pedablogical

This afternoon I’m in the second meeting on the Web revision, based on suggestions from MSU’s WIDE Research Center. So far we’re focusing primarily on getting terms defined and group roles determined. Our job for the next meeting is to go look at our areas of the Web site and come back with details on the user and action roles that people comes to the site with.

One of the things that bugs me about all of the sites that we have looked at as examples is the choice to use a lot of real estate at the top of the page for logos. I just don’t get it. Yes, you want to identify the organization, but is it worth giving up such a huge piece of the page? I don’t think so, especially for those folks working with lower resolutions. Between the tabs and menubars I have in Firefox, some of these pages end up giving at least a third of what I can see away to a big area of color with a logo. Examples: MSU, AMA, CCCC. There are ways to include the logo, still be clean and elegant, and not give up so much space.

The most interesting thing to those folks who might visit the NCTE site is the discussion of adopting folksonomy for all of the resources on the site as well as the ability to comment on anything that appears on the site. There’s also a goal of having remote publishers who add news and such for the site, and whose writing will go through a filter before being published. Of course, that brings up the issue of quality control for folks on staff. It’s going to be a awkward issue to work out, though it can easily be solved by demarcating visually and textually the difference between official statements and material and the shared materials posted by the general site visitors. Also discussing personalized pages, the long-discussed myNCTE pages which we have been talking about for years. Eric Crump and I discussed such things what feels like decades ago.

The hardest thing for folks to grasp seems to be the issue of action-based and role-based ways of using the site. It’s just differentiated browsing. Just as we provide different ways to learning in the classroom, we have to allow different ways to get to the same information online.

Consistency is an issue for me as well. We’re talking about designing whatever we need for action/role-based navigation, but so much is already set by the CCCC site. It’s said that CCCC is different, but it’s a real mistake to switch around branding and navigation on various parts of the same site.

TeacherSource | learning.now . Does Home Internet Access Improve Academic Achievement? | PBS:

“Researchers noted that for the first six months of the study, Internet access appeared to have no effect on GPA. However, “Internet usage did predict GPA obtained after one year of home access.” This pattern continued through the end of the study, the researchers observing a correlation between home Internet access and higher grade points. They also correlated home access with higher standardized test scores in reading: “More time online was associated with higher reading comprehension and total reading scores.” They attributed these results to the text-heavy nature of Internet”

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | More likely to have a mobile, use the net, listen to radio and read papers: it’s the girl: “girls aged 12 to 15 are more likely than boys to have a mobile phone, use the internet, listen to the radio and read newspapers or magazines. Only when it comes to playing computer and console games do boys overtake girls.”

Columnists – StatesmanJournal.com—some interesting assumptions of the decisions that are being made and the reasons for those decisions (all w/o any info to back them up).

News from Reading Today Daily : PBS blog will examine how technology is changing education:

“The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) yesterday unveiled a new blog called learning.now, which will address how new technology and Internet culture are significantly affecting the ways educators teach and children learn. Host Andy Carvin describes the new blog as being “at the crossroads of Internet culture and education.” Visit the new blog at http://www.pbs.org/learningnow.”

Researchers Find Internet Use Has Pros and Cons for Kids—”The findings show that online interactions provide essential social support for otherwise isolated adolescents, but these online boards may also normalize and encourage self-injurious behavior and add potentially lethal behaviors to the repertoire of established adolescent self-injurers and those exploring identity options, said lead author Janis L. Whitlock of Cornell University.”