Category Archives: Digital Living

Avatar photo

Power Users and Casual Users

One of the questions that has come up as we’ve been training instructors on using the new learning management system, Desire2Learn, goes something like this: Why are they making us learn a new, complicated system when Blackboard did everything I needed it to?

It seems like a reasonable question. I’m not going to tell certain instructors that they aren’t using enough instructional technology when they’re getting their students to learn without it. If they are just using the Learning Management System to post their syllabus and e-mail students, I’m not going to tell them they should change their teaching style just for the sake of using the advanced features of a new system. And part of me feels guilty for making them take the time to learn a new system when they aren’t going to use the exciting, new features that were the reason for the change.

But for logistical and financial reasons, DePaul can only have one active Learning Management System, and the powers that be had to choose the one that they thought would best meet the needs of all instructors—including those who are teaching purely online classes and who need a lot of control and flexibility from the Learning Management System.

But this tension between different kinds of users is not unique to DePaul. It is present in all kinds of software development. Upgrades and improved systems bring new features and better efficiency, but you have to invest in installing and using the new system. And the pace of development can move faster than the ability of casual users to adapt to it.

Think about what happened when we all switched to Microsoft Office 2007. There was a major overhaul to the user interface. While those of us who do document design on a daily basis may applaud how much easier it is to access text styles and keep them consistent now, it was a big adjustment, and in the short term we all lost productivity. If you were the kind of person who only opened Word a couple times a week, it may have taken a long time for the increased efficiency in the new layout and features to cancel out the lost productivity when you were first learning the program, if that ever happened at all!

For whatever reason, software markets seem to be driven by the power users, who demand more advanced features and faster update cycles.

And more casual users are often required to update their software just to stay compatible with everyone else, even if what they have serves all their needs. If you’re using an old version of Microsoft Office, you can’t open the new file formats from Office 2007 without a special plug-in. If you’re still using Internet Explorer 6, many of the Web pages you visit may not render properly—Google Docs, for example, no longer officially supports users on Internet Explorer 6. When casual users have to upgrade their technology just to interact with the rest of the world, it’s easy to see why modern luddites claim that the technology is controlling them rather than the other way around.

I’m not anti-technology of course—I wouldn’t be in this line of work if I was. I marvel at how much more I can do with a hand-held device today than you could do with the most advanced computers on the planet twenty years ago, and I’m always excited to try the next big thing in tech. But I think we need to keep thinking about the best way to reduce the friction on more casual users as we go chasing exciting new features.

Avatar photo

When “The Social Network” Penetrates the Rest of our Lives: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

When we learn something new, it’s natural (and often helpful) to reference previous experiences. In the trainings we’ve been holding for Desire2Learn, we’ve often found ourselves making comparisons to other Web tools in hopes of fostering connections to the new system.

With D2L, one of the first comparisons that comes up is Facebook. When we show people how to create a profile, they are entering information “as they would on Facebook.” Then, once they’ve added a picture of themselves, that picture displays in discussions “like it does on Facebook.”

I wanted to step back from this comparison for a moment, though, to ask, “How useful is this practice? What is the cost-benefit ratio?”

The Good: Familiarity Breeds Usability

In many cases, yes, using knowledge of other tools to learn a new tool is helpful. Usability studies (often from Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert I love to cite) show that features of websites that we can “learn” will make our experiences with a site better.

For example, on most websites, companies place their logo in the upper-left corner of the screen, and this logo serves as a link to the site’s homepage. This wasn’t always the case, but once this feature became available on several websites and users “learned” to click the logo to go back to the homepage, it caught on as a common feature across the Web.

Profiles and other tools operate in D2L do seem to be taking cues from social networking. It’s helpful to see a student’s face next to their discussion posts, and students in online classes appreciate the extra touch that “seeing” their instructor throughout the course provides. Since this is a familiar feature from Facebook, it can make the Discussions tool more usable.

The Bad: Identity Crisis

Unfortunately, something that we learn in one tool doesn’t necessarily translate to every other space on the Web. If the Discussions tool in D2L looks like a Facebook wall, will students have the savvy to switch to a professional tone when they enter an area whose appearance usually reads “social”?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I would argue that this is an important teachable moment. We are communicating more and more online or via text, and the ability to switch your persona and your tone in different scenarios is a valuable one. These can be the most difficult learning curves to overcome, since it’s harder to differentiate between two similar items than it is to differentiate between opposites. In this case, familiarity is at the core of the problem, but by setting clear expectations and modeling effective professional communication, you will help students learn a skill that is a “must” for their future professional lives.

The Ugly: Social Network Contempt = New Tool Contempt

I can’t say that I’m as big a fan of Facebook as others in my demographic, and I sometimes worry that making comparisons to Facebook can be problematic for our audience in trainings. Many people aren’t the happiest with Facebook right now due to some recent troubles with changes they made to privacy settings, so I don’t want to bring any negative baggage to the new system.

While these are negative experiences we may not want to associate with a new tool, I think they can also make us smarter users overall, which never hurts when we’re learning. Rather than encountering a rude surprise when we discover that our D2L profile information (where we shared our love for bubble baths and interest in YouTube videos of babies using iPhones) is available to everyone in our academic classes, we know to ask questions about information availability up front.

Whether you’re thrilled or horrified to see features familiar from social networking sites find their way into your learning management system, remember that you don’t need to use these features any more than what helps you as an instructor. There may be a trend toward social networking, but don’t let that force you into constructing 140-character assignments.

Blackboard and Desire2Learn

Having worked with instructors over the summer and during the fall quarter on transitioning from Blackboard to Desire2Learn, I understand the frustration and confusion many have experienced regarding DePaul’s decision to change learning management systems.

As one of the participants in the LMS review, I tested Moodle, Angel, Desire2Learn, and Blackboard 9. I’ll cut through all the pros and cons and just say that I thought Blackboard 9 would be the best decision because we were already using Blackboard 8. Obviously, the decision has been made to move to Desire2Learn, and that isn’t going to change.

Instead of talking about why I wanted to switch to Blackboard 9 or why we should all appreciate (or hate) Desire2Learn, I’d rather talk about the confusion and frustration in moving to Desire2Learn.

I am teaching a section of WRD 103, Composition and Rhetoric I, this quarter, and I am using Desire2Learn as a supplement for the course. I post my daily agenda, readings, assignment sheets, and other “stuff” on my course site. So far, none of my students have had any trouble accessing the course site or the materials there, and while some might give Desire2Learn’s usability all the credit for that, I’d say that my students’ determination and experience with networked computer interfaces helped them more.

I personally haven’t had any major headaches in using Desire2Learn. I never taught in Blackboard so I can’t compare the teaching experience, but I have built and provided support for about a hundred courses in Blackboard in the past two years. Fundamentally, the process for building “stuff” in either LMS is the same. You click buttons, point to files or areas in the course, type, and click more buttons. I’d argue that an instructor who knows how to build course content in Blackboard could do the same in Desire2Learn once he or she finds the appropriate buttons in Desire2Learn. I think Blackboard users are having a harder time finding the appropriate buttons in Desire2Learn because it uses a horizontal navigation instead of a vertical navigation like Blackboard.

Desire2Learn:

Blackboard:

     

Neither navigation is inherently better; it’s a matter of becoming familiar with one or the other, or in my case, both. I think a lot of faculty and staff are initially confused that there isn’t a menu along the left-hand side of the screen, and out of this confusion arises frustration.

Sometimes, confusion and frustration can be productive. But in the cases I’ve seen faculty experience frustration and confusion with Desire2Learn, they tend to manifest in negative, unhelpful ways. It generally follows a script something like this: “Help, I can’t figure ‘X’ tool out. What do I do? Desire2Learn is so dumb/hard to use. Why did the university even decide to switch to this? It’s so stupid. You know, there have been schools or departments where the faculty refuse to adopt a new LMS.”

I certainly sympathize with this sentiment, but I tend to think it’s a waste of time. My advice would be to just forget about how you did thing in Blackboard, Angel, or whatever other learning management system you were in before, and just think more generally about computing. When you get some new software, you can rely on your prior knowledge to expect that the “File” menu in the new software will be similar to the “File” menu in other, similar software. So the “Content” link in Desire2Learn is going to be similar to the various course content areas in Blackboard, like “Course Materials,” “Readings,” and “Instructor Information.” So when I said that it’s less about Desire2Learn and more about my students’ determination and experience with networked computer interfaces that has helped them with becoming familiar with Desire2Learn, I’m hoping you can find a similar determination and can call on previous general computing knowledge to help you.

I leave you with a flowchart to help with figuring out Desire2Learn: (ref)

Avatar photo

Keeping it on the Web

Our department fielded a question from a student recently about a Blackboard app for the iPhone. The student saw the app in the Apple App Store, but when she tried to use it, she found that it had to be enabled by the university, which it hadn’t been. Now, this is a bit of a moot point now since our university is transitioning from Blackboard to a new learning management system this year, but it got me thinking about the trend of apps for mobile platforms.

I got my first smartphone not too long ago—an Android device—and like anyone who gets a new smartphone, the first thing I did was download dozens and dozens of apps. How exciting it was! Games, maps, video services, content delivery! For the next few weeks I kept my eyes peeled on all of my most frequented websites. Does this site have an app? Does this company? Does this service?

But when the excitement wore off, I looked at some of the content-delivery apps and thought, why does this app exist? Couldn’t this information just be displayed in a mobile-friendly Web page?

Web pages—you remember those, right? The pages that display content by coding it into universally standard, non-proprietary HTML code. The pages that can be accessed from any computer or Web-enabled device with any browser and look and behave mostly the same. The pages that are not subject to any kind of approval process. I’ve seen an unfortunate trend lately where smartphone owners see their platform’s app store as their primary portal to the Internet and forget about the Web browser.

More and more people, especially young people, are carrying a smartphone, and I think that trend is only going to continue. And as online educators, it’s going to be hard for us to not accommodate the one Internet-enabled device that students have with them at all times. In the next couple of years, departments like mine are going to have to start testing how usable educational Web tools are on mobile devices before recommending them to faculty, considering potential challenges related to internet crime.

Diving deeper into legal specialties, the expertise of cyber crime lawyers like this criminal lawyer Milton is increasingly relevant. These professionals, skilled in navigating complex internet crime legal challenges, play a pivotal role in today’s digital world. Their understanding of both technology and law helps in crafting robust defense strategies. It’s essential to have access to such expertise in our tech-centric society.

But locking content into a specific platform with an app isn’t the way to go. It isn’t ethical, because we shouldn’t be telling students they’ll be at an advantage buying one brand over another. It isn’t practical, because we would have to keep up with all new developments in mobile operating systems. And it isn’t necessary, because these devices have perfectly capable Web browsers.

This isn’t to say apps don’t have their place—there are many things a Web page just isn’t capable of. But for content delivery, let’s spend our time developing mobile-friendly Web pages rather than making apps.

Avatar photo

Foreclosing on Face Time: Online Learning and the Housing Crisis

Richard Florida is perhaps best known for his 2003 book The Rise of the Creative Class in which he proposed that the future fortunes of modern cities would depend on their ability to attract innovative, white-collar professionals. He labeled this group of workers the “creative class” but noted that this group extends far beyond artists and designers to include scientists, engineers, and other problem solvers who use outside-the-box thinking to overcome challenges in their fields. 

This spring, Florida published The Great Reset, which focuses on the current recession and its impact on urban development. Florida claims that the recession presents a valuable opportunity for the U.S. to scrap failed policies and move in a new direction to meet the demands of a changing economy. One of the key theories he presents is that the government subsidizing of home ownership (through tax deductions and low interest rates) has severely limited the mobility of the American workforce at a time when workers desperately need to move to find work. For expats dealing with similar issues abroad, you can read more here to understand how these factors may impact you in Thailand. Florida believes that rather than continue to encourage Americans to buy homes and put down roots in one city for the long haul, our post-recession economy should encourage renting and mobility and embrace the natural cycle of boom and bust that allows some cities and regions to thrive while others wither and die. To facilitate this shift, the availability of services like a full service residential moving company becomes crucial, making it easier for people to relocate as job opportunities arise.

While I don’t believe that we’re going to become a nation of renters overnight, I know firsthand that the housing crisis has left many members of generations X and Y questioning the value of owning a home. For the hundreds of thousands of young Americans who are unable to sell their homes and unable to find fulfilling jobs close to those homes, the carefree and unattached life of a renter certainly has a renewed appeal.

All of this is good news for online learning for obvious reasons. Distance education is designed for people who want to learn without being bound to a particular place. If the recession is forcing Americans to appreciate the value of being mobile, many people might also reevaluate their views on the value of spending years stuck in one place just to get an education.

But what if Florida is wrong? Surely many people put down roots in one place for a host of reasons that outweigh their desire to go wherever jobs are plentiful. With that in mind, it seems likely that employers will be forced to make some compromises in order to attract the best talent. One compromise that seems likely to continue to gain traction is telecommuting—allowing workers scattered across a city, region, or country to work wherever they please.

A friend of mine in Seattle runs a consulting firm that helps companies manage geographically isolated employees. In talking with him about his business during a recent visit, I kept thinking about how valuable the experience of being an online student is for anyone who ever needs to work from a distance. Online courses teach students much more than just how to be good accountants or nurses or programmers or teachers. Online learning also teaches students how to communicate, collaborate, build relationships, and solve problems without being in the same place at the same time. The future of the housing market might be difficult to predict, but it seems clear that technology continues to make working remotely a more viable option for more workers. With that in mind, I can’t think of a better way to prepare today’s students to be flexible, mobile workers than through coursework that transcends geographic boundaries and even the occasional upside-down mortgage.

Avatar photo

The Virtue of Consistency

A friend of mine from high school recently posted a study of his 2.5-year-old using the iPad and then wrote a blog entry about it called “What My 2.5-Year-Old’s First Encounter with an iPad Can Teach the Tech Industry.” One of the points he makes is that consistency matters. He makes the point that simple things like uniform standards for buttons and sliders are very important. This is something that has broad applications in everything from street signs to Web navigation to course-design elements. While many will argue that standardizing these things eliminates creativity, one can argue, successfully I believe, that consistency in the design means better usability.

When designing courses, should we really be concerned with creativity in button colors or navigation bars? Isn’t it better to spend our energy making sure that the content is interesting, the interactions are engaging, and the assessments are relevant? Think about what would happen if you were in an unfamiliar city, and the city planners allowed every neighborhood to design its own stop sign. Now, instead of the familiar octagon-shaped, red sign, every corner had a different type of sign. What if it wasn’t just the stop signs but all the signs that appear at intersections that were nonstandard? Would you be able to experience the city, or would you be more focused on making sure you always stopped when you needed to? While this may be an extreme example, we can produce the same effect in course design if navigation and course elements are not standard within the course, and in some cases even between courses in the same program. Sure, it may mean that the course looks more “cookie cutter,” as some would argue, but think about the physical classrooms themselves—aren’t they all the same or at least pretty similar? Isn’t it better for students to spend their cognitive energies not deciphering the course but instead interacting and engaging with the content?

Does this mean that every course needs to be the same? I would argue not at all, but it is likely that classes in the same program have similar needs, from both the student and faculty perspective. Standardizing courses in online programs can have additional benefits beyond simple usability. First, support is easier, as standard navigation and language makes it easier for help-desk staff to easily help a user resolve issues. Second, documentation can be standardized and created once for the entire program, allowing staff time to be spent on other training and support endeavors.

As we think about design in online classes, let’s look at ways we can simplify and standardize navigation and directions. Creativity should be revealed in the content and not whether you can make tiger-striped buttons.

How Are Tomorrow’s College Students Learning Today?

Take a look at the list of finalists in the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Competition. Each entry listing includes a description of the project entry, and some have an explanatory video. Public commenting ends April 22 and public voting will be held in early May.

“But why write about this K–12 competition in a university blog!” IDDBlog readers may exclaim. First, there actually are some college-level entries.

But the main reason is simple: We look to the K–12 experience because these students will be our students very soon.

We already know our university students use Facebook; that they order clothes, textbooks, and computers online; that they download their music and TV programming. But what do we know about their educational experience?

Take one of the MacArthur competition projects: digital fabrication. You see a five-year-old design a box on a computer and then print, cut out, and tape together the box he designed. It is a project that moves mathematical modeling and engineering design into primary grades.

The digital fabrication project exemplifies how STEM education can be made accessible to even the youngest learners. It nurtures creativity, problem-solving, and critical thinking skills while introducing them to the exciting world of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Experts in the field of education like Kamau Bobb agree that this early exposure can lay a solid foundation for future STEM learning and potentially inspire a lifelong interest in these fields.

How does a university redesign its curriculum to engage students who have been creating, designing, and integrating for twelve years, who have been using computers in the classroom throughout their formal education, and who’s primary formal learning experiences have been project- and inquiry-based?

Food for thought!

Avatar photo

The Death of Flash or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the iPad

In case you haven’t heard, Steve Jobs has been waging an increasingly wounding war for years on Adobe’s Flash platform. It all began with Apple’s initial release of the iPhone, which was conspicuously lacking Flash support. At the time, hardcore techies poked fun at Apple’s iPhone ads that promoted it as the smartphone that finally offered “all the parts of the Internet.” The phone’s lack of support for Flash (and Java) even prompted Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority to label the ads as misleading and insist that Apple stop airing the ads in the UK.

While some hardcore iPhone naysayers continue to cite its lack of Flash support as a major shortcoming of the device, many users stopped caring the minute Google began offering a customized version of YouTube for the iPhone. More recently, Google has gone a step further, experimenting with the emerging HTML5 standard and its support for embedded video without the need for third-party plug-ins like Flash. Some predict this experiment is a key step in a larger plan at Google to abandon Flash completely.

Today, Adobe has even more to worry about than being locked out of the massive iPhone audience and the potential loss of visibility on YouTube.com. With iPads currently flying off the shelves and Jobs making increasingly catty comments about Flash to the press, geeks everywhere are quick to proclaim that Apple is driving another nail in Flash’s coffin. Adding insult to injury are the big-name online video providers following Google’s lead. ABC has already created the ABC Player for iPad and rumors abound that Hulu will eventually release a similar application.

So why does any of this matter to instructional-design professionals? While Flash won’t die out overnight, its waning popularity is a very immediate concern for anyone involved in the development and distribution of instructional media. Obviously, anyone who specializes in Flash development has to wonder if it’s wise to continue to tie his or her fortune to a platform that might be obsolete in five to ten years. Similarly, anyone who creates content that might rely on Flash for distribution might need to re-examine how they deliver content to students. This is particularly true if you want students to access that content on an iPod Touch, an iPhone, or an iPad.

One major ray of hope in the Flash deathwatch has been Adobe’s promise to add an iPhone application compiler in Flash CS5, which was just released on April 12. This compiler is supposed to allow Flash developers to create native iPhone applications, and Adobe has already uploaded many examples to the App Store. However, iPhone developers have already begun citing recent changes to the iPhone Developer’s Agreement, which now states, “Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine.” In other words, don’t use some other program with some other language to create iPhone apps.

This is all very bad news for Flash developers. However, it’s really a loss for software developers everywhere. Flash might not be perfect, but it is beloved by a cultish following of developers for one key reason: it keeps things simple. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Simple? Isn’t this the same tool that brought the world useless animated introductions with spinning logos and the never-before-needed “skip intro” button? Yes, it’s true. Flash allowed some awful people to do some awful things, but Flash doesn’t kill users. Designers do. When used for good, Flash has simplified life for many programmers by allowing them to create sophisticated applications that look and function consistently across all major browsers on all major operating systems.

Without Flash, designing a Web site that looks tolerably consistent in Internet Explorer versions 6 through 8 can be a major headache, let alone trying to make that same site play nice with Firefox and Safari. And for the real masochist, you can try to accommodate Chrome and Opera users too. Now, add to these hassles all of the variables that come with designing for mobile devices—seemingly infinite variations in screen sizes, unpredictable data connections, and controls that range from numeric keypads to full QWERTY keyboards to touch screens where every link needs to be big enough for a grown man’s fat, sausage-like index finger to click without clicking three other items in the process.

Flash promised to spare developers many of these heartaches by letting us build once and deploy to any browser and even create a desktop version any user could download and run via Adobe’s AIR runtime environment. And with CS5, we finally thought we were getting somewhere. We could finally create a single app that could run on the Web, on the desktop, and on any iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad. Unfortunately, it seems Apple isn’t too keen on Flash developers sullying its beloved App Store with inferior code converted with an inferior compiler. So for now, it seems developers and anyone else with a vested interest in mobile learning are still stuck with a difficult decision: stick with Flash and hope for a cease fire, or try to play catch up with developers who’ve spent years mastering programming for Mac operating systems. I, for one, am keeping option three on the table: abandon technology altogether and start working on a Ph.D. in history. Because no matter how many iPads he sells, Steve Jobs probably won’t force me to relearn the events that lead up to the Treaty of Versailles.

Conduct Detrimental to the Team?

Being the sports fan that I am, I have taken note of the recent outbreak of Twitter-related disciplinary actions involving athletes. Those of you who follow the NFL or NBA are familiar with the Chad Ochocincos and Gilbert Arenases of the world. And the trend has filtered down into the collegiate and high-school ranks as well. The Texas Tech football team was banned from tweeting last season, and just last week, a University of Idaho basketball player was suspended for tweets critical of his coaches and teammates. The rational for the disciplinary action is nearly always that the tweet is “conduct detrimental to the team.”

One of the great challenges and opportunities in online teaching and learning is the capacity to leverage the medium to take a distributed environment and create community. One needs only a moment to see the proliferation of social networking as evidence for the ability of the Web environment to support community. Clearly, not all tools work as envisioned, nor do all courses benefit from the use of certain tools. Yet, does a compelling argument even exist to not make use of such technologies in online learning? But what is the appropriate action when a discussion board is hijacked or a class blog goes up in flames?

Classroom management is not a subject often discussed in online-learning circles. With the increasing socialization of our online courses, is conduct detrimental to the team an issue? And what can be done about it?

We all agree it is imperative to continue striving to improve each student’s learning experience while maintaining an equilibrium that promotes the use of social tools and the establishment of an environment of respect.

The question is how?

I am curious to learn about strategies for dealing with, or better yet, preventing such conduct from this community.

Poor Usability or Just Poor Users? The Squeaky-Wheel Syndrome

A week or two ago, I sat in a meeting where we attempted to weigh the intelligence of our faculty and students. Oh, we were too polite to call it that exactly; ostensibly at least, we were discussing how we could make our wikis more user-friendly. The discussion covered a range of possible cures for the perceived disease, from more intensive faculty training to student scaffolding to more and better tutorials. All well and good, this desire to make things easier for our end users. As a fairly recent convert to Usability, I embrace its tenets and evangelize for its centrality in our design process. Still, I wonder if things are really so difficult for our users, and if so, for whom and how many? Are we looking at a usability issue or a user issue? Are we simply reacting to the squeakiest wheel?

We use PBworks for collaborative work spaces in select online courses at SNL Online. Most have been used successfully, and most difficulties can usually be traced to unfamiliarity with the user interface: difficulties that are generally addressed and resolved with PBworks’ video tutorials and the task-specific tutorials we produce in-house. However, some students and faculty struggle mightily with the same interface, and the same support materials do little to alleviate their distress. Why is this, and what should be done about it?

Now, I will grant you that users differ in their facility with tools. And I will further grant you that we designers sometimes fail to make things as clear as they might be.

However. When the only appreciable difference between successful and unsuccessful engagement with a technology is the user set, I feel we have to examine whether we’re responding to a real usability issue, one that is intrinsic to the design of the technology and its interface, or to a problem of poor users.

I fear too often it’s the latter. Lacking any data on our users, we respond to the complaints of a few and extrapolate their difficulties to the general population. If a faculty member or student complains about their problems using a tool, we immediately jump to the conclusion that the tool is defective and devote hours of support and development time creating resources to ameliorate the perceived deficiencies, resources that we assume are better than those already produced by the makers of the technology. All this effort is expended to solve the problems of a small set of users who will never be made comfortable with a new technology by any level of support. Further, all of this activity occurs in the absence of any data indicating real need or a cost-benefit analysis.

I’m not sure what the solution to this might be. My department doesn’t have the resources to conduct extensive user testing for each technology we might introduce. However, we also don’t have limitless resources to chase the ephemeral perfect tutorial or provide one-on-one student and faculty support. Perhaps we have to admit we can’t help everyone, every time. Perhaps, once in a while, the squeaky wheel must go ungreased.