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Is it time for a digital reality check?

A look at the reality that our current world poses and what might be more important why we are all enamored with iPhones.

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Maybe if I had a machine shop instead of Photoshop…

Gray skies? Check. Chilly temperatures? Check. Drizzle? Check. Must be November in Happy Valley. It’s okay, someone from Florida would find this stuff horrible, but not us here at Penn State. Not in the least, we just take the time to stay inside, be innovative, and think some interesting thoughts (maybe even blog about them). Some examples of this innovation, as always, can be found in the BuzzLion.

Dave Stong of ETS is known for his graphic skills, but he is also a lifelong learner. He recently had an interesting academic experience that occurred on a personal level, and it made him reflect on learning style and what it means to him.

Newspapers, even old institutions like the New York Times, face many challenges in a time when there are so many other sources for news. Cole Camplese, ETS director, recently discovered Times People, a social network of sorts within the Times Web site. Cole offers his thoughts on this, including a great way to improve it.

Elizabeth Pyatt, ETS instructional designer, has found that believe it or not, politics gets in the way of linguistics. She posted recently on her blog on a very encouraging trend she sees regarding Unicode and linguistic identity of Eastern European countries.

Elizabeth also posted in the Learning Design Community Hub about Ray Kurzweil’s recent presentation here. He is the developer of Kurzweil screen reading software for students with many reading disabilities.

There has been some questions about gaming and virtual world courses at Penn State. Brett Bixler, ETS lead instructional designer, recently posted in the Educational Gaming Commons about a course in this coming this spring.

That’s it for this week’s BuzzLion. Thanks for reading, and see you next week!

It's Friday afternoon, so it must be time for a blog entry. But what to write? It looks like it will be a general observation that life is complex.

This week was busy and "diverse". I attended two accessibility committee meetings, a BLI review meeting, three meetings with faculty, a videot recording of Ray Kurzweil, and a session with Graham Spanier. A lot to think about...

I think Ray Kurzweil was supposed to speak about accessibility tools, but really spoke about using logarithmic curves to predict future trends. This sounds really boring, but I like numbers so much, that I was actually quite impressed. I do worry about his notion of humans speeding towards "singularity" - it makes having another "Dark Age" sound much more appealing.

The presentation from Graham Spanier was also interesting, but what struck me most was that he said end users (i.e. students/faculty/non-tech staff) are mystified by edicts which have no explanation. In truth, I think most of ITS does try to explain why they do what they do, but often the explanation is very technical.

For instance, would you predict that a programmer would be handle French ç, but have problems with œ (did you ever care before)? Or that you're better off using a point scale in an Excel gradebook rather than percentages? How about that PNG images from Powerpoint are large and "bad", but those from Illustrator are small and "OK"? I can see your eyes glazing over already.

Part of accessibility and Unicode education is explaining why you have to insert what appear to be random snippets of code in certain places (then cursing that the WYSIWYG tool doesn't do it for you already). As you can imagine it's a challenge, because most users want to push a magic "Accessify" button (we haven't built that yet). As President Spanier said, it is a challenge to communicate to users that really their life would be simpler if they took a few minutes to click a few obscure settings and lock down some items for security purposes.

And speaking of accessibility, I noticed that even accessibility experts forget about accommodations for new technologies. When figuring out how to get information to faculty, a suggestion was to videotape a series of modules. I think this is a good idea, but we will be obligated to make sure all the videos are captioned! Maybe we could supplement with alternate presentations which are much easier to accessify?

On the other hand, I heard that the next version of Dragon Speak speech recognition will be 99% accurate even with minimal training. Will this be the tool that processes a complex acoustic signal into something humans recognize. That would be so awesome!

So this week I was reminded that life was complex. This is something we all complain about, but sometimes I wonder if we make it worse by trying to "simplify" things too much. I'm not saying I'm going to ditch concepts like usability, but I wonder if we give ourselves enough time to absorb or even appreciate what complexity we do have.

When I began here, a common complaint was that Penn State was operating on three platforms instead of selecting just one. But the fact that Penn State is open to Mac/Windows/Unix is something I loved. It shows that Penn State was willing to explore the best tool for the job be that accounting, digital art or high-end scientific computing.

Although building software adapted for multiple platforms is definitely a pain, I do think the overall quality is improved in the long run. Similarly I believe that building in accessibility makes the tool better for everyone and building in Unicode awareness makes your software portable to a global audience.

But it all takes time. Not that much time, but definitely an extra five minutes. I just wonder how willing we are to find those five minutes?