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Monthly Archives: November 2006
Powerpoint v Keynote
There’s a seminar coming up that I’m planning to go to on the semiotics of Powerpoint. In the meantime I found this blog (the URL’s too long, so I’ve had to break it up)http://homepage.mac.com/lesposen/
blogwavestudio/LH20040807225237/LHA20060422204527/index.html
piece about how Keynote (see promotional pic) is infinitely better than Powerpoint – it frees you from endless blobby lists and transitions and ‘it doesn’t get in your way’. Yes, that’s just what good software should do – it shouldn’t get in your way.
I read another blog post somewhere about making text-free Powerpoint presentations. Don’t use text – just think how wh
at you say can be represented in graphic form.
But how would this work with the OU brand template?
Is email a dying art?
John Lanchester, Guardian Weekend, 4 Nov 2006 http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1940641,00.html
‘Email was once a marvel of practicality and utility; people under the age of 25, though, never knew a time before it was broken by spam, and prefer to use instant messaging or texting. In the corporate world, as a publisher once told me, “email’s main function is an instrument of torture”. In civilian life, I increasingly ntice that people don’t actually read their email; they sort of skim it, and get the gist, and any fine distinctions or crucial information are usually best communicated in some other way. So the heroic period of email is already in the past.’
An end not a means
Lots of interesting things came out of the OU Research Day. I liked the speaker who pointed out that the RAE is an end not a means. Interesting to view it as a tool, not a task.
Intuitive
My reading of the DZX222 Help Conferences suggests a problem built into the online course idea. These days, we expect sotware and gadgets to be intuitive. If they’re not we get frustrated, angry and, more than likely, give up.
Now, DZX222 has a detailed set of printed materials, as you would expect from an OU course. Do students read them? No. Then they go to the Help conference, or somewhere else in FirstClass and start asking questions that are clearly answered in their course materials. Not only that, they don’t read other postings in the Help conference, or the FAQs posted at the top of that confeence, so they ask the same things again and again.
I think this links to the HeatMaps that I blogged a month or so ago. That showed that people who went to the library website tended to go automatically to the Help button, even when the link to what they required was on the Home screen.
I suppose this could be a digital natives v digital immigrants thing, but I don’t think so (not only because I don’t like the whole natives/immigrants analogy). I think people like to have technology / software explained to them by someone who knows, as they work through it. That’s what these students are trying to access. That’s why the Help conference is so useful.
And FirstClass isn’t intuitive. It’s got a bizarre threading system that I still haven’t managed to figure out. You can’t choose to file messages in a way that makes sense to you. You have to trawl through a lot of irrelevant stuff. And because the OU is in the process of migrating to Moodle, they won’t fix it.
Mystic powers of the blog
No sooner do I vent in my blog about my interrupted epistolary interviews than both interviewees get back to me with answers.
🙂 🙂 🙂
Technical hitches
My pilot interviews are throwing up lots of things that didn’t happen last year. I guess, as I’m adding about 25% to my knowledge of this technique, that that is only to be expected.
Gill sent me web links and attachments – thus demonstrating that you can use these interviews in that way if you want. She also replied to my questions from a laptop in Canada, thus demonstrating clearly that the interviews are neither time- nor place-dependent. (The photo shows where she emailed me from. I downloaded it from her Flickr site, and it’s copyright Gill.)
So that’s the good stuff. On the other hand, I filed one of Sali’s answers in the wrong place, and then thought she hadn’t answered so sent her another copy of the question and then found she had answered so sent her another question. Then the OU server went down. So now I’m not clear whether she got fed up with me messing things up and decided to stop participating, or whether she did get back to me – but Outlook didn’t pick it up. So that’s annoying. Specially bad timing because now it’s awkward to email her without looking as if I’m nagging her. And I don’t want to nag her – if she wants to stop being interviewed that’s fine. On the other hand, if she thinks I’ve just stopped then that’s no good either 🙁
And I’ve been back to look at my Outlook archive of my interviews. It’s lost Martin’s responses to two questions, and a couple of my emails. I can access them via Google Desktop, but otherwise they’re not there. So, again, Martin may have responded and his reply may just be lost in the ether. Luckily, I’ve only sent him that question once, so I’ve just emailed him again to explain what’s happening. Hope he gets back to me, cos we’re up to question seven and it would be good to have a complete interview.
Writing up
Inspired by Anesa’s recent blog posts, I have started to write up my thesis!
Karen did suggest a couple of months ago that I could bank some sections of my PhD which I was feeling confident about. Accordingly, I’ve written 1000 words on the ethics of online research, which wasn’t too complicated, as I drew heavily on last year’s U500 presentation. Then I dragged out my mini-viva presentation to use the section of units of analysis. That needs to be added to – I’ve got a couple of articles that I need to reference. Oh, and I’ve done a piece on episolary interviewing. It needs to be tidied up but most of it is in place.
That’s 3000 words or so – hey, I’ve written 5% of my thesis. How cool is that?