digital media musings

notes from San Jose

2007-03-06T16:07:00.000-08:00

So I spent two days with 250 other Adobe certified instructors from around the world, and got to rub shoulders with a number of Adobe employees.

The only piece of information we're allowed to share is that Creative Suite 3 will be announced March 27. This was subsequently reported in the media this week.

It was interesting to talk to trainers coming from the Macromedia side of the house, as Macromedia had run their training partner organization quite differently than Adobe, and now those trainers are part of the Adobe Solutions Network.

Based on conversations I had with other trainers, the market for providing training is currently quite good. Many of them are busier than they'd like and are looking to hire staff. (To work as an ACI, you need to pass an expert-level product exam and have a teaching certificate. Most people get these through Comp TIAA, but state-issued teaching certificates such as I have are also accepted. Those would be minimal qualifications, by the way. You also need high-level knowledge of the product and the ability to teach.)

I learned from the other trainers about an Adobe product called Captivate which I'd been previously unaware of. This product enables training professionals to "quickly create interactive, engaging training content without learning Flash or hiring a professional developer" (according to the website). There are other tools out there, but several trainers told me they really like this one. So I plan to check it out. Adobe sells an online conferencing tool called Connect (formerly Macromedia Breeze) which my colleagues also gave high marks to; it sounded like many of them were using Captivate and Connect together.

I'm unable to reveal any details of the products we saw, but the public beta of Photoshop CS3 should provide some hints. I'll say this: Adobe will probably remain my favorite software company for the foreseeable future.

is there a web 2.0 aesthetic?

2007-02-20T16:22:00.000-08:00

This week's reading of Web 2.0: Mistaking the Forest for the Trees? by Dave Rogers raised more questions than it answered for me about web 2.0. I keep wondering if there's a visual style definitively associated with web 2.0.

I've probably read 15-20 articles about it, and I'm still not clear on what web 2.0 is. User-driven--I get that; Amazon, Google, YouTube MySpace as primary examples--ok; encompassing web-based services; yes. But it seems to be a term bandied about by just about anybody on the hi-tech wagon and used in a multitude of ways.

Tim Reilly, inventor of the term (according to the very web 2.0 Wikipedia site) currently defines it this way:

"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.". [3]

Hmm. . . sounds pretty open-ended and vague.

web site genre--class assignment

2007-02-19T09:11:00.000-08:00

Our genre was government websites. I'm not sure we had a chance to agree on how to define the genre, but some commonalities we found in the sites were:

.gov domains
public-funded
department and agency listings
emergency, regulatory, and elected representative links
search boxes
aggregators to other government sites
bad slogans (say wa?)
options for viewing in multiple languages
section 508 compatibility
Federal sites had a tendency to use a red/white/blue color scheme
Washington state and local sites showed a lot of green and nature

Some sites we looked at were:
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (formerly INS) (www.uscis.gov)
Internal Revenue Service www.irs.gov
Access Washington http://access.wa.gov/
King County http://www.metrokc.gov/

I also looked at
City of Woodinville http://www.ci.woodinville.wa.us/index.asp
Washington State Board for Technical and Community Colleges http://www.sbctc.ctc.edu/

I especially like the Access Washington site. That could be in part because I'm a little familiar with it. From a citizen's point of view it's accessible, including the "how do I" list of quick links on the homepage, prominent search box, tabbed browsing, and homepage access to multiple languages. From a work standpoint I've accessed it to look at job data for my students and look at business license regulations.

City of Woodinville site is pretty decent for a smallish local government site, with links to councilmember email addresses, a list of upcoming events, community profile, and regulations (building codes and permits are hot topics in the city right now, with an imminent rezone with major implications). About 18 months ago, I needed to research the draft comprehensive plan for a piece I wrote about the commercial, residential, and parks & recreation future of the city, and had difficulty locating the information I needed. (Aside: the design definitely says small-town--I'd like to see it look more professional.)

The SBCTC site claims it's recently redesigned with "enhanced usability." It looks better organized than in the past, with links targeted to specific users such as board of trustees members, faculty, administrators, and students. Let's hope so. I've had past trouble locating the information I was looking for on this site.

Final comment: it seems that even more than other genres, it's incumbent upon government sites to think from a user's perspective. What questions do citizens want answered? How can use of confusing acronyms and "gov-speak" be minimized? What level of writing (8th grade? 11th grade) will be understandable to the general public, yet specific enough to answer sometimes-complicated questions? How can citizens contact elected and staff officials? A well-designed government website certainly saves taxpayer dollars by reducing the need to staff phone lines and email-response units.

account and password overload

2007-02-17T17:42:00.000-08:00

I think I've finally hit the wall. This week I failed to log into two of my online bank accounts and had to reset them, and I kept entering the wrong password into the "old" blogger, so it forced me to upgrade to the "new" blogger, which took 20 frustrating minutes of trying to figure out what it was asking for. I think I've exceeded the "standard" seven pieces of information we can hold in our heads, and need to move to fingerprint or iris identification to log in to my many accounts.

Anyway, I went through the painful upgrade process just so I could post a quote from Robert Bringhurst, one of my favorite writers on type design, in which he compares type on a screen vs. type in print:

"The screen mimics the sky, not the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision. It is not simultaneously restful and lively, like a field full of flowers, or the face of a thinking human being, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, or like astronomers, in magnified small bits, examining details. We look to it for clues and revelations more than wisdom. The makes it an attractive place for advertising and dogmatizing, but not so good a place for thoughtful text."

My other tidbit of the week is this YouTube video called Introducing the Book, which makes perfect sense in the context of "conventions" we've been talking about this quarter, and last quarter's discussion of technology adoption. (I actually think they should have dispensed with the laugh track: it insults the poor monk, who has no idea that books need to be read left to right. Humorous to us, but really, how would he know? Future netizens will laugh just as much at us.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRjVeRbhtRU

prioritizing web usability

2007-02-11T19:22:00.000-08:00

Well, I just finished a 4-hour brain-dump about Jakob Nielsen's book, and I'd rather not rehash it here. More about it in Tuesday's class.

But what I will observe, having just turned my InDesign document to a .pdf with some interactive links, is how the "gulf of execution" we learned about in class is very much in evidence in the print-to-web world. InDesign allows capturing weblinks for export into Acrobat, which actually knows what to do with them, but it's nowhere near as simple or elegant as it is to add a hyperlink in Blogger or other online tools. I found the "cognitive load" involved in getting the interactive tools to work gave me a three-Advil headache.

One word: blech.

usability experts are left-brained, designers are right-brained

2007-02-04T20:13:00.000-08:00

Well, the actual title was Usability experts are from Mars, graphic designers are from Venus, but I found the feminine connotation of designers from Venus inaccurate: I've had many talented male students who had a very masculine approach to design. So I'd categorize it as left- and right-brained.

While stereotypes are always risky, let's live dangerously for a moment. There seems to be the lack of a math gene in many of my design students, while the art gene is beautifully and abundantly evident. In fact, one of my favorite stories is of my colleague, an incredibly talented teacher and artist named Beth, who is terrified of math and has the worst sense of direction I've ever seen. Beth has a complementary twin: she is an accountant, with no artistic sense whatsoever. Beth is thin with curly hair; she tells me her twin is stout with straight hair. They must have made an amazingly complete duo in utero.

My students are nearly universally dismayed by math and often put it off until the end of their studies, only to reluctantly find they need remedial study before they can get to college-level math and graduate. They are similarly intimidated by HTML and other forms of coding. Once in a while I get a programmer who wants to learn about design, and they are equally wary of the elements of design (line, shape, color, value, texture, space, and form) and principles (balance, unity, harmony, variety, and emphasis).

The piece articulates the tension between design and structure quite nicely. (It's not much of a stretch to correlate math and coding ability with structure.) I am one of those weird people who has both left- and right-brained traits--I've both written code and designed. This may sound like a good thing, but sometimes I feel like a "Jill of all trades, mistress of none." To translate this saying for our Asian classmates, this sort of means that I can do many things, but none of them especially well.

The required reading for this week, Blueprints for the Web: Organization for the Masses, was less enlightening to me. I've been a sorter since I can remember. When I was a kid, I would periodically dump my piggybank or seashell collection (I grew up near the beaches of Southern California) on the floor and sort, sort, sort. To this day it calms me to sort things, whether it's bills, design books, student work, or categories our college's website redesign (I'm on the redesign committee). Course organization has been one of my focuses in the online classes I teach, and I often get feedback that students like the courses specifically for that reason.

Certainly the point in the article is well-taken that it's enlightening to have many different user perspectives on sorting. One person's Grandma's Recipes is another's Summer Berry Pies.

track steps @ imaginary forces

2007-01-30T19:16:00.000-08:00

begin project 1
click projects button
nothing says "web videos"
click back button
click on "Our Reel"
it wants to load Quicktime
run active x
go back
click projects button
click interactive (with Kathy's help)
click featured projects (doesn't load any)
click honda element web video
click one of the videos
quicktime window comes up
video begins playing

/end project 1
begin project 2
click company
click location
mapquest returns the following message:
MapQuest found a similar location for "530 w 25th, new york, ny 10001". Please select or revise your search.
/end project 2
begin project 3
this experience was frustrating. Cool-looking design, poor user interface. No search box. Not enough clues. Names for options unclear. Visual and interface design are beautiful but not usable. Very typical of Design firms (with a capital D). The site fails to meet expectations for usability, and therefore doesn't reflect well on the company.

Unfortunately, due to the tendency of the user to blame themselves (documented by Norman & Nielson), potential clients trying to review their site will probably assume that they just don't "get" design and that the Design firm knows more than they do.

more thoughts on cluetrain. . .

2007-01-30T16:30:00.000-08:00

well, here's my quick take on the Manifesto:

*the 95 bulletpoints should be condensed to 10
*hyperlinks do flatten hierarchies: after I posted a piece critical of Quark to a public user forum, I received an email from Quark's director of communications. That would have never happened back-in-the-day.
*they were right about markets being conversations
*15. "In just a few more years, the current homogenized 'voice' of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court." Well, we might like to think so, but mission statements and brochures are as omnipresent as ever.
*like so many other publications of the late '90s, Cluetrain smells of internet hysteria. As we learned, the New Economy was subject to many of the constraints of the Old, including the need for sensible business planning. It's not enough to be loved by your customers and to "get" the internet.
*42/43/65. "As with networked markets, people are also talking to each other directly inside the company—and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines.
Such conversations are taking place today on corporate intranets. But only when the conditions are right." "We're also the workers who make your companies go. We want to talk to customers directly in our own voices, not in platitudes written into a script." Corporate blogging (both internal and external) has certainly started a new conversation between employees and customers, and some of the advantages and pitfalls are just now becoming apparent.

the law of unintended consequences

2007-01-29T12:36:00.000-08:00

So industry-watcher and commentator Pariah S. Burke's website is launching a contest to redesign the icons.

"Quark VS InDesign.com Launches Contest to Design Alternate Adobe Creative Suite 3 Icons; Designers to present their visions of Adobe Creative Suite 3 applications in competition for an extensive prize chest. All entries to be compiled into a free library of alternate CS3 icons."

http://www.creativepro.com/story/news/25128.html

What I find most interesting about this whole icon controversy is that it would never have happened without a) the public beta of Photoshop CS3, which alerted designers to the new icon(s), and b) the blogosphere, where the rest of the icons were unveiled in advance of the product release. I can't imagine that the Adobe icon design team (at least in private) welcomes a public referendum on their efforts in the form of a design contest. Quite possibly a contest-entering designer will create a set of icons that are clearly superior.

Just another example of bottom-up, user-generated content turning the status quo on its head. If I were in charge of Adobe's branding strategy right now, I'd be reaching for the Excedrin. On the other hand, it demonstrates how passionate users are about their Adobe applications.

Is this what the Cluetrain Manifesto was talking about?
7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
12. There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

the Adobe CS3 icons

2007-01-28T17:17:00.000-08:00

So this week's reading about HCI (human-computer interface) brings to mind the tempest brewing over Adobe's redesigned icons for the upcoming CS3 (Creative Suite 3). When the original Creative Suite debuted, the beloved Venus icon from Illustrator was replaced with a flower, and the eye icon from Photoshop was replaced with a feather. (InDesign already had a butterfly metaphor, which was retained but updated). Go Live, Adobe's web design program (which has a very small market share compared to industry leader Dreamweaver), got a star metaphor.

Those icons were tweaked in CS2 (created with xray photography), and looked like this:

Users had mixed feelings about these icons, but Adobe's decision to release the products on a synchronized schedule as a suite certainly argued for an overall branding strategy.

In much the same fashion, Adobe's 2005 purchase of Macromedia and resulting integration of the (now confusingly large) product line created the need for a consistent branding strategy.

Here's where it gets interesting. Adobe has traditionally been very secretive about upcoming releases, but decided to break tradition and join the public beta craze with Photoshop CS3. Designers who downloaded the beta noticed a new "PS" icon, and many concluded it must be only for the beta, because it was so minimalist and (some argued) poorly designed.

Lo and behold, John Nack's Adobe blog revealed that these icons are going to ship with the product, and published a link to the remainder of the icons, which can be seen here.

The design user community's response has been overwhelmingly negative. On a good day, designers make Simon Conwell look generous, and they resoundingly gave a thumbs-down to the new design.

Reasons included the following: the two-letter abbreviations force users to perform recall rather than recognition, since the letters must first be interpreted, unlike a symbol. The squares do not differentiate products and therefore don't help the user. The colors do not map via product line (Dreamweaver is one one side of the wheel, Go Live on the other--both are web design tools). The icons may not be accessible to colorblind users. Many two-letter abbreviations might have two meanings: PS could refer to Photoshop or PostScript. The second letter is sometimes lowercase, sometimes small capital.

As an experiment, without comment, I put the wheel up for my design students who are learning the Adobe and Macromedia products, and asked for their feedback.

A sampling of comments: it looks like alphabet soup, how are we to remember what the abbreviations stand for, it resembles the periodic table (which in fact is the metaphor Adobe used), I like the color wheel, why aren't the symbols superimposed on the squares to provide reference, how will I differentiate the icons in the taskbar, why do products such as Flash and Acrobat retain their symbols. My students did solve the mystery of the lowercase vs. small caps: small caps are used for acronyms (FH=Freehand), while lowercase indicates the first two letters (Au=Audition).

One commenter to John Nack's blog (Brian Ellis, 12/28/06--you'll have to search John's page for his comments, as I couldn't link directly to them) did a heuristic analysis which gets to the heart of HCI.

Anyway, I thought the icon redesign makes a wonderful case study for usability analysis. Can't wait to see if the Adobe designers consider the feedback and redesign the icons before the product is released (rumored to be between April and June, so it's very late in the cycle to incorporate changes). It's worth considering that all this pre-release feedback wouldn't have happened without the public beta. Seems to validate the idea that the it's difficult for insiders to accurately analyze design usability. Team members are just too close to the project.

on great industrial design

2007-01-22T12:39:00.000-08:00

I find myself vacuuming a lot lately, and I'm not an inherent clean freak. A few months ago a friend told me about a vacuum cleaner she'd bought that was just amazing. She offered to let me try it, and I was instantly sold. Went out and bought a $450+ vacuum cleaner (well, I shopped the best deal, and actually paid a lot less) the next day.

Why? This vacuum cleaner was so elegantly and simply designed, and so good at cleaning, that I actually find myself wanting to vacuum. I've been a pretty poor housekeeper for years, thanks to working full time, raising 3 kids, and being a perennial student. But the reward of actually seeing what you've cleaned (it has a see-through bagless system) and the intuitive design lead me to get the thing out at least once a week. My husband actually asked if something was wrong with me when he saw me vacuuming weekend after weekend. He thought I'd suddenly developed a case of germophobia.

Regarding Vaun's blog post about the pitfalls of design by committee, this brand was created by a lone inventor who spent years perfecting his design, and the result is a product I truly love to use.

week 3

2007-01-21T18:27:00.000-08:00

So my 1st choice would be to usability expert (that's the title according to chap. 11 in last week's reading, but the "expert" part is a little premature in my case). I am buried in usability books right now, reading Nielson's 2006 Prioritizing Web Usability (which is the book I'll review for our book review), and also Krug's Don't Make Me Think, Norman's The Design of Everyday Things, Nielson's seminal 1999 Designing Web Usability and our class text, Web Redesign 2.0. For good measure, I'm also reading Digital Media: An Introduction, which I'm considering using as a text in a new Survey of Digital Media class suggested by our advisory committee which I'm developing for my program. It was cool to open this last one to a digital media timeline that discusses some of the thinkers, inventions, and organizations we met last quarter in COM546, including Vannevar Bush, ENIAC, ARPANet, and others. I learned that the term "computer graphics" was coined by a Boeing Engineer in 1960! It's amazing to look at the timeline and see how many technological innovations sit for 10 or 20 years before they become "overnight" sensations.

Given our team size, it's unlikely that I could choose something so narrow in scope as a usability expert, so I'm also willing to write, project manage, assist technically with graphic & image creation/optimizing. What I'd like not to do is be the Dreamweaver/HTML person. I don't think I have time to adequately get up to speed in the timeframe we have, given my other responsibilities. I just learned that my colleague & I will be presenting a prototype of our faculty development class on Effective Online Teaching at a statewide conference on May 1.

I'd like to talk more with my team about our goals before posting URLS of sites, as I don't know what type of site we're interested in creating.

Standards and adoption re: last Tuesday--it was difficult in the timeframe to figure out a common IM tool. In fact, I have AIM only because that's what my kids use and as I mentioned before they're the reason I took up IMing, only to find I much prefer email or cell phone and my college sons we not too interested in IMing their mother. None of my teammates were using AIM, so during Tuesday's class I learned that my Hotmail account has IM. I set it up, but am reluctant to use it because of my experience with irritating AIM popups, automatic launch, and annoying messages about who's online. I have a pretty high technology filter in that I juggle so many things that I don't like distractions, and IMing's negatives outweighed the positives for me. I will say this for the standards and interoperability issues tho: Blackboard, the learning management software I use for my online and face-to-face classes, has a chatroom which obviates the need for students to find a common provider. I haven't used it but can see now how it would be useful for enabling synchronous discussion.

On to the reading Notes on Design Practice article: the "messy, indeterminate" world of design is familiar to me, although I haven't heard it described that way before. The communications underpinning is key to teaching aspiring designers: no matter how beautiful their design, if they are not designing with the client's message and target audience in mind, they are unlikely to be successful. Likewise, the discussion of the social process of design gets a lot of attention in our program--we constantly remind students they will often be working in a team. His use of the term design artifacts I find a bit puzzling, as an artifact strikes me as almost a byproduct. In industry we use the term "digital assets" to describe pieces which are assembled to create a graphic communication, whether they be images, words, artwork, or video. I like his reference to stories, as I see the design world evolving this way. My colleagues who teach video production and animation are acutely aware that the story is the foundation of what their students are trying to create. Perhaps we don't think so much in terms of a website telling a story, but in some sense it defines who an organization is, and therefore it does tell one.

As for the Shedroff piece, I've been (subconsciously) interested in information design ever since my days in technical publications many moons ago. Which reminds me: I'm also reading Edward Tufte's new book, Beautiful Evidence. This book is truly beautifully designed and written, and one I'll refer to often in my own evolution as an information designer. Shedroff laments that meaningful interaction is rarely taught, and I concur. One of the keys to teaching online successfully is to interact with students in a way which engages them and inspires them to think, develop, dream, and create. In the rare moment when this connection happens optimally, teaching feels like a privilege, and that's what keeps me in the field. Regarding sensorial design, in both teaching theory and design theory we encounter the need to engage all the senses to hit multiple learning styles and provide rich content. Thinking about tactile sensations, here's a link to a clip which took the design world by storm about six months ago (my Apple-computer-centric colleague was all over this when it came out). Now Apple has included some multi-touch features in the new, and pricey, iPhone.

http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/
click on the "demo reel" on the right side to see the video

The 4th assignment

2007-01-16T21:31:00.000-08:00

I just discovered this piece @ 9:30 pm. I'm not able to address these adequately tonight, given the hour and my early icy commute tomorrow. I can speak to the first one--I think I answered it in the previous post, and I'm somewhat flexible about the actual role. I'll revisit the others later in the week.

9.00 pm Final assignment has three parts:
Make sure you have a blog post that specifically outlines your goals and the roles you are willing (and not willing) to take for the team. This is very important -- it may result in a realignment of the class.
Find two or more sites that reflect the end product you think you'd like to produce (or be able to produce by the time we conclude in June) - either as an individual or through group effort. Post these to your blog by Monday (when reading is due). Give us the URL and your reasons for selecting them.
Finally, think about standards and adoption (fall quarter lessons!) as it relates to interoperability of instant messenging clients. Why do you think IM is not as seamless as e-mail? Share your arguments for or against interoperability in IM.

7 pm blogpost

2007-01-16T19:35:00.000-08:00

[this is starting to feel like a race. . . can I make the 8 pm deadline??]

Well, here's what comes to mind having read my teammates' posts. (I'm unable to locate Kai-Chen's or Mini's, so I'm referring to Vaun and Randa). Wanna start a business?

Vaun has amazing creative talent. And someday I'd like a personal tour of his studio. The glimpse of the pine cones and knick-knacks in his photo reminds me of a card game and books my kids used to have called I Spy that have intricate photos of all kinds of pieces of childhood. He could be our creative guy.

And Randa will make an A-1 project manager. Me? I dunno, I can cheerlead and connect people. I don't see that in any of the roles we read about this week, but it's something I believe is necessary to any project.

As far as job titles that I could actually "sell" to a client (and coincidentally get paid for), I'll go with usability expert--because I'd like to become one, and project manager--because I kind of do a lot of that in my job. I could also serve in a technical role, altho my knowledge is strong in some areas and curiously lacking in others. One of my goals of being in this program is to remedy that. . . I've spent so much time maintaining expertise in the print publishing world, teaching online, and co-managing my program, that I haven't upgraded my web skills as much as I'd like. I teach navigation, designing with metaphors, and interactivity in my Acrobat class, where students create a multimedia project. I teach optimizing Illustrator and Photoshop files for web. I teach typography for web. I learned HTML a zillion years ago and haven't done much with it, although it reminds me so much of the typesetting coding of yore that it's not intimidating at all. But I haven't learned Dreamweaver and Flash, and I hope to take care of that this summer when I'm not teaching.

Project manager for intranet redesign scenario

2007-01-16T18:38:00.000-08:00

[for some reason, I'm unable to copy/paste from the class website. Wish I could copy the writing prompt so I don't have to keep switching between windows.]

This is actually a good exercise, as both traditional print-based graphic designers and web-development teams now interact online, sometimes never meeting face-to-face.

As the project manager for the intranet redesign, and assuming I'm not able to bring stakeholders together for a live, face-to-face meeting, the first step I'd take is to arrange a meeting via Microsoft Live Meeting or Adobe Acrobat Connect (formerly Macromedia Breeze). Finding a time to schedule when all stakeholders are available would doubtless be an issue, but some form of synchronous communication (where everyone is online @ the same time) is important to set the tone, build the team spirit (if that's not too hokey a term), and reduce what distance learning researchers call "iterative email strings" where a relatively simple question/issue takes forever to resolve because no interactive communication is available.

I've participated in several meetings/software seminars conducted this way, and they have pros and cons. The "pro" are that they require some level of concentration and thus the members are relatively engaged; questions can be posted and answered by the moderator or other participants; video feed or screen shots may be available, and they are relatively easy to set up technically. Cons are that technical glitches are inevitable ("i.e.--help! I see the screen shots & video, but have no audio!") and participants may get distracted. It's not quite the same as spending face time in a room where the cell phone is turned off and everyone at least has the appearance of being engaged in the discourse.

As the project manager I'd ask everyone to introduce themselves, establish their physical location, put up a screen shot of themselves (humans attach a lot of importance to the face, and working with people whose appearance is known makes them seem more "real"), and describe their role in the project. Then I'd outline the project goals and directives, intended audience, budget, schedule and deliverables (sorry, Vaun, there's that word!). We'd establish a mode to work together (at this point I'm kind of interested wikis or chat room as opposed to email--an email string quickly gets unwieldy), and set a regular schedule of interaction, whether synchronous or asynchronous (meaning meetings that happen in real-time, or where contributors post @ their convenience).

My job as project manager requires me to be a cheerleader, so behind the scenes I'm probably meeting with upper level executives to make sure we are creating a product that meets the organization's needs; talking to individual contributors/stakeholders (writers, designers, programmers, database administrators, IT managers, and most importantly, USERS!) on a regular basis by email, posting to any common area such as chat room or wiki. To return to the users for a moment, hopefully some kind of reliable data has been gathered about how information has been gathered disseminated, what the roadblocks are, and how this project will address the needs of the organization's employees.

As the project approaches completion, prototypes should be available online, perhaps with a "public" (i.e. stakeholder) area where features can be tried out and commented on.

I could go on in much greater detail, but in 30 minutes, this is my start. The most important aspect of the project manager's job is to talk to the stakeholders and be the cheerleader and designated go-to person. If enough employees know this is your project, they'll approach you with useful ideas/suggestions. Even if you can't implement them all in the current go-round, you've got a solid base to work from and constituents have bought into your product.

If it sounds like I've "been here" before, it's from a) teaching online, and b) being involved in our college website redesign, and c) being completely frustrated with how our own intranet works. . . or doesn't!

metadata

2007-01-15T16:26:00.000-08:00

I meant to define "metadata" in my blog post and forgot. Metadata is "data about data." An example of metadata is information attached to a Photoshop file. The Photoshop file is made up of data--in a color image, this would consist of pixels composed of values between 0-255 for red, green and blue (for a total of 16.7 million possible colors). The metadata attached to the file indicates what kind of camera shot the image, what the f-stop (aperture) and exposure length (shutter speed) were, focal length of the lens, whether the flash fired, document file format, file size, date created/modified, and keywords added to assist in searching. (This list is not complete, and is an example for just one kind of file.)

job titles in the digital age

2007-01-15T08:54:00.000-08:00

Well, this week's readings cause me to revisit a topic from a previous post, in which I talked about the trouble I had researching alternate names for various programs within our two-year multimedia education offerings. Part of the problem is that the field is so new that generic titles are not yet standard. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is one source we use to predict employment trends, trails rather than leads in defining digital media job titles.

Our program's advisory committee consists of people working in industry (Microsoft, Nordstrom.com, Amaze Entertainment to name a few), non-profit, and education sectors (Seattle Art Museum, Bellevue School District). Our program allows students to specialize in the following areas: game design/animation, video production/streaming media, and web/print design. So our committee is a varied group. At our last couple of meetings, we've spent a fair amount of time discussing how we can prepare students to become web designers. In the early days of our program, web design evolved from the print design world and was pretty straightforward, provided the student had the aptitude for HTML. Today's environment is much more complex, and we commonly find employers asking for skills which encompass both design and coding.

The problem is that good design aptitude and good coding skills rarely exist in the same individual--in fact I often joke in class that most of our multimedia students are math-phobic. Math and logic skills certainly are a prerequisite for dealing with HTML, CSS, XML, Javascript, database programming, and other web development tools.

So how to reconcile the two? One suggestion from our advisory committee was to have students take an intro-to-programming class that would at least teach them which design features can and can't be coded by a developer.

I appreciated the review of job titles in the two articles (Web Team Roles and Publishing Team) as it helped clarify for me where responsibilities might lie in a large team. Unfortunately, too often employers want an unrealistic skill set in a single individual. For example, I was recently asked to serve at the last minute on a hiring committee for a new website manager. The long list of job requirements included a) writing/marketing/branding skills, b) development/management of all aspects of website and intranet, c) design/implementation of UI, streaming media, special effects, and new technology, d) budgeting and regulation compliance, e) data/market analysis. Preferred qualifications included a 4-year degree and experience in graphic design, knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, XML, ASP.net, best practices for web site architecture, and several other areas.

My thinking was that with luck, we might find a candidate with skills in two of the three primary areas: marketing/branding, web development, or graphic design. Expecting a single individual to have skills in all three areas is unrealistic, in my view. But I was not surprised at the job description, as I've seen many like it.

The takeaway for our Digital Message Design class is this: employers may ask for the moon, and you may feel you need to become expert in a wide area to even qualify for an interview, but don't discount the experience and skills you already bring to the digital media arena. More knowledge is certainly better, but everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and none of us can be good at all of it.

the year of the e-vite

2006-12-06T18:46:00.000-08:00

so if I didn't already have so much blood, sweat & tears invested in my current research topic, I'd run a study that posed the question:

does the advent of e-vite mean people are throwing more parties/inviting more people?

I've been invited to three holiday parties on Dec. 16. Okay, I consider myself & s/o (significant other--husband, in my case) reasonably fun people to have around, but I can't recall this ever happening before.

I'd postulate that e-vite is seducing people into either a) having parties they usually wouldn't, because while they may have good intentions, the prospect of creating, printing, mailing, and spending postage on invites has in the past brought them to their senses, or b) inviting a more far-flung list of acquaintances just because it's too easy to go through your email address book and say: what the hey, let's invite 'er and see where the chips fall!

Or maybe my sdq (social desirability quotient) just took a big boost for reasons unknown.

Somehow, I suspect the former.

technology meets snow

2006-11-30T16:38:00.000-08:00

I'm going to keep this short, but Blackboard (a learning management software we use which basically creates an online classroom "shell") was a lifesaver for communicating with students following Monday's snowstorm. It allowed me to:

*Teach my online class without interruption
*E-mail my face-to-face class groups with an update that the college was closed
*Administer a final exam online which had been scheduled to be given face-to-face on Wednesday. 13 of 15 students completed the exam during the scheduled class time, which I thought was phenomenal, given that not everyone had power and/or internet access.
*Issue surveys to two classes asking if they wanted to present final projects as scheduled or extend class by one day to make up for the missing lab hours. (Unsurprisingly, they voted overwhelmingly for the extra time.)

You know, I do my share of complaining about technology, but computer-mediated education has its merits!

Into the wilds of IE7

2006-11-30T13:55:00.000-08:00

"Think of some piece of technology that you have recently purchased or a piece of software or feature of an existing piece of technology that youhave recently started using. Think about why you made this decision - what factors caused the"adoption." Now - talk about your experience ... and then think about the theories we've talked about in class. Which theories help explain your behavior?"

So I bit the bullet and downloaded IE7 on one of the five computer stations I regularly use (one in my office, one in the classroom, two desktops at home, and a laptop--if anyone's counting). Was not terribly keen to do so, and I'm sure some of you are wondering why I use IE7 in the first place since Firefox has had a better product for quite some time. The answer is that most students use Internet Explorer and when I'm demo-ing in front of a full class of 30, confusion will reign for less technologically-adept students if their screen looks different than mine. Thinking about multiple user interfaces is tiring (trust me, I used to switch teaching software packages AND platforms every three hours, and I thought my brain would explode when I couldn't remember the shortcut that worked 20 minutes before in another class!).

However I've been annoyed with the IE6 interface for a long time, so I read two or three industry reviews on IE7, which convinced me that it would be a big improvement and a relatively painless conversion. Nonetheless, I decided to use only one station as a guinea pig.

Surprise! It was painless! Gone are all the stupid pull down menus (tho advanced internet options are still squirreled away where Microsoft figures most people won't find them). The interface is clean and minimalist, which translates to valuable screen real estate freed up.

How about applying Everett Rogers' characteristics of innovations theory to my little upgrade experiment?
1) relative advantage: "better than the idea it supersedes." It wasn't hard to improve on IE6.
2) compatibility: "consistent with existing values, past experiences, and needs of potential adopters." Since I was already comfortable with websurfing, this was not taking a big risk.
3) complexity: "degree to which an innovation is perceived as difficult to understand and use." I was pretty confident from the industry reviews I read that this wouldn't be an issue.
4) trialability: "degree to which an innovation may be experimented with on a limited basis." Since I could try the new software on a single computer, and didn't need to uninstall IE6, my experiment had a high degree of trialability.
5) observability: "degree to which the results of an innovation are visible to others." Again, since the reviews were by technogeeks whom I trusted, and screenshots of the new interface were provided, I was willing to sample the new product. Next, over the upcoming break I plan to upgrade the classroom computers, which will in turn expose 100+ students to the new environment. I would definitely avoid upgrading the classroom computers if I weren't confident that students will quickly and easily adapt.

Wash me, dry me, spin me. . .

2006-11-21T15:36:00.000-08:00

A dirty little secret lives called VNR.

Three years out from an undergrad advertising course and 18 months out from a public relations course, today's reading of Gillmor's reference to what he calls video press releases [more commonly called video news releases] (p. 184) reminded me that I had studied them from a practitioner's point of view.

So I dug out my textbooks, and found these references:

Marketers like to have as much control as possible over the time & place where information is released. One way to do this is with the video news release, a publicity piece produced by publicists so that stations can air it as a news story. The videos almost never mention that they are produced by the subject organization, and most news stations don't mention it either. Many pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, Aventis, and AstraZeneca have used VNRs, as have GNC, Mercedes, Nieman Marcus, and others (Belch, 2004, p. 581).

Even more insidious:

News releases in video form, known as VNRs, have become standard tools in the practice of public relations. The best VNRs are those that cover "breaking" news--a press conference or news announcement that broadcasters would cover themselves if they had the resources. Such "breaking" news VNRs are delivered by satellite directly to TV newsrooms. [Caption reads:] The real thing. Once a VNR makes it into a newsroom like CNN's and over the airwaves, few viewers question the story's authenticity or origination.

Satellite feeds of unedited footage, called B-roll, include a written preamble-story summary and sound bites from appropriate spokespersons. The TV stations then assemble the stories themselves, using as much or as little of the VNR footage as they see fit.

Questions practitioners are asked to consider include: is the VNR needed? How much time do we have? How much do we have to spend to make the VNR effective? What obstacles must be considered, including bad weather, unavailablity of key people, and so on? Is video really the best way to communication this story?

Oh, yeah, and one more thing is mentioned in the text: Then, too there is the controversy surrounding VNRs in general. . . . TV guide's researchers reported that, although broadcasters used elements from VNRs, rarely were they labeled so that viewers could know their sponsor's identity.

. . . The fact remains that if an organization has a dramatic and visual story, using VNRs may be a most effective and compelling way to convey its message to millions of people (Seitel, 2004, pp. 247-249).

Anybody besides me feel like they want a shower?

Belch, G. and Belch, M. (2004.) Advertising and Promotion, 6th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Seitel, F. (2004.) The Practice of Public Relations, 9th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Additional reading:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Video_news_releases

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/06/1432244

A perspective on Web 3.0, Net Neutrality and the DMCA

2006-11-16T11:31:00.000-08:00

Online media columnist Sean Carton explains why he thinks the web-based software services will not catch on unless Net Neutrality and digital media copyright issues are sorted out. I thought this tied nicely to our discussion about Net Neutrality in last Tuesday's class.

Read it @:

http://www.publish.com/article2/0,1895,2060291,00.asp

The Tragedy of the Commons

2006-11-13T07:07:00.000-08:00

I'm glad we read this. I encountered it earlier in an environmental science class, and always wanted to come back to it.

Hardin ties the idea of a shared pasture with individual herdsmen vying for ever-increasing shares of the resource to overpopulation, and argues that population problem "has no technical solution, but requires a fundamental extension in morality." His scientific paper was notable for its discussion of morality (Wikipedia, 2006).

Last year I wrote a paper for an international relations class examining the population problem and have posted some excerpts here. Current projections indicate human population may top out at about 9 billion by mid-century and then begin declining (PRB, 2004).

"Historically, human population has been remarkably stable, with high birth and death rates ranging from 30 to 50 per thousand per year (PRB, 2004). High birth rates were necessary to maintain population numbers; this pattern held true regardless of culture or ethnicity. For example, in England in the 17th century, 60% of children did not survive to the age of five, and only 30% survived to age 15—old enough to procreate (PRB, 2004). For most of human history, the combined high birth and death rate resulted in very slow population growth.

The first well-known attempt to describe human population trends was by Thomas Malthus. At the end of the 18th century, he published a book, Essay on the Principle of Population, which postulated that “war, famine and disease” were inevitable to counteract the tendency of population to grow geometrically while food production could only grow arithmetically. This theory gained credence because it was mathematically formulated, at a time when the rational approach to intellectual inquiry was first becoming fashionable. He believed that the poor in particular should exercise “self-restraint” to keep from increasing in number (Montgomery, no date). His theory of population growth being tied to war, famine, and disease became known as the Malthusian trap (Peterson, 1999).

Beginning in the 1920s, demographic transition theory took root as a way to explain population trends. This theory posits that industrializing nations pass through four stages: stage one, with high birth and death rates; stage two, with high birth rates and falling death rates (due mainly to decreasing death rates of children 0-5 as sanitation and medical care improve); stage three, in which birth rates fall since children become an economic liability instead of an asset, and access to contraception improves; and stage four, characterized by the low birth and death rates seen in industrialized countries (Montgomery, no date). Large increases in population are seen in stage two since birth rates far exceed death rates at this juncture. This is the state that many developing nations are currently in, which explains the continuing rapid increase in world population even though birth rates are stabilizing or even falling.

Interestingly, it has been noted that developing nations appear to be going through the demographic transition much more rapidly than the developed nations did. A comparison of Mexico’s transition to that of Sweden’s in the 18th century shows that while Sweden’s fertility and mortality declined fairly slowly over a period of 150 years, Mexico experienced a rapid increase in population when the death rate fell quickly, which led to the government policies which encouraged contraception and education (PRB, 2004).

Mexico’s birthrate fell from 7 children per woman in 1965 to 2.5 in 1999. The government encouraged this trend with a 25-year ad campaign extolling that “small families live better.” Traditionally, Mexicans held a belief that one of the reasons they lost the southwest to the U.S. was that the sparse population impeded their ability to defend the territory, and as a result of this loss, population growth was encouraged. The government’s 1974 about-face on population growth expanded women’s access to contraception and dramatically affected the birthrate (Dillon, 1999). Likewise, China’s well-known “one-couple, one-child” policy has dramatically dropped the birthrate, although not without controversy or unintended consequences—such as the gender imbalance brought on by the cultural preference for sons and consequent abortion of female fetuses (PRB, 2004). Nonetheless, these examples show that government policies can have dramatic effects on population numbers.

A more recent concern is what the implications of declining national populations are. Whole new issues arise in nations which have a fertility rate below the replacement level: low birth and death rates imply an aging population, with a set of problems the world has not seen before (Longman, 2005). The capitalist model assumes continued economic growth; what happens to this growth if fewer people need goods and services? Who will care for an aging population, and how will government entitlement programs deal with a declining worker-to-retiree ratio? Governments are just beginning to address the far-ranging implications of these trends, which are evident in countries such as Japan, Russia, and Germany.

Post-industrial societies have factors which work in favor of very low fertility. Contraceptives, career choices, the economic drain of childrearing, “biological clock” factors, lack of a desirable partner, unstable employment, and high housing prices can all cause women to reconsider how many children they have, if they have them at all. Even in developing countries, rising education levels cause women to delay marriage, use more contraception, and have fewer children (PRB, 2004).

There are positive benefits, called the “demographic dividend” of declining populations. Some experts believe that having fewer children frees resources for investment, labor, and other pursuits (Longman, 2005). Certainly, the environment benefits when fewer humans compete for resources."

While it could be argued that Hardin is correct that a "moral" solution (we could have quite a discussion over the morality of China's policy, in particular) rather than a technical one is needed to solve the problem of overpopulation, he did not foresee the benefits, and therefore the motivation, to individual women of having fewer children (better educational and economic opportunity), nor did he predict that later-industrializing countries would progress more rapidly through the cycles.

I'll have to further ponder the relationship between tragedy of the commons to today's technological environment, but I thought brief review of the human population problem might provide an interesting background.

Dillon, S. (June 8, 1999). Small Families Bring Big Change in Mexico. The New York Times. Retrieved 8/9/05 from the World Wide Web. http://www.uwmc.uwc.edu/geography/Demotrans/mexpop.htm

Longman, P. (2005). The Global Baby Bust. Annual Editions: Developing World. Dubuque, IA: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin.

Montgomery, K. (no date). Demographic Transition. University of Wisconsin, Department of Geography and Geology. Retrieved 8/9/05 from the World Wide Web. http://www.uwmc.uwc.edu/geography/Demotrans/demtran.htm

Montgomery, K. (no date). Thomas Malthus. University of Wisconsin, Department of Geography and Geology. Retrieved 8/9/05 from the World Wide Web. http://www.uwmc.uwc.edu/geography/Demotrans/malbox.htm

Population Bulletin (March 2004). Population Reference Bureau. Retrieved 8/9/05 from the World Wide Web. http://www.prb.org/Template.cfm?Section=Population_Bulletin2&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=12488

Projected Population of the United States, 2000 to 2050. (2004). U.S. Census Bureau. Retrieved 8/12/05 from the World Wide Web.
http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/usinterimproj/natprojtab01a.pdf

World population growth rate continues to plummet. (May 2, 2005). Mongabay.com http://news.mongabay.com/2005/0502

World Population Prospects: The 2004 Revision and World Urbanization Prospects. (May 2, 2005). Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat. Retrieved 8/12/05 from the World Wide Web. http://esa.un.org/unpp
Tragedy of the Commons. (October 2006). Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/13/06 from the World Wide Web. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

More Friedman-related talk

2006-11-07T15:57:00.000-08:00

So I emailed my nephew, who is living in Bangalore teaching Indian tech support engineers how to deal with American customers, and asked him about what he sees. Here's some of his response:

"My sense is that the pace of outsourcing is slowing . . . I've also read articles that have discussed companies bringing business back to the States because they were losing customers. Further, [large international software company] seems to be trying to shift a lot of their services from voice/phones to writing/email. Training Indian employees in cross cultural sensitivity definitely has its limits. There are some cultures sensibilities that simply can't be taught but must be experienced and learned through socialization. Even language training has its limits. There are definitely a lot of issues with outsourcing here and costs are going up dramatically, so it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next 5 years or so."

All is not rosy in the flat world. . .

Online community

2006-11-07T12:08:00.000-08:00

I'm in a hurry, but I'm going to try to dash this off before my next meeting. I wanted to share my own positive experience with online community. In 1996, when the web was just taking off, a family member was diagnosed with a life-threatening form of leukemia. I immediately searched the web for information, and within a short time met a guy online with the same disease in England, who had just started a list-serve for patients.

Keep in mind that list-serves were not widely used by the public @ that time. Soon, others joined, and one brave leukemia survivor named Barb Lackritz became our de facto leader (sadly, she passed away from this stupid disease a few years ago). This kind of leukemia is often slow, but deadly, so patients often have a good deal of time to research treatments. Through this listserve we found the best center in the world for this kind of leukemia (not, as you might think, Fred Hutch here in Seattle, but M.D. Anderson in Houston). We traveled there for a consultation (on Sept. 11, 2001, ironically--but that's another story) and my family member ended up using their experimental protocol. Today, that protocol has become the gold standard and people enjoy longer remissions because of it.

Our listserve was a precursor to ACOR, which today has listserves covering many types of cancers. Things I learned from the listserve that would have been impossible before the internet included: real patient stories from around the world of treatment successes, failures, and side effects; information directly from leading international researchers who monitor the list; and information that contradicted "standard medical practice" of the day, but which in the intervening 10 years has been shown to improve outcomes. Patients and families from our list have testified before the FDA and founded multiple research organizations. List participants range from patients who happen to be biology professors and statisticians (both handy people to have onboard, by the way) to all manner of scared but determined everyday people, to highly respected researchers who have a unique opportunity to connect directly with patients living with this disease. Believe me, courage lives on this list.

The listserve has the usual problems of flame wars and misinformation (people's tempers run a tad high when they have an incurable illness), but a savvy listmember can find information unavailable anywhere else.

And that's why I get really irritated when medical doctors pooh-pooh the internet. Some medical doctors are themselves unlucky enough to get this kind of cancer, and they tend to seek out our little listserve and participate actively.

So--Vaun's drawing of the toilet stall is accurate (and I agree with him in many ways). But there is also a noble--and sometimes lifesaving--side to internet community.

Breaking up with Winston

2006-11-06T07:47:00.000-08:00

Dear Winston,

These kinds of letters are always hard to write. When we first met, I thought you were pretentious, eccentric, and oh-so-British, but undoubtedly smart. I soon fell for your British accent (what American woman doesn't?) and began to lend credence to your talk of supervening social necessity, law of suppression of radical potential, and diffusion of innovation. Your insider accounts of the "real" story of technological innovations were fascinating.

We spent quiet nights together--you, me, and my 15-watt reading light--while my husband slept, oblivious to our trysts.

Your conviction that today's technological upheaval was really nothing new was so reassuring to a woman buffeted by technology overload. "This has happened before," you whispered. "There's really nothing so revolutionary about it." Oh, how comforting. The new technology's not going to overwhelm us after all! If it's been seen before, we have tools to deal with it!

Mistresses always want to believe pretty things, and it was a pretty thing indeed to think that we could predict technology's effects on society, and therefore be proactive, instead of reactive.

Last night, when we settled in together, I was so ready to hear your take on the Internet. "Prototypes and Ideation," the chapter head read importantly. "This Grand System," read the page headers--okay, I'm probably the only person who reads headers in books; it's a failing born of my years spent as a typesetter.

It started so promisingly--with a thorough analysis of the genesis of Arpanet, born of ARPA, soon-to-be-rechristened the faintly evil-sounding DARPA. Vannevar Bush was duly noted, the players and the plays painstakingly recounted. Oh, you had me last evening, Winston, as soon as we said hello.

But affairs usually end badly, and this one was no exception. Your painstaking analysis of the past broke down completely when you tried to predict the future. Hindsight's 20/20, alright, but you must cringe when you read your 1998 prophecies: "the limited Boolean logic of the search engines," "the disastrous application of the concept of commoditisation of information" [ed.: British spelling intact], "little support the idea that the net will become a crucial method for selling goods and services," "the creation of a virtual social community seems to have less, if any, purpose except as a sort of hobby." The evidence is damning.

Like a mistress being told "I love you, you're beautiful, but I'm going back to my wife," your words predicting the future of holography fell on deaf ears, Winston. How could any of the pretty tales you'd spun be believed, since you so clearly missed the implications of the Internet?

Well, I'll get over you, Winston. You led me down a garden path, but I should have trusted my instincts at the beginning. Like all relationships, I've come out of this one a changed, perhaps wiser woman. I will say this: I'll never forget you, and maybe there was something to your beloved concepts of supervening social necessity, and suppression of radical ideas.

just in time for halloween. . .

2006-10-30T20:26:00.000-08:00

. . . a search engine hosted by a hot-looking black woman.

Go ahead, check her out:

http://www.msdewey.com/

Type in "digital media" as a search term, and get back a diatribe on mainstream media.

By the way, if you leave her up on the screen, the more you ignore her, the angrier she gets. Sort of like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.

Funny, but creepy. . .

"I told you so"

2006-10-28T17:20:00.000-07:00

I noticed that the 2nd ed. of the Friedman book has a different cover. The first one has this iconic image by Ed Miracle, titled "I told you so." There is something about this painting I find compelling; the rowers frantically trying to avoid the inevitable, the ships about to plunge into the abyss. I'm not really sure how it ties to the content of the book, since Friedman's point, as I see it, is essentially that a flat world is not, after all, the catastrophe for exploration (a metaphor for progress?) predicted by the conventional wisdom of Columbus' day. Maybe that's why it was pulled from the second edition.

So as long as we're going to talk about Friedman, Highline Community College professor T.M. Sell recently wrote an op-ed piece for the Seattle Times in which Friedman's book does not fare well. His criticism includes the following:

"Friedman never really says what he means by the world is flat, but apparently it's a metaphor for the world getting smaller and the playing field getting more even.
This metaphorical machete has a couple of problems. Think about it: The shortest distance between two points on a globe is a curve. In a flat world, those curves would get straightened and hence be farther apart.
The second problem is the metaphor treats world trade like a competition between nations, which it demonstrably isn't."

Sell goes on to point out that lack of infrastructure and corruption in places like India hampers these countries' ability to compete for ever-higher level outsourced jobs.

Both Friedman and Sell recognize the decline of high-pay, low-skill jobs that were a mainstay of the American economy in the 20th century. Both stress the importance of Americans teaching their kids to value education as a way to protect themselves from the downsides of globalization; predictions are that our children will change careers much more frequently than we did. "Lifelong learning" is a buzzword I see in action on my campus every day. People who come to our college range in age from 16-70, and many are retraining from all sorts of careers. It takes a lot of courage to come be a multimedia student in your 40s or 50s if you lack a technical background, and I have many hard-working students who fit that profile.

When I first read Friedman's book, I found it explained many seemingly disconnected events in my own personal & professional life, but his outlook was a little rosy for my taste. Since the release of the 1st ed., I have the sense that companies have pulled back somewhat from international outsourcing. Two cases in point: a friend of mine is a lead scientist at a large division of an international company, and several months ago told me that their local production facility had been shut down and the jobs sent to Pennsylvania. I expressed surprised that the jobs weren't outsourced to China. "No," he replied; "our predictions are that within five years it will not be economically attractive to manufacture in China." The other case: a start-up flat-screen TV company called Olevia has decided to manufacture 50 miles outside of L.A., instead of dealing with the set-up, distribution headaches, and tariffs involved in offshore manufacturing.

Which is not to say that globalization won't continue, but perhaps trends such as locally grown produce instead of peaches from Chile represent a recognition that the wage savings realized by globalization are at least partially offset by the costs of transportation, cross-cultural communication, and need for complex international business structures.

Apropos of nothing, 2

2006-10-25T08:41:00.000-07:00

It's come up a couple of times in class now: the idea that reading is much faster than listening. I'm curious, is there research that shows that? It might kind of shoot my grand plan to post lectures as podcasts in the foot.

Unintended consequences, distributed networks, and sushi in Spokane

2006-10-23T07:25:00.000-07:00

One paragraph in this week's reading of the third metamorphosis jumped right off the page at me:
"The focus of the [ARPANET, precursor to the internet] research was to design an 'internetwork' of computers that would continue functioning even if major segments were knocked out by nuclear bombs or saboteurs. Thus, the network itself was assumed to be inherently unreliable, with a high probability that any portion could fail at any moment. . . . they adopted a 'headless' distributed network approach modeled after the postal system. . . communication always takes place between a source and a destination."

This explains precisely why the Internet has been so powerful, and why traditional institutions such as governments (think porn and gambling regulations in the U.S., or ongoing Chinese efforts at political suppression) and corporations (think entertainment conglomerate efforts to protect their content--i.e. profits--to squish Napster and YouTube) have been largely unsuccessful at controlling it to date. The Internet is headless; no entity has the overarching ability to direct it. Therein lies its freedom and ability to empower citizens--not to mention vexing problems such as how governments can prosecute online child pornography rings which may span the globe.

Talk about unintended consequences! I doubt the designers envisioned just how profound their invention would be.

The effects of the distributed network model adopted by the internet founders continue to transform society in ways trivial and profound. This weekend, my husband and I traveled to Spokane to visit our freshman son at Gonzaga. As mentioned by someone in class last week, Spokane has free internet access throughout downtown (more progressive than Seattle??), so I was conveniently able to put out a work-related fire or two while online. When we walked into our son's room, he was listening to music online via Ruckus (I'd never heard of it, but I'm sure many of our classmates have), and showed us a video parody of a Tupac song set at Gonzaga by two students--who promptly went on to get a contract with NBC, he told us proudly. (I can just hear their parents: we spent $150K on their education for this?)

Our son wanted to take us to a sushi place, so I kept my doubts about ordering raw fish while east of the Cascades to myself, and much to my surprise, the atmosphere, clientele and food rivaled a place in Santa Monica I'd been to. I kept thinking to myself, in Spokane?

But as we drove home past Moses Lake, where housing developments are sprouting up like cornstalks, I recalled that either Google or Microsoft is building a huge server farm there. Because of the distributed network created by the internet, it's perfectly plausible that tech-savvy people would choose to live somewhere like Spokane, where housing is affordable. Hence the market for good sushi.

The distributed network is no longer merely virtual; it's also transforming geography, redefining where and how people live and work.

Apropos of nothing

2006-10-18T11:42:00.000-07:00

A random thought occurred to me as I was trying to locate the logout button on one of the 3 online banking sites I use: has anybody such as ISO looked at standardizing web interfaces?

Uses and Gratifications

2006-10-15T19:45:00.000-07:00

Uses and Gratifications is a new concept to me, but worth considering. Had a bit of trouble swallowing the academia-speak in "Determining the Uses & Gratifications for the Internet." (Does the article really need to quote multiple social scientist studies to back up assertions such as "the Internet is revolutionary; it represents a paradigm shift in the way we do business"?) In some ways the article seems naive. "Users of AOL can be a reasonably representative sample of consumer Internet use." Really, in 2004, when it was written? I'd argue that AOL ceased being representative of Internet users by the millenium, at the latest. I've been trying to get my 83-year-old dad to dump AOL for a long time.

"Around the World Wide Web in 80 Ways" suffered from some of the same conceits (again, do we need four studies to validate the statement that "entertainment is a major motivation for going online"?). However, reading the two articles made me reflect for probably the first time on why I spend so much time online. The reasons are complicated, sometimes conflicting, and heretofore quite unconscious. One primary reason is work email; gratification results from responding quickly to student, administrator or business community representatives promptly and therefore increasing the reputation and visibility of our program. A second would be to interact with my online students. A third is just to "zone out" at the end of the day or sometimes midday, surfing for general or industry-specific news and entertainment. Social connections are another reason; research for my own student activities another, banking and checking stocks quite another; staying informed on community and political events a distinctly different reason. What I'd never considered from a uses & gratifications perspective, or really any conscious one at all, is "what motivates me?" What I was struck by as I pondered that (@ 2 am last night because I couldn't sleep) is that all of those motivations might occur in rapid succession or simultaneously. I regularly switch effortlessly between work and personal online activities. Without really ever stopping to consider it, I think I've taken the approach that if I need to check my online bank account during work hours, I should be able to, because the advent of 24/7 computing means I'm also likely to talk to students @ 6 am or on the weekend.

The lines blur; the motivations for being online are interconnected and hazy. No wonder studies have a hard time parsing the data (as the "80 Ways" article seemed to admit at the conclusion).

The "80 Ways" article also had some questionable conclusions, in my view. It tried to separate "serious activities" (such as politically-motivated surfing) from casual ones (downloading music/videos); but today downloads would rank much higher, thanks to Apple & YouTube--I don't think this reflects the less-serious nature of the audience, but the fact that technology has made it easy to do so.

Finally, how has the political landscape changed due to the Internet? I think the study misses the boat by trying to separate "serious" political surfers from others. This summer my 20- and 18-year old sons were both home from college and regularly watched Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert online. Young people are getting their news from sources like these because of the disconnect between what they experience as draft-age Americans and how the traditional media portrays the U.S. political environment. I watched with interest as my 18-year-old watched Colbert's "Better Know a District" profile of Bellingham which had a thoughtful (if funny) analysis of U.S./Canada border security. I fear these kids will become quite cynical, with Leno, Letterman, Stewart and Colbert as their primary political news sources.

Warming up to Winston

2006-10-15T19:13:00.000-07:00

So at first I found him a little too obtuse, and a little too British, but the more I read him, the more I find to sink my teeth into.

I think we have a tendency to idealize both political history and scientific history. Certainly my own recollection of the invention of the telephone was a romanticized version of "Come here, Mr. Watson, I need you" (probably a relic of 4th grade science instruction). The reality is much more nuanced. I was struck by the idea that Alexander Graham Bell's "amateur status is in complete contrast to the way in which things are done these days, not the least the mighty research laboratories that bore his name." When I worked in telecommunications many moons ago, our company occasionally hired Bell Labs veterans. They were respected indeed in our company; recently I read an article lamenting the lack of industrial research such as that which used to come out of Bell Labs and Xerox's Palo Alto Reasearch Center (PARC) , to name a couple. Today the tradition is being renewed by Google and Microsoft research departments.

I was ignorant that Western Electric, which manufactured for AT&T for many years, was founded by Bell's rival, Elisha Gray--both men and their companies apparently profited nicely from their agreement. The rather sordid legal battles and backroom negotiations described in the text actually made me feel that the era we're living through now is not so unique. This is somehow comforting. Perhaps we've been here before after all.

The Telegraph

2006-10-09T07:48:00.000-07:00

So I think my first “a-ha” from the Media & Technology book is that it’s getting harder for me to read “real” books, especially those with dense content, without my trusty computer as a sidekick. First thing I wanted to do was Google Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. Funny, I envisioned the painting as very gothic, even though I was pretty sure he was involved in Bauhaus and therefore his style would hardly be gothic. The image itself did not impress me in the least—my imagination, and Benjamin’s words, painted a much more vivid, tragic, picture of a determined angel fighting against the blowback of events. Klee’s image looked like a childish cartoon. So what does that say about “the rise of the image, the fall of the word” (to crib from Mitchell Stephens, whom I’ll return to in my research)?

I found the reading slow going. I wanted to define apposite, so tantalizingly close to opposite, but clearly separate in meaning. So that required a trip to dictionary.com, where I learned that it means relevant. Quickly followed by a sidetrip into jeremiad, meaning bitter lament. Mmm, good words. Hadn’t consciously thought much about vocabulary till taking the GRE this summer. At 46, how many words should you expect to add to your vocabulary per week?

Well, I digress. The telegraph chapter was illuminating. We see the suppression of radical potential today, do we not, in the media companies’ fight to keep free creative content off the web (recently Napster, now YouTube)? I’ve been dimly aware that history attributes many scientific breakthroughs to the wrong player, but this case study was interesting.

Finally, a typographic rant about this book: it’s set in a font called Perpetua, which has a very small x-height (height of lower case letters that don’t have ascenders). At the very least it needs to be set larger. Perpetua also lacks a property we look for in choosing body copy fonts: that of invisibility. Its personality gets in the way of delivering the message.

Social Aspects of New Media Technologies, pt. 2

2006-10-09T06:59:00.000-07:00

We can see why the internet is so compelling, under uses & gratifications theory. It easily outperforms TV in at least three of the four gratifications. Entertainment? Far more choices, on demand. Personal relationships? TV strikes me as more of an impediment than a gratifier in personal relationships, while the internet allows people to connect with old friends, find romance, and participate in worldwide listserves based on personal or professional interests. Surveillance? Both media offer extensive opportunities to be aware of local, regional, national or international events of interest, but the internet allows individuals to express opinion, and perhaps more easily get involved.

The critical mass piece got me wondering, how long until traditional "paper" banking is entirely obsoleted by online banking? How will slow adopters/low resource individuals be served?

The diffusion of innovation steps look a lot like those used in advertising. First consumers must be made aware, then persuaded, the item purchased, and their decision confirmed.

Something I'm troubled by with much of the technology we're currently surrounded by is the increasing speed of obsolescence. (Is there a companion graph to level of diffusion called level of dissolution?) The entired lifespan of VHS was about 25 years; recently I went through our family's collection of home movies and Disney tapes. The home movies will need to be recorded to a newer media; the Disney tapes, which a few years ago were worth as much as $200 each as collector items--well, I'm not sure what to do with them. How about all those digital .jpg pictures we've all been snapping the past few years? All the information in .pdf's? Adobe Systems, Inc. recently introduced a file format called .pdf x/a, the "a" standing for archive. They committed to support the file format for 50 years. But given corporate mergers, bankruptcy, etc., how can we really know if this file format will survive that long?

Social Aspects of New Media Technologies

2006-10-08T19:23:00.000-07:00

Right off the bat, this article leads me to recognize a problem I'm struggling with at work. We are revising curriculum for our technical college's two-year Multimedia Design & Production degree, and I'm researching potential name changes. The particular degree I'm working on revising has been known as the Multimedia degree, but now that we offer another degree focusing on video production for the web, and a third in 3D animation, the name needs to differentiate from those. This degree is really a degree for print and web designers--but how sexy does an A.A.S. in "Web & Print" look on a transcript? So I've been looking at "Graphic Design," which by current U.S. Department of Labor job descriptions is accurate--but I fear sounds so stodgy that young people will avoid it. "Multimedia" is technically inaccurate, because print publishing does not fulfill the common definition of multimedia, which requires at least 3 of the following: text, graphics, interactivity, sound, animation. I love the UW's "Digital Media" moniker, but since our video production degree is title "Interactive Digital Media," any similar reference is bound to cause confusion. "New Media" is just too vague, as the article points out.

So here I am, teaching in a discipline undergoing so much transformation that we're not quite sure how to label it. Almost, but not quite, makes me wish I was teaching Nursing. Ideas for names, anybody?

the telecom biz

2006-10-08T18:59:00.000-07:00

I had never heard the term "disruptive technology" until reading the Economist article, but it certainly made sense in the given context. I couldn't help but contrast how VOiP is transforming phone service to the telecom industry environment 20+ years ago, when I worked for a local telecommunications company, Teltone (then based in Kirkland, now in Bothell). I remember a great deal of talk about UMS (Universal Measured Service), where phone companies were expecting to generate revenue by charging for local calls on a usage basis just like long distance, instead of charging a flat fee. Instead the nearly the opposite has happened--long distance is nearly free, and most young people I know dispense with land lines entirely. When we dropped off our second kid to college at Gonzaga this summer, it seemed almost archaic that dorm rooms had land line phones that students could rent.
The article also clarified for me why, when our family went in for our "forced" cell phone upgrade after two years this summer, Verizon pushed so hard for us to add services such as texting and internet access. They need the revenue stream generated by the value-adds.

Day 1

2006-10-03T19:16:00.000-07:00

Well, this is a homecoming of sorts for me, here in the Communications Building at the UW. Many years ago I worked in this very building, back-in-the-day of typesetting-before-desktop-publishing-was-invented.