I’ve alluded in a previous post about the fact that the typical request-view-reload experience for web pages is capable of becoming a thing of the past with the advent of properly programed and usable web experiences via what has been coined as Rich Internet Applications. What this means is that your typical desktop user experience for a program reports an immediate response in updating the UI (user interface) so that the interactions signal to the user that they are getting something done in the browser. Read on for more of what I mean…

In the past, when you tell your browser to request a new web document by either:

1. Typing in the web address in the browser address bar
2. Clicking on a hyperlink (which in effect does the same thing as item 1–it’s just your browser doing the typing for you)

This invokes what is known as an HTTP request which sends a bunch of text across the network to the web server you are talking to. Contained within this request is the items or document that contains other items such as pictures and media, etc. Typically this caused your web browser’s page to go white or blank for a few moments while the web server is working on your task and the network is doing its darndest to push all that information back to you. If either of those two things are slow for whatever reason the user may think they’ve done something wrong.

Typical user feedback that the browser is working (and I see people ignoring these ALL the time) are what are known as spinners. These are usually the logos in the browser that show animations. 

For example here’s the one from the now historical precursor to Mozilla Firefox: Netscape Navigator 4.8:

If users don’t see their requested web page come right up, often times they think they did something wrong when in fact the browser is just chugging away waiting for the network and/or web server to respond to their request. (In some cases their own computer may be just multitasking). So they will hit the reload button or click the link again, or my favorite: double-click the link. What I’m saying here is that it’s just not intuitive to the user what they are supposed to do if they don’t see something right away, when in fact they are really being asked to do is be patient. Imagine that.

With Ajax (a coined term for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is that the browser is making little tine HTTP requests for updating little parts of the page without browser supported built-in feedback in the way of spinning logos. Sometimes these are present but not always. A lot of the time it’s not even worth it because we have faster networks and faster computers, and the data being requested is teeny-tiny compared to a whole entire page of text and images. An example of this is google suggest.

All of this stuff updates the typical web user’s experience to a point somewhere in between a desktop application where all the computing power and data to complete the task is local to the machine and not on the network or "in the cloud" as it is now becoming popular to say.

With that all said, here is a presentation I saw earlier this week on a talk given by some Ajax user experience experts that I think really hit on this. If you have a spare hour I suggest taking a look at it. A lot of programming terminology is in there but I think it’s important if you are a technologist and expect "cloud computing" or "RIA" or "AJAX" to become part of your instruction

This is not news since I just stumbled on this, and it turns out that this has been going on this whole year: the Flickr Commons. It’s a way to obtain references or use of images that have no copyright restrictions or at least been put into the public domain. This is an example of one from the WWII era (a period I’m really starting to enjoy learning about).

With that said, I’m gearing up for a new project that will involve my commitment to the Adobe Education Champions group (E-Champions) to utilize their ‘gift’ of a Connect Pro account so I can begin sharing with the ed tech developer community some of the techy things that apply to what they might be learning theory-wise.

I’m calling this my edutechie corner and someday soon I will have a series of screencasts that showcase some of the Adobe Creative Tecnology software suites.

Details will be forthcoming…

In the meantime, here’s an idea using some of the methods that Adobe itself is pushing in the next generation of designer and developer workflows using one of my more favorite tools: Fireworks:

This is Sarah Outwater, a young woman who has been blind since she was 3 years old. She’s a cancer survivor (metastatic retinoblastoma) and has been in her condition ever since she had surgery on her eyes to protect her from the deadly disease.

I was invited to participate in a charity project for a little girl she had heard of on the news who was in a similar condition as she was at her age, except technology has advanced and this little girl (last I heard) was free of her cancer and still able to see.

Sarah is an extremely intelligent girl and can play several different musical instruments and uses technology to support her education and professional career goals. In her charity project, she was compiling a music album and asking for donations to help the family of the girl who was receiving cancer treatments. As part of my donation, I offered to build a web site and create/donate some multimedia presentations for benefit concerts and post them on the website (This was before I heard of YouTube). Sarah brought her laptop to my workplace and we cut some video interviews together and I showed her how to edit content for the website. Later we were joking together in a group meeting about how people and technology interact. I made the quip that people who talk to their technology to get it to do obscure things are borderline bonkers, and she retorted "well that’s nothing. My technology talks to me!"

Of course it was true. In our interactions for her laptop was equipped with screen reading technology that allowed her to complete her work for school and work on her music projects. This is a prime example of adaptive use of technology for a population that predominantly gets their work done despite the fact that they can’t see what they are doing.

However, that’s not the only way people who can’t make use of their eyes to do their work continue to survive. They must be able to use their other senses. Audio alone in my humble opinion is not the savior of interaction with technology. People must be able to use their other senses too. Which of the remaining  4 senses makes the most sense for HCI for blind people? Touch or tactile surfaces is what’s coming to mind.

Here is something that Macrodobia (Adobe the company and Macromedia’s Technology) have been pushing for a while…the idea that consistent technology for authoring multimedia content be available on a multitude of devices. What this means is that soon someday we will be seeing flash on tons of personal handheld devices.

I also suspect we will see flash interfaces on other devices too such as kitchen appliances and home entertainment center components. Even more sobering would be to see it in public facilities and transportation devices such as elevators.

Adobe is really pushing their flash platform which is really good for people like me who enjoy learning about their platform. What I would really like to see is an concerted effort to research what accessibility options exist for persons who can’t use their eyes to interact with interfaces that will potentially be flat and non-tactile.

Even Apple’s iPhone with all its glitz and glory has its issues. How does a person who can’t see be excited about an iPhone for their communication needs? Sarah had no problem using her cell phone to communicate, and could very easily find the buttons to push because she could feel them with her fingers. Voice activation is probably on the horizon and may become mandatory for devices using these interfaces, and I will be waiting to see what advances are on their way with Adobe’s technology.

With that said, how do we best exercise our brain muscle(s)? I’ve been using the Nintendo DS for the last 2 years or so, and I only play puzzle games for that fact. It’s nice to be able to run a few levels of a game before retiring for the night, solve a sudoku puzzle in Brain Age. Am I smarter because of it? Maybe. I get plenty of mental exercise at work, but for those of us who may not have mentally challenging days (or have the wrong types of mental challenges) it may be a great way to break away and justify playing a game or two.

And for those who want to know, my current brain age is 27.

My take on it is that for instruction we have to take into effect the philosophy that the best determining factor of what a person will learn can depend on what they already know. If a person is situated and surrounded by technology, they likely expect technology to be the medium by which they receive instruction.

With that said, I was having a conversation with a faculty member yesterday about the most important role that technology places in curriculum. I go back to my own learning experiences, both self-directed and instructor-led, classroom or "life experience" and realize that the human factor has always been a big part of it. If I was the last person on earth and all I had left were the technology left behind, I wonder how I might go about continuing to learn all that I could about various subjects?

My take on it is that if students have an expectation of how best they learn we should be aware of that fact. At the same time, I like going back into history before the advances of technology that we have currently were available. My assessment is that some of the greatest teachers and learners still succeeded without it. Why? It could be a number of factors, but having proper motivation of self or of instructor was likely a factor.

Most of my colleagues in the field would agree that by nature human beings are built to learn all that they can. Whether or not they are successful in that aspect of their life largely depends on their environment. Therefore, there is still a great need for people who can be mentors, encouraging entities, tutors, coaches, and most importantly good parents. I think it’s useless to point fingers at things or people or place blame when it comes to poor learning outcomes. Rather we should work towards correcting and improving learning opportunities. Technology is a big portion of that, but being an influence and role model for successful living is priceless in a world filled with teaching and learning opportunities.

May we choose our technology wisely and seek the success of our students accordingly!

In all these cases, the content producer provides the experience, and the content consumer walks away with a desire to return. Specific to education, we are to engage our students in a good learning experience and we want them to desire to learn based on that experience. The overall outcome is a student who leaves our instruction feeling like they got their return on investment (time, money, effort, etc.) and we as instructors know we have helped someone to learn and to grow.

As far as technology is concerned, we should be looking for ways to appropriately select/design/implement technology that increases this rather than overwhelms someone with new technology that is difficult to learn and/or cumbersome to set up.

For the web, a big buzzword being pushed by content developers/designers is what is being called RIA’s or Rich Internet Applications. What this means is that we can use technology to enhance a web site to the point where it becomes more usable than just a static page of text. It becomes alive and responsive, with minimal impact on the hardware/software requirements and prior user knowledge/experience. For a while now we’ve been seeing this with Web 2.0 (a term I still don’t like using, but will anyway for the sake of communicating with others who do understand and use it), and social networking concepts.

I’ve been experimenting with Adobe’s Flex platform which allows a software developer to create a single-frame Flash application using traditional programming methods rather than the Flash authoring tool which has an animator/designer perspective. The types of things that can be created with this are endless and Adobe is very quick to push this into the mainstream. Adobe sees it as the best thing since sliced bread was invented, and for the time being I agree with them. If enough developers get behind it, I can see it influencing desktop educational software development for quite some time.

One of the recent products developed on the Adobe Flex RIA mindset is a tool called Scrapblog. It’s a tool that allows anyone to create a rich engaging multimedia presentation that is shareable across computing platforms for free.

I’m going to try and create something cool and post it here later this week so stay tuned. Check out some things that others have done: (I haven’t seen many educational focused presentations yet, but intend to change that soon!)

http://www.scrapblog.com/viewer/viewer.aspx?sbid=31324

In the meantime, I’ve upgraded the look and feel of the site with a free theme from http://www.freewpthemes.net/ because I don’t have any time to design a new one on my own.

Enjoy.

This is an interesting perspective as a preface to this: http://www.adobe.com/solutions/broadcast/pdfs/forrester_report.pdf

 

We (at work) have made a concerted effort to comply to the TEACH act for fair use rights in digitizing media for educational purposes. Under the TEACH act, an accredited institution must take measures to ensure that digitized dramatic content must not be able to be replicated or archived by those who would consume it.

 

 

"11. While the transmission of distance education content may be conducted by diverse technological means, an institution deploying "digital transmissions" must apply technical measures to prevent "retention of the work in accessible form by recipients of the transmission . . . for longer than the class session." The statute offers no clarification about the meaning of a "class session," but language throughout the statute suggests that any given transmission would require a finite amount of time, and students would be unable to access it after a designated time. Also, in the case of "digital transmissions," the institution must apply "technological measures" to prevent recipients of the content from engaging in "unauthorized further dissemination of the work in accessible form." Both of these restrictions address concerns from copyright owners that students might receive, store, and share the copyrighted content. Both of these provisions of the statute call upon the institution to implement technological controls on methods for delivery, terms of accessibility, and realistic abilities for students to download or share copyrighted content. These provisions specifically demand application of "technological measures" that would restrict uses of the content "in the ordinary course of their operations." In other words, when the restrictive controls are used in an "ordinary" manner, they will safeguard against unauthorized reproduction and dissemination. This language apparently protects the institution, should someone "hack" the controls and circumvent imperfect technology." (Source: http://www.copyright.iupui.edu/teach_summary.htm)

 

The reason I ask this is that our campus has made use of the Helix Community Streaming server and has been delivering content using RealNetworks’ proprietary streaming format. Because at the time the decision was made it seemed to work and in our minds we were doing our best to deliver a good learning medium via online video and protecting ourselves in the process. Also, from a usability standpoint, many instructors who deploy media on the server encourage their students to download the latest free version of RealPlayer. I’ll refrain from the criticism of the annoyances that deploying the software creates (I’ll trust anyone replying to this message will do likewise)

 

I’ve not delved into it too much but the Windows version has a blatant feature embedded into the client that allows the user to save streamed media directly to their computer. It is painfully obvious that once installed, any of our instructors and media developers who have gone to great strides to protect content because the technology at the time was originally invented to protect it, is now left with a big problem to fix.  While our streaming media initiative is still very young (we aren’t delivering much copyrighted work at this time), I would like to address it before it gets blown out of proportion.  I have some ideas already but I’d like to ask what everyone else is doing for reference.

 

It seems like media technology companies have failed to address the impact that their ‘bowing’ to the trend of the general community of media consumers finding a way to download video content anyway shouldn’t affect education in the least bit, but if I’m reading into this correctly it seems like they’ve left educators out of the loop on their decision.

 

So I guess my point is three-fold: 1. Am I reading into this correctly given our circumstance, that we aren’t covered under the TEACH act anymore? 2. Is anyone else aware of this and affected by it? 3. Since RealMedia is a proprietary format, it isn’t easily convertable into another more desireable format. What would you be able to offer as a suggestion what to do with our instructors’ content?

 

Any insights would be appreciated.