SXSW 2011: Vote for MashED Up!

The presentation I co-authored with Doug, MashED Up!: Mashups and Higher Education, is up for vote in the South by Southwest PanelPicker! So, if you enjoyed the talk we gave at eduWeb and are thirsty for more or you’re attending SX and want to see how mashups intersect with education, click over to the voting booth and give us a thumbs-up.

Do you have a presentation currently up for vote? Let us know in the comments!

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The Kids Just Launch

Watch this (it’s less than two minutes). Then you can file it away under “What All the Kids Are Into These Days,” and then, you can make a copy of that file and file it in your secret “God, I Feel Old” file.

Mitchell Davis is a self-made YouTube celeb from Ohio who, segue, kind of reminds me of a young Jim Carrey if Jim Carrey’d had iMovie at 18. What I’d like you to note about this video is how genuinely “2010 teenager” it is. It’s a vlog, first off, so the format is new-ish, and there’s a sort of MySpace-y casual narcissism, but there’s also the obvious comfort with technology, the use of comedic editing techniques culled from the media he’s grown up with, and the way the whole thing looks and feels like a video chat.

Next, I’d like to direct your attention to my favorite fashion blogger. Tavi Gevinson is 13 and has honed a common childhood penchant for playing dress-up into a prodigious sense of (and interest in) fashion that, in turn, has become a widely read and highly regarded fashion column. Style Rookie reads like a teenage diary because that’s how it started out and, as Tavi maintains, what it still is. Most importantly, it’s that natural lack of pretension that makes her blog great.

What these kids give us is a triple lesson in real artists shipping, good enough being great, and authenticity. The nice thing about that last one is if you’re doing the other two right, “realness” comes along for free.

So ship that thing you’re sitting on. Make it good, but don’t wait for perfect—improve it as you go. Is the editing in that student-produced video not quite right? Are the styles in your faculty blog still a little off? Are you worried about selecting the right photos for an event recap? Do/make/publish the thing. Get it in front of people and let them beat it up. Then do it again and again. Your project will either die from the constant pummeling and you can move on, or it (and you) will be stronger than ever. Then you can learn from your mistakes and get better and faster at producing content.

Bonus takeaway: make sure you’re not afraid to try things. That’s how to get millennial-level familiarity with new tools: just have at it. You’re not going to break Photoshop or the Internet. Go ahead and mess with the weird settings on your camera. Try GarageBand. Vlog. Then keep at it until you decide you hate it or something good comes out. I mean, come on…all the cool kids are doin’ it.

#hadto #sorry

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Human RSS

Need another reason to work with smart, interesting people? They act as a living feed reader. Hook your coworkers up to a quick-communication tool like Yammer and Hello! A human filter for your Internet. That’s pretty much the setup here. Below is some of what the mStoner hive mind fed itself recently:

From Volt: Harvard professor and staff writer for The New Yorker, Louis Menand has a new book out titled The Marketplace of Ideas. In it he argues that the intellectual sanctuary currently occupied by the American liberal arts professoriate has turned their main task into one of increasingly pointless self-replication (e.g. English Literature professors are best at making more English Literature professors). Oh snap!

From Rob: Tech evangelist Robert Scoble interviews George Revutsky and Dustin Kittelson of ROI.works on how search engines like Google and Bing are getting wise to the tricks of SEO hacks and giving content its throne back bit by bit.

From Jeremiah: PDF My URL. Aside from sounding oddly inappropriate, it does what it says and turns a webpage into a handy PDF.

From Kevin Z.: The New Rubik’s Cube is now weirder to use and more expensive! If the ability to retain the mental list of algorithms required to solve the original cube wasn’t alienating enough, you can now own a version of the puzzle intended for use in a dark room by rich people!

From Doug: How much did your iPod cost…the planet? Sourcemap, a collaboration-based online tool can feed your guilt the facts about where the things you carry came from and how much carbon it took to put it in your hands. (You’re welcome.)

From Patrick: Disney/Pixar’s Up plus some Australian guy’s genius for mixing samples = a convincing argument for easing up on copyright restrictions. The seemingly sanctioned “Upular” borders on magical.

From Kevin R.: “Here we are now, entertain us…” Through submitted photos and short quotes, Jason Lazarus’s Nirvana documents the moment people were introduced to the iconic Seattle band. It’s a great look at the less broadcasted side of pop culture—the side of the receptors.

From Beth: Lastly, a WikiHow on “Deskercise”. Self-explanatory, I believe. You probably don’t even have to consult your physician. As a bonus, the video at the end can be viewed on its own as a scathing dissection of what it means to be a 21st century office worker.

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Broad Engagement Abhors a Caveat: or, a Giant Learns to Fist Bump Without Crushing the Townspeople

NBC Chicago’s masthead. 03 November 2009

Today my city is “laughing about Jessica Simpson ripping Melrose.” I’m not specifically, but it’s plausible that many other Chicagoans are.

Clicking on the quote (notably displayed in NBC Chicago’s masthead) brings me to a page showing that over half of sampled Chicagoans find Ms. Simpson’s diatribe amusing. Further, a quarter of us could care less, and the rest of us are evenly split as being either “thrilled,” “sad,” “furious,” or “intrigued.”

How did a large corporation get us to admit this without coming across as our painfully-uncool-but-tries-to-be-hip Dad? Essentially, it did three things:

1.) It scaled itself down to a smaller, more personable entity. For the purposes of this audience, NBC became NBC Chicago. Bravely, “NBC” isn’t even stated. It’s implied by their logo. (Granted, it’s not that brave when your logo is as well-known as theirs, but for a media behemoth, this act is a veritable trust fall.)
2.) It lowered the barriers to participation. If you’re a member of their site, all it takes is some brief introspection and a mouse-click to voice your opinion on the subject.
3.) It overtly displays the results of participation. Your response to a survey gets added to the tally, the results of which show up larger than the headline of the story. This kind of treatment says, in a very immediate way, that what you think, dear reader, is as important as the subject matter itself. Stating a group’s opinion as a kind of citywide status message on the site’s front page, reinforces that message and invites discourse.

Plot twist!
Point number two is qualified: “if you’re a member of their site.” I’m not. I didn’t participate in the poll. Although, I made it most of the way towards doing so. I skimmed the article, formed an opinion, and clicked on “intrigued.” Then, one last hurdle popped up requesting my email address and a password in order to become a member. As a member of dozens of other sites already, I felt the weight of all of my username and password combinations (which are attached to one or more of my four main email addresses) bear down. In fact, each time a site asks me to create a new account I become increasingly wary and less likely to do so. This time was no exception, and I closed the window and left the site.

Obviously, this hurdle wasn’t too high for the others who participated in the Simpson/Melrose survey, so the value of getting an email address might be enough for NBC to keep it in place. One begins to wonder, though: how many others like me have they lost as potential participants? Moreover, asking for identification corrupts the notion that they genuinely want everyone to participate. I’d posit that more value is gained by getting me to dive into the site and stick around than by getting my email address. If they emailed me anything, I’d most likely just delete it. Or, I’d open it and immediately scroll down to the bottom to unsubscribe.

Them’s the brakes, NBC.

The Moral
While they did more than most to engage their audience, NBC might want to reconsider that last step. My advice to all of you: keep the barriers to participation as low as you can afford to, and keep the longview in mind when you define “low.”

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EdUI 2009: Recap

Having finished both days of EdUI, I’m left with a single complaint: I wish I could’ve attended more sessions. For their first foray into conference coordinating and hosting, the EdUI team pulled off no small feat.

Edu-geekdom was well represented: IT pros, developer ninjas, design nerds, library techies, social media mavens and more populated each session un-siloed, curiosity piqued by a line-up of web and usability all-stars. Some highlights:

Jared Spool with a photo of a Julia Childs crop circle.

The In-N-Out School of UX Veritable godfather of usability, Jared Spool, delivered the keynote on “Cooking Up Gourment User Experiences on a Fast-Food Budget” which proposed that a great user experience doesn’t require a huge budget—just meticulous preparation (skillful implementation), quality ingredients (content), and creative approach (smarts).

One of my favorite takeaways from this talk dealt with how successful UX teams tend to view process. To Spool, a process is just a series of steps, any steps used to accomplish a task. It differs from a methodology in that you might never use the same process twice. Methodology, on the other hand, requires refinement and repetition. Successful teams hone the tricks and techniques they employ during a process—they don’t concentrate on constantly re-working their methodology (the possible outcome of which, Spool warns, is a dangerously myopic dogma). Focusing on technique allows a team to improvise when necessary.

When You Stare into the Webcam, the Webcam Stares Back at You For the plenary session, Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University, presented a surprisingly moving look at anthropology through the lens of modern digital culture. He made the point that as information architects, designers and developers, we’re “architects of human relations.” We shape the ways in which people interact. Adding the ability to vote down a particularly vitriolic comment on YouTube, for example, civilizes the overall conversation. Designing and developing communication tools that are intuitive and fun to use encourages people to connect with strangers as well as friends.

As architects we enable what Leisa Reichelt calls “ambient intimacy.” Ambient intimacy is the YouTube vlogger who addresses highly personal secrets to everyone and no one in particular. It’s also us as the unseen but acknowledged crowd that acts as a receptor for that kind of information. Videos on this can be seen at Wesch’s KSU page, or visit his working group site Mediated Cultures for more information.

Finally, a Way to Get Lost in the Virtual Stacks The surprise hit for me came at the end of the conference. Bess Sadler, a Research and Development Librarian at the University of Virginia, did a walk-through of Blacklight, a project created by the University of Virginia Library that has grown into a thriving open source community.

Blacklight attempts, amongst many other things, to “replicate the serendipity of browsing library stacks.” UVA’s newly indexed music catalog demonstrates this well. Prior to the Blacklight implementation, a search through the music library required specific terms like a composer’s name or the exact title of a song in order to return useful results. Now, users can search using broad terms like a work’s era, genre, country of origin or language to get an overview of related works. Additionally, non-traditional assets like coins and works of art can now be cataloged. Play around with the catalog University of Virgina Library.

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Intervention! You are eating too much Internet!

Are you getting info-fat? Are all those Laugh Out Loud Cat videos finally catching up to you? Are you finding you can’t knowledge-gorge the way you used to when you were two years old? You are not alone. Here’s a list of things to try the next time you start to notice some cellulite on your synapses.

1. Browse with a purpose. Keep in mind what actually interests you. Sites are getting better and better at writing enticing headlines and designing highly-tempting “Other Top Stories” widgets. Did (celebrity) and (celebrity) break up? Did someone give birth to an alarming number of babies? Do you have to know? NO. You do not. Unless you make your living via a celebrity gossip column or blog or maybe Reader’s Digest, you will most likely be able to gather all you need to know about these things from other people on the bus or while you’re buying groceries. If this kind of stuff is your junk food (yes, I do enjoy BWE as much as the next person), and you have to have it sometimes, see #3.

2. Skim. Things gets trickier when you come across an article that might be of use to you. Do you really need to know “How to Use Social Media Marketing as a Tool For Business” right now? Haven’t you already read six other articles on the same subject? Do you still have leftover questions? If so, fine. Skim it. It’s taken me a long time to realize that I don’t have to process every word of every article I read (sorry, writers). Peruse and pause at the interesting parts. You will add years to your life.

3. Set a time to stop. Diversion is good and conducive to productivity but not if you never start working again. Tell yourself to close the Videogum tab at a specific time or after a specific number of minutes (or, I suppose, hours if your case is severe).

4. Use RSS Feeds. Viewing only the top headlines from your favorite sites is the fastest way from point A to point B in terms of keeping up-to-date on topics that interest you without slogging through dozens of other posts (and possibly getting diverted multiple times).

5. Manage your RSS Feeds. My strategy for feeds is “quantity provides quality” in that if you subscribe to a bunch of sites that interest you, you’re more likely to find a great article while browsing your feed reader. That said, as soon as you start to notice that one of your subscriptions is dead weight, get rid of it. Your reader ain’t a day care.

6. Acknowledge that while voyeurism is fun, your friends are not that interesting. By all means, use social media to find out what they’re up to and keep abreast of what they’re interested in (be it the apparently surprising talent of someone generally thought to be unattractive, Star Wars Retold by Someone Who Hasn’t Seen It, or How to Greet Your Friends during an Epidemic), but when you start looking at a friend of a friend’s Cinco de Mayo party ‘03 pictures, you should probably close that tab.

7. Don’t take every quiz the Internet offers you.

8. Acknowledge that getting the highest score on or beating any Flash game is not actually going to be that fulfilling. It’s a lot like when you finally complete a sudoku puzzle. It’s very, “Well, all of those numbers are in place now.” No beam of light suddenly emits from the newspaper expounding some ancient wisdom, you’re just sitting there with some numbers in some squares. It’s the same thing with stacking multicolored jewels and using gerbils to catch cupcakes. The sense of accomplishment is hazy and fleeting.

9. Start doing something else. This is the “Look! Something shiny!” approach. Take a walk. Make something to eat. Pet the cat. Perhaps, while you’re not looking at the browser, close it using a keyboard shortcut.

10. Can’t do it yourself? Download Browser Timer. It’s like a computer-warden that shuts down your browser at a specified time. Consider it the methadone of internet addiction. For PCs. For Macs.

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Habla HTML

Recently, Steven Heller, a prolific design critic, author and former art director for The New York Times, wrote about being a print guy in an increasingly web-focused industry. He said, “I realize that the design world has changed so radically that not knowing this [web development] language is like not speaking Spanish in Miami Beach.”

I’ve felt the same way for some time, and while it seems comforting, at first, to share a career-crisis lifeboat with another person, comfort gives way to panic when you realize that other person is supposed to be at the helm of the rescue vehicle, more or less. So when I mentioned wanting to tighten up my HTML and CSS skills to another designer, I was a little surprised when he shot down the idea. He said our paths as web designers eventually come to a point where we’ll have to decide if we want to design websites or make them work, especially if we’re working in a company. I walked away wondering if he was right, and if so, what to do?

At a crossroads? Minimize risk. Maximize awesome fun time.

In a situation like this, the best one can do is assess the benefits of learning a brand new skill and minimize the risk of wasting one’s time and money.  To do so, I came up with three basic guidelines:

1.) Make sure the new venture is something that genuinely interests you. Acting out of obligation only takes me so far, and it doesn’t usually get me anywhere pleasant. If you have the luxury of not doing something you’re only obliged to do, don’t do it. Invest your time in a way that lets you excel at something you like more.

2.) Put the new skill in perspective of where you see yourself in five or more years. Assess how long it will take to get to a comfortable skill level in this new undertaking, whether that time could be better spent, and whether it’s in line with what you’d like to be doing in the future (or if it’s just a distraction).

3.) If it doesn’t meet the first two criteria, be OK with not being an expert at everything. Knowing when to let an initiative go is almost as important as coming up with the idea in the first place. If you don’t stop when you should, you take your time and attention away from current or new work that could benefit from the extra focus. Worse yet, you might be distracted to the point of missing new opportunities as they arise.

So how do you know when to quit? Designer Naz Hamid lays it out this way: “When no further gains are met, when you feel the work is no longer fun, interesting and most importantly, good, that’s when it’s time to end it and move on to the next project.”

Working on my web dev skills met the above criteria for me, so I’ve decided to borrow a formidable stack of books from the office library and start there. I wonder if Heller’s going to do the same, or if he’ll resign himself to simply being a legendary designer/author/critic.

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Things I Will Not Do as an Interface Designer

The way I see design, it’s like helping someone dress for an occasion. You’re placing your institution online to meet and greet visitors, some of whom you know, some you don’t, and all of whom you’d like to leave with a good, personable impression. In that sense, I will make every effort not to send you out in something embarrassing because I value our friendship and I’m generally a nice person.

Imagine, for example, I am helping you decide what to wear for a dinner party at an upscale restaurant with people you’ve never met before but desperately want to impress. I’m not going to dress you in something trendy simply because it’s trendy. I’m also not going to dress you in something that just isn’t you. Nor will I let you leave under-dressed. If I did any of these things, you’d be uncomfortable, and everyone would notice. Things would be awkward as you fidgeted with your asymmetrical neckline or oddly-placed buttons, and you’d eventually isolate yourself near the bar as your confidence drained. At this point, you’d begin blaming me for convincing you to wear this…this thing; and a few hours later, our mutual acquaintances would be notified of the end of our friendship via some social networking app.

In the un-metaphor, in order to create a genuine and enjoyable online interaction between your website and your visitors, I will not simply appropriate a “cool/edgy/hip” style for you. In other words, I’m not going to take MTV.com’s Internet-clothes and make you.com wear them unless you truly are loud and possess a fleeting, celebrity-obsessed attention span. If your institution was founded before the turn of the century and currently has a well-earned reputation for being serious and focused, slapping some textures and grunge fonts on your website will seem unpalatable at best and disingenuous at worst. Like Christiane Amanpour reporting live in a Slipknot t-shirt.

I also won’t let you walk into the Internet without the personal touches that keep sites from looking interchangeable. Nor will I put you in a outfit that looks like I’m re-gifting something Aunt Crystal wore back in ’92 (you know, when she got really obsessed with Native American culture and hypercolor clothing). Unless, of course, that really is you. In which case, I know a few places that sell screen printed dreamcatcher shirts. Let’s go!

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