Future Timeline (xkcd)

I am curious why it takes Jesus a full 14 years to convert everyone on the planet to Christianity after returning in 2018.

Famous Objects from Classic Movies shows you an object that appeared in a movie and asks you to play hangman to guess what it is. So, if you see a bowling ball and _ _ _   _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _, you might think of The Dude’s favorite sport and the movie that made him famous.

Famous Objects from Classic Movies

The icons are gorgeous (reminding me of another cool website) and the simple game is fun to play. As you type, it will fill in the blanks, giving you three misses before you lose. Most of my failures were with foreign films or ones made in the past decade—since we’ve had kids, our ability to get to the movie theatre is sporadic. The site is also integrated with IMDB and points to trailers for the movies. It’s great fun for a movie buff, and sooooo easy to keep clicking …

VSL was founded in 2006 by Kurt Andersen, Michael Jackson, Tim Nolan, Emily Oberman, and Bonnie Siegler. The idea was born from people being deluged with emails suggesting something to watch or read or do. With the advent of Twitter, information flows much more freely than when they started this project, but it is still amazing to me how many times VSL will point to something new. I followed their Twitter account for a while, but there is something special about getting that info in the email.

My Chicago Bears won Super Bowl XX in 1986

Twenty-five years ago, I was graduating from high school, seeing my valedictorian speech blow away in the wind, and surviving a lonely first semester at DePauw, away from family and friends. It is a year that stands out in my life due to all of this personal change, but it was also quite a year for events around the globe, too.

What is amazing to me are the similarities with the big events of today. In 1986 …

… the Space Shuttle Challenger explodes 73 seconds after launch, killing seven crew. 2011 will mark the end of the Shuttle program.

… an earthquake in El Salvador hits 7.5 on the Richter Scale and kills 1,500 people. On March 11, 2011, the Sendai earthquake and subsequent tsunami claimed almost 10,000 lives with 17,000 more missing. Less than a year earlier, China was devastated by a 6.9 quake that killed 2,600.

… a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, leading to the worst nuclear disaster in history. Thanks to the Japan tsunami, the Fukushima nuclear power plant is becoming the second worst in history.

… Libya killed 3 and injured 230 in a bombing of a discotheque in Berlin. They are still the bad guys today, fighting a revolt and a U.N. coalition that just bombed the country to enforce a ceasefire (I’ll let that last bit of irony sink in).

… Jean-Claude Duvalier flees Haiti. After the devastating earthquake last year, “Baby Doc” returned to Haiti in January.

… the Khian Sea cargo barge began a 16-month journey to dump its toxic cargo. Some of it landed in Haiti. The rest of it was finally dumped in the Indian Ocean. The Gulf of Mexico was trashed this past year by BP’s huge oil slick.

… a Lebanese magazine reports that the U.S. has been trading arms with Iran for hostages, the Iran-Contra affair. Wikileaks recently released over 250,000 diplomatic cables, forcing a lot of unplanned transparency in international politics and leading to legal actions.

Here are some other things that happened 25 years ago:

• Polaroid wins the instant camera business, knocking Kodak out of the picture.
• My Bears win Super Bowl XX
• Pixar is launched
• Halley’s Comet returns
• U.S. Senate televises its debates on a trial basis
• Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone’s vault on live television, discovering only a bottle of moonshine
• Over 5 million people participated in Hands Across America, forming a human chain from New York to California to raise money to fight homelessness and hunger
• Len Bias dies from a cocaine overdose 48 hours after being selected 2nd in the NBA Draft
• Eric Thomas develops LISTSERV, the first email list management software
• Greg LeMond wins the Tour de France, becoming the first American to do so. He would win twice more and Lance Armstrong would claim seven straight titles.
• Patrick Sherrill kills 14 employees at a U.S. Post Office, leading to the phrase “going postal”
• Fox Broadcasting Company launches
• Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev meet for unproductive talks about arms reduction between the U.S. and U.S.S.R.
• The centennial of the Statue of Liberty’s dedication is celebrated, just three months after it reopened to the public after an extensive refurbishment
• Mike Tyson wins his first world boxing title, defeating Trevor Berbick
• Lady GaGa was born. So were Lindsay Lohan and Megan Fox. The deaths were more significant.

I wonder what will happen 25 years from now.

The beautiful artwork by artist Adam Long are like postcards from the past, commemorating some of the notable events that have led to our present social networking culture. These include:

• The Notificator, a message vending machine at British railway stations
• CompuServe, the first computer time sharing service
• CBBS (Computerized Bulletin Board System), a computerized answering system born in the Chicago Blizzard of 1978. It survives today as chinet.
• The invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee
• Q-Link, the predecessor to America Online, that connected Commodore computers together (see the 1986 promotional video).
• The 2003 launch of social network systems on the Web, notably Friendster, MySpace, and LinkedIn
• Tim O’Reilly’s FOO Camp, a hand-picked curation of interesting people coming together for a conference with no set agenda
• The launch of Facebook, which in 6 years would eventually get to 500 million users in July 2010
• Dell Hell, the name given to Dell’s poor customer service
• The launch of Twitter, which just celebrated it’s 5th birthday, and its coming out party at SxSW in 2007.
• A Burger King employee takes a bath in a BK sink, demonstrating to businesses that there is no controlling a brand anymore.
• The Sacha Baron Cohen movie Bruno met an early death. Twitter buzz is credited. Twitter is also assigned importance in international politics, with the U.S. State Department urging the service to postpone a scheduled maintenance to keep Iranian protestors tweeting.
• The “United Breaks Guitars” trilogy chronicles the poor customer service of United Airlines. Later, Southwest gets a tweetful from filmmaker Kevin Smith, who was deemed “too fat to fly.”
• NASA astronaut T.J. Creamer tweets from space
• Japan’s win over Denmark in the 2010 World Cup sets a record with 3283 tweets per second (tps)
• Charlie Sheen sets a record as the fastest Twitter account to reach 1 million followers.
• Rebecca Black’s video, “Friday,” is at the moment is approaching 38 million views (the artwork pegged it at 18 million) despite being widely panned

The Command Center opened last month with Tim O’Reilly, Brian Solis and others speaking on social media. PeopleBrowsr recently released ReSearch.ly, allowing access to 1,000 days of Twitter data and creating a focus on collective memory.

Ever since Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was released, “Abe Froman” has been the most commonly used alias for when men want to anonymously check into motels.

It’s not true, but it feels true. That plausibility is what makes Daily Urban Legend a fun blog to inject into my regular Snackr news feeds. It tests my information fluency with regularity.

DUL is the work of Maggie Serota, who tries to make up a new fake fact each day to share with friends. Serota—a Brooklyn writer who has contributed to publications like The Onion A.V. Club, Radar, and NY Press—started this project as a Twitter hashtag (#UrbanLegendIJustMadeUp) but turned it into a Tumbler blog so she can include pictures.

Daily Urban Legend makes up new "facts" to share with friends

In addition to the Froman fiction, here are a few of my other favorites:

• Walt Disney was not cryogenically frozen after his death, but his cremated ashes are used nightly in the fireworks displays at Disneyland.
• The U.S. birthrate jumped about 16 percent in 1995 to reach a decade long high, just 9 months after Boyz II Men released their hit single “On Bended Knee.”
• Back in the 80’s, some cocaine shipments were smuggled into the country inside the sneaker phones given away with Sports Illustrated subscriptions.
• The only way Prince will communicate with others when it is not in person is via fax machine.
• 86% of all emergency room trips for children under the age of 10 are the result of swallowed board game pieces.
• By the year 2026, there will be more fictional lawyers practicing law on television than lawyers practicing law in real life. In related news: 43% of the defendants who choose to represent themselves in a court of law feel qualified to do so after watching the DVD set of the entire L.A. Law series.
• 2 pledges at a University of Florida frat party died after smoking soiled cat litter out of a bong during a hazing ritual.

Look it up.

Fortunately, there some 3700 better photos of the big orange moon as it brushed against Earth as close at it ever gets (some 221,565 miles away).

The term supermoon was coined in 1979 by astrologer Richard Nolle:

In short, Earth, Moon and Sun are all in a line, with Moon in its nearest approach to Earth. At any new or full moon, Earth and Moon and Sun are all in a line: Earth is in the middle in the full moon alignment, while the new moon happens with Moon in the middle. This coming together in an alignment is technically termed a syzygy. Sometimes – from a few times to a half-dozen times in a given year – these alignments also happen when the Moon is in its perigee, or closest approach to Earth. Astronomers call this very special alignment a perigee-syzygy. I call it a SuperMoon – which is a whole lot easier on the tongue.

There was some confusion about how this particular supermoon was reported, as the closest full moon in 20 years. Supermoons occur with great frequency, but there are only a few extreme supermoons per century, which means it is a closer-than-average pass of a supermoon. The last of those came a year ago in January, and the next is expected in November 2016. Of the sixteen extreme supermoons between 1950 and 2050, only two have occurred as late as March (most are in January). So the more accurate statement would be: Saturday’s lunar event was the first extreme supermoon in March in 18 years.

A Map of the History of Science Fiction

According to the artist, “History of Science Fiction” is a graphic chronology mapping the genre from its roots in mythology and fantasy to the space operas of today:

The movement of years is from left to right, tracing the figure of a tentacled beast, derived from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds Martians. Science Fiction is seen as the offspring of the collision of the Enlightenment (providing science) and Romanticism, which birthed gothic fiction, source of not only SciFi, but crime novels, horror, westerns, and fantasy (all of which can be seen exiting through wormholes to their own diagrams, elsewhere). Science fiction progressed through a number of distinct periods, which are charted, citing hundreds of the most important works and authors. Film and television are covered as well.

The image was inadvertently leaked onto the Internet a couple weeks ago, going viral enough to prompt Shelley to start collecting emails from fans interested in a possible poster version of the map. In addition to being a visual delight to explore, it is also a great reading-viewing to-do list for a complete science fiction education.

Shelley—a Brooklyn artist specializing in large paintings and sculpture installations—has also done paintings depicting the evolution of Avant Garde, the New York downtown scene, media role models, and Fluxus.

Building a visual language through free symbols

The site is intended to be simple to use and include images that are easily understood across cultures. These icons are highly designed, quality visual artifacts accessible from a few major categories:

• animals
• food & beverage
• healthcare & wellness
• people
• safety & warnings
• science & math
• sports & recreation
• tech & communication
• transportation
• travel & wayfinding
• weather & nature

The symbols are free. In fact, free distribution is a core part of the effective strategy to improve visual communication. The images are in Public Domain or available under Creative Commons license.

The Noun Project is looking for volunteers to translate their website into languages other than English, and eventually will implement a system where community members can contribute to the project as well. Think Urban Dictionary for icons.

PostRank, a Canadian social engagement aggregator service (formerly AideRSS), has turned their attentions to TED, too. They released a special view of social media activity that shows which TED talks are most discussed.

Search TED talks by social media endorsement

The site lists the top five in each category (Technology, Entertainment, Business, Design, Science, Global), as well as the top videos shared on each of the different social networks. According to PostRank, the top design and technology talk is Pranav Mistry’s SixthSense device. For global issues, it is Julian Assage’s interview about Wikileaks.

PostRank tracks in real-time where and how users engage online, and what they pay attention to. Their social engagement data measures actual user activity, which they claim is the most accurate indicator of the relevance and influence of a social object or individual.

The issues of gender in this domain clearly haven’t been solved in the interim, so instead of synthesis and analysis, you get a list of topical links (a couple of which are more recent than 2008):

* * * * *

Advice to men: “Learn to shut up and listen.”

* * * * *

The most fascinating and perhaps most important of the links I had curated was reference to Corinna Bath’s warning that the semantic web may be gendered. Like the first phone books that listed the names of husbands in each households, the architects of such curations carry their biases into the rules the machines will use to create this knowledge. It also reflects cultural biases that have persisted over the life of digital artifacts, meaning the machines will reflect gender biases in the content they find, “learning” misinformation.

Coverage of reports like this one from 2005 and this one from 2007 in some key demographics are both reflective of imbalances of adoption and over-generalizing in documenting bias. This is what machines see, too.

* * * * *

Code like a girl

* * * * *

Dennis Howlett conducted a series of interviews with women in leadership, motivated by a McKinsey report on advancement of women. This was two years before Clay Shirky’s rant about women not self-promoting themselves enough.

* * * * *

Among top tech blogs, few of the writers are women, but that doesn’t mean women don’t write and contribute heavily to the tech blogosphere. Orli Yakuel compiled a list of top technology blogs written by women.

* * * * *

The apparent closing of the gender gap is based on changes in work force, not pay—More qualified women are in higher positions demanding higher pay, but that doesn’t reflect equity with their male peers. This is problematic because it helps propagate the myth that gender issues have been resolved.

* * * * *

Most organizations have to battle the problem of siloing, where small groups within the larger organization become isolated. Women are most likely to participate in cross-group communication, which is just one of the reasons gender inclusion is vital to the long-term success.

* * * * *

Across all genders, there is a tendency for people to counteract traditional gender stereotypes when trying to impress someone during a negotiation:

Men’s strategy of behaving in a more conciliatory fashion apparently succeeded in producing a positive impression in the counterpart’s eyes. However, the women’s strategy of behaving more assertively failed to create a more positive impression. Instead, women who behaved more assertively, were judged more negatively.

Is that one of the reasons there are still few women corporate leaders in Silicon Valley?

* * * * *

Women are pretty good at science

Yet, academics are in bad shape, particularly in science, when it comes to creating female leaders. Too few women scientists achieve leadership positions, due largely to gender roles and chasing women away from science“>non-supportive culture. Just last fall, the Journal of Applied Psychology claimed to show a gender bias existed in letters of recommendation for faculty hires (in psychology).

* * * * *

The establishment of a dominant demographic for brands and marketing may also lead to the elimination of gender as a marketing focus.

* * * * *

A few organized efforts to support and promote women include: Girls In Tech, the BlogHer network, and WITI (Women in Technology International).
* * * * *

This just in: Women aren’t men.

However, at the end of a packed week filled with celebrity sightings and digital fluency games, I’m looking at a tight deadline to remain on track. Thus, you will be treated to links to all of the open tabs in my current session of Chrome. This serves two purposes: A blog post filled with some things of recent interest, and reclaiming my computer before a weekend of dissertation work.

Current Events

• Crowd Laughs When Congressman Is Asked: Who’s Going To Shoot Obama?—What happened and didn’t happen when Republican Rep. Paul Broun was asked this question at his townhall meeting.
• Homeless Man Daniel Morales Finds Daughter Through Twitter—The 58-year-old participant in the Underheard project (homeless Twitterers given prepaid cell phones) gets a call from his daughter.
• Researcher reports on animals’ reflective minds—To the question of whether non-human animals have metacognition, UB’s J. David Smith says the answer appears to be “yes.”
• The Wiki Strikes Again: German Official Drops “Dr” After Wiki Investigation—erman defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has said he would remove the “Dr” from his name while a plagiarism investigation of his PhD took place. Where did this investigation originate? Wikia, the for-profit wiki project started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
• Salary Survey—Learn what members of Information Architecture and User Expereince community reported and see the trends in IA titles, salaries, and activities.

Relational Politics

• Study shows how metaphors shape the debate about crime fighting—Psychology Assistant Professor Lera Boroditsky and doctoral candidate Paul Thibodeau have shown that people will likely support an increase in police forces and jailing of offenders if crime is described as a “beast” preying on a community. But if people are told crime is a “virus” infecting a city, they are more inclined to treat the problem with social reform.
• Political Voices: Political Engagement Through Text Sound Poetry (PDF)—a paper from Wesleyan researcher
  Celeste Hutchins.
• Even in a crowd, you remain unique, life scientists report—The size of the group strongly predicts the individual uniqueness in the animals’ voices: The bigger the group, the more unique each animal’s voice typically was and the easier it was to tell individuals apart.
• 10 Things Your Parents Told You That Still Apply to Social Media—Adages from moms and dads are applied to online common sense.
• Are we more — or less — moral than we think?—Emotions are key: Those facing the real dilemma were most emotional. Their emotions drove them to do the right thing and refrain from cheating.

Organizations

• Complexity theory for managers—After applying a metaphor of NP-Complete math problems to business: Teams led by good managers are competent and not micromanaged.
• ‘Telecoupling’ explains why it’s a small world, after all—Telecoupling is about connecting both human and natural systems across boundaries. Jack Liu said that telecoupling is a way to express one of the often-overwhelming consequences of globalization.
• US cities using tech to cull ideas from citizens—New York and cities around the country are trying to follow the example of private companies and use technology and the Internet to harness the wisdom of citizens and create virtual civic forums.

Technology

• The Story of Twitter—Jack Dorsey tells Stanford about how Twitter came out of his experience at Odeo.
• Finally, Sweet Sleep for MyBlogLog; Another Yahoo Service That Could Have Changed the World—Blog community and data widget service MyBlogLog, acquired by Yahoo 4 years ago last month, will finally be put to rest by its parent company on May 24th.
• New Baby Essentials: Domain Name, Twitter Account, YouTube Channel—Better to plan the baby’s name based on what domains are available. That’s why the service Babysquatter was, well, born. Using Babysquattter you can check out which names are available and even block the awful name your MIL wants by showing it as unavailable.
• bloom.io: Start-Up Proposes Visual Instruments for Social Data Expression—Conceptual thinker Ben Cerveny and visualization-guru Tom Carden, both from Stamen Design in their previous life, have just launched a new visualization venture, called bloom.
• Got an Old Computer? Jolicloud OS Can Now Make it a Zippy Cloud Machine—Jolicloud, the Operating System that primarily serves netbooks, today expanded its support to include computers as many as 10 years old. If you’ve got an old desktop computer with as little as 348MB of RAM, it could be fun and useful again.

There were more, but this is no longer a “quick little post.” Now searching Google for “Tabaholic.”

A Pew Internet study revealed that 22% of all online Americans used social media for politics during the 2010 campaigns.

In covering this report for Web Pro News, Mike Sachoff highlighted these statistical tidbits:

• The “political social media user” group represented by these 22% of internet users voted for Republican congressional candidates over Democratic candidates by a 45%-41% margin.
• Among social networking site users, 40% of Republican voters and 38% of Democratic voters used these sites to get involved politically.
• Tea Party supporters were especially likely to friend a candidate or political group on a social networking site during the 2010 election—22% of such users did this, significantly higher than all other groups.

Which all underline the idea that, while the motivations and use of social media may still be partisan, there is no longer a gap between major party use of these tools for political engagement. As we collectively develop our digital fluencies, these skills become a common platform for potentially escaping partisanship, too.

Back in 2003, Americans officially shifted to networked communication for their political engagement, when email became the best channel for political campaigns. Now, mobile devices are becoming increasingly important, with about one-quarter of Americans using them to engage with the 2010 mid-term elections.

Screenshots from Pennant

Pennant is an interactive visualization depicting Major League Baseball from 1951 through 2010. It is a gorgeous visual treatment of the kind of statistical data I enjoy browsing, from over 115,000 baseball games. You can view any team’s complete history, any given season, or re-play-by-play individual games. Since this is an interactive application drawing from time-based data, this is a great tool for exploring how the fate of teams changed over the course of a year or game. It costs $4.99 in the App Store, but it is great to have as a demonstration of what the iPad can be (as well as anticipating future updates).

The application was initially developed as a thesis project at Parsons by Steve Varga. Pennant was launched courtesy of data drawn from Retrosheet and The Baseball Databank. Varga created his own API to manipulate the raw data, to leverage new calculations that support the visualizations. He may release that massaged data to other applications in the future as an open API. More of Varga’s work is available at Vargatron.

The application isn’t perfect, of course:

• When searching the 1983 season for a game I went to, I was annoyed that going back to the season timeline always reset me to the middle of the season, not the game I was viewing.
• Navigation is clunky if you want to move laterally. There isn’t a way to look at the detail for a game and simply flick to the next game in that view (there should be).
• Keyword search is non-existent, making it impossible to search for references to Roger Clemens pitching against my White Sox and explore just those games.
• There is no player tracking. The data is available to follow an individual player through his career, like you can with an entire team. Imagine re-living the now tainted 1998 home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.
• Customization isn’t supported, nor are personal histories or favorite games. I would love to go through my old stack of scorecards and ticket stubs and curate all of the games I attended in person. When player timelines are supported, it would be a great tool for documenting my annual fantasy baseball rosters.

Pennant is currently only available on the iPad and requires a wireless connection, so it may not yet be practical for taking to ball games to look up stats. It is, however, quite satisfying for replaying games I attended, like the time the White Sox knocked a young Roger Clemens out in the fifth inning or the “Ryne Sandberg” game on June 23, 1984.

Most of my applications are for work productivity, games, or news aggregation. I like the possibilities of specialized apps that allow easy and enjoyable exploration of large data sets in a specific domain. The tablet is wonderful for this kind quick interaction and could be quite useful to support journalism, tourism and attending conferences. This one is particularly well done, and I hope some updates are coming in time for the 2011 regular season.

HTML5 is backward-compatibile with HTML4, and there is already wide support available on most browser platforms. An upgrade on the markup currently in widespread use, it adds a bunch of new tags to the previous protocols, allowing for more interaction and standardization. Demos are readily available on the Web.

To help in this knowledge upgrade, there are a couple resources that are worth noting:

An interactive visualization showing browsers compatibility with HTML5

From the Asylum Run (by Paul Irish and Divya Manian) comes HTML5 Readiness, a nifty interactive visualization showing how prepared the major browsers are for HTML5. Mouse over the bands to reveal each feature, and follow the rings to track each browser. The compatibility also extends back to 2008, so it is easy to track progress in development of these browser applications. Divya posted a bit of background on the project and how it came to be.

Another useful tool is the HTML5 Test, a web page that generates a report based on the browser calling the page. The tool scores 10 elements and an additional 6 related specifications, arriving at a number to compare browser interpretation of these developer functions.

Score your browser's HTML5 compatibility

To learn more about HTML5, pick up Mark Pilgrim’s O’Reilly book, HTML5: Up & Running. The text is essentially up online for free under Creative Commons licensing.

The map of my LinkedIn professional network

The map is interactive (to you). When you click on one of the nodes in your network, that person’s profile is displayed in the right sidebar and the connections you each share are highlighted. It is easy to see who the influencers and connectors are among the people you know. This has some practical value for better using the LinkedIn service:

You can use those insights to measure your own impact or influence, or create opportunities for someone else. So, you might see two distinct groups that you could introduce to become one. Or, you might leverage one person to connect them to someone else.

Source: Visualize your LinkedIn networkwith InMaps, 1/24/11

My use of LinkedIn has been largely limited to my academic connections made during my time in the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. Much of my initial exploration of social networks occurred as I prepared to graduate with a Masters degree in 2006, motivated by a desire to stay connected to those in my class and the two classes before and after mine. This is clearly represented in the dark blue cluster. Since that initial growth, I have mostly responded to connection requests but very rarely seek out new connections. This has led to a second large cluster of Informatics connections acquired during my quest for a Ph.D.

Other groups of note reflect my local Bloomington community (rose colored) and my old high school friends from Woodstock, Illinois (light orange). I also have a couple small clusters based on connections in Silicon Valley (maroon), mostly acquired through my Twitter API book, and my pre-academic job at TicketsNow (light blue). The most interesting color coding is the deep orange, scattered throughout all of the clusters. These people seem to be Indiana University students and faculty who are not Informatics folk.

While this is an interesting reflective exercise—both to consider who I know and how I’ve used LinkedIn—it would be more useful if I could also see the second connections, the people my people know. Understanding the next-step reach of my connections might inspire some expansion into clusters of interest and to know how the people I know are known outside of my network. I’ve never understood why this information isn’t easier to get to on LinkedIn, especially since I can visit anyone’s profile and it suggests a path to connecting to that person.

This service is free, provided your network is large enough to map (at least 50 connections and 75 percent of your profile completed).

Less Than Ideal

I got the gig just before the new semester began, which didn’t allow for much lead time in creating new material to match my approach to teaching. I wanted to emphasize how to approach understanding and implementing application development rather than trying to achieve expertise in this particular language. Since I was coding assignments, quizzes and exams from scratch each week, I managed to produce a few lemons that didn’t serve either learning or evaluation well. This included a final exam in which I greatly overestimated the ability of my students to make sense of complex code enough to debug and comment it, let alone enhance its features. There was also a revolving door of associate instructors in the first half of the semester that presented scheduling and continuity issues.

The class was much too big for a coding class, in my opinion, with 80-90 students taking this required course. The size prevented us from working together in front of computers and turned both projects and assignments into logistical nightmares as the instructors tried to give everyone enough support. Most importantly, the skills and interests among the students clearly divided them into two groups, each with quite different expectations for the course and abilities to pick up this material. Being a designer by training, I iterated throughout the semester, helping most but sacrificing the attention of some of the more gifted programmers in the class.

After the final grades were submitted, I started to work on a different way to structure the class that would address a few key needs:

1. Emphasize both individual mastery of the language and social application development
2. Allow students to work at their own pace
3. Learning through explanation
4. Reward participation

Gaming as a New Approach

In the first half of 2010, a class was taught using a gaming metaphor to determine grades. Indiana University Telecom professor Lee Sheldon tried this last spring for a course on multiplayer game design. Sheldon’s syllabus focuses on students earning experience points (XP) for “fighting monsters (Quizzes, Exams etc.), completing quests (Presentations of Games, Research etc.) and crafting (Personal Game Premises, Game Analysis Papers, Video Game Concept Document etc.).”

While I hadn’t seen the specifics of this syllabus until after I had prototyped my own course redesign, I was definitely inspired by the idea. There are some notable differences between my approach and one Sheldon implemented. The T366 class focused on multiple individual and group activities, but the end result appears to be a single point metric—XP—that increases with each student’s ability to master a particular task. My version of gaming-as-grading tried to value multiple resources and tie these elements together. For example, experience points may get you the leveling that translates to a letter grade, but students also have to manage “coin” and “honor” … each of which can be used to facilitate different activities. My course is also being designed to make it possible for a student to succeed while emphasizing or de-emphasizing group work. Finally, while the course has a regular meeting schedule (ideally, three one-hour sessions each week throughout the semester), the pace at which each person works is dictated by a combination of personal and social negotiations.

A flowchart for the game dynamics of a programming course

My initial descriptions of the course structure can be downloaded as PDF

I’m anxious to try this method out, even as I’m aware I may never get a chance to do so (eventually, I need to graduate and move on). However, I think there is value in exploring game dynamics as a mechanism for both productivity and learning in the workplace, too. At the very least, I’ll consider my reflection on Fall 2010 complete.

What do you think?

UPDATE: I’ve also posted this on Quora.

I gravitated toward things with which I was most familiar—a phone call, web browsing, Twitter apps. Today’s reflection is about my exposure to the new interactions that came with the phone.

I started a blog thread on Smaller Indiana asking how important your cell phone has become to your day-to-day routine. There is also a short survey about cell phone functions you can complete. If you want to help me out, leaving feedback in any of these forums is appreciated.

Out of the Box
I know this thing is more than just a phone. I got four cables with it in the box to give it computer cred. Even though Hanapin did get a real T-Mobile phone service package with the phone—which incredibly arrived about 20 hours after making the online purchase—I was expecting some kind of activation process, or at the very least a lengthy battery charge. To my surprise, the manual suggested I try the little red power button. Moments later, the Android was squeaking at me.

My first hiccup, though, came quickly: with the login for my Google account. There were only two simple boxes on the screen, plus a displayed button (as opposed to the form factor ones on the device). It didn’t take that long to successfully click on the first one and type my username. Selecting the password field, however, was a challenge for me. The phone alternated between dragging the visible page up and down and briefly highlighting one of the two input boxes. With some patience and better aim, I got the cursor into the proper position to type. My password, though, wouldn’t take. I probably spent a good 5-10 minutes on that one first interaction before I could move forward.

Those two particular interaction issues—an inability to select objects on the screen, and difficulty getting my passwords to take—plagued me as I downloaded and explored a variety of applications.

My most important application is likely going to be the one that gets me access to Twitter. The tool of choice was Twindroid, a third-party Twitter application for the Android that was recommended on a number of sites. After surfing to the web site through a Google search, I clicked download (nothing happened) only to later read that installation required downloading software through the Android Marketplace, a button buried in a hidden window from the home screen. The process of locating and installing Twindroid was quick and easy, but I couldn’t get the application to accept my password. Giving up, I came back to discover it did, indeed, know who I was.

My index finger is huge compared to the links it needs to click

Re-learning Interaction
I’m not certain if this is a breakdown of feedback or expectation. Maybe I have to get used to unpredictability of so many coordinated connections (me, my phone, the data access service, the application, Twitter), where there may be more opportunities for a broken channel. I do know that it was very frustrating for me to not understand why the thing I wanted to do (log into Twitter through Twindroid) wasn’t working. Even with interactions I assumed I knew, there appears to be a separate learning curve unique to the smartphone environment.

This is particularly true with something as simple as clicking on a link or button. Unless the web site or phone application maintains the proportions of the target to the real-world size of the fingers touching them, the interaction creates a barrier to use and efficiency.

So far, I have encountered the following kinds of interactions:

1. Click the Button—This is the most certain interaction, since it involves tactile feedback and some permanence of function. I’ve always got a way to get back to the main menu and navigate backwards in the current breadcrumb, but there doesn’t appear to be a way to move forward. In addition to the five buttons on the front, there are also two side buttons. One controls the volume, and the other takes pictures. I don’t know yet if they serve other purposes.
2. Touch the Screen—I am not used to touch screens, but my expectation is that it is pressure sensitive, like the old kiosks where you have to push to make contact between lower layers under the surface. This is not how the Android touchscreen functions. A light touch is sufficient. In fact, I suspect the pressure I was applying after I first turned it on probably helped spread out my heat signature and made my fingers fatter.
3. Tap the Screen—The first light touch seems to select. Holding down my finger or tapping a selected item appears to click it. Initially, there was a lot of combination interactions trying to force a response. As I have started using Twindroid and Google searches on the phone, though, a lighter touch and tap is giving me more control, and confidence.
4. Drag the Screen—This is a basic but sexy interaction, where you can flick your finger and have the screen fly by in a multi-dimensional scrolling action. It is the same kind of interaction I would have with a piece of paper, so this was the easiest to get the hang of. The only drawback is when I mess up on the touch selection above.
5. Turn the Screen and Slide the Screen—With the iPhone, you can turn the phone and it will detect orientation. While the Android has an accelerometer to potentially have this same response, the orientation of the screen seems to be tied not to the orientation of the device but whether or not the screen is slid open to reveal the QWERTY keyboard. It is nice to have the option of how to best view content, as well as having that content adapt to the change in screen orientation. However, sliding the screen out is an extraneous interaction unless you want access to the keyword. Similarly, it would be nice to be able to do some kind of typing without revealing the full keyboard.
6. Typing—For someone who texts at the pace of an arthritic grandmother, I welcome more options afforded a QWERTY keyboard. I found myself typing with my right index finger to try to solve my password entry problems, but in general feel quite comfortable now using my thumbs to hunt and peck. The shift and tab-to-select actions, though, are awkward and non-existent, respectively. At some point, I’m going to compose a blog on the Android to really put it through the paces.
7. Scroll the Selector—Initially, I found the little scroll wheel on the front of the device meaningless. I never used such interaction objects on laptops or mice that had them, so I assumed I would ignore it. It turns out that scrolling ball is very useful for navigating the links and form objects on web pages. It always retains context of what is visible on the screen, even if you scroll from the top to the bottom of the page quickly with the finger drag interaction. It may help solve my fat finger problem trying to hit the small text links.
8. Shake the Phone—I’ve seen the iBeer app on video and other mindless apps that use the accelerometer to sense motion. The first (and maybe only) application I downloaded and installed that relies on this interaction is the Magic 8 ball. I shake the phone, the picture on the screen shakes as well. I am wondering how much shaking interactions will be used in meaningful applications (for example, if I start playing music, can I shake up the playlist to scramble it).
9. Plug in the USB cord—This doesn’t help with my interaction on the screen, of course, but it was one of the first interactions I performed on my Android in order to keep it powered up. The phone comes with two USB connections, one that goes to an outlet and another that goes to a laptop.

Nothing life changing yet, but I have yet to try to integrate my phone into my daily routine.

Why was that spot so perfect? Why so warm?

A half-hour later, they were still snuggled together:

Then, just to prove their membership in the Makice clan, they stuck out their tongues for a final picture.

The widget is one of a dozen or so Internet systems developed to support their mission of transparent government. The Sunlight Foundation relies on Internet technologies to get the truth out into the open. They support, develop and deploy new online systems to make information about Congress and the federal government more accessible to the American people, fostering more openness and accountability in government. These projects include:

• Capitol Words—For every day that Congress is in session, Capitol Words sums up the day with one word (the most frequently used word from the Congressional Record).
• Punch Clock Map—Transparent politicians volunteer their itineraries for public review through a Google Map
• PoliQuiz—an interactive political trivia game.
• PublicMarkup.org—gives you the opportunity to review and comment on proposed bills before they are even introduced in Congress.
• Where Are They Now?—Community effort to track whether and where former Congressional staffers are employed as lobbyists.
• Party Time!—Tracks where and when politicians are partying.

Other Sunlight projects are inspired by such things as the Foreign Agent Registration Act, new legislation, personal finance records, earmarking, and citizen journalism.

Launched in 2006, the Sunlight Foundation works hard to get citizens involved with the process of governing through awareness initiatives like OpenCongress. This site collects a wealth of information from sources like GovTrack.us, Google News, Technorati, and OpenSecrets.org, turning them into blog reports on what is really happening in Washington, D.C. “We think everyone should be an insider.”

Past initiatives included the successful Let Our Congress Tweet campaign earlier this year, which responded to rules changes that would keep elected officials from using Twitter. Sunlight also sponsored a visualization contest. The winner was Unfluence, a network querying tool that showed the context of political donations, connecting candidates to corporations.

Bill Moyers describes the Sunlight Foundation

The Obama Effect
As the TwitVote experiment likely proves, the Twitter community—itself a reflection of online technologists and other early adopters—is pro-Obama. I suppose I’m no different.

The Twitter community is a bit biased

This election cycle has been far more uplifting than the past several if only because it seemed several reasonable options among the many candidates, in a race that included an historic battle late into the primary season. Barack Obama isn’t my ideal candidate, but when I show up at Meadowwood tomorrow morning—some 3.3 miles away from my house—I’ll be voting for what he inspires.

We forget, often, that the President may be the most powerful leader in the world but he also holds an office that doesn’t make laws, establish budgets, or rule on Constitutionality. Presidents merely influence these things through the people they choose to surround them and the way they conduct themselves in public. I’m sure Barack Obama has great ideas about how to fix the economy or health care, etc., but that isn’t the reason to vote for him.

If you want a sign of what kind of nation we might be under Obama, look at the army of citizen volunteers willing to go door to door to fight for his candidacy. They change avatars and middle names on Facebook in a sign of support. They compose songs. Most importantly, they get involved with local politics and become active in their own communities. Kerry and Gore didn’t invoke the same degree of passion. Obama is attractive because of the reaction the nation has had to his campaign.

Vote Report
Obama can’t take credit for any of the work done on Vote Report—a community-sourced election oversight project—but I have to wonder whether it comes to fruition without his Presidency motivating people to get involved.

Vote Report is led by a group of online activists that include Micah Sifry and Noel Hidalgo. For the many voters who experience voting problems—long lines, broken machines, missing names on registration rolls—this project provides a conduit to register a complaint on location. Using Twitter and hashtags (like, “#wait:120″ for a 2-hour wait in line), messages are distributed and aggregated to give a real-time look at where problems arise in the 2008 national elections. You don’t have to use Twitter in order to participate; Vote Reports has other ways to send your experiences to the volunteers, including phone (an automated system at 567-258-VOTE (8683), or talk to a human at 1-866-OUR-VOTE).

Community-source election oversight

One of the outcomes of this mass of information is a Plodt graph to show how the data changes over time. The team of developers is also working on a mashup with Google Maps. For developers and researchers, there are also several ways to get the raw data. Vote Report is a massive collaborative effort that includes support from organizations like Rock the Vote, Common Cause, NPR’s Social Media Desk, Women Donors Network, PBS, and Demos.

Behind the scenes at Vote Report

For more on Twitter and politics, visit Warren Sukernek’s list of political Twitter bookmarks. It contains a growing number of web articles and tools surrounding the current political season.

Poverty from Blog Action Day.

I was reminded of this event recently, but Blog Action Day has been pacing in the back of my mind since participating last year, with an article about sustainable design for the communal topic of Environment. I’m not sure how I’ll approach Poverty, but as a graduate student with family, I think I have some experience on the matter. The organizers have also helped by providing a page of resources to help bloggers be more informed on the subject.

There are currently over 4,000 blogs registered to participate, reaching over 8 million readers. Everybody consider participating in Blog Action Day on October 15th.

Cymbolism associates colors with words

Cymbolism is a new website that attempts to reveal which colors go with which words by asking visitors to associate one with the other. A spiffy interactive interface presents each participant with the definition of a specific word and 19 color options (and a “skip” option) from which to choose. After voting—which could eat a lot of time, if you let it—your most recent selections are compared to those of other participants.

In addition to being an interesting diversion, Cymbolism has the potential to be a great resource for designers. Color are an important aspect of communication. While color guides abound on the web, this one may be more meaningful because it reflects wider input from those who might view a web site, as opposed to a handful of experts making color decisions.

Colors are believed to have very specific meanings, but these meanings vary over time, place and culture. For years designers have been using colors to communicate feeling and mood, to trigger memories to make us act a certain way.

Cymbolism is an attempts to quantify the association between colors and words, making it simple for designers to choose the best colors for the desired emotional effect. Cymbolism tracks these associations over time (and in future versions by user demographics) to help designers to better create designs for the desired effects.
Source: “What is Cymbolism?“

At the moment, there are 178 words in the Cymbolism dictionary, with color associations backed by over 250,000 votes. If those aren’t enough, you can suggest a new word to add to the rotation. At some point demographic breakdowns will be added to the data collection, but for now each word will show both cumulative and recent color association trends with a color spectrum indicating which colors have been selected most.

The color of Authentic

Cymbolism was developed by Suffolk Software, with some help. Suffolk has two other projects of interest: a series of “most aggregated” RSS content on various topics (including a rather cool one on movie trailers, MostPreviewed), and a challenge to release a new web site every five weeks.

The color association project, which was launched at the end of July, is the interactive part of an interesting resource on the psychology of color. Enthusiasts and designers will find much useful information on color in the Cymbolism blog.

Twintro introduces followers to one new member a day

At first view, I dismissed Twintro as purely a marketing gimmick, something only SEO consultants and those offering webinars would use. That’s not the case, however. Twintro is billed as a way to sample and explore interesting people without the higher barriers of manually finding, following and unfollowing new twitterers.

Finding interesting people on Twitter outside of your circle of friends is a problem for rookie and veteran users alike. Twintro solves this dilemma by bringing fascinating, amusing, and thought-provoking Twitterers to you. Twintro is a service built on top of Twitter, so it does not require you to sign up, log in, or visit this site.

There is great potential, too, for Twintro to become an intriguing new view of daily Twitter use that proves insightful for researchers and community managers.

To join, you must follow Twintro on Twitter. This is a requirement both to view the re-tweeted content as well as to receive direct message notification about being a featured twitterer. Every day for about 10 hours, Twintro retweets the day’s posts from different members. Anyone following Twintro or viewing the web site will get to peer into someone’s day.

Rob is the sole arbiter of who gets featured, giving the system a human filter to keep spam out of the shared channel. Twintro also plans to throttle the number of posts being sent each day, further guarding against spam.

In addition to offering your own tweets for a day, you can nominate others to featured with a simple @twintro reply with another Twitter member username.

My primary use of Twitter is as a mechanism to connect to my local community of Bloomington, Indiana. Twitter also offers great academic interest, with several Informatics projects developing around the platform. A surprisingly small percentage of those I follow turn out to be people I don’t know or who don’t live in my vicinity. Twintro, however, may become a “safe” way to stumble upon new connections outside of my small geographic and professional circle.

Today, I tracked Mauricio Balvanera‘s trip to a San Francisco dentist. Seven of his tweets were reposted on Twintro. I look forward to seeing who shows up in Twitterrific tomorrow.

Chrome was the talk of Twitter on Tuesday

After a few years of feeling normal, however, Mac users are suddenly second-class citizens again. Recent releases of Internet cool—Photosynth and now Chrome—have no Mac compatibility, leaving us again on the outside looking in. We can only live vicariously through others, which is why I am increasingly thankful for the presence of the world’s best blog: Read/Write/Web.

R/W/W not only offered to share their initial beta testing with the world, but on Tuesday Marshall Kirkpatrick’s blog also published an entire series of Chrome posts reporting on a major security flaw and issues of privacy in the terms of service.

Introducing … Chrome! (for some)

Most people found out about Chrome through the innovative web comic describing the application. True to the nature of the Internet, it has already been spoofed. For a superb (though long) presentation on how Chrome came to be, spend an hour with the Google developers behind the project.

Not all reviews have been glowing, and the browser suffers from the immediate problem of being beta (existing plug-in support), but the initial successes being reported are enough to be optimistic that Chrome will be a real option for Mac users sometime soon. Jason Lee Miller, a frequent contributor to another great blog, had a nice synopsis of Tuesday’s splash, reflecting a general consensus that Google’s innovation—while not perfect—is likely to advance the state of future browsing. It is impressive that the top search engine has spent so much time thinking about the conduit for consuming the content people find.

Someday, we’ll know for sure.

On Monday, Doodle announced a leap to the next level with the release of a Facebook application. While Doodle isn’t designed to replace existing calendaring tools, it does bring the unassuming tool a bit closer to the masses.

Doodle adds a Facebook Application

To use Doodle, someone first writes up a description and offers some possible dates and times, inviting others to express their availability with a few check marks. The most popular time slots usually win, but the creators are able to take the information and do what they want.

As the developers remind us:

“Doodle” is an English term and means “casual scribble”, “casual design”, or “casual sketch”. While Doodle is not a drawing service, it indeed makes scheduling events so simple as to make this an almost casual task.

The power of the tool is found in this simplicity. There are no master templates or attempts to shape polls to fit the detail of a specific kind of event (i.e. business meetings vs. dining out). There is no integration with calendaring systems or notification of results. Doodle handles one thing only: revealing possible consensus without littering an inbox.