UI resources

So like all good instructional designers I have just enough knowledge to know that I don't know much at all about a wide variety of topics, one of those being interface design. I have a brother-in-law who is currently working as a contractor for Microsoft, on a UX (user experience) team for a product that he could tell me about . . . except for some pesky little non-disclosure agreement. I did, however, ask him what he tends to read as background material for his job--here was his response:

The design of everyday things (or the Psychology of Everyday Things) is still considered good. The principles of interactive design haven't changed that much by what I know. There's a great book just put out by MIT press called Designing Interactions, highly recommended but not a textbook, per se.

The book that gets the most circulation around my office is Don't Make Me Think by Krug. For usability issues, it's great and still current, and specifically about web pages. The irony is, it's almost impossible to really make it work across the board for an application like the one we are building, which has a really high learning curve and such a specific alpha user base. Objective: teach marketing professionals how to break into the search ad world. Jakob Nielson still gets some play, but is outdated and more or less out of touch. There are also a number of blogs that get some play. Blogs are really valuable and getting more so all the time, beyond books I think.

Agreed on the last point (with obvious exceptions like http://sitcogblog.blogspot.com, I mean really, who is writing this crap?). Joking aside I always get interested in what practitioners do. After all if they get paid to do it, it must be worth something right?

Come big or stay at home?

One of my favorite expressions that seems to sum up a Washington Post Story from 12 former Army captains

There is one way we might be able to succeed in Iraq. To continue an operation of this intensity and duration, we would have to abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service. Short of that, our best option is to leave Iraq immediately. A scaled withdrawal will not prevent a civil war, and it will spend more blood and treasure on a losing proposition.

As a side note, this apparently didn't make the op-ed print section, and is only available online. You wouldn't be alone in asking why they ran an op-ed piece on a movie producer but didn't run this one. But you'd still be shy an answer.

So this is a nice bi-partisan slap really (which is always something I prefer), the open hand is delivered to "stay the course" advocates whose one variation is a troop surge (which the captains specifically refer to as a method of getting insurgents to relocate as opposed to just plain getting them, and pissing off local populations in the process), and the back-hand is delivered to the steady withdrawal folks. Thus the come big or stay at home comment--start a conscripted military or send them back home as quickly as possible.

I honestly don't know what to think either way, but I do know that if you're one who claims to listen to commanders on the ground, here's 12 of them talking.

I do know one thing. I remember on 9/11 Tom Nickel (one of our best and brightest doctoral graduates) came into our office and was talking about our history with Osama Bin-Laden, that we trained him and armed him as a fighter in the Afghanistan war against the former Soviet Union. This was all news to me at the time. The reason I bring this up is that this is one of our current strategies in Iraq. Frustrated by the gloves we put on in not wanting to use overwhelming brutal force (acting as insurgents to fight insurgents) we're choosing to wage war by proxy, arming Sunni militias to oust Al-Qaeda operatives. We train them, we arm them and then (at some point) we have to leave. A former ruling minority surrounded by their former oppressed majority. Looking in my crystal ball, I gotta say this can't be a good thing for us.

School Vouchers, Oreos, and Cheesecake

So I can't help but weigh in on this issue, with the vote coming in a few weeks' time. For those of you outside the state of Utah, we're considering a measure to put between $500-$3,000 dollars (per student) into the hands of families who send their children to private schools. The summary bullet points for the pro-voucher folks are some pretty good sound bites. According to the folks at UtahVouchers.com, this is about:

Your Money
Your Child
Your Choice

One of my favorite ads for the voucher program is a couple explaining it with an Oreo analogy. Each child in a class of thirty has an Oreo for every thousand dollars spent on them (7,000 per child), one goes to a private school, taking the maximum 3,000 and the remaining amount stays in the school. The argument is a smaller class size, with more money for the public school--plus the one child gets an opportunity for private school they might not otherwise have.

Here's my problem with it (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). First, the $4k stays in the school district for only 5 years. I'm not clear on where it goes after that, but it goes--presumably to the private schools where it is being spent, more likely back into the general fund that is supporting the voucher program (more on that in a bit). The idea is that natural enrollment increases will replace those dollars--which sounds great as long as our per pupil funding stays the same, and gets adjusted for inflation (note this would just be to support the status quo, we'll talk opportunity costs in a bit too).

So during that first 5 years, where is the money coming from? The state general fund, not the uniform school fund (as UtahVouchers.com is quick to point out). A seemingly fabulous idea, but here's the opportunity cost. What if you took the 9.2 million dollars for vouchers and put it into the poorest of our school districts? Increasing teacher pay/professional development/mentoring/retention, reducing class sizes, increasing access to technology, providing more vocational classes and programs? Yes it's a drop in the bucket in terms of the 3.5 billion dollar uniform school fund, but here's the thing. It isn't one bucket. It's several different buckets and you're dropping it in the one that's already full. What's more, you're doing it with everyone's tax dollars.

Briefly let's talk about another fact that UtahVouchers.com openly discloses:

. . . the state's cost of every child in private school is supplemented by money paid by their parents, since the voucher normally does not cover the entire cost of tuition

This makes a tremendous amount of sense, private schools can get expensive. In fact, according to ChoiceInEducation.org, the median tuition rate is $3,800 per year. Let's crunch some numbers. Someone in the middle of the low income 2 person household (say a single mom) making $12,210/year qualifies for the full $3,000. She has to make up the $800 difference--which is about 6.5% of her annual income spent towards education. A single mom in the middle of the 2nd highest bracket earns $57,989/year and qualifies for only a $1,000 voucher. She makes up the $2,800 which amounts to 4.8% of her annual income. So it looks like we're helping the low income families, and that's certainly the way school choice is being pitched, but in reality we're helping people who don't need that much help at all. All of this assumes, of course than an equal range of income families participate and that the only costs of private school are tuition. Every additional dollar spent on things like transportation, school uniforms, etc . . . can be subsumed by the wealthier family a lot more easily. My bet, is that this will consist of a series of $500 tax breaks for the wealthiest families who already send their kids to private schools.

The honest sound bite for vouchers is

Your Money (I've got plenty of my own)
My Child
My Choice

We may not be taking Oreos away from public education, but we are adding Oreos to the education pie, just concentrating them into a tiny little slice that goes to the guy who already ate all the cheesecake, and the bon-bons, and a whole box of dove ice cream bars.

The power of large numbers

I just got the following message that gmail somehow failed to flag as spam (I can't possibly be reading my messages faster than other folks--so what gives? I've grown accustomed to certain advantages in not keeping up to the minute with my email).

Dear Friend,
I am Mr.Chi-Lin Huang I work with Bank Sino Pac, formerly known
asInternational Bank of Taipei as Executive Vice President & Deputy Head
of Division,Wealth ManagementI have a deceased client funds in my bank of
$17.3M USD and I need you to front as beneficiary,your benefit is 50% of
the total funds.Ifinterested
contact me with your Name,Address and Phone number,for more information on

Email:hchilintw57@yahoo.com.tw

Email:huang_chilin2000@yahoo.com.tw

Sincerely,
Huang Chi-Lin

As much as I hate to decline potentially lucrative business deals (and of course my whole life I've being dying to front as a beneficiary) I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm not going to fall into 8.74 million dollars by contacting Huang Chi-Lin. And my guess is that millions of the recipients of this message feel the same way. So why go phishing with such lousy bait? Because even if you only git one nibble in a million, you've come out ahead. You've literally made almost no investment to get started.

What do we have in education that compares to this--a relatively low investment (near negligible) with the potential for high payoff? I got thinking about this after a DRK-12 conference in which there was much discussion of the "next generation" of educational problems. Several of these discussion points were closely related to web 2.0 kinds of issues (flickr was explicitly invoked for example) along with (as you'd expect MMORPGs/environments like 2nd life). While there might be tremendous benefit to seeing someone put together a learning environment in 2nd life and then share it with the world it is not what I would characterize as "almost zero investment" quite the contrary, open education is all about investment--and in some sense the ROI isn't all that grand. To date, the biggest re-use I've seen of my (admittedly quite small) contribution to the community has come from/to myself. Students going through the new CS3 version of the flash class can choose to use the Flash 8 materials if they have an old version of the software--and pull them down from OCW.

I'll grant that this has been tremendously useful. But--this still involved a fair amount of effort to put up (although I'll admit I didn't do much of the heavy lifting). So if open courseware and open education aren't the exciting investment opportunity of the educational domain what is? What comes at a minimal cost with the long odds of a high payoff? I see it in bad ways of course, my kids negotiate everything and I mean everything. Talk literally is cheap, so they've learned to speak up and see what happens--because they know it's a non-zero chance that we'll cave or change our minds. Sounds a lot like some of the behaviorist "pigeon pecking" experiments.

But can't this be a force for good? How about open content spam? You email a Shakespearean sonnet to the in boxes of teeming millions with the hope that a handful will actually read it. You add commentary/critique/discussion opportunities with the hope that 10% of them will continue on after just reading the sonnet.

Everything new is old . . . again

So what is a next generation console game? According to this BBC article, and the fine folk helming Halo 3, it's this:

We're expanding our ability to empower our fans to really take the game and make it their own.

Halo 3 will include tools to let gamers edit their own game movies and share them among friends, swap photographs from games, as well as re-build many of the maps the makers have provided, through a feature called Forge.

This sounds really cool, really innovative. Ground-breaking. Sort of a Web 2.0 vision of console gaming, that nobody has ever even conceptualized before, much less put on store shelves . . . Oh wait tic, maybe this has been done before. In fact, this is really just about game mod tools--which have been around at least since 1991 - with the Bard's Tale Construction Set. I personally didn't use the BCS, but I did play the Bard's Tale series a *cough* few times. And if I hop in my way back machine I can remember the Adventure Construction Set, also on my C-64 but back in 1985. I had this really cool Star Trek adventure where you had to repel a bunch of Klingon boarders and then storm their ship. But I digress. Granted, this is a bit different since it's difficult to build much of a developer community when the majority of people transfered files on a 5 1/4" diskette. But here's the thing:

It's
been
done
before

Not that that's a bad thing--the market clearly is ready to support it, and would like to see it again.

Here's my takeaway on a professional level. Chances are excellent that whatever you're working on, it's been done before too. PBL for instance. You could say that it started with Howard Barrows in the late 60s and you'd be right, but whether or not he created it with a blind eye to educational theory it has clear conceptual ties to Dewey and the broader educational reform movement, and that's just taking one step back in time.

We are really good at putting our conceptual blinders on and forging ahead, perhaps covering territory that's already been done--which isn't a bad thing in and of itself, I'm a big fan of replication research, but when you replicate inadvertently, that's a very bad thing. In general, you want to tweak the design a bit--explore an outcome that the initial study didn't, or modify the intervention slightly. And the best way to move forward is to read what's already been done to help inform your replication work. Lit review, lit review, lit review. Probably the most glossed-over practicum experience in any doctoral program--which is bad since doc students produce such a huge amount of the primary research.

Annunciation is key

So, Deonne, Sarah, and I were at a PI conference in D.C. early this week up until the morning of 9/11. For the most part I didn't think about it too much. We did get a chance to walk the mall on 9/11 before our flight and decided to tour the capital building (where the senate meets). For those of you who haven't been, I highly recommend it, especially if you have someone with you who has been there before. All of the museums were free, as was the tour of the capital building, and there are some dang cool museums too (we went briefly into the holocaust museum, but only had about 45 minutes before we had to hop on the Metro). The Metro is very easy to work with (although I still managed to almost get on the wrong train just about every time--a special thanks to Deonne and Sarah for not letting me head out to the burbs. Oh, and the announcements left a lot to be desired, a bit like the speaker at the drive through).

Anyway, back to the capital building, they gave us what my colleague Kathryn DiPietro (who spent several years in Tennessee) would call a "come to Jesus" talk about the security measures. This involved saying in a loud and clear voice that we were not to leave any belongings in the capital building for any reason, and that we could not bring anything we could eat or drink into the building. This was backed up with very capable steely-eyed flat bellied professionals wearing sunglasses despite the clouds and rain, carrying rifles that (as Danny Vermin might say) could shoot through schools. So I'm a little nervous about the details, and even though Deonne was assured that gum was okay, I decided to confirm with one of said steely-eyed flat bellied professionals and asked "but gum's okay right?" at the second (of three!) checkpoints. Turns out that it's extremely important to emphasize the "m" in gum. Because it sounds a lot like "n" and I got a look (this one was not wearing sunglasses) that made me want to rethink my life.

Something is seriously wrong here

I had no clue about this but according to this article we've got PZEV (partially zero emission vehicles) being sold in 8 states that are illegal to sell in the remaining 42. Now, this isn't necessarily about improved gas mileage, but it is about clean air. As an example of just how clean the air can be:

As the California Air Resources Board has noted, the tailpipe emissions of these cars can be cleaner than the outside air in smoggy cities.

Which may not seem like a big thing here in cache valley, except when you think about our inversion, which can spike us to the top of the list for poor air quality. The cost looks to be about $400 for these cars, which IMO doesn't necessarily price people out of buying a new car, and that's assuming all those costs are passed on to the consumer. Honda, is partially eating these costs on the Accord, and I'm sure there's an economies of scale issue here--if they weren't building two of the same vehicle, and were building more PZEVs that cost should come down. So why I ask you, can't we legalize these vehicles in all 50 states? Better yet, why can't we mandate them? We have the worst vehicle emissions standards in the developed world. Bar none. There are big clean air offenders like China who have cleaner vehicle emissions standards than us, and I don't think we're doing our auto manufacturers any favors by keeping our standards low because their vehicles are often illegal to operate in other countries.

I'm so grateful that the clean air act is protecting us from the sub-humans who would actually attempt to buy a PZEV for use in a state that doesn't have these standards. I would shudder to think that anyone is actually trying to curb pollution.

Linux Home Web Browser

Ok, so there's apparently a big reason why my father-in-law was about ready to throw out this machine. I've succeeded in getting kubuntu 7.04 installed on this lovely work of art but I think I'm going to stop there. Attempts to do anything creative with the video card have not been successful and frankly it's a bit of a miracle I managed to boot off the CD-ROM drive at all. (it essentially ate my first copy of the install disk by marking it up a ton--almost as if a hamster were inside the machine trying to scratch a line on it as it rotated). So kubuntu linux is running great but that's as far as I'm going for now. My father-in-law did ask me to spec out a box to do something more interesting, so I'll keep you posted if anything comes of that.

Linux Home Media Center

I was at my in-laws this past weekend and my father-in-law was all set to discard a 1.6 Mhz 512 RAM Dell Optiplex machine (it even has a firewire card he added on). Putting aside for one moment that these specs are almost on par with my work laptop--and realizing that in retrospect I should have just calmly packed it into the van and said goodbye, I decided to follow up on an ambition I've had for the last couple of years--a home media center that uses Linux. Unfortunately, if it works I'll be giving it back to him because I opened my pie whole a bit too early. Not to mention something like this at our house, with our "TV" and our "stereo" would be a bit like putting a fresh coat of paint on a pig.

So far I'm just at the stage where I'm reading, and Jen is giving me weird looks about the conspicuous box parked in our living room, but I'm starting to get optimistic (when I see videos about people popping in a DVD and having it automagically work right out of the box) and at the same time a bit nervous overall (when I read about a 30 minute project turning into an hours long nightmare). But hey--the hardware (so far) is free right? I'll keep you all posted on just how well this works out.

Right now, the plan is pretty simple (which should help):

• No TV in (they get HD and I don't think this machine could take that kind of heat).
• Simple DVD playback
• .mp3 playback
• web browsing
  
• arcade emulation (when is the last time you played a nice game of space invaders--or the game that could have funded my first year of college: cyberball). This, incidently is the other reason why we can't have something like this in our house.

Large Scale Wireless

So, I pulled this from search engine watch. Apparently Google is part of a coalition of companies petitioning the FCC for some of the airspace that will be vacated by broadcast television when the move to digital TV takes place in a couple of years.

Personally, I like this idea. I currently have one viable option for high-speed: cable through Comcast, and I'll just say that as an ISP they leave a whole lot to be desired. We generally have a couple of down times a month.