Poet Ponders the Digital

Lower case ‘a’ from Adobe Caslon Pro, superposed onto some guides. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Asked to summarize my research projects... Curiously, beyond the theses and dissertation, all my work is in economics of media and narrative. I ask what works and why when offering stories to audiences. What connects with an audience and can we model what audiences want from narratives? (Yes, you can model data on narratives and what "sells" and what wins awards and what nobody wants.) Yet, my degree research projects all relate to design of writing spaces, as knowing what works is also key to knowing what could be "sold" to users. MA: How poor LMS UI/UX design creates online spaces that hinder the writing process and teacher mentoring of students. Also: The cost of LMS design and compliance with legal mandates for usability. Ph.D: The experiences of special needs students in online settings, from commercial spaces to games to learning spaces and which space...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley September 2, 2014 Deadline October 2014 Issue Font Wrangling: Take Control of Your Typefaces Too many typefaces are cluttering up printed pages, online spaces and computer drives. Hundreds, or even thousands, of fonts on our computing devices prove too tempting for some people. It’s time to wrangle your fonts and refine your designs. A high school teacher rejected the first term paper I typed into a computer. Notice that I didn’t write the paper on the computer; I entered text I had written on paper. I sought to avoid the hassles of using correction fluid with my typewriter by switching to the computer and its dot-matrix printer. Despite using the “letter quality” mode of my Epson printer, the built-in font looked odd. The teacher complained that the lowercase g, p and q were squished and lines of ink smudges were unacceptable. Unless you could afford a daisy-wheel printer with its typewriter mechanism, a personal computer was an ...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley March 3, 2014 Deadline April 2014 Issue More Than a Typewriter: The Power of Word Typewriters still amaze me, especially the antique mechanical models. There’s something wonderful about the feel of levers, gears, springs and rollers working together to transmit thoughts into words. Typewriters possess a romance computer keyboards and touch screens lack. But, please, stop using your word processor like a typewriter. Word processor abuse mars many otherwise good documents. Bad habits people develop over time lead to documents that are ugly and difficult to edit and revise. The numerous excuses for improper word processing deserve dismissal. It does not take days or even hours to learn to use tabs effectively. Paragraph styles take minutes to understand and appreciate. Even a complex looking table of contents takes only a few mouse clicks to create if you construct a document properly. When you know more about your software tools, you also kno...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley January 7, 2013 Deadline February 2013 Issue Accommodating Difference with Good Design Websites and software should be accessible to as many people as possible, including individuals with physical and neurological differences. Developers sometimes forget the various challenges people experience when visiting websites or using software. Failing to test interfaces for accessibility leaves barriers in place that exclude readers and users, the last thing any good organization or company wants to do. In the physical world, we notice the obstacles others encounter. Most of us try to help when we notice steep steps, heavy doors, high shelves or small print frustrating another person. Whether out of empathy, compassion or a sense of obligation, we don’t need laws to tell us that helping other people is the right thing to do. Of course, there are laws such as the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), amended in 2008, and the Individuals with ...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley August 6, 2012 Deadline September 2012 Issue The Responsive Web: Every Screen is Different Websites should be viewable and usable on as many devices and computer screen sizes as possible. That sounds obvious and simple, but designers know that it is increasingly difficult to anticipate how people might visit a website. If you have a website for your business or organization, you should test it on a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop and a variety of computers with a mix of screen sizes. Testing a website on one computer with three or four browsers is insufficient, though that remains an important aspect of testing a website. No longer do we sit at 800-by-600 or 1024-by-768 screens to explore the Web. As a designer, this is frustrating. As a smartphone owner, I’m thrilled I don’t need a computer to read news headlines or read book reviews. I’ve always tried to design websites that work well for most users. Before 2006, I designed websites for myse...

I'm taking a short break from designing my Blackboard shells for both an on-campus and online course because I'm exhausted. Don't let anyone try to persuade you that online courses and courses with online content are somehow "easier" to prepare and to deliver. The time and energy required is substantially greater than the effort to prepare a traditional university course. Universities need to consider this time and energy more accurately. The minor stipend I receive for creating an online course does not reflect the time I invest in the effort. I definitely believe there are more benefits than negatives to providing online content to students, including extra content for traditional on-campuses courses. But, we have to admit that effective online delivery is time-consuming. The reasons for this are many; I can address a few now: 1) The course management software itself requires time and effort. Everything online is simply more time consuming. The benefits in...

As I prepare to assume the role of coordinator of an online (and traditional) degree program, I have been thinking about my ideal educational model. My ideal system would include online and traditional instruction, so many of the ideas I express below apply to traditional classroom education and online. Online systems might provide flexibility not possible for some traditional schools, which is why I am a believer in hybrid educational systems. So, my ideal degree program would… Allow students to switch between online and traditional instruction if they find online doesn't meet their learning styles or needs. Allow students to take and re-take any online tests and lab practicums two or three times until a set deadline, encouraging mastery over merely passing a test. A mix of questions or problems would prevent "memory gains" from repeated questions. Three exams does seem a reasonable cap, though. Allow students to move faster or slower than the traditional quarter and sem...

For the last couple of days I have been reformatting and revising a Word document I created and then passed along to colleagues. Unfortunately the colleagues used "brute force" to alter the formatting of the document. This formatting method rendered the automatic table of contents, title page fields, and indices useless. Brute force formatting is when you override the style of a paragraph or word to match another style's appearance. For example, instead of changing a "Normal" paragraph to "Heading 2" for a section, the editor of the document simply increased the size of the text and applied "bold-italic" font attributes. As a result, headings created this way did not appear in the table of contents. Such formatting was applied throughout the document. In once case, a bullet list appeared in the table of contents because the style was "Heading 3" — with brute force formatting to make the text appear like the "List Paragraph...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley October 25, 2010 Deadline December 2010 Issue Scrapbooking Made Easy Scrapbooking is a serious hobby for some people. Two of my cousins create beautiful works of art using special acid-free art papers, rubber stamps, decals and photos. Scrapbooking is an art form in the hands of serious “scrappers.” Then, there are people like me. I can’t cut a decent trim using Fiskar scissors and don’t even allow me near glue. I’m more likely to glue the photos to myself than the pages. Yet, there is hope for those of us with scrapbook impairments. Digital scrapping, also known as DigiScrappin or digiscrap, enables us to use computer software to create virtual scrapbooks that can also be printed. There are several specialized software packages available for scrapbooking. These applications sell for less than $40. Broderbund and Nova also sell special editions of their scrapbooking applications for weddings. The wedding editions include clipart and fonts appr...

In college, I wrote software documentation for mainframe users, which meant I had the opportunity to use text editors and word processors on a variety of computer platforms. I composed documentation on everything from glorified typewriters (DEC VT102 and IBM 3270 terminals) to slick WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") Apple Macs. I was probably not alone in being captivated by the Mac experience. Toss in PageMaker, a few fonts, and a LaserWriter for a complete desktop publishing system, and the Mac was hard to beat. Yet, I quickly realized that I wrote better on my MS-DOS 2.1 PC running WordPerfect 4.2 from floppy disks. How could this be? The Mac was easier to use and the papers I typed looked much better on paper. Why did I type so much more, and much better, on the PC? I didn't work on the Mac; I explored. I'd play with fonts, formatting options, and the nifty features of Word or PageMaker. I'd also play Crystal Quest, Lode Runner, and Dark Castle for ...

This weekend I installed WordPress on our personal server. The process took about two hours, including customization and tweaking beyond the basic installation. No great PHP or MySQL skills were required; as long as you know how to use the command prompts you can install WordPress. The modifications included adding Amazon code to the PHP-generated pages. This allows us to use Amazon links without long URLs. To do this, I had to copy code from our Amazon Associates account and paste it, formatted, into the PHP code. Not a challenge, thankfully. I also enabled two spam filters via the PHP code. What makes WordPress, Drupal, and Moodle popular is the ease with which these systems can be extended. Third parties have created numerous plug-ins, widgets, and themes for these three open source platforms. I could, rather easily, support a pretty large number of teachers and students using open source software (OSS) for Web applications. The price is ideal and the skills required are incre...

Yesterday, I defended my doctoral dissertation and paid the last $120 in fees to the University of Minnesota. For the cost of tuition, they really should include the dissertation filing, even though the money is technically paid to a private publisher. Here is a portion of the "ETD" report you receive after submitting the final project: Print Date : 05-12-2010 _____________________________________________________ Campus : University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Program : Graduate School Plan : Rhetoric/Sci/Tech Comm Ph D Major Degree Sought : Doctor of Philosophy Plan : Supporting Program Minor Dissertation: Online Pedagogy: Designing Writing Courses for Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders Dissertation / Final Research Categories ______________________________________________________ 736 : Speech & Rhetorical Studies 810 : Educational/Instructional Media Design 835 : Special Education 864 : English Education It is comple...