Animation

I'll admit it--I grew up watching and loving the Disney movies--and thoroughly enjoy Pixar films, Futurama, and other animated offerings.  I admit it--as film mediums, they are amazing, and a great source of entertainment.  For education, however, I'll be the first to admit that I don't really like them.  Perhaps its because too many websites seem to go overboard on their animations--and I've never seen a good one to help teach mathematics.

My third year of teaching, we piloted using a self-paced remedial math program that was designed around having each student help teach a purple alien mathematics.  While the program was mostly marketed to Elementary and Middle school-aged children, we were told it was appropriate for "early High School" students as well.  To a student, within three weeks, each student in our test group complained that the program was "juvenile," "silly," and/or "baby-ish."  Even though they legitimately needed the help the program would provide around the mathematics, they weren't willing to deal with the animated alien interface to get to the practice--and I can't blame them.

One of my pet peeve websites is www.coolmath.com.  When I first started using this website for enrichment and practice with students, it was a kaliedoscopic carnival of colors, flashing icons, and a custom cursor.  While it's been toned down a fair amount, it's sill not anywhere near a pleasant site to look at.  I guess my overexposure to bad animations--those "oh, look at me--I can create moving flashing lights!" sorts of interfaces has blinded me to any kinds of good animation on the web.  I'm still looking--but especially in thinking about working with high school age students and up, I wonder whether animation is ever more effective than live video.

Math TV

I'll admit it--I used this website, http://www.mathtv.com/, frequently in the classroom.  There's an amazing amount of work here that's been done not only creating individual videos aligned to specific topics AND specific question types...but also to create multiple solutions!  It's one of the things I love about math--while there may be a "standard process," there's almost always more than one correct way to solve a problem.  And by showing multiple solution strategies to students--that come from somewhere other than just me--I can help to highlight that facet of mathematics for them.  True, it often leads to someone someday using it as justification for an incorrect solution or one that only works by happenstance...but that just lets me discuss the difference between "multiple correct solutions" and "every solution is correct."  Ah, the nuances of mathematics!  I had a few students enjoy this website so much that they wanted to create their own version--unfortunately something that never quite took off--and others who developed favorite video creators who they'd try to find anytime they needed help.  While it wasn't always the first way I showed a student how to do something mathematically, this has been a fabulous resource for me.

Images on the Web

I'm having a bit of a hard time with this week's assignment: find examples of good and bad websites in terms of how they integrate graphics into the website. I'm still stuck on my first two shared websites (tastespotting and irish2000) as fairly archetypal examples of good and bad design--and that holds true for what they have (not) done with integrating visual images. But instead of beating the dead horse by describing these websites, I thought I'd take you on a look through three of the major recipe clearinghouse websites: Food Network, Epicurious, and Food.com (formerly Recipezaar), and briefly discuss the highs, and lows, of each. For each site, I searched for "burger," and selected the first search result to analyze the page.

Of the three, Food.com was the least effective visually for me.

First, the layout is cluttered--the header bar is fairly clean under the advertisement, but as soon as you get to the recipe itself, it's written in the same font as the navigation suggestions to the left and the advertisements, information, and suggestions on the right. For this recipe, there is not image of the finished product, or any of the steps along the way, although other recipes on the site do have more directions. Overall, when I was looking at this website, I did not feel that the visuals--the fonts and images--were helping me find the important information.

I'm torn in ranking my two other websites, but I think Epicurious comes in a close second for me.

Epicurious was significantly cleaner than food.com: first, the layout is a bit simpler: we still have a lot of advertisements and some navigation integrated in the header bar, but when you get down to the "meat" of the page, the recipe takes up 2/3 of the horizontal space, with advertisements and suggested links occupying the right third. Epicurious also uses more variety in font size and emphasis: the title of the burger is larger than anything on the page, making it clear what the important information is. Subheadings, such as ingredients, are larger than the narrative description or their items, making it easy to scan for the section that you need. They also include an image for every recipe (as far as I could tell), and use icons like the blue ribbon to indicate popular recipes. You can also easily tab to user reviews, more photographs, and other information, making the site more interactive and communal.

For me, Food Network just barely beats Epicurious--but just barely.

Food Network has many of the same layout features as Epicurious: the name of the recipe is the largest font on the page, and headings and subheadings are larger than their contents. Each recipe (that I found) has an image of the recipe, and when it's contributed by a Food Network Chef, shows an image of the chef, as well as the title of the show and episode where the recipe was featured. Each recipe also shows a ranking, from 0-5 stars, based on site averages in the header bar. As with Epicurious, the recipe takes about 2/3 of the space, and ancillary content is in the right third. Unlike Epicurious, however, similar recipes are placed on the left under the image--which I find helpful because those are the links I'm most likely to click--and having them isolated next to the recipe helps me find them. What most sways the image use battle for Food Network is the header bar--although there is still an advertisement, I find their header much cleaner and easier to use than the one on Epicurious. It's not a perfect design, but I find the visual layout slightly more appealing.

So, there you go--three quick website reviews on recipe sites. I'll fully admit to using each for different reasons, regardless of their design properties--but in terms of visual layout and ease, Food Network is my favorite.

Here are the specific websites I looked at if you want to see:

Food.com: http://www.food.com/recipe/kevin-garnett-burger-405025

Epicurious: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/reviews/Open-Face-Crab-Burgers-with-Red-Pepper-Dressing-352591

Food Network: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/bobby-flay/tuna-burgers-with-pineapple-mustard-glaze-and-green-chile-pickle-relish-recipe/index.html

What do you think?

Hypertext: Annotated Choose Your Own Adventures?

I've been trying to think this week about what we know about how texts work well and engage audiences--and how we can apply those understandings to improve our creation of hypertexts and hypermedia. For me, and based on the readings over the past few weeks, good hypertext expands on what we know from our understandings of literacy, rather than abandoning them.

When I was younger, I loved reading Choose Your Own Adventure novels--having that much control over how the story enfolded was an amazing amount of control. Those two--or three--short sentences at the end of each page completely changed the way I engaged with the text. I'll be the first to admit--I almost always peeked ahead to see what was going to happen next with each of the choices before I decided on one--and even read one cover to cover once, rather than by jumping around--and was just continuously amazed at how much the act of flipping pages shaped my experience. When hypermedia is well constructed--especially if we think about novice or intermediate learners (in terms of content knowledge), the format of Choose Your Own Adventure books seems particularly helpful.

When I've created hypermedia before as a teacher, I've often focused on embedding multiple layers of meaning and scaffolding for students. I was amazed to find in this week's literature review that there really isn't any benefit--and in some cases it's even detrimental--to include semantic information like that. In many ways, it reminded me of the editions of Shakespeare I read in high school and college. In the high school texts, the right page was always the traditional Shakespearean text--word for word, line for line. The left hand page included footnotes, translations, and explanations to help clarify the language. In college, however, both pages were Shakespearean text, while the annotations and explanations were at the end of each volume as a series of footnotes. While I remember feeling at the time that the high school versions were a bit too juvenile--too much support and analysis--the formatting was so much more helpful than flipping back and forth to the footnotes--especially when it wasn't clear when there would be information there to find--or not. I wonder how, especially for more advanced/crucial topics, we can take this idea of paralleling annotation and narrative to make semantic information more helpful, rather than distracting.

While there are a lot of things that hypermedia and hypertext can learn from traditional text--formatting, consistency of font, ability to quickly find information--I keep coming back to this idea of conceptualizing good hypermedia as a well constructed, annotated, multimedia choose-your-own-adventure....without the death and injury ;)

What do you think?

Hypermedia: The good, the neutral, and the really ugly

In thinking about sources of hypermedia, I tend to categorize websites into three basic categories:

• The Good: those that are so amazing I wish I knew how to design that well
• The Neutral: those that are ok....but nothing too special
• The Really Ugly: those that make me think they were designed circa 2000 (or earlier)...and not updated since.

While each has the potential for being rich sources of information, I know that I'm much more likely to be able to focus on the information when sites are well designed and, to some degree, predictable, if the information is something that I really need, I can deal with worse design.

One of my favorite websites to use as an example of an "I wish I could do that" is TasteSpotting. For me, I find it extremely clean and easy to use--it's a great way for me to browse recipe ideas and figure out what looks good--and what doesn't. They draw from several great sources in the blogosphere, and just give a nice snapshot of current trends in "home cooking." It's not perfect--the search engine could be a lot more powerful--but I love the combination of images and text that create a wonderful overview--and provide inspiration for what I'm going to have for dinner tonight, as well as what I'll have in the future.

In terms of a really ugly website, and I hate to say this because the organizers really do run a wonderful festival, is Irish 2000. While the green font on a black background might be culturally appropriate, it's too reminiscent of DOS to be particularly effective. Additionally, no matter what browser you open it in, subsequent pages load below the anchor bar on the left hand side rather than in the frame, making it impossible to get information without scrolling down. The layout is cumbersome, and information difficult--if not impossible--to find.

When evaluating a website as "good design" or "bad design," I think these are my high leverage questions:

1) How easy is it to access the information on each page? Is the layout distracting? Too many flashing icons/colors?

2) How easy is it to navigate between pages? Are links clear? Is it easy to travel in both directions? How many clicks to get back to the home page from any given page?

3) How easy is it to find a specific piece of information? Is there a search and/or index function? How many layers do you have to "dig through" to get to any detail?

What questions do you ask?

Kate

Digital Native, Digital Immigrant Reflection

I was first introduced to Prensky's dichotimization of digital natives and digital immigrants last summer, and in this reading as in the first, I was struck by how many individuals I know that don't really fall into either of these categories. I am chronologically, and I think accurately, a digital native. In 2001, when this article was published, I was graduating high school. My parents purchased an IBM greenscreen with actual floppy disks and no hard drive that I remember playing with from a very early age. I dabbled with programming for a while because it was a feature in the 3-2-1-Contact magazine I got as a gift, but when I stopped getting the magazine, I moved on to other endeavors. I generally find it easy to pickup new technologies, and moreover, really enjoy exploring their capabilities and developing expertise.

In my work at the Kurt Hahn School (www.kurthahnschool.org), one of my roles was to help teachers, staff, and students use our online grade book and biographical database programs. Some adults--both those within the D-gen and older--would need only short, targeted instruction on basic functions, at which point I could more or less set them free to explore the system, troubleshooting individual problems as they arose. Other adults--both older than and within the D-gen--required much more significant instruction. They wanted their hands held through every step of the process the first several times that they completed any individual task. They were unwilling, or at the very least, wary of exploring the system beyond the confines of what they had already been shown. I saw the same kinds of trends with my high school students (who were born between 1988 and 1995)--some took to technology like fish to water, while others were starkly phobic and required constant supervision and encouragement--and every level in between.

When thinking of instruction, this range of comfort and fluency reminds me that I can't take technological skill or ignorance for granted in any situation. With every group--whether its an online course, virtual meeting, or face to face walkthrough session, some of my instructional time needs to be devoted to providing an appropriate baseline of technological fluency, as needed by the course. While this could include an option for digital natives to "test out," it needs to be robust enough so that when that initial experience is complete, I can reasonably assume that technical issues will not be the driving factor in determining success from that point on. I also need to be sure that the technology in my instruction supports the learning process--that individuals aren't spending more time learning the technology than learning the content. There are many wonderful technologies out there--but if it takes 3 hours to learn how to use it at even a basic level, it might not be worth it for 15 minutes of instruction.

While I think Prensky is right to say that the world is changing, and that the way we view the world is evolving, I find little evidence to suggest that this gap is either consistent or based only on age. Socioeconomic status, country of origin, access, willingness to experiment, and curiosity seem to be essential factors in determining whether an individual has more in common with the digital natives or the digital immigrants. As an educator, I need to be careful not to assume that all individuals over 30 are digital immigrants--or that those under 30 are digital natives.