Poet Ponders the Digital

MarsEdit and Blogger are not cooperating, and I’m uncertain if I will use MarsEdit past the trail period. Currently, what the application offers me is a way to compose drafts outside of Apple Mail, but it isn’t offering me much more than that because I use Google’s blogging platform. Annoyances that require using a menu choice, instead of the Option pane: Date should be included with “Post Status” for scheduling purposes. Enclosure settings should be within the editor window, along with Title. Bullet lists should be a default formatting choice, as they are common. More serious annoyances: Paragraphs require two blank lines, even in Rich Text mode, or you must clean the code within Blogger. Images do not function properly, no matter how many experiments I have tried.  I’m not saving much time if I still need to carefully format a post in Blogger and insert images from within Google’s interface. MarsEdit prefers WordPress, without a doubt. For Blogger, MarsEdit ...

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...

My students like to use Google Docs for collaborative drafts of projects. They like the "Suggesting" mode for editing, though it takes time to get used to this approach compared to Microsoft Word, and they really like the "Chat" mode for working together remotely. I'm not as comfortable with Google's "Suggesting" edit mode. I like the "Track Changes" approach of Word, but that might be out of familiarity. The "Revision History" is also little clunky in Google Docs. Students have rolled back edits by accident, especially on tablets. Maybe the location of the "Editing Mode" and "History" (the upper right) makes them prone to accidental "palm clicks" when holding the devices. I've not used the JavaScript-based macro features, but I am glad there is a way to automate editing tasks. One of the reasons I love Word is the ease of Visual Basic for Applications. JavaScript ("GScript") ...

Use the best tool for the job. It's a simple saying, and one many writers ignore. Paper and pencil, while often my preferred tools for writing, have not been the best tools for writing for at least a century. Typewriters are better, if you are concerned with speed and legibility. Typewriters with correction tape gave us another reason to prefer the mechanical to graphite sticks and wood pulp. I remember my sense of awe when I saw the earliest word processors. These were typewriters with memory, and sometimes a disk drive. Not quite computers, but certainly something more than a manual typewriter, I wanted one… but never owned one. Instead, I upgraded from a blue Smith Corona manual typewriter to a brown Brother electric. Even after receiving an early home computer, a Commodore VIC-20, the typewriter was the best device for writing quickly. My first real computer, a Tandy 1000, included a simple suite called DeskMate. I used the text editor to write stories, saving the...

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 ...

Which documentation standards do we decide what to teach students, and does it matter? In this post, I'm going to explain why I teach students in my technical writing courses XHTML for Web design instead of HTML5. My suggestion is to teach what works most consistently across computing platforms, knowing that the standards of today will be replaced. Documentation file formats and coding habits should adhere to standards because one of the goals of technical documentation is that it be easy to update and revise at a later date. Teaching documentation, therefore, should include teaching the ideal habits for technical writers and documentation designers. Consider HTML and XHTML. Long before standards bodies, such as the W3C, approve and finalize any standard, experience teaches us that the browser developers will have already implemented a mix of whatever is coming — and each browser will be an incomplete and incompatible mess. I still remember trying to get basic features to ...

For the last few months I have been working on a new website for the Military Writers Society of America. The goal was to create a collaborative writing site, where the members of MWSA could share ideas and work together to create the online version of their magazine Dispatches. In many ways, the goal was the same as when I create an online classroom for university students: the technology should assist collaboration and never hinder participation. If you are curious, the new MWSA website is at: http://www.mwsadispatches.com What I've learned during this process will influence my approach to designing other online spaces, including courses. Allow me to detail the lessons, some of which were frustrating. 1. Drupal was a good choice. I experimented with several other content management systems, such as Joomla, Mambo, Moodle, XOOPS, and the classic PHP-Nuke. It was Drupal or Joomla, and Drupal won. For all the choices out there, I settled on Drupal because it is so ubiquitous...

I'm preparing for the 2011-12 school year, which this year means learning new software systems, university philosophies, and everything that goes along with any new job in today's connected world. I hadn't really thought about the comparisons until this month, but I am noticing how my issues at work aren't that different from those of my wife at her office. Group scheduling and management software varies from okay to horrible. I've used several different "groupware" platforms. The new employer uses Novell GroupWise — at least until school starts. Right before school starts the university will be switching to another platform. Not the best of timing, but that's reality in any organization. The university is also migrating to new learning management software, new Web servers, and a new collaboration platform. What could go wrong? It's strange how dependent we've become on our networks. My wife and I have struggled with synchronizing calenda...

For the last few weeks I have been eagerly waiting to start preparing online course shells related to my new university post. Unfortunately, I still do not have access to the Blackboard servers used by the university. The delay, I am told, has something to do with the HR department. The odd part of that explanation is that I do have access to the other online services to which the university subscribes. As with many smaller colleges and universities, the information technology at this university is contracted out to specialists. I believe the Blackboard services are subscribed to directly via Blackboard, while email and website services are hosted by other companies. Currently, the university email and calendar system is on a Novell GroupWise hosted service, while website and intranet servers running Microsoft SharePoint involve yet another service provider. I don't know if HR and other departments farm out IT to yet more companies, but I wouldn't be surprised. When you create ...

In the last few days my wife and I have fought Blogger and SurveyMonkey. For two applications that are used by a lot of people, especially writers and academics, the applications are horrible. When an engineer and computer programmer can't figure out the choices to accomplish basic tasks, something is wrong. I have used Blogger for several years. This is a great platform, but some of the tools need improvement. The help to accomplish tasks leaves much to be desired. We wanted to create a multi-author blog. While we were able to get the setup to allow anyone to post, the author name was always the same. It took several passes through the settings to realize you needed to create special "inbox" addresses for each author. Sure, it was a logical fix once we realized the issue, but it wasn't obvious on the surface. That's not good. Also, the editor has some problems with formatted e-mail. I wish the editor were more like Google's Doc application. ...

What makes a Web site readable? As the Internet moved from the ASCII texts of the USENET and FTP repositories towards HTML, no one really cared about appearance. The notion was that content was everything — and most content files were journal articles and scientific research. The early notion of specifying fonts on the World Wide Web was a major shift from the original notion of the Web. You can look at changes from HTML pre-1.0 to our current standards and the shift towards visual content is obvious. The reality is that there was no stopping the drift towards a visual medium. Given basic HTML 2.0, designers resorted to complex tables-within-tables to mimim familiar print designs. From the earliest handwritten manuscripts, artists have known how words are placed on a page (or screen) affects how they are read. No one was about to settle for no control over a Web site's appearance. Temptation to experiment can lead to innovation, but on the Web it also helps to k...

For October 16, 2007... Blog post: Add a YackPack plugin to your PBwiki (click on plug-ins) and try it out. Sign-up for tappedin.org (http://ti2.sri.com/tappedin/index.jsp) and explore its features for online chat (see how it was used at Hillcrest High School: http://www.slideshare.net/sbgaddy/hillcrest-high-school-21st-century-project-student-products). Reflect on how you might use tappenin.org or other discussion sites (WebCT/Vista, Moodle, Drupal) or tools (IM’ing, etc.) or virtual/game sites (Second City, etc.) for online discussion. I gave up trying plug-ins with OS X and Safari, which I think might happen in many educational settings. I just don't have the energy to manually link and setup so many items, even though I have done so with images and other elements in PBwki. As with Google Docs and other "Web 2.0" items not supporting Apple's browser at this time, I generally won't sacrifice my system to another browser. (FireFox is the only major alternativ...