“…the perfect commonplace book, in which I will continue that proud Renaissance tradition of recording useful quotations, inspiring stories and intriguing snippets, but which will eventually, in a surprising modern twist and via a complicated but plausible chain of events involving bestsellerdom, successful film adaptation and a meeting of minds with the star during an on-set visit, end in a long and happy marriage to Jake Gyllenhaal. Is it any wonder I keep buying, when only an unlined leather notebook stands between me and all this?”

“The project team is conducting a study in a bid to find a way to prevent the transmission of dengue virus. They are seeking volunteers to bloodfeed mosquitoes in their Aedes aegypti colony. To bloodfeed the mosquitoes, participants place their arm in the colony cage for a period of 15 minutes.
Participants will receive a $10 … Gift Card for every cage they feed.”

Not my ideal way to earn ten bucks.

In a recent blog post he explores the combined potential of a national schools curriculum and the advent ofthe iPad.

Through the National Curriculum, he says, “every educator and every student throughout the nation can be drawing from and contributing to a ‘common wealth’ of shared materials, whether they be podcasts of lectures, educational chatrooms, lesson plans, and on and on and on.  As the years go by, this wealth of material will grow as more teachers and more students add their own contributions to it.  The National Curriculum isn’t a mandate, per se; it’s better to think of it as an empty Wikipedia.  All the article headings are there, all the taxonomy, all the cross references, but none of the content.  The next decade will see us all build up that base of content, so that by 2020, a decade’s worth of work will have resulted in something truly outstanding to offer both educators and students in their pursuit of curriculum goals.”

To achieve this potential, we need to change how we think about teaching, about students, about the education process itself. We must recognise teachers and students as creators of value.

“Educators spend endless hours working on lesson plans and instructional designs – they should be encouraged to share this work.  Many of them are too modest or too scared to trumpet their own hard yards – but it is something that educators and students across the nation can benefit from.  Students, as they pass through the curriculum, create their own learning materials, which must be preserved, where appropriate, for future years.

“We should do this.  We need to do this.  Right now we’re dropping the best of what we have on the floor as teachers retire or move on in their careers.  This is gold that we’re letting slip through our fingers. We live in an age where we only lose something when we neglect to capture it. We can let ourselves off easy here, because we haven’t had a framework to capture and share this pedagogy.  But now we have the means to capture, a platform for sharing – the Ultranet, and a tool which brings access to everyone – the iPad.  We’ve never had these stars aligned in such a way before.  Only just now – in 2010 – is it possible to dream such big dreams.  It won’t even cost much money.  Yes, the state and federal governments will be investing in iPads and superfast broadband connections for the schools, but everything else comes from a change in our behavior, from a new sense of the full value of our activities.  We need to look at ourselves not merely as the dispensers of education to receptive students, but as engaged participant-creators working to build a lasting body of knowledge.” [Pesce's emphasis]

University Website - xkcd.com cartoon by Randall Monroe

Every university home page is a delicately judged balancing act.  As the main door into a large, complex organisation, the home page must serve many different audiences — prospective students and their parents, alumni, professional staff, academic staff, current students at all levels, the media/marketing department, journalists, visiting academics, employers, sponsors and investors, government agencies, professional associations, benefactors, random members of the public who heard about a public lecture they’d like to attend and it starts in, like, 15 minutes from now, could you just tell me where it’s happening?

Claire Spencer and I presented a poster at Ausweb 2005 on emerging best-practice for university home pages. The poster was based on a competitor research project comparing 68 university web sites.

In turn, the competitor research was part of a larger project aimed at making some evidence-based decisions about the design of a new home page for the large research university that employed us.

We undertook several types of research:

• user research — an online survey about preferences, ideas and opinions
• business requirements analysis — a survey of internal stakeholders, asking them to prioritise different types of information and online service; and a review of corporate strategies, plans and other documentation about business goals (changes in the student enrolment profile, increased openness about research activity and outputs, key marketing messages, etc)
• user personas — task analysis, identification of key user groups and characteristics
• usability assessment – task-based testing in a usability laboratory, expert walk-through of our web site and several others
• web standards – identifying the coding, accessibility, performance and related standards we wanted to use in the new design templates
• content analysis – extensive review of the content and services already available on the University’s many, many (many!) web sites and in its publications (brochures, newsletters etc)
• site traffic analysis – understanding which parts of the University web site are important or heavily-used, and who uses them (or should use them)
• search log analysis – identifying sought-after content, understanding the language our web users employ (so we can use it in our web content); by undertaking ‘test searches’ we gained an understanding of why users preferred search over link-clicking for some types of content
• stakeholder consultation – interviews with senior managers, communication and marketing officers, content owners, subject matter experts and other internal stakeholders, to understand their ‘pain points’ and identify how the web site might help to resolve these

This research took about three months of intensive work by Claire and me, with help from other members of the project team. At times our manager and some colleagues chafed about the effort that went into this research phase.

However, when it was all synthesised into a design brief and proposed site structure, the value of the preparatory work became clear.

An immediate benefit was that the development stage was relatively fast and simple. Everyone knew what was required and what technical standards we needed to meet. We had a clear task list and timeline. Testing of the prototypes was mainly technical — validating code, checking download times,  and so on. Some lightweight user testing confirmed that we were on the right track with the navigation and visual design.

Another benefit of doing the groundwork emerged when we reached the ‘final approval’ stage for the new design. Whereas previous home-page designs had been the subject of months of debate before being signed off (if they were signed off at all), this time the proposed design was almost immediately endorsed by the relevant authorities, with only one or two minor changes requested.

[grins] Did I say “relevant authorities”? Don’t let that term mislead you: our web governance model at the time was nothing to be proud of. Several senior executives — and quite a few of their direct reports — each thought they had the final say over what went onto the home page. Even a minor change to the wording of a link could lead to months of argument, competition and resentment.

For the web team, tucked into a low-profile niche quite a long way down the organisational hierarchy, the only way to resolve disputes was by careful consultation and negotiation with the higher-ups, often at arm’s length (eg our manager’s boss might conduct the negotiations on our behalf, instead of letting the project manager speak for herself). We had no power and very little access to senior decision-makers. Instead of trying to acquire formal authority ourselves, we took a dual approach that established our credibility.

First, as outlined above, we invested time in ensuring our decisions were soundly evidence-based — an absolute must in large research-oriented university where every staff member believes they are entitled to question every decision.

Secondly, we worked on developing relationships with people who had an interest in the web and could advocate on our behalf. We provided a range of services to faculties and departments, including a broad-ranging training program, professional support via a community of practice, and a consultancy service to help them undertake their own web redevelopment projects. Business managers, communication specialists, IT managers and web staff all benefited from these services, and in turn they provided lobbying support for the redesign project and other University-wide initiatives related to web management.

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Bonus: Gregory Beyer’s review of a non-existent book, “The Devil and the Rising Sun: A Year Inside the West Carolina University Admissions Department” by Cortoroy Chen, makes me wish it existed. Very funny, if you’ve ever worked at a university.

And a non-humorous bonus: web managers and content strategists will find lots of useful standards, frameworks, checklists and other tools on the Victorian eGovernment web site.

Undergraduate students use the library for collaborative group work during semester as they work on problem-solving and team-based assignments. Towards assessment time, individual study is preferred.

Research students look for quiet spaces where they can safely leave a couple of books and a laptop while they browse the shelves or take a break from reading and writing. Academic staff in the humanities and social sciences tell us they want similar quiet spaces in the library; academics in other disciplines tend to use their offices or other locations for study. Retired academics would also appreciate this type of space: retirement doesn’t mean the end of intellectual life.

Like most academic libraries we have a ‘special collections’ reading room where accredited researchers can view rare or ancient books, manuscripts and other items.

The NewYork Public Library operates what NY Observer journalist Molly Young calls the city’s last silent place, the Allen Room, a hush-hush space on the second floor of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (formerly the New York Public Library main branch) on Fifth Avenue:

“I wish there were more drama,” said [author] Alexander Rose, “but it’s convivial and collegiate. There’s no Norman Mailer trying to kill his wife in here. No tension, no melodrama.” … Founded in 1958 as a tribute to Frederick Lewis Allen, the historian and editor of Harper’s Magazine, the room serves as a workspace to a rotating group of authors. Rubberneckers take note: The door is locked at all times, and access is restricted to those who have book contracts, a photocopy of which must accompany requests for a key card. “It’s like Aladdin’s cave,” Mr. Rose said of the room, which he heard about through the literary grapevine. “I looked it up, and it actually did exist.”

Image, above: Radiation Infographic by byDavvi, CC-licensed

Marshall McLuhan was right: the medium is, in part, the message. That, says Jan Swafford, is why ebooks will never completely replace print:

“E-books won’t destroy paper and ink. The Internet and e-books may set back print media for a while, and they may claim a larger audience in the end. But a lot of people who care about reading will want the feel, the smell, the warmth, the deeper intellectual, emotional, and spiritual involvement of print.”

Some messages, of course, don’t require an emotional investment on the part of the reader.

Health of England - The New York Times iPad infographic -- click to see more images on Flickr

Known for the quality of its ‘infographics’ — visual representations of information that explain events or concepts — the New York Times is experimenting with new ways to present data. An ‘interactive infographic’ accompanied a recent NYT article on the north-south gap in England’s health care:

“The different ‘Health Wheels’ distil 32 different health indicators across 9 geographical regions. The wheels act as visual barometers for the health of each region, in order to provide users with an intuitive way of scanning through all the indicators. A map of England communicates the national perspective in response to the wheel, with a ‘traffic light’ colour code identifying which regions score ‘better than’, ‘worse than’ or ‘average’ compared to the national mean. For the regional view, segments on the wheel are color-coded according to the performance of each indicator.”

You don’t need an iPad to see it — the NYT published a video and Flickr set of photos to show the infographic’s development process and the final product.

Other online publications have also experimented with animated infographics to explain complex concepts.

The Little, Brown paperback edition of Iain M Banks’s latest novel, Transition, comes with a unique barcode. Scan the barcode with your iPhone and it will download companion features for the novel — unseen chapters, author’s notes and commentary, and an annotated list of characters.

Rival publisher Canongate:

“… is no slouch in the digital department itself, … launching a (paid-for) enhanced iPhone app for Nick Cave’s novel The Death of Bunny Munro … complete with videos of Cave and an audio version synched to the text of the book, scored by Cave himself.”

Smart business.

Infographic showing relative proportions of printed and digital materials lent by US libraries. Data source: ALA. Infographic published in the Wall Street Journal (click image for full article)

Libraries, too, are embracing e-books. Led by the Internet Archive  a group of US lending libraries have set up OpenLibrary.org, a web site for borrowing e-books.

Geoffrey Fowler writes in the Wall Street Journal that the OpenLibrary catalogue includes access to “more than a million scanned public domain books and a catalog of thousands of contemporary e-book titles available at many public libraries.”

The digital collection will include scans of out-of-print books that can still be found on library shelves. Each title can be borrowed by only one person at a time; if the e-book version is checked out, then the corresponding printed edition will not be available for loan.

“Enterprise software products are complex, powerful tools. Their complexity is one of the reasons businesses sometimes fail to fully realize the expected return on investment from these products.

“For enterprise employees, who must use these enterprise applications, this complexity poses a considerable challenge. When an organization deploys an application, it expects users to learn the new system, integrate it into their existing work processes, and become proficient enough to allow the organization to realize the system’s full benefits. Far too often, however, enterprise employees find these new systems hard to learn, hard to master, and difficult to integrate into existing processes.”

Enterprise systems are rarely engineered for usability, and this is their downfall: by being cumbersome to use and difficult to customise, enterprise systems will cost your business tends of thousands of dollars in wasted staff time — many, many hours of waiting, backtracking, checking, workarounds and delays, not to mention the helpdesk support.

Fourteen experts, including researchers from the University of Texas, Stanford University, Microsoft and Facebook, predict the directions of social media research in 2009. This field of social analytics is about using data to better understand human behavior and preferences, particularly in online social environments. Such data has enormous potential to generate new business opportunities for onine service providers — and, if you’re an Orwell fan (as am I), to raise the spectre of Big Brother clothed in many uncomfortable shades of grey.

Over the last 12 months Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, the Australian War Memorial, Washington’s Smithsonian Institution and other cultural organisations have been contributing images to the Flickr Commons. The (US) Library of Congress has published a report on its Flickr Commons pilot project, essential reading for academic libraries and other institutions that are considering joining the program.