I finally found the time to sit back and watch Randy Pausch in CMU’s Last Lecture series.
WOW
So many profound things within his talk. It is unfathomable to me how someone in his situation puts something this inspiring together.
I’m going through a bit of a transition at work that has me looking more closely at data visualization and data fusion. One of my students presented on Digg last week, and spent some time looking at some of the R&D projects under Digg Labs.
While these projects are great examples of data visualization, I have mixed emotions on the usability of each individual example. For instance, let’s look at Stack:
This is a real-time visualization of people around the world digging articles. You can rollover each stack to get the article headline, clicking on each stack brings up a box with the story headline, the first hundred characters and a graph depicting recent Digg activity for that specific article.
I like all of the examples from Digg labs (I even downloaded the Stack screen saver for my mac), but they all feel *less* useful than the main Digg site itself. It’s always good to experiment and prototype, which appears to be a driving factor with Digg labs, but I feel like I’m missing something here. Would you be better off using one of the Digg Labs visualization packages than Digg itself in some instances?
The Electric Sheep Company just released a new virtual world platform, Webflock. This is right on the heels of Google’s release of Lively. There’s a great post by the Technology Intelligence Group (thanks J.Swords) about how the Electric Sheep got it right and Google did not.
Why? Webflock runs in a browser via Flash. Lively requires you to download an application. I could not agree more with this assessment.
But…Lively is free, Webflock is not. From the bottom of the Webflock site:
WebFlock can help you realize your goals for a social, fun and immersive web presence. A basic implementation, which includes the out-of-the-box feature set, custom 3D avatars and 3D space, and 12 months of the application services fees, is available for under $100,000. To learn more and schedule a demo, please fill out the contact form.
Hopefully I can get a free pass to see a demo world at some point.
On a different note, I saw a post on Google’s Blog today about advice for students, “Major in Learning”. It’s a good read, and stresses what Google (and other companies in the conceptual age) are looking for in applicants:
… analytical reasoning.
… communication skills.
… a willingness to experiment.
… team players.
… passion and leadership
Well…sort of. I’ve been falling behind on my reader and Millet filled me in today on Lively.com, a Google application that lets you:
Create an avatar and chat with your friends in rooms you design
Doesn’t sound all that interesting, does it? IMVU has been in this space for a while and it also seems very similar to Habbo Hotel. PMOG actually kicked in with a quest on avatars on the web that also led to weblin, myrl , Meez, and unype.
I guess I was expecting more from Google in this space. I’m sure we’ll see more soon…
I also stumbled across a time management game where you play the role of a nurse working in a hospital ER. Interesting that it appears to NOT focus on actual work in the ER, but rather how to better manage one’s time. I think I’m starting to agree more and more with Jim Gee’s quote:
Games’ greatest strength is not information delivery: it’s about experiences and how they make you see the world in a different way.
Things will likely be slow around here for the rest of the summer as I’m teaching two sections of IST 110, running my pilot study for my Doctorate degree, and preparing for my comprehensive exams. I’m sure a few teaching moments will come up like they usually do. The first was yesterday.
I spent most of the day covering RSS. I did the historical walkthrough, talking about HTML, showing some code, illustrating how the presentation and data layers are basically combined. Then we moved into CSS, then to XML and finally to RSS. The class was split into teams with each team reviewing a specific reader. Each teams was responsible for subscribing to at least 10 feeds. At the end of the activity, one team member demonstrated the reader to the rest of the class, giving a high level description (web-based, addon, standalone, etc) and showing the process of subscribing. As I walked around the room, talked with students and overheard conversations, this is what I took away:
I told my last 110 class, and I’m sure I’ll repeat myself this year, that I want students to look back and think “Bart was right, this stuff is extremely useful and efficient!”. Most of my students are freshman, so the need for many of these tools has not hit them yet.
After thinking about the comments of several students about not wanting to use RSS, I started to think along the lines of surfing the web as an experience. Designers go to great lengths on some sites to create an experience for the user. By using an RSS reader, we’re losing out on some of the experience of visiting the actual site. Is this good or bad? Sure RSS saves us time, but for some websites is it worth the loss of the experience that goes along with visiting a well-designed site?
