to clarify something is only a click away.

Google Docs

We can easily carry these discussions over to Google Docs, in deciding who needs to do what by when. I’ve set up one file for us to collaboratively write to and shared it with everyone in the group as collaborators. Formatting is easy and different collaborators can simply colour-code their highlighted changes for one editor to compile, with as many rounds of edits as necessary. Or you could just let everyone write whatever they want if you’re brave – personally, I like safer ground rules.

If anyone overwrites groupwork by accident, the versioning ensures you can revert to the last good one easily. As an extra precaution I’ve suggested everyone back up what they do as an export. Once this is ready for final submission I can easily share it via a Skype chat or simply have everyone review it online quickly. If I could change a couple things (and maybe I’m just missing a feature or two) it would be that of a live change tracker in the interface and that the formatting would be better preserved if you export to Word.

Other options less enjoyed

There are many online collaboration tools, but they tend to have problems inherent. And, truthfully, unless you need to share a desktop presentation or whiteboard something, many of the tools won’t actually be of much use.

Elluminate is a cool e-learning and business collaborative suite, but unless you’re up to paying substantial licensing fees, the free version allows only three participants in a limited-feature collaborative environment. The modules look cool, but the only way you’ll see them is a sales demo.

Yugma is another tool which, while providing a full trial for 15 days after which you’ve got a pretty bare-bones environment, I’ve found to be buggy. The feature set looks good but, in trying to use it earlier in the summer for my coursework and just recently for a contractor to demo some wireframes, it has simply hung when I’ve tried it.

Zoho tools bills itself as a suite to compete with Google Docs and more. A brief overview of their services from their landing reveals a very complete suite and what I’ve read would point to Zoho as a solid choice. However, we needed something without user limits or poor feature sets. You still need to pay to get the full meal deal and, in this case, that wasn’t going to work. I’d be interested in looking at it further though, because if all the tools are truly integrated, there would be a very compelling case to use Zoho.

Twiddla was another option that, had I been looking more at collaborative whiteboarding and drawing, I would be interested in investigating further. It didn’t meet my needs for this instance, but I found the user experience good. Simple, online and easy to use. I’m always big on something that doesn’t require the download of a desktop app, as the experience between users on different OS’s will often reflect which one the developers started with.

Final thoughts

I wish Google Talk was more like Skype. It wouldn’t even have to offer IP telephony. If you use Gmail, then you can search Google Talk web chat transcripts in your inbox. That’s not the same as a self-contained chat tool that gives you a full feature set including full transcripts. Then again, the best tools are ones that do one thing really well. Talking and chatting are great with Skype and collaborative writing and publishing to a number of formats are great with Google Docs. You can make them work together pretty painlessly and that’s probably the best way to go.

The funniest Palin

James — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:33:37 +0000

Originally found this via pkulak.

In honour of our election day north of the 49th, another US-based reason to make sure you vote.

No related posts.

I’m a citation weakling

James — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 01:00:51 +0000

I’m getting my head around writing for graduate studies, but I don’t think I’m using citations the way I probably should be to really provide effective support for arguments I’m making.

Maybe it’s my process. I just completed a paper that, while it didn’t have to be academic writing in the truest sense, still did require a minimum number of citations and all references to be formatted as per APA standards. I don’t mind any of that and, since I like what I read to generally be based on fact and forceful arguments (as opposed to, let’s say, claiming you get foreign policy because you can see Russia from your house) I certainly want my own writing to be logical and supported.

However, I find that my process for literature review and citation is weak. With this particular paper it didn’t help that I changed my mind significantly on the premise and rewrote most of it late in the game. However, that simply highlights the need to solidify my premise early on and then thoroughly read a wide variety of literature with enough time to craft it into my writing as fluidly as possible.

What I find I’m doing generally, though, is not reading the literature thoroughly enough. I write something, scan journal articles when I need support and pull appropriate pieces out. However, I’m just not sure how to do more reading in the available time. I’ve got solid tools to help and I probably have to incorporate their use more religiously.

So … what do you do to, not only, keep your references organized, but to get through an appropriate volume of literature to get the right references in the first place, and pursuasively weave the citations into your writing?

Testing designs on non-functional prototypes

James — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:53:39 +0000

I find myself grappling with the odd project management and user feedback issue as I trundle through the big project that takes up the bulk of my working day at present (and likely will through to next summer). In particular one issue has been eating at me for a while. I find it challenging to do really useful user testing on click-through HTML prototypes when they’re not yet functional enough to just hand off to an end user for something like task completion analysis. Any thoughts readers may have would be helpful.

A little background

The project I’m dealing with is a major redesign of the course and program catalogue on our public web site. The phase I am presently working on is only focused on blending what have previously been completely separate data sources which publish separate program marketing ‘sitelets’ with official institute program pages into one ‘micro-site’ for each program we offer. The part-time course catalogue and search functionality are later phases.

The process to this point

In getting to the point where we’ve got a visual design and web-based prototype, I followed a pretty standard development approach:

examined existing usability analysis on our catalogue for key issues
conducted primary stakeholder research to uncover additional content management and presentation issues
developed a comprehensive design and functional requirements document
developed rudimentary IA and tested it with stakeholders via online AJAX card sort exercise
produced application storyboard/userflow and wireframes (with interaction notes) of all key presentation and content management interfaces
our team produced photoshop composites and HTML prototypes to demonstrate rudimentary end-user features
multiple presentations and demos have been conducted for broad, management and school-based stakeholder groups to solicit feedback, including current summer students
the feedback will be amalgamated in the next couple weeks into a design ‘lock-down’ so that we can code the application

My problem

While satisfying all stakeholders or blending data might seem like the obvious issue, it’s not. While the coding process will create a fully functional beta application which we can use for user testing, I have desperately wanted to test the prototype, but found it difficult. The best solution I could come up with was to present the demo to the group of students and then have them answer a short paper-based survey to solicit their opinion, particularly since so much of it is not functional that any user testing would have created more questions than answers.

The survey methodology is not nearly as valuable in my mind as observing them interacting with it, because my concern is that certain visual or interaction design issues which might be caught while someone is using it, won’t become apparent until we’re beta testing the application, after it’s too late for design changes.

I’d love to hear thoughts from anyone who’s had to conduct user tests on prototypes.

Anticipating intentions and meeting expectations

Google Chrome

James — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 01:21:53 +0000

The new browser offering from Google was just launched today and its name is Chrome. Well, not so much a browser as a browser-emulated OS-type thingey. I won’t link to all the places it’s popping up on the web, since Google has. I haven’t used it much, but I will offer a few very small opinions to start.

It’s hard to imagine switching from Firefox since I have so many plug-ins installed, helping it make me more productive. Having said that, Chrome is smokin’ fast. Particularly, once you’ve loaded a site, Google gears caches the page and speeds up subsequent loads. I don’t use IE, but even compared to Firefox and Safari, everything loads very quickly. As I write this post from Chrome, it’s got the nice form textarea enhancement of Safari that allows me to resize my writing space on the fly – something Firefox has yet to enable.

The minimalist design really jazzes me, too. You might be able to tell from this journal … I love whitespace. The tabs load right up top with the address bar and bookmark toolbar just below, something Google calls the Omni Box. Beyond that, it’s all browsing space. A small (presumably) AJAX indicator appears at the bottom showing you URIs as they load or link URLs, but that’s it. I’ve always found the lack of status bar in Safari unnerving, so Chrome seems to hit the sweetspot of working space maximization, with enough cues to help users understand what’s going on.

User tools are compacted into two menus at top right, while page loading controls (back, forward, reload) appear at top left to each side of the address bar. The layering of tabs, address bar and bookmark toolbar just feels good. Other than a user-specified homepage, the default loads your most recent history as boxes (in kind of a storyboard layout), with a full history list available with one click.

Downloading and privacy look pretty good, too. It allows you to drag downloads to the bottom of the page and decide what to do. No download directories here. Plus, an incognito window will help you hide information about …. that gift for your loved one

I have yet to explore some of the obvious integration with various Google tools, but as an avid gmail, calendar and reader user, I’m sure there will be many benefits. For a more solid rundown of features, ReadWriteWeb is doing some crowdtesting of the app and I plan to take a better read-through shortly.

The big, and I mean big, drawback so far? I can only use this at work, which I’m not likely to much, because it’s only available for Windows at this point. I hope it’s only a matter of time until I can test it at home in my preferred Mac environment.

I’m sure I’ll discover more when I can actually use it where I want.

Facebook in real life

James — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:12:29 +0000

From the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford. Funny stuff.

The real reason for C-61

Will post-sec embrace the open social?

James — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 05:02:34 +0000

The answer to this question seems to be largely dependent on what you read, and it probably also depends on what you want to use open, social software for. Based on some of the mailing lists and discussion forums I read, and post-sec sites I visit, social media concepts (whether built on open source or not) are far from well-articulated in most cases.

Content strategy and content management systems

Feeds are becoming more common, but are not necessarily being implemented in a way that allows site visitors to have real choice as to what updates they can receive. The public web site is the prime marketing channel of any institution, and on any given post-secondary web site you are liable to see the gamut. Poorly designed and architected, hand-coded static pages, to full-blown database-driven, XML-gasmic experiences, with a feed associated with everything, regardless of whether the content is appropriate to supply a feed for, or not.

With regard to marketing content, determining what to feature, how to elicit subscriptions, where you might want user-generated content like comments, how you engage prospective students in a public dialogue and whether you’re prepared to open up things like course ratings to public discourse are all questions institutions are grappling with in presenting a more user-friendly, socially-constructed face to the world.

As the marketing side of post-secondary is where I spend the bulk of my working time at the moment, it is not only the issue of what to publish, how it is structured and how those decisions are made that can be challenging. The CMS conundrum is perhaps moreso, always a topic of some discussion on university web development lists. Everyone wants to know what each other uses, but often the one asking the questions cannot get his/her powers that be to make the leap and use open source. Enterprise support and architecture are understandably big concerns, but with the proper mindset about how they work and bringing support in-house, the question might move from if the move should be made to what flavour it should be made to. The idea of building functionality to suit as it is needed, as opposed to waiting for a vendor to decide to implement something, would seem to be a no-brainer.

What about curriculum and textbooks?

The main discussion I am starting to see is more around opening up learning to broad audiences. Learning commons or open learning models are not new, but have hardly become common by any stretch.

I know some people probably feel “the tide is turning, there is no way to stop a moving freight train and it is only a matter of time” (How is that for mixed metaphors?), but there seems to be a lot of push and pull with the issue of open sourcing texts, let alone constructing course curriculum collaboratively. At the one end you may have younger or more digitally savvy faculty members balking at the high price of textbooks and wanting to remove the cost barrier in providing access to them for free online. However, the other end has big publishing interests who want no part of it. Yearly revisions for the cost of a new book seems to be their lifeblood.

Seems to me that opening up the whole process of accessing reading materials and collaborating on course elements brings the notion of constructivism to life:

Christopher Rice, a lecturer in political science at the University of Kentucky, is one such trendsetter. In 2006, Rice experimented with a wiki for his Introduction to Political Science class. In addition to online articles, the wiki links to books at Project Gutenberg for older texts. This kept the students’ reading list to below $40, an important consideration when tuition seems to go up every year. Students could also collaborate, posting class notes and helping to develop the course.

With regard to publishing royalties, is there a middle ground that is not getting explored much (or maybe it is and I am just woefully unaware)? Often people have a hard time reading solely online and need a hard copy. What about multi-level and multi-user licensing? A free non-printable, digital license akin to Google Books format, a slightly more expensive PDF version that you can print yourself, or an on-demand full cost printed and bound version from the publisher. If a publisher wanted to ensure they were not giving away the farm through free digital-only licenses, they could implement a very reasonable online-only class-wide license. Not quite free, but not what we have now, and that is a step in the right direction.

The Ars Technica article above also touches on tenure and the disincentive of royalty-free publishing. I do not profess to understand that enough to offer an opinion or solution, but it seems to me that if an academic world-view began to emerge that valued open access to post-secondary education, publishing models would develop that would adequately deal with the tenure and royalty issues.

Some argue that open curriculum won’t work, that is until you read through the blog post and comments, including the author’s own. The author wrote with a blanket statement, something which needed to be qualified …. badly. The basic concept of open access to, and collaborative development of, curriculum can work just fine, but not if there is no oversight, guidance or editorial hand moving it forward. All one need do is look at the concept of comments on news stories to see that, while it may indicate popularity or interest, unguided opinion on a factual piece of copy seems to have poor results (maybe it is just me). Similarly, building curriculum iteratively without experience guiding it would likely not make it worth learning.

What about learning platforms?

I would give my own present experience with learning platforms a mixed review. While a tool like Moodle puts a powerful LMS (or PLE depending on your definition) at your finger tips without exorbitant licensing costs, making the system really sing requires some work. The implementations I have seen have not really explored the user experience side enough to ensure task flow, navigation, contextual content, design contrast or user features are really structured to make the system as user-friendly as it should be, let alone appropriate use of rich media (as opposed to overwhelming use of Flash, ensuring poor accessibility among other things).

Distance learning is pretty well established. With the emergence of the web, in the past 15 years, online platforms like WebCT, Blackboard and, more recently, Desire2Learn and Moodle have replaced older distance methodologies like correspondence. I do not want to comment on the value of distance learning because so much of the success potential is derived from the user experience design effort, type of curriculum, credential and personal learning style. It is a bit of a generalization to say whether it works or not.

Attrition rates of distance-only learning are pretty well documented, but would likely be improved by adjusting the delivery method. As opposed to passive replication of lecture materials, a well designed online learning environment can go a long way to improving distance outcomes. Royal Roads, for example, blends short residencies with distance-based cohorts and has graduation rates well in the 90′s.

In conclusion

Regardless of whether an institute embraces or eschews open source software, developing strategies and plans for open access and collaborative methodologies would seem to be crucial. Students are demanding convenience and, often, self-directed education where appropriate. Developing an open, social strategy requires careful deliberation of, not only, what an institute wants to do, but the appropriate tools and approaches that will get them there. User experience design and considerations with regard to development of learning and marketing platforms is probably key in this regard. As well, pushing for more progressive text licensing models and experimenting with more student-faculty discourse on collaborative curriculum development will strengthen the student connection with the institution and develop a stronger sense of ownership of their education.

Residency wrap

James — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:07:31 +0000

I really could not think of much but getting a good night’s sleep for a couple days after my Royal Roads residency ended last Friday. Now that I have had time to get through the rest of one of my two textbooks and finished the first of my two post-residency assignments, I can look back over the past few weeks and see where I am, where I have come from and where (I think) I am going ….

People and castles

Notwithstanding the little barrack dorm in which I spent 12 days, the campus experience was great. Our group seemed to gel very well and I sense the two weeks was the beginning of some pretty good friendships. The intensity allowed us to focus on group project work and start this degree on a reasonably even playing field, while helping us better understand places in which we can all improve to make the distance group work more successful over the next couple years. A good indicator of the overall intensity was the level to which people cut loose after our banquet. A release was clearly needed.

We were told that the reason the RRU programs are so much more successful than traditional distance programs (95% success versus 50%) is that they throw short, intense residencies into the mix. I believe it. Distance education can be isolating and will often not work for learning styles which depend on relationships and interaction with other people. I believe that having faces, names and personal relationships will help people to feel more inclined to put in extra effort at times when motivation may be ebbing. I also think the beautiful grounds, peacocks, Hatley Castle and general ambiance might have a little to do with it, too.

Learned concepts and new explorations

While I had a grounding in qualitative and quantitative research and the basic difference between them, I have had a pretty skeletal understanding of what they really are and how to look hard at data. I would say that is still pretty true, but I have a far better idea of the things I need to explore to begin to get a better grasp on quantitative data analysis and the ways in which we can frame qualitative research questions to avoid bias. This is an area into which I will be delving more deeply.

Even the small amount of reading I have done to this point on learning theory really has me pumped to learn a lot more. In particular, the way learning is so deeply connected to philosophy and psychology is very intriguing. I have always found sociology very interesting and, in particular, how technology is affecting human behaviour. With a communications background and, now, an excuse (by way of getting a grad degree) to look deeply into the intersection of social science and technology, it is pretty safe to say my spare time is largely spoken for.

Recognizing personal behavioural weaknesses

Perhaps the biggest change I have started to see is in self-examination. I still know my strengths (though they are clearly not as strong as I thought they were), but I am really looking at my weaknesses as bigger monsters to be tamed. As you read the following, do not get the impression that my confidence is suddenly shattered. Rather, I simply find that many of my tacit assumptions about myself are not proving to be true. I find myself somewhere between initial disruption and making meaning of my own new discoveries in this area.

I far too easily revert to type when group projects become challenging and tend to start ‘shoring’ things up and regimenting process to move them along. MacKeracher (2004) says that, among other traits I seem to possess, emotional intelligence includes recognizing emotions in others and handling relationships by managing moods and emotions in others. It is safe to say that this area could use a bit of work on my part.

It is not that I fail to recognize the emotions of others, and I can even be pretty empathetic at times, but I believe I do not give them enough validity if things get tough. If someone else works or learns in a far different way from me, my approach is likely to have poor results. I need to learn to more quickly recognize those who are right-brain dominant, or perhaps whose style is not as autonomous as mine.

I am no longer convinced of my analytical and critical thinking skills. I know it is still my orientation and love evidence to back up an assertion, but based on the things I was writing in my first pass at an academic paper, I clearly still make a lot of statements based on bias and opinion when I am unaware of doing so.

The payoff in change

If there is a silver lining to be found in all this, it is likely that I am recognizing things that can be changed with a little work. Not only will better accepting different approaches and improving my emotional intelligence simply make me a better person, it will certainly pay dividends in how I do my job, as well as the group work I will be involved in during this Masters degree.

Aside from allowing me to obtain my degree, going deep into this general subject matter is really where I see a lot of the personal growth and gratification coming from. I guess it is a pretty big help that I have long found the stuff very interesting.

Removing bias in my thinking will help me ask the right questions at the right time as I read and will ensure my writing reaches a new level. While this is important in academic reading and writing, I am certain it will even pay greater dividends in my daily activities, improving everything from work presentations and research right down to the writing on this blog.

Finally, getting more rigorous and capable in research will perhaps allow me to move in new professional directions over time. Doing it well will help my current job, but will most certainly prepare me for new challenges, too.

Reference

MacKeracher, D. (2004). Making Sense of Adult Learning. Toronto, Ont. University of Toronto Press.

One gigantic learning cycle experiment

The web as a research tool

James — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:52:58 +0000

The past couple weeks have been a real education when it comes to using the web for academic research. I am at different places on each of what I’ve identified (so far) as three primary knowledge streams of the MA I’m undertaking, research being the one I’ve got a middling amount of comfort with.

I do some as part of my work but need much stronger rigour to do it well, and I’m a neophyte on the learning theory part. I’ve used the web daily in work and personal pursuits for well over a decade and tend to just take it for granted. I wonder if anyone else in my cohort places themselves in different comfort zones for these knowledge streams or if they even look at it that way?

I always wondered how citations and references were kept straight, particularly when you read a thesis with dozens upon dozens. What’s been a real eye opener is the availability of academic papers, journals and other research through online databases. Mind you, until you have access to them via your school library, they remain largely unknown or unavailable.

I know I will only have access to the academic databases through RRU for the duration of my MA, but I have a notion that I may be able to continue to access them as a staff member through BCIT‘s online library interface. It’s something I intend to check out fairly soon. I’m hoping to move to more research based work down the road, so I’m certainly hoping.

In terms of actually keeping references straight for citation purposes, I’ve played a little with Refworks to this point and have to say that it’s a marvel – another tool that you get access to as a Masters student. It’s like Delicious on steroids, specific to academic reference and citation. I’ve been aware of another research bookmarking tool, called Connotea, but brief looks have left me wondering about its value. It’s targeted at scientific researchers, but I’m not sure of any citation formatting or similar functionality. I could be wrong, as I just haven’t looked at it much.

Everything is saved for later use and you can spit out references in a variety of academic formatting, suitable for whatever you’re writing at the time. I’m already hooked and, whether I decide to go the project or thesis route, I’m sure it will become pretty much my favourite online research tool. These discoveries are nothing short of serendipitous for me.

One gigantic learning cycle experiment

James — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:23:38 +0000

In my mind, there are two distinct ways of looking at what this group of great people has been through in the past two weeks. There’s the side that forces you to look at yourself, examine your own beliefs and theories and (hopefully) begin realizing some new possibilities. Then there’s the piece that RRU looks at or gets out of it.

I think the RRU piece is a very large constructivist learning experience that has one large macro learning cycle to it. We’ll all have plenty of tiny learning cycles along the lines of Kolb’s theory, but this MA will be more akin to Taylor’s broader model when you think of the RRU perspective. Do you think RRU designs this that way, or am I out to lunch and simply sleep deprived?

Our residency ‘boot camp’ (and make no mistake, this has been a bootcamp) is the disruption phase. We’ve received our share of downloads via a behaviourist learning model. Several lectures on learning theory and research methodology. However, I start thinking about how much the group exercises forced us into upheaval and working in ways that were uncomfortable at times. To me, that’s the disruption and now we go back to real life and try to integrate that and accept it to form a new reality.

For myself, I think of how I could change or avoid the missteps in future group projects, particularly when we’re working at a distance. It seems that boundaries could be better created and enforced by the group simply discussing at the outset a way of working that fit for everyone – and then agreeing that everyone will stick to the framework. This doesn’t mean it has to fit anyone’s personality type or learning style better, but it will help ensure that people can strike a balance and work from a common set of principles.

If anyone comments on this, let me know what you think you’d do differently to better frame a group project?

Risks associated with online publishing

James — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:17:05 +0000

Apologies for simply quoting various places in one article, but I thought
this overview from the Citizen Media Law Project was worth repeating through paraphrasing. The following are pretty obvious, but easy to forget if you start blogging regularly.

While I know I should be using APA, I’ll also apologize for that and plead the hunger-panged, time-strapped, conversational blogger as an excuse.

In the well-worth-a-read article, Gilmor makes very good points (with a lot of information I haven’t included below) about what to keep in mind. It speaks very much to accuracy, truth and things like slander – all things we should be very aware of in the realm of academic integrity and rigour in doing our own work. It’s so easy to bang off a blog post, that sometimes these things don’t remain top of mind.

A few direct quotes in bullet format to whet your apetites ….

If you publish information that harms the reputation of another person, group, or organization, you may be liable for “defamation” or “false light.”

If you publish private or personal information about someone without their permission, you potentially expose yourself to legal liability even if your portrayal is factually accurate.

If you use someone else’s name, likeness, or other personal attributes without their permission for an exploitative purpose you could also face liability for what is called misappropriation or right of publicity.

If you have web forums, allow reader comments, host guest bloggers on your site, or if you repost information that you receive from RSS feeds, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (“CDA 230”) will likely shield you from liability for problematic statements made by your users, guests and other third-parties.

if you publish or use the creative work of others, their trademarks, or certain confidential business information without the permission of the owner, you may be exposing yourself to legal liability for violations of intellectual property law.

As you publish your work online you may want to correct things you have previously published.

Online constructivism

James — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 08:45:48 +0000

As we all really begin looking at learning in the context of the web, it’s interesting to take a look at some of the research around the effectiveness of the medium. How some of this information affects you probably depends on how you feel about the web to begin with, how you’ve used it and how successful you’ve felt it’s been for you.

In my working experience, I’ve managed web sites and online communities, but never used them for learning, as facilitator or learner. Personally, I find this incredibly interesting stuff and really look forward to the journey. I think RRU is probably onto something, with a combination of blended intensives and distance courses, because an online-only experience will likely be a weak one for me.

Do you think the web holds the key to a new, promising frontier? Or, perhaps it’s a new way of delivering something that’s always been there.

The Personal Learning Environment (PLE)

I stumbled across an interesting piece out of Germany. I’m not sure I agree with some of it, because in the end a lot of the analysis really identifies issues broadly applicable to emerging social media and doesn’t say much about specific application to learning. Things like protection of data ownership, or that social media is a shift to user-generated content are hardly new notions. Perhaps in the realm of learning, inclusion of user-generated content is new, but not when you simply look at blogs, wikis, media sharing and many other tools on their own. Isn’t constructivist learning about creating your own knowledge by blending new information and past experience?

As opposed to any one point or issue in their article, what Schaffert and Hilzensauer (2008) have really stumbled on is the overarching notion that collaborative tools in an online environment makes it constructivist. They compare a PLE with a Learning Management System (LMS) in much the same way new online social media (web 2.0) in general is compared with the passive information gathering of what is often referred to web 1.0, where there is no way for the user to contribute or create anything new.

Is it easy to see how contributory tools and communities of learners (particularly in cohorts) turns the journey from passive to active, prescribed to constructive?

Reference

Schaffert S, & Hilzensauer W, 2008, eLearning Papers, No.9, http://www.elearningpapers.eu/index.php?page=doc&doc_id=11938&doclng=6&vol=9

Team dynamics

James — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:10:50 +0000

Now that our first assignment is all done, but the short presentation later today, I wanted to reflect on team dynamics. It’s fair to say that there was a challenge or two in this first project. I don’t consider that bad, as this week has been primarily about learning about one’s self.

Part of this is the unfamiliarity the members have with each other. Most people here have known each other for four days and we’ve been working quite intimately. The benefit time gives you is that you learn where to go and to not go with certain people. Unpredictable environments can negatively impact collaborative productivity (Dunin-Keplicz, B. & Verbrugge, R., 2004).

How am I reacting to working with different personality types? Which types are more or less complimentary to mine? What about the intrinsic things we have that goes beyond type and allows us to be chameleons and cope well outside our comfort zone? Some do this well, some not so much.

We ended up, more or less, each doing a piece of the first assignment, with a lot of back and forth and feedback loops. I don’t want to judge the benefits of this in this one specific instance, because someone will always likely be the point person to edit and submit a group project, or to pull all the collaboration together into one final draft.

A touchier question for me is one we probably all grapple with. Is it better to do a part of the project which we know we’re not suited for because we want to expand our skillset, or should we go to the place that’s familiar for us since it’s easier for us to be sure of the end result? This certainly requires some soul-searching. If we’re way outside our comfort zone, will we know when we need to back off, or ask for help or not?

Reference

Dunin-Keplicz, B. & Verbrugge, R., 2004, Engineering Societies in the Agents World, pp107-122, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg

Taming an MBTI beast

Taming an MBTI beast

James — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:31:48 +0000

I found what we covered today to be a pretty important thing and it’s left me struggling a bit to frame it in light of learning and working in a team environment. In our morning session with Hillary, the MBTI inventory was both reassuring and disturbing.

At a surface level it wasn’t really surprising. I know I’m analytical, organized and prefer working through something by breaking it into manageable pieces. Due in large part to being a project manager, I can fairly easily take on the role of trying to get things to a logical conclusion. This is fine if you are a client and project lead and you’re paid for getting something done. Maybe not so much where the boundaries and roles are less clear and far more fluid.

I approach anything in much the same way, including ‘banging’ through a first draft of an assignment. I often write in a stream of consciousness and stop to review after producing way too much material. However, when I consider those traits in light of the projects we’re now working on, how do I apply my tendencies in a way that will most positively work with a group dynamic – one that will often include people who are less verbal or express themselves in a quieter or more reserved manner?

In producing good team projects, I’m really grappling with how to use my traits to their fullest potential while ensuring they don’t engender in teammates a feeling that my tendency to organize and focus is coming through as taking control or dominating in any way.

I’m trying to make sure I’m always bouncing things back to people, asking their feedback and ensuring I’ve acurately captured what they’ve said. Is that enough? Any thoughts from those who plot anywhere close to an ESTJ?

One gigantic learning cycle experiment

First impressions of Royal Roads University

James — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 07:28:21 +0000

More aptly, this post might be called, “What I crammed into my first day and a half.” Seriously, though, it’s been a bit busy and this post will not do it justice. This is not to suggest that I’ll be posting recaps of everything I do because there is more MA focused blogging to come. I’m not sure if that will be at a WordPress hosted blog or this one.

Note: I’ve included a few pics I took today and many more will likely come next weekend. You can view larger sizes as part of the Flickr set by clicking on any picture below.

The surroundings

It’s quite a beautiful campus and location, on a hill sloping down to the water in Colwood, a suburb of Victoria. Situated amongst old growth forest on former First Nations land, the campus is pretty breathtaking. Hatley Castle, and Nelson and Grant buildings, in particular, really show off the military college history of the place.

Plus, there’s a big focus on sustainability and recycling and that’s a pretty big plus for me.

Unfortunately, since I broke the 18-55 lens on my Nikon D40 a couple weeks ago, I’ll be using my lower resolution Fuji S602Z for the next two weeks. Oh well, they look fine for smaller, online pics. On that note, I’m looking for a good deal on one of the Nikon compatible super zooms. I’m thinking one of the 18-200′s, but I digress.

The accommodations

This is not a negative, per se, but they are spartan. Had I decided to apply earlier and booked an ensuite room, I’d have my own washroom, but that’s another story. The upside is that it will be easy to focus on the work at hand, with nary a sofa or TV in my room to distract me. There is plenty of opportunity outside to clear one’s head every so often, there are great hiking trails and I’ve already given the gym a spin tonight, prior to doing the reading from today. It’s all good.

The food

While I’ve only had a veggie burger with salad, I must say that the Habitat Cafe food is actually a pleasant surprise, particularly when one compares it to what’s available at BCIT. The food here is reasonably priced, healthy and appealing and there seems to be a reasonable selection. As a meat-free guy, I’ll always want more good veggie options, but they are apparently open to requests and this won’t be the only place I’ll eat, so I think things are in pretty good shape.

Day one

Truth be told, the first day was a fairly relaxing intro to what’s coming. We had a good orientation this morning, giving us an overview of the amount of work ahead and then took care of student cards and a short campus tour. I’d already had a look around, both this morning and a few weeks ago.

Good lectures on research methodology and article critique rounded out the afternoon, with a little more detail emerging surrounding the coming days’ activities. One of the things that will work very well for me is the focus on analytical thinking and critical analysis. I may actually go two weeks without being told I’m being too analytical …

In closing

There’s plenty more to come – in the next two weeks and two years. I’m hoping to get a few more peacock shots (which should not be a problem) and go a little further afoot to see some of the trails and natural surroundings.

No related posts.

Masters blogging

James — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:27:52 +0000

A lot of my writing on this site will now chronicle the trials and tribulations of obtaining a graduate degree while working full-time, trying to maintain a marriage and family, and hopefully still getting a little exercise along the way.

Something I’ve been pulling together for some time and which is finally happening, is the MA I’m pursuing. The focus is learning and technology and I’m doing it through Royal Roads University in lovely Victoria BC.

In truth, the only time I actually know I’ll be at RRU is during the two weeks beginning July 28th. Most of it is a distance and online cohort and whether I do another residency next year will be determined by whether my MA ends up being thesis or course based.

We’re just rounding the end of a two week pre-residency session, dissecting a few chapters of texts on adult learning and research and a few sundry pieces about issues like cohort based learning and the application of new learning to professional pursuits. We’ve also been getting our feet wet in the Moodle instance set up for this cohort.

Out of the past week’s readings and online forum posts has come a first assignment asking me to examine my assumptions about learning within a constructivist learning framework. If I understood the epistemological questions, the assignment was really about asking myself if I thought people learned largely through direct, observational methods, or more by inferring and reasoning. I’m not sure at all that I hit any sort of nail on the head with what I wrote.

Luckily, this first paper is as much about practicing academic style and showing a baseline for further development than it is for anything else. It will be used primarily as a feedback mechanism and will be updated at the end of my two week residency, which begins next Monday.

One gigantic learning cycle experiment

Digital rights and access under assault

James — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 07:23:12 +0000

It doesn’t seem to matter what kind of access you want, or what you want access to. You’re under assault, plain and simple. With the news last week that Bell and Telus customers will pay at both ends for text messages and the obscene Rogers iPhone rate packages, we just have two more issues to deal with on this front.

Ed. Note: It should be noted that since I started jotting down notes for this post, Rogers has improved their data packages, but only for a two month promotional offer and not to the point where the prices aren’t still ridiculously high.

Reusing a legally purchased song on multiple personal devices, saving a recorded program for private viewing later, or even embedding a copyrighted video for comment on your blog could all land you in trouble if C-61 passes in the fall. Mind you, cellular rate plan issues are part of a much larger problem that includes throttling. Web companies understand the implications to their businesses. Throttling is mostly related to large bandwidth activities like torrenting, and would seem to be moving in lockstep with copyright issues. After all, making it illegal to possess something is more effective if you choke the ability to get it in the first place.

If all this isn’t enough, Canada’s complicity in ACTA will ensure that your digital equipment can be confiscated due to nothing more than an over-zealous border guard. Whether you got it back or not, it may well not include what you originally had on it. Plus, it would seem a Biker-chick lovin’ industry minister did a did a better job standing up for our rights than the current one. Mind you, today Jim Prentice did call out for Telus and Bell to justify their messaging grab.

That’s likely to really make a REAL difference.

Canada already has some of the highest wireless rates in the world. And, we have a government who is:

moving toward a complete lockdown on how we use our digital media
in lockstep with US government and big business marching orders
trying to kill innovation by (perhaps unwittingly) supporting walled gardens and closed source intellectual property
helping create a digital divide by allowing the high cost of access to continue unabated

The Harper government seems completely oblivious to the shit-storm C-61 and ACTA are causing, or perhaps they simply don’t care. All we can hope for is that cooler heads will prevail in the fall session of the Commons, or opposition parties will act in unison and defeat C-61 if it goes ahead as currently proposed. I know it’s on the radar of the NDP, based on canned email responses I’ve received from Jack Layton. Unfortunately, they’re not in a position to do much on their own and the federal Liberals have been silent enough on these issues that one could be forgiven for thinking they’re simply unequipped to formulate a position on that. Then again, it takes a lot of energy to focus singularly on a carbon tax.

Regardless of where C-61 or ACTA land, in truth the problem is lack of transparency and the Canadian government’s lack of public consultation on federal legislation and an international treaty framework.

Harper’s a guy who claims to want less government intrusion in the lives of ordinary citizens. That is, I guess, unless personal freedoms distract from his core goal – keeping his Bush administration and business buddies happy.

How important is social media?

James — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:17:59 +0000

(Pretty f**king important as it turns out …)

While you have to get past the swears, the slideshow below from ParisLemon came to my attention via the Technology Liberation Front. Very good stuff.

| View | Upload your own

Canned responses to C-61 letters

James — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 04:33:11 +0000

While I haven’t yet printed, signed and sent any of the copyright petitions, I did manage a bit of an email writing spree regarding this hideous proposed legislation. Would it surprise you to know that I haven’t had a real response from anyone yet?

To be fair, our politicians might just be getting a tiny earful on this one, so I’ll reduce my expectations to … nil? I would have thought Ujjal Dosanjh (my MP) might have responded directly. However, why would he start doing anything now?

The first email I sent directly to him and the second I sent to Stephen Harper, Josee Verner and Jim Prentice, with copies to Ujjal, Stephane Dion and Jack Layton.

My email notes

The snippet below is the substantive gist of the first email:

As long as I’m not distributing what I buy for profit, I can’t understand why the Harper government is so willing to pander to business in this regard. I can’t understand why governments are so slow to understand that using my own media on multiple devices does not hurt the copyright holder. And, in fact, sharing will generally increase sales.

Copyright law this stringent does nothing for Canadian citizens and stifles the creativity and ingenuity that open standards and open access to technology and digital media creates. Plus, this is doomed to failure in any regard as people will simply expend more effort to go further underground in how they access, acquire and share digital media.

When you combine it with ACTA, which the feds have also been negotiating (and also not consulting their constituents regarding), normal people will be under attack every day, defending what they own and likely forced into expensive and unnecessary legal fights.

And the second, with more of a pleading tone:

Since this bill was introduced last week, there has been near universal opposition to it. Media coverage has been solid and comprehensive and has spanned the globe. The only ones who seem to be in favour of this are the US trade reps who have been pushing the Canadian federal government into crafting it in the first place. They still feel it does not go far enough. Far enough for what? A complete stripping of our rights? Or, is this really only about ensuring closed wall licensing to make big business copyright holders richer, at everyone else’s expense?

Most independent artists understand that, in a business landscape dominated by large labels and distributors, they need audiences to be built through open sharing of their works. This is how careers are often built and sustained. This bill does nothing but discourage this behaviour. The lost leader provisions around time-shifting are made useless by the fact that this content is not someone’s to keep and use for their personal entertainment. Plus, since the software used to allow this behaviour on locked works will now be illegal, I’m not sure how you expect people to avail themselves of that provision. That using a legally purchased digital media asset on more than one device, again for my personal entertainment, might somehow make me a criminal, would be laughable were it not so sad.

Who do you think is doing most of the file sharing and digital media posting to the web? Teens and younger folks. So, you’ve effectively targeted them as criminals, blindsiding them via over-zealous and poorly thought out legislation. Do you seriously think you’ll be able to extract the $500 penalty for peer to peer sharing, or the $20,000 penalty for sharing via aggregate platforms like YouTube, Flickr, or other social media sites? And what about someone who wants to comment on a copyrighted video via their own blog, which they saw on YouTube and further embedded on their own site? Does that make them a criminal?

Mr. Prentice and Ms. Verner, I honestly doubt you could even answer this last question, as it’s fairly clear to me that you don’t really understand how online social media not only works, but is completely changing the way people connect and communicate. If nothing else, I ask you to think of the innovation this will kill. I also ask you to do some real consultation across this country to understand why this legislation is bad. That is, if the firestorm you’re presently enduring is not helping you to understand.

Should this legislation go to the Commons for a vote in the fall, it could go either way. If it succeeded it would just be a sad harbinger of where this country would be headed under a Conservative majority, and likely means the Liberals were more frightened of an election than they were concerned for the rights of Canadians. However, what I hope, should it get that far, is that it would get voted down and actually trigger that election. Mr. Harper, if the Conservative strategy is that the next election deliver you the majority you crave, misreading public sentiment on this issue may actually have the reverse effect.

The spot-on responses

First I got Jack’s response, ~~eerily similar to~~ exactly the same as what Michael Geist shared from a commenter:

Thank you for sharing your concern with the Harper government’s Bill C-61, An Act to amend the Copyright Act.

The NDP is strongly opposed to this legislation. We are calling on MPs from all parties to listen to their constituents and join the growing chorus of those who are against C-61.

New Democrats are pushing for proper legislation that will ensure artists and creators are compensated for their work while allowing consumers reasonable rights of access. Over the past two years we have urged the Conservative government to consult with stakeholders and develop relevant legislation that would protect artists, innovators and consumers in the 21st century. However, this government has completely ignored all calls to bring forward reasonable copyright legislation and regrettably this bill is worse than originally feared. There is no evidence of any attempt to strike a reasonable balance to protect both either artists or consumers. Instead, C-61 represents a full capitulation to the U.S. corporate lobby that will pave the way for the criminalization of perfectly reasonable behaviour–like format shifting of most legally purchased content.

What can you do? If you haven’t already, you can contact the Ministers of Industry and Heritage, the Prime Minister, the leaders of the other opposition parties and your local MP to tell them of your opposition to Bill C-61. Encourage your friends and families to do the same. For contact information, please visit: http://www.parl.gc.ca/common/index.asp?Language=E.

Please know that your participation is important to building an opposition to this bill that will be hard for Parliament to ignore.

Again, I appreciate the time you have taken to contact me on this critical issue. Feel free to pass along my email to anyone who may be interested.

All the best,
Jack Layton, MP (Toronto-Danforth)
Leader, Canadaâ€™s New Democrats

But, surely Stephen Harper would be paying attention, right?

Dear Mr. Wanless:

On behalf of the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, I would like to thank you for your recent e-mail.

Please be assured that your comments have been noted and that they will receive due consideration from the Minister, who has already received a copy of your correspondence.

L.A. Lavell
Executive Correspondence Officer
for the Prime Minister’s Office

For his part, Dion is as informed and articulate as always:

On behalf of the Honourable StÃ©phane Dion, we would like to acknowledge receipt of your correspondence and thank you for taking the time to contact the Leader of the Opposition.

It is an extraordinary feature of our democracy that there exists clear lines of communication with our elected representatives. However, due to the high volume of correspondence that we receive it may take some time before we can reply.

Mr. Dion always appreciates hearing from Canadians and being made aware of their views. Please be assured your comments and concerns have been reviewed and noted.

We are confident that by working together we will achieve StÃ©phane Dion’s vision for an economically prosperous, socially progressive and environmentally sustainable Canada.

Sincerely,
The Office of the Honourable StÃ©phane Dion, P.C., M.P.
Leader of the Opposition
Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada

And, finally platitudes and nothingness from the dynamic duo, Prentice and Verner (whose presser was really sad commentary on how far over their collective heads they are) which didn’t address any of my points:

What does Bill C-61 mean to Canadians? Specifically, it includes measures that would:

expressly allow you to record TV shows for later viewing; copy legally purchased music onto other devices, such as MP3 players or cell phones; make back-up copies of legally purchased books, newspapers, videocassettes and photographs onto devices you own; and limit the “statutory damages” a court could award for all private use copyright infringements;

implement new rights and protections for copyright holders, tailored to the Internet, to encourage participation in the online economy, as well as stronger legal remedies to address Internet piracy

clarify the roles and responsibilities of Internet Service Providers related to the copyright content flowing over their network facilities

provide photographers with the same rights as other creators

What Bill C-61 does not do:

it would not empower border agents to seize your iPod or laptop at border crossings, contrary to recent public speculation

What this Bill is not:

it is not a mirror image of U.S. copyright laws. Our Bill is made-in-Canada with different exceptions for educators, consumers and others and brings us into line with more than 60 countries including Japan, France, Germany and Australia

Draw your own conclusions. I know I have.

Does tech make us stupid, or just rude?

James — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:13:56 +0000

OK, so maybe not stupid, but apparently lazy. At least according to The Atlantic‘s Nicholas Carr it does. Based on the length of the piece, his writing chops are certainly still intact.

Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do …. I think I know whatâ€™s going on. For more than a decade now, Iâ€™ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.

Carr seems to think the web’s delivery format, and the sheer volume of information he is exposed to, is making it harder for him to concentrate on longer, more involved reading. The fact that so much information, including that used for research, is often just a click or two away and digestible an excerpt at a time, says Carr, is making us impatient. He says that his friends agree:

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintancesâ€”literary types, most of themâ€”many say theyâ€™re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether.

But, is this about capacity to read more deeply or just not taking the time? I’m probably as guilty as anyone of not reading as much, but I do try to make sure I have a book going most of the time. I actually relish the opportunity to get into a novel or work of nonfiction. I certainly don’t find it any harder to concentrate, despite the fact that I follow lots of feeds and scan plenty of online content on a daily basis.

The Technology Liberation Front‘s Adam Thierrer feels reasonably positive about the change communications tech is bringing:

The death of media scarcity and the rise of information abundance was bound to have profound implications for how we read, write and communicate—in most ways for the better, but perhaps in some ways for the worse. I doubt we’ll ever have a Shakespeare arising from the world of Twitter, for example, but I believe we are better off for having technologies and media platforms like it in our lives.

On this point I also have to disagree. Not necessarily with the fact that a variety of more immediate and engaging ways of communicating is a good thing. It is, but it’s often manifesting itself at the expense of social skills and manners. Grammar and eloquent writing is mostly a lost art form, based on the general level of discourse in the blogosphere. A great deal of this can be traced directly to IM and email, where shorthand acronyms are the order of the day.

I can’t begin to count how many times inappropriate cell phone conversations punctuate the air or cause car accidents, or encountering kids who can’t turn their iPod down long enough to be polite to the store clerk. Don’t even get me started on the whole issue of texting or IM-ing via cell. Handy yes. Annoying and unpleasant? Often. Why? Because too often we use gadgets as an excuse to avoid and ignore our fellow human being.

There’s no doubt that our behaviour is changing as a result of the volume and format of information we are now exposed to. I would suggest, though, that it’s crucial for us to try to be mindful of a couple things. Take the time to read. A real newspaper, a novel, anything that forces us to focus a little more. By extension then, take that notion of focus and target it on other people. Don’t use technology as an excuse for anti-social or disengaging behaviour.

I’m a citation weakling

The real reason for C-61

James — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:48:02 +0000

American pressure is nothing if not intense. It starts with big business and media bending the ear of the Bush administration, who in turn, essentially forced Canada’s hand. Did we just become the 51st state? Sovereignty, anyone?

The following speaks for itself, courtesy Michael Geist:

The public campaign was obvious. U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins was outspoken on the copyright issue, characterizing Canadian copyright law as the weakest in the G7 (despite the World Economic Forum ranking it ahead of the U.S.). The U.S. Trade Representatives Office (USTR) made Canada a fixture on its Special 301 Watch list, an annual compilation of countries that the U.S. believes have sub-standard intellectual property laws. The full list contains nearly 50 countries accounting for 4.4 billion people or approximately 70 percent of the world’s population. Most prominently, last year U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein and John Cornyn, along with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, escalated the rhetoric on Canadian movie piracy, leading to legislative reform that took just three weeks to complete.

The private campaign was even more important. Sources say that emboldened by the successful campaign for anti-camcording legislation, U.S. officials upped the ante at the Security and Prosperity Partnership meeting in Montebello, Quebec last summer. Canadian officials arrived ready to talk about a series of economic concerns but were quickly rebuffed by their U.S. counterparts, who indicated that progress on other issues would depend upon action on the copyright file. Those demands were echoed earlier by the USTR, which, according to documents obtained under the Access to Information Act, made veiled threats about “thickening the border” between Canada and the U.S. if Canada refused to put copyright reform on the legislative agenda.

Faced with unrelenting U.S. pressure, the newly installed Industry Minister was presented with a mandate letter that required a copyright bill that would meet U.S. approval. The government promised copyright reform in the October 2007 Speech from the Throne and was set to follow through last December, only to pull back at the last hour in the face of mounting public concern.

In the months that followed, Prentice’s next attempt to bring the copyright bill forward was stalled by internal cabinet concerns over how the bill would play out in public. The bill was then repackaged to include the new consumer-focused provisions such as the legalization of recording television shows and the new peer-to-peer download $500 damage award. The heart of the bill, however, remained largely unchanged since satisfying U.S. pressure remained priority number one. Just after 11:00 a.m. last Thursday, the U.S. got its Canadian copyright bill.

Help me understand C-61

James — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 04:37:43 +0000

I really don’t get this legislation, purely from a political standpoint. I completely understand that Harper will tend to swing between supporting a business agenda or toeing the American line, depending on who he’s pandering to at any given time. However, you have to wonder about the strategy of this. When I add the ACTA treaty, which Canada is negotiating on the international stage, I’m really confused and frightened about where this country is headed.

Is Harper baiting us? With his minority in the Commons, things could go either way. On the one hand, he gambles that the Liberals will vote with something like this to avoid bringing down the government and causing an election. This strategy counts on gaining seats under that scenario. However, legislation like this is so thoroughly repugnant that the voter backlash could very well lose them seats.

Since my fomenting would only add more noise to a very loud protest, all I can say is that we should be very scared. Michael Geist‘s key points about the fine print:

However, check the fine print since the rules are subject to a host of strict limitations and, more importantly, undermined by the digital lock provisions. The effect of the digital lock provisions is to render these rights virtually meaningless in the digital environment because anything that is locked down (ie. copy-controlled CD, no-copy mandate on a digital television broadcast) cannot be copied. As for every day activities like transferring a DVD to your iPod – those are infringing too. Indeed, the law makes it an infringement to circumvent the locks for these purposes.

And more fine print ….

Canadians can’t actually use these exceptions since the tools needed to pick the digital lock in order to protect their privacy are banned. In other words, check the fine print again – you can protect your privacy but the tools to do so are now illegal. Dig deeper and it gets worse. Under the Canadian law, its up to the government to introduce new exceptions if it thinks it is needed.

Still more ….

The other headline grabber is the $500 fine for private use infringement. This will be heralded as a reasonable compromise, but check the fine print. Canadian law already allows a court to order damages below $500 per infringement, so the change may not be as dramatic as expected (though $500 in damages is the maximum for private use infringement). Moreover, it is already arguably legal to download sound recordings in Canada. Under the proposal, there are exceptions for uploading or posting music online (ie. making available) and even the suggestion that posting a copyright-protected work to YouTube could result in the larger $20,000 per infringement damage award.

And finally, why this bill might actually be good for open source development (likely contrary to what the Conservatives and their business buddies probably want) ….

In other words, online materials that are available under a Creative Commons license are fair game (as they are already), but most everything else is still potentially subject to a restriction. This was precisely what many feared – rather than pursuing the far superior expansion of fair dealing, the education community got a provision that does little to enhance classroom learning.

Jonathan Zittrain writes about these very kinds of issues in his new book and makes the argument for allowing digital property and the access to it to remain unfettered. Unfortunately the worldview of the Conservatives seems to favour closed gates and the concept of wealth-building licensing.

The access issue is already being threatened as ISPs begin clamping down on customers suspected of downloading bit torrents and similar large media files. It has nothing to do with, as Roger’s asserts, managing network resources, and everything to do with managing access to content and looking toward leveraging access for higher fees.

Don’t worry, though, the aforementioned ACTA treaty will ensure any modicum of privacy you had with regard to what you are accessing or downloading would be completely gone.

No related posts.

Online learning lacks personal touch

James — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:56:29 +0000

Came across the following via Stephen Downes, where he refers to to a response from Clive Shepherd. Neilsen first suggests:

I continue to believe in the linear, author-driven narrative for educational purposes. I just don’t believe the Web is optimal for delivering this experience. Instead, let’s praise old narrative forms like books and sitting around a flickering campfire â€” or its modern day counterpart, the PowerPoint projector â€” which have been around for 500 and 32,000 years, respectively.

I continue to write books, and I continue to develop training seminars, because I believe these media are best for deep learning of new concepts.

To which Stephen remarks:

I think learning happens through numerous media, including web posts (which is why Nielsen writes his online column in the first place). And I think that people continue to write books and develop training seminars because that’s where the money is, not because that’s what produces the best learning.

And finally, Shepherd’s (partial) comments:

Interesting. Of course we don’t know exactly what Jakob has in mind when he talks about e-learning – traditional, self-paced instruction? live online learning using web conferencing software? collaborative distance learning? informal learning using web 2.0 technologies? If we assume he means the former – what we used to call CBT – then that gives a starting point for a critique of his assertion. Jakob’s key idea here is that ‘deep learning’ is a lean-back experience, best accomplished away from a computer, whereas most web activity is a lean-forward experience, which is designed to meet the individual’s immediate goals in the way that they see fit.

I come at this issue as someone who has developed a few very rudimentary e-learning courses in the corporate world, who now works as a web user experience lead at a post-secondary institution, and who is likely to be doing a Master’s degree soon, with a significant component delivered via distance and online.

I think what Neilsen is trying to say is that the web is not the ideal environment for the level of immersion necessary for significant learning and that his ‘just in time’ metaphor is apt. I don’t think, though, that it’s necessarily about having an author-driven narrative. Regardless of any social media capabilities you can enable to make online learning better, you will never get the engagement of sitting in a room with peers and a capable instructor.

I also think that the medium may not be capable of delivering a full degree without some face time, but is great for snippets and individual courses of certain kinds. For one thing the feedback mechanisms for students, while improving all the time, are no match for the back and forth engagement of students and instructor. Forums, comments, message boards, email, IM, chats …. they’ll all good but lack immediacy in most cases, and body language subtleties in all cases.

Truth be told I’m not sure I ever want the medium to improve to the point where it’s as good as face-to-face.

The future of the web?

James — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:04:35 +0000

Found this at I Power, via UX Magazine. A scary thought to be sure, but certainly a plausable direction for big media and telecom to want to go.

While there are some who ask what the future of the web looks like – and issues around accessible sites, semantic content, open source and the like are hugely important – it’s crucial to focus on the issues that will affect the most people in the most significant ways.

Whether you can see your favourite web site on both your phone and laptop isn’t nearly as important as whether you can access it in the first place. And, what about the right to your own digital media to use – legally – as you see fit. Big media is losing its grip on what it spoonfeeds you, and can charge you for, and as such, many of its revenue streams. An easy way to get them back is to package the content you can see with broadband access.

It’s an easy model for them because, as alluded to in the video above, it’s exactly the same model employed for digital cable. That’s why transparent public consultation on ACTA, and absolute net neutrality are two key things that should be on everyone’s front burner.

In my mind, the two issues are intrinsically connected. ACTA would ostensibly help media controlled bandwidth to throttle what they don’t want to give you access to, and to ensure they enforce licensing fees for every little bit of pay-for-use content they can.

Don’t help ACTA squash your rights

James — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:53:17 +0000

As often is the case when government either can’t control, or can’t understand something, the current drafting of ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is more about ensuring citizens have no right to privacy, than it is about addressing counterfeiting in any significant way.

Unchallenged, this could spell trouble for the movement to data portability and open technology in our ever-expanding information age. Of course, how would you really know what’s being proposed? The negotiations have happened in complete secrecy, with virtually no public consultation, yet the rumour mill is indicating that this agreement could come in with a whole host of significant measures, including search and seizure, mandatory cross-border disclosure and intermediary liability.

In other words should you end up under some cloud of suspicion, you have no right to your own information, no right to your own digital equipment and anyone along the line could be culpable. What does all this mean? Since these measures would presumably be defined by a document with no public scrutiny or consultation, defining the criteria is equally as nebulous. Is your ISP guilty for your illegal download? Who knows?

While it is ostensibly an international treaty, can there be any doubt its major driver would be the US? After all, this kind of knee-jerk stripping of personal liberties is not far off what the Patriot Act did under the guise of the war on terror.

Part of living in a free, democratic society is that some people will do the wrong things sometimes. We, hopefully, draft laws that protect the greater good AND individual liberties and define those wrong things via that mechanism. One key tenet of this whole notion is that one’s suspicion of guilt will, both, pass a considerable litmus test and that this suspicion is just that – suspicion.

Are we unwittingly aiding an erosion of privacy?

And, while our personal freedoms risk becoming more restricted, people are becoming ever more open in their approach to sharing their information. Why else would Google gear up to launch a suite of applications allowing any site to become a Facebook knockoff. Seems to me that’s creating the potential for a real problem in the not-too-distant future. For example, if we continually expose more of ourselves through social media tools and there are fewer protections of our rights, that information becomes very easy for the powers-that-be to get a hold of.

Personally, if I was an American I’d be very leary of using Google Health. This is not because the idea of managing my medical information through a stable, centralized online application is without merit. Rather, that another piece of my very personal life is exposed. As soon as, for example, I have a centralized commercial account that’s importing prescription and health condition information from, say, Walgreen’s, suddenly this stuff is in the hands of for-profit businesses and vulnerable to uses I may not be comfortable with.

Now, I realize that Americans are used to having their health information in the hands of commercial businesses, but it’s very much a foreign concept to me and one that I’d staunchly oppose. It’s not drawing too long a bow in my mind to combine this issue with over-zealous IP treaty privacy policing to effectively lose complete control of my personal life. Is there anything more core to one’s being than that of health?

What about extending that to health coverage by HMOs? Since one of their mandates is to keep claims low, does exposing your health information, however minimally, risk a claim being disallowed? The US health industry has done a great job of buying votes to keep the US healthcare system private. Is it even just possible that the collusion therein presents a problem with your personal data getting into government, and then, commercial healthcare’s hands?

While an entity like Google is not a social network, are the EU’s concerns still applicable? While your data seems to be more secure with Google, is the wider the net they cast for data partnerships placing your personal information at higher risk?

I certainly wouldn’t have a clue, but I don’t think I’ll risk my health to find out.

Digital rights and access under assault

Charlie Rose squared on Yahooglesoft

James — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:31:52 +0000

This really does seem to be about all most web news talks about these days … Courtesy Technology Liberation Front.

No related posts.

How will Harper stall InSite next?

James — Wed, 07 May 2008 08:50:52 +0000

There is significant research available pointing to the success of InSite, the Vancouver Downtown Eastside supervised injection site, run by Vancouver Coastal Health. The conservative government has been tepidly extending its life in bits and pieces while they continue to fish for red herrings, allowing them to justify closing it down, as they have been wont to do since coming to power. The current extension ends in just under two months.

Recently, the operators of the facility themselves have mounted a constitutional challenge in a pre-emptive attempt to stave off their closing, arguing that the government doesn’t have the authority to close their doors:

“This case is about whether the federal government has the power to impose jail time for the use or operation of that health service,” said Ryan Dalziel, counsel for the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, which has intervener status in the case.

More recently still, it came to light that last year, UBC medical staff wrote to prime minister Stephen Harper, pleading the case of InSite. They’re concerned that mounting medical evidence of InSite’s efficacy in preventing overdoses and the spread of disease is being ignored in favour of philosophical bent:

“And so they’re concerned, as they should be, about the health of patients in Vancouver and elsewhere. And I think they (InSite operators) thought policy decisions were being made that were not in the best interests of patients,” said Hepburn.

“Closing down Insite would immediately put a stop to the research. Allowing Insite to continue would allow more valuable research to be done,” said Provincial Health Officer Perry Kendall.

Finally, the government’s own researcher and a key witness in the BC Supreme Court case regarding InSite’s legal status has come forward to the Ottawa Press Gallery with positive findings about the facility:

“There is no doubt that InSite has made a positive impact for the individuals who use InSite, the residents, service providers and business operators in the neighbourhood, and for the greater public health of the community,” said Professor Boyd.

The original news release, with further background, can be found here.

The conservative government has waffled for years on a longer or permanent exemption allowing InSite to operate and plan for the longer term. They refuse to look at opening more similar facilities in inner city areas and continue to study the issue, citing conflicting research, while producing nothing to support their position. Now their own researcher and key witness doesn’t support them.

I’m waiting for a new federally-funded study, engaging witch doctors and faith healers, to be announced. The conservatives are running out of rocks under which to look for their conflicting evidence.

Don’t help ACTA squash your rights

A reversable food crisis

James — Thu, 01 May 2008 04:08:17 +0000

The biggest problem with the current food crisis is not that it exists, but that it never should have happened in the first place and can definitely be reversed. And it’s not just the wrong-headed rush to create biofuels, but the products our food system produces the most of (and how it produces them), which exacerbate the reduced availability of crops to directly feed people.

Biofuel

When you consider that the 25% of US corn crops currently used to produce ethanol will rise to over 30% next year, and is mandated by George Bush to double present levels by 2015, there would seem to be no relief on the horizon. As the flavour of the day, Corn’s price is going up and farmers are beginning to convert other crops to corn in order to cash in. It’s an answer to high oil prices, but it hardly seems the right one. We use roughly the energy we produce in making biofuel, and there are environmental impacts to that production, too.

The reduction in other available crops as food, in turn, drives their prices up. Basically, there’s a shortage of everything, it’s becoming more expensive and a lot of it is related to biofuel. Canada has been insulated from these price increases due largely to a strong dollar. This is about to end. Plus, it’s not really us in North America who are truly feeling the pain. When the price of maise, rice or wheat doubles it’s others who are really paying the price.

On this particular issue, the only question I really have is why we should do it in the first place. Sure, they’re cleaner burning, but given the current state of affairs their production is not without significant issues. It almost feels like we’re in a tug-o-war between climate change and starvation of the world’s poorest people. And, while countries like Canada pony up money for the food crisis with one hand, we enact energy policies mandating the production of biofuels with the other.

Food production systems

It’s not just the growth of biofuels and diminishing availability of other crops causing problems. In particular, the agricultural methodologies of multinationals like Monsanto and the resulting loss of biodiversity due to some of these same approaches will affect the planet’s ability to produce food. Some even make the argument that climate change in general is creating food shortages.

Calorie conversion

While I’m a vegetarian, I don’t like to rail about meat-eating, as I feel people need to make their own choices. In the developed world, we have a lot of options if we choose not to eat meat. However, the fact is that most of the world will eat whatever they can and simply cannot afford to be choosy. When looking at the efficiency of meat production, though, there’s really little room for debate.

A calorie conversion ratio of 54:1 means that you get one calorie of edible meat for every 54 you put into the process. This factors in all energy put into the process, such as the burning of fuel, but doesn’t account for the ethical or environmental problems associated with meat production. When you allow for ground water pollution, transport-related air pollution, loss of first-growth forest and jungle, the impact on indigenous societies in the developing world, the horrific conditions of your typical factory farm and the health impacts of a protein and fat-rich, omnivorous diet I’m just not sure that liking the taste of meat adequately makes amends.

Plus, the developing nations of the world, while often not getting enough to eat, don’t develop the western health problems related to a meat and dairy centred diet. That is, until they begin to eat more like us. Meat is sexy and symbolic of affluence. Rising methane levels for the first time in a decade might mean world demand for meat is on the rise. Sure, there are scientific advances which may make traditional animal husbandry and slaughter irrelevant, but in truth how many people do you know who would want to eat their meat if it was made in a lab? If we get to that point, let’s just please all become veggies – it’s far less creepy.

Putting it all together

As long as oil prices continue to rise, countries defend biofuel production, and more people eat more meat, this problem will continue and worsen. So what to do?

Governments must start feeding grains directly to people, instead of cattle and SUVs.
While vegetarianism is a difficult argument to make for many people, we must eat lower on the food chain. Our bodies, our planet, our pocketbooks and the world’s poor will all benefit.
Ride a bike, take public transit or walk. Even just one less car trip per week by each of us would make a huge difference in the demand for fuel.

Do we really want children being sold because their families are hungry and poor? Just one of the seemingly disconnected consequences of a planetary food for fuel swap that has reached utterly unsustainable proportions. The UN is demanding change because it knows that we are headed for catastrophe.

Are we smart enough to avoid it?

No related posts.

Unsubscribe me

James — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 02:27:19 +0000

No related posts.

The scary side of social media

James — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:11:52 +0000

Would you like to be extricating yourself from a relationship with this woman? This came to my attention courtesy of Boing Boing.

The sad thing here is that it’s just more indication that we’ve lost our collective minds. And, as a divorce-wars survivor myself, I can tell you from first-hand experience that airing your laundry in such a public, vindictive way as this is almost certain to backfire to some degree (even if some of the points you make are valid).

Even if that doesn’t prove true in the land of litigation down south, shouldn’t good taste and pride count for something?

Twits shouldn’t twitter

James — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:06:38 +0000

People, use your heads when deciding what to ‘twitter’ about. At a basic level, I can certainly see the value of staying connected with your friends. However, when you start plugging twitter into social networks like Facebook, it’s a recipe for annoyance, plain and simple. Why do I care what you think as you watch some TV show? I don’t.

Personally, I really don’t want to let others know the minutiae of my day and I have absolutely zero interest in knowing what a friend of mine is thinking as they ponder life’s mysteries while sipping a Starbuck’s latte at their laptop keyboard. If I find my online friend’s thoughts of interest, I can easily stay in touch via many other means. Let’s face it, only the early adopters already extensively using social media will be twittering anyway.

I’ve really relegated Facebook to being a way to send a note to friends and acquaintances and that’s pretty much it. I find the information stream coming from Facebook friend updates to be far more than I need, anyway, and I certainly couldn’t imagine having any use for even more of that crap via services like FriendFeed, so why would I want to follow anyone on Twitter? Sorry, the details of your day, or mine for that matter, are simply not that interesting or important. And let’s face it, we all know Facebook friends are not always real friends, anyway.

So, given all this preamble about my preferences, why on earth would I want to see a new level of unwanted detail on Facebook via the Twitter app? But there it is, right below the status updates on my logged-in Facebook homepage. “So-and-so is twittering: my Salsbury steak is mushy …” So what? Apparently your brain took a holiday when you decided to twitter that little nugget.

Just one more reason to ignore Twitter and use Facebook even less.

Iraq war photo essay

James — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:47:11 +0000

Are you a mud person or a sand person? In this piece the narrative is just as important as the pictures. Courtesy Slate.

No related posts.

Social software concerns

James — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:45:54 +0000

I don’t know what to make of Facebook. Honestly. I’ve never used MySpace and doubt I ever will. I started using LinkedIn, but found it of limited appeal because I couldn’t do anything much with it. Then I joined Facebook and used it like a madman for two or three weeks. Now I find I’m lucky if I look at it a couple times a week. And on and on this pattern goes. Trying and sticking with one tool consumes more time than I have and it’s often a hassle trying a new one.

As an agent for change, I see real potential in online community. However, when it comes to casual or fun tools, with every new social software tool, I’m forced to invite a list of users and then go virtually doing things together. I’m afraid after full days in the online world I tend to spend my spare time taking care of my body through real-world pursuits.

Perhaps trying and using new social software tools would be less of a pain if open authentication really took hold. For example, using the OpenID concept, having one central ID and contact list would mean that you could sign into any one of these applications and invite friends without ever having to import or transfer anything between platforms. If using Flickr, last.fm, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and/or any other of a myriad tools meant you could simply sign up and login without creating a new account, I’m sure I’d try and use a lot more software.

Extend this concept to an open API across the social software world and, well …. OK, I’m dreaming in technicolour. Enough of that, because, along with many other things that would probably cripple revenue opportunities the individual vendors.

Webreakstuff got it right, methinks, when they mused about the value of OpenID and microformats to help open up social networks from this perspective:

I want networks to ask me, right off the bat when signing up, if I already have a profile that can be imported in (through hCard+XFN). I type in the URL for my OpenID and the network gets my information (gets OpenID page, downloads hCard formatted information, builds my user information based on that). Then it can grab my list of friends from XFN formatted data. With one textfield (the URL for either my OpenID or a profile on a different network), it would pre-populate both my information and the information for friends I want to add. Sweet.

Beyond the hassle of using Facebook enough to leverage its value, I’ve always had questions about its security and whether it exposed too much. I’ve heard stories about identity theft through a little solid Facebook-ing coupled with a little Google research. The fact that joining groups may expose you to far more openness than you’d like AND that profiles become littered with moronic applications and the lustre begins to wear off a bit.

Like anything new which presents some level of opportunity to be exploited, the hype abounds for Facebook. Applications for the API roll out left, right and centre, but I’m pretty sure almost no one is making real money off them yet.

Newspapers and mock newscasts are making sure they don’t get left behind either. However, if Facebook had not been hyped mercilessly over the past year, do you think the New York Times would bother with it? I don’t.

While I agree that corporations tend to ignore things to which they should pay more attention, I think Stowe Boyd misses the point about productivity. Corporations are notoriously late adopters, and I would lean toward most use of Facebook in the office environment as a waste of time. The nature of the Facebook environment means that doing one thing, leads to another, which leads to another. Updating your status can quickly become a game of scrabble or multiple posts to friends’ walls.

There’s a much stronger argument for using instant messaging, wikis, and employee forums as internal productivity tools and leveraging tools like blogs, forums, and feeds for external marketing communications. I guess that’s the point that I’ve been coming to in this piece. Specific tools are good at specific jobs and, when they have solid rationale, they should be leveraged to maximum advantage, whether it’s for business, personal or community-building purposes.

I’m not sure, though, that the usefulness I see in a lot of social software extends to using every new tool that comes along and taking the time to keep using it, particularly when none of the systems will talk to each other.

Social networks for social research

James — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 01:35:35 +0000

Social networks are cool. But to get any benefit out of them, it is pretty important to spend significant and frequent chunks of time using them. I’ll admit it, I got bored with Facebook quickly and now I’m lucky if I check it twice a week. For me, in practical terms, a tool like Facebook for regular social discourse just can’t hold my interest for long. Use the concept to build something around an important issue or as an agent of real change and that’s different.

While my misgivings about Facebook make me doubt its usefulness as anything but fun diversion, a Danah Boyd essay from June has me wondering if there’s something deeper to online social networking, in terms of social research, and what these systems say about us. I’ll admit to the kind of knee-jerk reaction to MySpace that Danah writes about as she notes the class distinction between users of the two sites.

The discomfort in her writing doesn’t take away from what seem to be pretty keen observations about kids, their choice of social network and the broader perceptions around that. Demographic and psychographic comparisons of the two types of users very clearly delineate along socio-economic lines. While I’m no ivy-leaguer, the clean design and visual ubiquity of Facebook profiles appeals to me much more than the garish varieties of MySpace pages – I like white space and consistency. While it’s easy to see the appeal of these stark differences for marketers, how can we use this information to effect positive social outcomes?

Perhaps the divides between users of the two systems is more depressing social commentary on how we make assumptions about each other (and assumptions parents make about ‘their’ kids using Facebook):

Danah Boyd:
The division around MySpace and Facebook is just another way in which technology is mirroring societal values. Embedded in that is a challenge to a lot of our assumptions about who does what. The “good” kids are doing more “bad” things than we are willing to acknowledge (because they’re the pride and joy of upwardly mobile parents). And, guess what? They’re doing those same bad things online and offline. At the same time, the language and style of the “bad” kids offends most upwardly mobile adults. We see this offline as well. I’ve always been fascinated watching adults walk to the other side of the street when a group of black kids sporting hip-hop style approach. The aesthetics alone offend and most privileged folks project the worst ideas onto any who don that style. When I see a divide like this, I worry because it reproduced the idea that the “good” kids are good and that Facebook participation is good.

But are these conclusions about social class and online social network correct across the board? After all, MySpace came first and appeals to younger users, probably in part, because of the colourful and tacky way profiles can look, and that it’s much more about music, hip-hop and entertainment than is Facebook. Notwithstanding the fact that the clean white Facebook interface is not changeable, users can still trash up their space like crazy with everything from cyber-drink purchases, to zombie status and all manner of the downright silly and useless. And, while Facebook came later and started as a closed college network, it’s trying to become the platform for everyone. Just look at all the postings on Craigslist for Facebook application developers if you don’t believe me.

Certainly, it seems that some interesting research into behaviour and association can be done through online social networking, but I’m not sure it can inform us much beyond seeing if that behaviour is mirrored in the real world, or if something different or more profound is derived from using online social networks.

I know one thing. From a taste perspective (and this isn’t a knock against hip-hop, MySpace OR those who like them), I’m no more likely to listen to hip-hop than I am to use MySpace. Does that make me an elitist or racist? No.