…will not be televised; it will be podcast.”
According to one of my podcast books. (It’s typical that middle-aged guys like me gotta read books about what younger techno-kool people like me just intuit.)
So, my dear friend Lulu who sends out the “Farm Report on e-mail”, which concerns selling her and her husband, Farmer Herman’s produce from their farm in North Florida, can now reach a lot more people. Don’t ask me for statistics, but podcasting is only a year old and has changed the world in a limited way. In my view, it has made knowledge and content more specific. That’s something we’ve been waiting for. I can not watch as often as I can listen. I want to know, but I can not read as often as I can listen. Want me to repeat it in a different way?
My friend Lulu’s business depends in some way on communicating effectively in the right time and the right place. Podcasting does that. Not all the logistics are worked out yet, but in my view, podcasting is a delightful tool to get information to people as they need it.
IF we get involved in it now, we can do good work.
Lulu and Herman, who already know what’s what (in that they know what they need to inform people about), can be famous.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Slam! Bang! Learn! Pow!
What could be more fun than the Periodic Table you had to memorize in Chemistry class?
Now, isn’t that a conundrum?
Actually, speaking as one who as a high school student (and dropout) saw the periodic table as a beast at best, I am really encouraged by the creativity in the delightful site titled, The Comic Book Periodic Table of the Elements.
This is where it’s at!
This is DRY, way DRY, stuff to most students.
Sure, some kids like periodic tables and such. Good. What about everyone else?
The folks who designed this site have taken an unexciting thing and made it pretty Kool!
Good for you, John P. Selegue and F. James Holler at the Department of Chemistry at the 
Saturday, January 22, 2005
Important Research About How We See Web Sites
The recent release of Eyetrack III research, though quite limited in scope and depth, is very interesting. This study tracked the eyes of 46 people to learn how they see online news. The participants in this study were observed for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content.
I have copied and bulleted excerpts from their findings quoted from their web site below:
• The eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page, then hovered in that area before going left to right. Only after perusing the top portion of the page for some time did their eyes explore further down the page.
• Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page -- especially when they are in the upper left, and most often (but not always) when in the upper right.
• Photographs, contrary to what you might expect (and contrary to findings of 1990 Poynter eyetracking research on print newspapers), aren't typically the entry point to a homepage. Text rules on the PC screen -- both in order viewed and in overall time spent looking at it.
• Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior (that is, reading the words), while larger type promotes lighter scanning. In general, our testing found that people spent more time focused on small type than large type. Larger type resulted in more scanning of the page -- fewer words overall were fixated on -- as people looked around for words or phrases that captured their attention.
• We found that when people look at blurbs under headlines on news homepages, they often only look at the left one-third of the blurb. In other words, most people just look at the first couple of words -- and only read on if they are engaged by those words.
• On average, a headline has less than a second of a site visitor's attention. For headlines -- especially longer ones -- it would appear that the first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers if you want to capture eyes.
• Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best -- that is, it was seen by the highest percentage of test subjects and looked at for the longest duration.
• Shorter paragraphs performed better in Eyetrack III research than longer ones. Our data revealed that stories with short paragraphs received twice as many overall eye fixations as those with longer paragraphs. The longer paragraph format seems to discourage viewing.
• We also learned that the bigger the image, the more time people took to look at it.
• We found that images that are at least 210 x 230 pixels in size were viewed by more than half of the testers. Our research also shows that clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixations on homepages.
• Overall, we observed that participants were more likely to correctly recall facts, names, and places when they were presented with that information in a text format. However new, unfamiliar, conceptual information was more accurately recalled when participants received it in a multimedia graphic format.
• Story information about processes or procedures seemed to be comprehended well when presented using animation and text. A step-by-step animation we tested supported this idea.
This limited study has real implications for educational web sites. More controlled studies would really be important to explore these variables, but this is a very promising line of research.
I have copied and bulleted excerpts from their findings quoted from their web site below:
• The eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page, then hovered in that area before going left to right. Only after perusing the top portion of the page for some time did their eyes explore further down the page.
• Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page -- especially when they are in the upper left, and most often (but not always) when in the upper right.
• Photographs, contrary to what you might expect (and contrary to findings of 1990 Poynter eyetracking research on print newspapers), aren't typically the entry point to a homepage. Text rules on the PC screen -- both in order viewed and in overall time spent looking at it.
• Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior (that is, reading the words), while larger type promotes lighter scanning. In general, our testing found that people spent more time focused on small type than large type. Larger type resulted in more scanning of the page -- fewer words overall were fixated on -- as people looked around for words or phrases that captured their attention.
• We found that when people look at blurbs under headlines on news homepages, they often only look at the left one-third of the blurb. In other words, most people just look at the first couple of words -- and only read on if they are engaged by those words.
• On average, a headline has less than a second of a site visitor's attention. For headlines -- especially longer ones -- it would appear that the first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers if you want to capture eyes.
• Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best -- that is, it was seen by the highest percentage of test subjects and looked at for the longest duration.
• Shorter paragraphs performed better in Eyetrack III research than longer ones. Our data revealed that stories with short paragraphs received twice as many overall eye fixations as those with longer paragraphs. The longer paragraph format seems to discourage viewing.
• We also learned that the bigger the image, the more time people took to look at it.
• We found that images that are at least 210 x 230 pixels in size were viewed by more than half of the testers. Our research also shows that clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixations on homepages.
• Overall, we observed that participants were more likely to correctly recall facts, names, and places when they were presented with that information in a text format. However new, unfamiliar, conceptual information was more accurately recalled when participants received it in a multimedia graphic format.
• Story information about processes or procedures seemed to be comprehended well when presented using animation and text. A step-by-step animation we tested supported this idea.
This limited study has real implications for educational web sites. More controlled studies would really be important to explore these variables, but this is a very promising line of research.
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Burke Johnson's Educational Research Site
Want to know the strengths and weaknesses of various data collection methods? Want to see an excellent concept map illustrating mixed model and mixed method research? How about reading a transcription of a lecture on sampling?
If these types educational research topics interest you let me recommend the web site of my good friend and colleague, Burke Johnson.
Saturday, January 08, 2005
Open Source Resources
Two interesting links on Open Source I’ve come across lately are SoundForge.net and the GNU General Public Licence site. I particularly like SourceForge.net, which claims to be “the largest repository of Open Source code and applications available on the Internet.” There are many types of open source software. Probably the one thing it all has in common is that the program source code is openly shared with developers and users.
Open Source has great possibilites, especially for users who are unable to afford commercially available software.
Open Source has great possibilites, especially for users who are unable to afford commercially available software.
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