Usability and Human Factors

Scott Wilson , Paul Sharples, Dai Griffiths and Kris Popat have an article up on their work embedding Wave-enabled widgets into Moodle using Wookie. (Try saying that ten times fast.) What they envision is very similar in a lot of ways to what my former SUNY colleagues and I were thinking about when we proposed a Learning Management Operating System. Of course, that was 2005, so we were thinking about portlets rather than widgets. The lower barrier to entry and client-side nature of widgets are game changers.

I have a terrible backblog of posts that I will try to catch up on over the next few days, starting with my obligatory Sakai conference summary. Since last conference represented something of a watershed, I wasn’t sure if I would use the same categories of comment or come up with something new. I think I will stick with the same categories for at least one more year, with more emphasis on the Sakai 3 effort.

I have volunteered to give my local community college some advice regarding some LMS migration decisions they have to make—if to migrate, when to migrate, how to migrate, and so on. In many ways, they’re a pretty typical school with some pretty typical problems, so I thought it might be worthwhile to write down some of this advice for others in similar situations. You might be one of those others if at least three of the following are true:

Michael Korcuska has a new screencast up showing some of the concepts planned for Sakai 3:
 
I really like what he’s doing here. These multimedia narratives of concepts still in development should greatly increase the amount and quality of feedback the developer community will get—before the release gets out the door.
By the way, as far as I know, this is working (though not necessarily production-ready) code.

There’s a lot to dislike about the Facebook user experience. The groups capabilities are pretty anemic, for example. And don’t even get me started about making me go to a web page to respond to a private message. But I am finding some clever aspects that are worth emulating too. In particular, there is some subtle and clever work around subscription management. For example, if I comment on a photograph that somebody has posted, I am automatically subscribed to the comment stream for that photo. I have entered the conversation, and the system infers that I want to be kept abreast of it. There is nothing explicit in the user interface for this. I never had to click on “subscribe to comments” anywhere.

MergingArts has a good audio interview with Inigral CEO Michael Staton. Michael makes some good points about the nature of sites like Facebook that raise questions about a number of academic social networking efforts. Essentially, he argues that people don’t want to mix their work and social spaces. There’s an almost ontological separation of the two. Unlike, say, chat, which isn’t a “space” per se, Facebook is a “place” where people hang out.

Creative Commons licensed; photo credit: Angus Mackie

I’ve been reading Opening Up Education. So far, I’m impressed. It’s hard to get all the articles in a collection like this to be consistent, coherent, and equally interesting, but the editors seem to have managed to do just that. 
I want to comment today on the piece about Bodington by Stuart Lee. Long-time readers know that I have been a fan of this system. In the first part of a multi-part review of the system, I wrote: