e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • TiddlyWiki – a reusable non-linear personal web notebook

    TiddlyWiki has some unusual affordances that makes it suited to somewhat different tasks than other wikis I’ve seen (though I remind you that I am a wiki newbie). To begin with, the display allows you to call up a number of posts (which the developer calls “tiddles”) on the same page. This makes it well-suited to help users follow a train of thought across a number of entries. (I’d love to see a similar interface that enables me to aggregate a chain of blog-to-blog links and trackbacks on one page.) It also encourages shorter, one- or two-paragraph posts. Furthermore, TiddlyWiki is 100% client-side, using only HTML and Javascript. This means you can’t do things like version control and roll-back, but it’s incredibly lightweight and easy to install. Calling it a “non-linear personal web notebook” sounds about right; it’s useful for blog-like journaling by an individual but in a more interconnected and non-linear way. I may use this tool to create the educational conversation pattern language wiki I’ve been thinking about.

    Found via heyblog.

  • Hands-on Software Engineering e-Courses In Virtual PC Sandboxes

    O’Reilly (the premiere IT publishing house) now offers hands-on software training through a partnership with Useractive which, in turn, has a partnership with the University of Illinois. What’s interesting about the offering is the way that it’s apparently accomplished technically and what that affords. From a user’s perspective, you use your web browser to gain access to a desktop with all the development tools installed as well as a shell that gives step-by-step instructions. You do your development (in Microsoft Visual Studio or whatever is appropriate) within the browser and then click a button to submit your work to an instructor (presumably an U of I professor or grad student).

    How does this work? My best guess is that each student is getting access to a computer with all the appropriate stuff installed using some desktop sharing technology like RealVNC. All of the development tools have been installed on the remote machine, as well as the instructional shell (which, in most cases looks like it was slapped together using Visual Basic). But that wouldn’t be enough to make this venture profitable; how could they afford to have all of those machines available, as well as the staff to reset them after each student use? I suspect that remote machines are not physical boxes. Instead, they are probably virtual machines run using something like Virtual PC or VMWare. When the student is done with the lesson, the virtual machine just resets to the original image of the PC before the training started. Pretty slick.

    There are companies that are trying to use this same strategy for creating training sandboxes on web-based apps where you wouldn’t want learners to change data in the production environment (e.g., a trading system or a CRM application). This strikes me as a lot more complicated to get right than a desktop setup like O’Reilly has, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In the meantime, this looks like a strategy that mid-sized to large organizations could replicate internally for desktop apps, and it also looks like it may be a winner for alliances between companies like Useractive and schools like U of I.

  • Your Writing Style Should Influence Your Blog Layout

    You’ll get even more mileage from Amy Gahran’s must-read series on the seven styles of blog posts if you consider it in conjunction with the site usability findings of the Eyetrack III project. For example, the study found that pages with large headline font sizes relative to the article text encourage scanning and discourage careful reading. So if you tend to do a lot of link or blurb posts, then large headlines probably serve your readers well. However, if you tend to write a fair percentage of longer posts, though, (assuming that you want people to actually read those posts), then you probably want to keep the headlines smaller and in line with the main text of the post. Also, long posts tend to pull the reader down the page more than short blurbs. So if you use a lot of short posts (or if you write long posts but only show a paragraph or two on the main page) then your site navigation design will matter more, since users will tend to use it more heavily rather than following the content flow on the home page.

    Other interesting findings from Eyetrack III:

    • Most readers will scan at least five headlines, whether or not they are “above the fold.” So don’t worry too much about scrolling.
    • The first few words of your post title have a strong influence on whether your readers keep reading. Make them count.
    • “If your desire is to have website readers examine all or most of the type on your homepage, you may want to keep headline size and blurb size comparable.”

    I’ll be incorporating some of these findings into the forthcoming site redesign of e-Literate.

  • The Incredible Hulk Has a Weblog?

    This is too weird. Give the guy a movie and he thinks that everybody wants to know the mundane details of his life. Sheesh. Can you say “narcissism,” boys and girls?

  • RSS Feeds for Search Engines: A Very Good Thing

    I just upgraded to the long-awaited 2.0 version of NetNewsWire (NNW) (still in beta). So far, the new feature that is going to make the biggest difference to me is the ability to easily subscribe to search results in Blogdigger, Daypop, or Feedster. Basically, I enter a search term (e.g., “informational cascades”) and choose the search engine. NNW then creates a new RSS subscription for the results of the search term. This is going to be enormously useful in terms of keeping up on the latest mention of a meme I’m interested in, a company I’m following, a political issue, etc. I really, really hope that Google implements search term RSS feeds as well.

    The other things I like in the new release (many of which are just catch-up features versus the new competition) are much faster feed refreshes, the ability to flag content in order to store it indefinitely, and the ability to create a “smart feed” that highlights any posts from your various subscriptions that have certain characteristics (e.g., a link to your blog, the words “informational cascades” in the description, etc.)

  • Multimedia vs. Text Comprehension: Empirical Data

    The Eyetrack III project has has conducted a

  • Given Enough Eyeballs, Are All Fact-Checking Errors Shallow?

    Open Source advocate Eric Raymond once famously wrote, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” After the whole Dan Rather distributed debunking episode, I’m wondering if the same could be true of all (or, at least, many) problems with fact-checking public statements. This would include articles in the mainstream press, of course, but it could also apply to political campaign statements and consumer product claims, among others.

    It seems to me that it would be relatively easy to formalize a structure that would be well-suited to this task. What I have in mind is something that is like FactCheck.org in its goals but like Wikipedia in its social organization. Basically, somebody would submit a factual claim to the community for substantiation. Using some social interface, whether it’s a discussion board with collaborative filtering, a wiki, or something else, the community members would submit data and analysis and collectively negotiate the filtering of that data and analysis to get the best quality possible. You could either leave the system as a pure social negotation or make it a hybrid by adding an editorial staff (of veteran journalists, maybe?) to help with the vetting of community input.

    If I were the owner of a major media outlet like CNN or The New York Times, I would create a home for a community like this so that (a) it could improve the quality of the journalism my company produces and (b) it builds a strong, loyal, quality-focused, and non-partisan (or, really, multi-partisan) community around my brand.

    But that’s just me.