mmorton8's blog

There appears to be a war brewing between the Web 2.0 folks (whatever that means) and the archivists of our time. The Chronicle has an entry about Michael Gorman former president of the ALA and his attack on the underlying concepts behind Web 2.0. In response some of the Web 2.0 apologetics have responded.

Well Day 1 here in Broomfield has been exceptional.  I have really been impressed with the interest in assessment that everyone has here at this focus session.  It appears that all of the speakers are real high quality and am looking forward to hearing all that I can.   The hotel accomodations are exceptional and the food has been real good as well. 

Most importantly was the interesting way that the ELI folks run the conference.  They are actually using an assessment process,in a way, to conduct the conference.  First they set the contextual background then we listen to overviews and meet and reflect on the takeaways.  That really helps the content to stick in my mind plus there is a "serendipity" where you happen upon ideas or concpets that you maybe had not thought of. 

The first speaker, Karen Swan, created a great intro into the assessment process by focusing on the inputs and processes not just the outcomes.  The Project Parlor provided a great overview of what is to come.  I can't wait until Day 2

After working on a comprehensive faculty eportfolio for several years now (myMAPP) I have begun to realize that the classification of the entries is extremly important.  Currently the entries are put into the system each having their own ontology.  It is this ontology that provides the description that is used by the system to automatically map them to quality standards.  It is this ability to describe the content provided by the semantics that will drive the use of ePortfolios at all levels of our lives. 

I am preparing for a training where I will be working with some folks for a couple of weeks rather than a semester. There is definitely a difference between preparing to teach a semester long course and developing training for a two week cycle. I think the main aspect to this will be "knowledge activation". It will be more difficult to assess to see if there has been "knowledge gained" as opposed to basic retention. I wonder if there is any assessment tools for that?

I have written a Book Review for InfoQ on Agile Java.

This last semester I taught Java Web Development here at UNO. It was a great experience from the standpoint that it made me learn things even deeper. I hope my students got something out of it. I was also fortunate enough to have taken the approach of trying to facilitate learning rather than playing the "I know everything" game (in fact I don't :) ). This allowed me to leverage knowledge in the classroom and I think all had a better experience because of it. We went over many items and even put some of it into practice. The thing that really saved my rear though was Netbeans + Derby. Without that I probably would have created a bunch of people who decided that Java web development sucked. Even though it is only hard because it has gotten so complex and layered. Netbeans allowed me to skip all of the Tomcat setup. Derby allowed me to to skip the DB setup and Netbeans made integrating all of it a piece of cake. Great work guys! I am glad to see the Swing crew come though.

There is an article in "Customer Loyalty and experience design in e-business"  Design Management Review by Karl Long that really nails what good interface design is all about I think. It all comes down to these four items:

• Trust
• Competence
• Autonomy
• Enjoyment

Basically trust is the cornerstone of the developing customer loyalty. IMHO Google exemplifies this in a great way. Yahoo does too to a certain extent. There isn't anything invasive in their online products yet they are functional enough to allow to get done what I want to do.

Competence is the concept that that a website should make the user feel competent. Sites that are cluttered with ads and headlines of 'quasi' news erode that actually. Most marketers don't really get it yet that more is not always better. Also if things are to difficult to use that can really erode a users feelings of being competent.

Tying into this competence concept is the idea of autonomy. In other words the ability to allow the user to control their own destiny. Many times we as developers feel the need to handhold the user through a particular process. By allowing the user to learn the interface (as long as it is easy to learn) you give them the sense that they are controlling what the outcome is thus making them feel empowered.