Dumkopf!

Sight without eyes

Wired magazine has lost the zest it purveyed in the early days but it still comes up with some zingers.

"The brain doesn't care where visual input comes from. So why not see with a camera jacked into your tongue?" asks Michael Abrams in the December issue.

Now if you've ever wondered about reality beyond the visible spectrum, seeing with your elbow can really get you twisted.

Why not crank up the brain implants to take in radio waves? Use your head as a phone? See in the dark?

Furthermore, can you trust your eyes? Photographs are now a form of fiction. How about what you see when you peer at your dog? It's confusing world. All bits.

A new kind of software

Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science is a mind-blowing book. Not that I've read it -- I'm perhaps 50 pages in, a mere grain in the sandbox of this monster tome. But already I've been overwhelmed as Wolfram explains that every scientist before him has gotten it all wrong, and his notions will revolutionize not only physics and chemistry, but economics, sociology, and psychology, too. (My marginal note to myself: Cojones.)

In a nutshell, Wolfram's thesis is that nature can't be described by a bunch of equations. In the real world, processes interact -- and each come away changed. Algorithms make a better worldmeme. Wolfram posits that just about anything can be explained by the interaction of a few simple programs.

If that's all there were to it, Wolfram might have a shot at surpassing Hawking's Brief History of Time for the least read popular book ever published. But today on Wolfram's web site, I happened upon The New Science Explorer.

The Explorer is software that lets you perform Wolfram's experiments as you read along. Wow! For $65, you can follow the original research. I ordered a copy immediately. Maybe when I retire to a desert island, I'll have time to work my way through all of Wolfram's work. This is the way science should be learned!

Visual Thesaurus Update

Navigation has been improved on Plumb Design's Visual Thesaurus. It's worth a visit. You put in a word, e.g. "learning." Here's a snapshot of what you see:

I love tracking a word in this environment -- or even letting it go off on its own, linking one word to the next.

The Airline Trail

Stan Malcolm has been photographing the Air Line Trail, a railroad straight as an arrow from Boston to New York. The right-of-way is now a beautiful state park. Stan's album of photos over the course of a year is inspiring. Go ahead, take a look. And then settle back for thirty minutes of bliss as you click through the collection.

Grokker

Grokker

InfoRomanticism?

InfoRomanticism on the Internet
Romantic sensibility in the design of online content

To stimulate the visualization of potential answers, apply the art of drawing. This takes the form of hard sketches. Other synonyms include models, diagrams, renderings, thumbnails, storyboards, flat prototypes, studies, and "wireframes" (a term that I recently picked up). The benefit of drawing is to quickly provide a relative map of elements, text and graphics, in a playful format to expedite exploration of ideas. Drawing promotes an organic growth of concepts. Toggling between risk-taking and discovery-making is inherent here. Such a conceptual evolution provides an engaging platform to determine distinction and relevance of a variety of approaches. This, in turn, streamlines a concept's approval and translation into code.

Color

This evening I read Bill Horton's Illustrating Computer Documentation, the Art of Presenting Information Graphically, On Paper and Online. (1991)

What a practical book! Now out of print, you can buy an electronic copy for $20 from Bill's website. Such a deal.

Bill goes on to give lots of information about color, some of it, ah, eye-opening. What freaks me out is how little use of color one finds in books, cases, "white" papers, and so forth.

The next chapter, Enriching Graphics, describes such things as how to number graphics and captions. Captions! Authors will spend hours getting the words just right or diddling over a comma, but dash off captions as if they were a useless bother. I have news: People read subheads, then captions, and then, if they're still on board, the body copy.

So many reminders. Page design. Cultural nuances. Symbol libraries. On and on. Illustrating Computer Documentation is chock full of rules of thumb and practical advice.

Engineer's UI

New Definition of Literacy?

Stephen's Web features an article today entitled The New Literacy.

Academics are wringing their hands over the decline in student literacy. Professors lament that their charges can't write a sentence, follow the rules of grammar, or read a complex passage. Last year researchers found that most of the students on the campus of a California State University lacked the skills to read the textbooks in their heavy backpacks.

Perhaps the current crop of students fill in for reading with other forms of literacy. They are "polyfocal."

Stephen Downes says,

Stephen purports that

Perhaps taking in many short bursts of information in parallel is superior to the text-only communication we are accustomed to. Stephen concludes, "The new literacy may not be an even greater grasp of the fine points of language, but rather, a capacity to move beyond the limits of text and to manipulate experience directly."

Robert Horn tells the story of a medical student at Stanford who whizzes through medical texts, taking in their messages by reading only the pictures.

There's not so much wrong with having a short attention span for a person who can grok deep meaning in tiny bursts of time.

OLL Nielsen & Flanders

On Wednesday morning, I dragged myself out of bed to listen to Vince Flanders and Jakob Nielsen critique webpages in what was falsely billed as "USABILITY WRESTLEMANIA."

Vince is author of Web Pages That Suck and a very funny fellow. (When Gloria met Vince and said, “Hi!”, Vince replied “Not since 1970.”) Jakob is a useability guru whose own site is visually dull because he refuses to use graphics.

Jakob and Vince gave two-minute reviews of websites. Live. We start with the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Confusing. Activities and information buttons intermingled.

U.S. Airways. Let’s make a reservation. Unlike the DMV, you can tell where you are. Reservation is up front while most people would want to do research first. Which Hartford airport? The page would not work for the visually impaired, because the “Continue” button would have dropped off the right side of the screen. One of the Hartford choices is a private airport that U.S. Air does not fly to.

What are the three worst things designers do? Vince:

1. You gotta know your target audience. You should be able to figure out what someone is doing within four seconds. The Suttleworth site addresses the needs of the designer, not the reader.
2. Inappropriate use of technology. See webpagesthatsuck.com.
3. Poor navigation.

Vince’s best things people do.

1. Target audience. You’re all going to die! Buy life insurance.
2. International Herald Trib site. Select font size, one or three columns. An amazing tour de force. (Glish.com enables you to change font face.)
3. appropriate tech. slide a frog.

Jakob pointed out these web sins:

1. No prices. Not providing information people need to know.
2. Big blocks of text.
3. Inflexible search. Needs prioritization.

Jakob’s “what people do well”

1. Search boxes are more prevalent
2. Fewer gratuitous, bandwidth-hogging images
3. Real-time update inventories, “Only two copies left”

Too bad Vince and Jakob wouldn't wrestle or even argue. (Their websites praise one another.) Vince at least showed up with garish wrestling garb. I had hoped they'd dig into some eLearning pages, but I guess that's a bit much to hope for when the vendors in the Expo are footing part of the bill. Can't bite the hand that feeds and all that.

Design Not Found

Bad Designs

Interface Hall of Shame

Usable Web

Seeing what works

Last night I read an article by Ruth Clark in The eLearning Developer's Journal that clarified several things my gut had told me were important to design. Read it yourself, but just to tantalize you, I'll summarize part of her Six Principles of Effective e-Learning: What Works and Why.

Over the past decade, Richard Meyer and colleagues at U.C. Santa Barbara have measured the effectiveness of text, graphics, and sound in multimedia learning. He found that:

• A combination of text and relevant graphic improves learning 89% over text-only.
  
• Animation with narration (sound) was 80% more effective than animation with written captions. Caution: using both sound and a written caption overloads the senses and degrades learning performance.
  
• Too much is too much. Superfluous graphics cut learning rates in half. Similarly, students learned 69% better with lessons that were light on text than on full-bodied versions.
  
• Treat the learner as a human being, using you and I, informality, and a human-life avatar or guide, and learning increases.
  Posted by Jay Cross at 03:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

CA Award Winner

Color, Contrast & Dimension. A beautiful site and Communications Arts award-winner.

Empowering the visual sense

Here's a simple little application that opens the mind to the possibilities in the near-term future. The application is called Small Blueprinter.

You slap together a diagram of a building in seconds. (Hey, this is only windows and doors.)

Push a button for an isometic view:

Push again for a walkthrough. This is the view from my front door at sunset.

I only stumbled across this fifteen minutes ago. It's a mind-strecher, no?

I'm developing a resource section

I'm developing a resource section on visualization. My opening is:

envision. 1. To know in advance: anticipate, divine, foreknow, foresee, see. See FORESIGHT, SEE. 2. To form mental images of: conceive, envisage, fancy, fantasize, image, imagine, picture, see, think, vision, visualize.

Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition. 1995

envisioning. 1. Seeing from a fresh perspective. 2. Looking at relationships and non-linear sequences. 3. Imagining and prototyping new ideas. 4. Focusing and documenting the flow of group discussion. 5. Shortening the time it takes learners to say, "Now I see." 6. What visionaries do.

Internet Time Group, 2002

from Lockergnome this morning: Zone-Tour

from Lockergnome this morning:

Zone-Tour

Photography is another love of mine (surpassed only by my love of computers). Maybe it isn't photography itself that catches my interest, but maybe it is more the possibility of stepping outside of the norm and seeing things that most other people don't see. This web site, zone-tour.com, is the essence of what I am talking about. Its developers call it an urban exploration to show you a world otherwise hidden and out of mind. Most people don't think of the world that exists beneath their feet or on the roof of their building... but these people do! They spend their time taking pictures and videos of these out-of-the-way of places to show the rest of us who have never thought about them. Check out the pictures of an old German bunker in France, or look through the pictures of the Stanton Sub Station in New York. All the photos on this web site are beautifully taken and you can even do a search on the web site by country to see if there are any "hidden worlds" near you.

Australia's Living Heritage, Arts of

Australia's Living Heritage, Arts of the Dreaming
Jennifer Isaacs, JB Books

I read this picture book/essay while on vacation in Australia. It describes Aboriginal art from baskets to rock carvings to bark painting to body painting to decorated weapons to sculpture.

"All Aboriginal art is symbolic; much of it is geometric of non-figurative." In fact, it's quite a surprise that the art of the oldest continuous culture in the world (40,000 - 60,000 years old) expresses itself in a form that could be mistaken for "modern" abstract art. Lots of circlues and dots and wavy lines, generally recounting one's personal creation myth and ancestor stories.

Western eyes often miss the frame of Aboriginal art, for it often incorporates found objects from nature. A pile of rocks two blocks down the road from a painted boulder may represent the eggs of an emu.

Lego man. Very cool.

Lego man. Very cool.

Nifty visual summaries of "lessons"

Nifty visual summaries of "lessons" from the ASTD Conference.

MAP.NET -- a geographic plot

MAP.NET -- a geographic plot of realms of knowledge. Pretty, but sparsely populated.

In Chicago last month, I

In Chicago last month, I dropped my Olympus D510 digital camera on the sidewalk bordering Michigan Avenue. No dents, but the shutter button would not move. Olympus wants $143 to repair it. I paid $400 for the D510 last year. Now it sells for $225 - $250. Alas, the D510 will become landfill.

Today I pawed the Canon S30, Olympus 720UZ, and Nikon 885 at Sarber's Cameras on Solano. They're each $500. They're each 3 megapixels. The Canon is unattractive. The Nikon feels nice in the hand. The Olympus has an 8x zoom. I poured over specs and reviews at Digital Photo Review, an excellent resource, by the way. Tomorrow I plan to give myself the 720UZ for my birthday. I'm turned on.

Follow-up a day later.
The electronic viewfinder on this camera drives me nuts. I intend to return it tomorrow.

And two days thereafter.
My new Olympus D40 just arrived from J&R.

Raven maps are beautiful National

Raven maps are beautiful

National Geographic Map Machine Tornado Touchdowns

Interface Hall of Shame

Interface Hall of Shame

'Screen Language': The New Currency

'Screen Language': The New Currency for Learning
John Seely Brown

"I was a dinosaur," says Brown.

According to Seely Brown, there is a new kind of digital divide now and it is the divide between faculty and students. Faculty, stuck in yesterday's analog world, are confronted with students who arrive nicely fluent in digital technology and the virtues of hyperspeed. Students already have a handle on how to convey their emotional states electronically. It's up to adults to learn that vernacular, he said. Educators who create programs for adult learning and distance learning need to apply the vernacular and deepen and strengthen these new means of communication.

TextArc, an alternative way to

TextArc, an alternative way to view text.

You must experience TextArc to appreciate its beauty and potential. Just do it.

The n_Gen Design Machine

The n_Gen Design Machine is a rapid prototyping graphic design engine that generates savable graphic files from the user's own text content filtered through n_Gen's Design Modules. The latest release of n_Gen (v 0.98d) and Design Modules (PINK SERIES) are now available for download.

The Guggenheim has a stunning

The Guggenheim has a stunning site. I loved the motorcycle show and the on-line version is very good. The main entry page presents tiny thumbnails of every bike in the show. Click to see pictures, stories, specs, different views. Lots of information is close at hand.

The collection of French art from Russian collections is breathtaking. You simply have to see it. Music is matched to the individual painter. History is well-told, an audio narrative to set the context and written historical info on each canvas. It's easy to figure out. You can zoom in on the pictures. And the art is definitive. Perfecto.

People signing at UVA

People signing at UVA