OH NO!! I was just looking at the front page of Blogger.com and I saw an invitation to use an audio blogger! Now I can use my cell phone to post MP3 files that get posted for the world to hear!!! I guess that means that if I'm driving down the road and I can't get any of my friends to answer their phones (for instance - they might be paying attention to what they are doing behind the wheel) then I can call Bloggger.com and talk to myself!!! OH NO!!!

I am amazed at how many students will walk out of a class that is in session just to answer their phones. I have three classrooms across the hall from my office and I regularly see students walk out of class, answer their phones, and then say something to the effect "oh nothing, just in class" seeming to indicate that being in class is nothing important, and talking to their friends is a lot more important! It concerns me that audio blogger will now give students yet another target to waste their cell phone minutes on instead of interacting with the people and places right there in front of them. (I guess it shows that I have started the "Internet in Everyday Life" reading).

That's it for my morning rant - see you all in class on Monday.

Darn! I was hoping I wouldn't have to go to work tomorrow! When I heard the forcast for 3 - 6 inches of snow I was hoping for a day off! The snows over and we didn't even get a quarter of an inch - what a bummer! I guess I'll have to go to work tomorrow (which is just as well since we have a lot of work to do).

Thats it for now - off to read some more Liebowitz before class tomorrow night!

It's Friday morning, and my class of Micro-Computer Operating Systems students are taking a quiz. Its a fairly simple quiz (name some parts of the screen and describe how to do some basic file management tasks using Windows 2000) but I figured they could use an easy grade after taking the midterm two weeks ago. Not everyone did well on the midterm, and now they need to rebuild their confidence before we start talking about more complex issues. I read the assigned homework for our class and am beginning to wonder if we are entering into the Philosophy portion of our class. I hope not, since I hate philosophy -- too much talking and not enough doing (kind of like the French)!

See you in class on Monday.

Hi Folks, I have to say I was amazed to hear last Monday that poeple are actually reading this stuff! With so much other reading to do, I have to admit I've not been very good about looking at other people's blogs! I hope you are enjoying it (although I can't imagine why you would.) I saw Ruth's article about war correspondents using blogs to keep others up to date (actually I saw tha article in the paper before she emailed the link to the entire class). That type of blog sounds interesting! Now, how do I find it? I know so little about blogs that I don't even know if a search engine exists that indexes the blogs. It seemed from the article that there are a number of different blog sites, how does anybody keep up with all of that information? How do you know which ones are the good ones, and which ones are a waste of time? As you can tell, this is an area where I have no experience whatsoever. I hope you are enjoying your spring break, and I'll see you next Monday.

John

Its Thursday night and I'm just sitting down to do some reading for this class. I have to admit that I'm starting to resent the ever-present blogger assignment in this class. Even though each session is quite short, I'm bothered by the fact that it is never over! I have never kept a diary (except for one three week trip to London when I was in college) and I'm not the diary sort of folk. I just wish this assignment would end!

I guess part of my frustration is also weariness. I had a big project due in my other class, and spent a lot of late nights this week working on it. I'm looking forward to spring break!

Well, its Tuesday evening, and I'm sitting in my office wondering if anyone is going to take advantage of my office hours tonight. When I assign a tough project, the students tend to line up outside my office the night it is due, but this week's assignment is moderately easy. The students have to take a PDF file I gave them, and put form elements on the page to make it interactive. These form elements include check boxes, radio buttons, and text areas. For part of the assignment the student has to make a text area appear and disappear based on which radio button is selected. In this example the form asks which is the best way to contact you-fax, email, or voice- and depending on which option you select a different text box will appear for you to enter the appropriate data.

Thats about it for tonight. Lots of reading to do, so I'll see you next week.

Its Thursday night and I just finished my second position paper for this class. I am looking at wireless networking and the impact that has on information retrieval from all sorts of devices like Cell Phones and PDAs. I found an interesting article that talked about the social barriers to using wireless information retrieval. It was pretty well written, and identified seven barriers that need to be taken into account when designing an interface. The two I particularly liked dealt with self-image and what we are willing to carry around with us. The first barrier was that since we will likely be collecting this data in a public place, we will not allow ourselves to look foolish with lots of unusual gestures needed to retrieve the data (kind of a "cool" factor). The second issue has to do with a much higher degree of intolerance for feature creep in devices I have to carry around with me. Users are much more likely to tolerate a number of unused features on their desktop machines since there is so much more power and speed on a desktop. When we are accessing the web on a cell phone (with limited screen space and low bandwidth) unnecessary features are much less likely to be tolerated. It was an interesting article.

That's about it from here - now it's on to another paper that is due next week (a GOMS analysis). Have a good weekend.

John