It’s been a while since I’ve written anything, and it’s probably going to be a while before I really get back into blogging in any serious way. I’ve taken on several projects for the eLearning Global Giveback Competition from LINGOs, which has recruited instructional designers (and aspiring ones, such as myself) to develop learning solutions for a variety of charitable NGOs pro bono.

Also, I’ve really gotten into reading every single thing that Cory Doctorow has ever written. Eventually, I’m certain to mine some of the wonderfully weird and amazing things that he brings up in his books for this blog.

Getting really annoyed, however, always seems to inspire something for this blog, and it’s no different this Sunday morning. My employer recently distributed some really nice coffeemugs to everyone in the company. Normally, “really nice” is not a word combination I’d use to describe a coffeemug, but this one earns it due to its extra big handle that affords room for 4 of my fingers as I hold it.

The only problem is, I can’t train myself to actually use all 4 fingers. Since 99% of all the coffeemugs I have ever used have been designed for only 3 of my fingers, I instinctively grab this one in the same way. It’s uncomfortable as hell, and I am made aware of this mug’s (supposedly) accomodating design everytime I reach for it.

Even though the designer of this coffeemug has intended a comfortable, (dare I say) luxurious beverage experience for thier end user, it fails miserably because the user has developed an adaptation for living without it that simply cannot be unlearned.

Maybe when human evolution has gifted us a sixth finger, I’ll be okay. For now I’ll just have to use this mug for a pen holder.

Occasionally, it’s nice to see something in a much more highly regarded place back up your views. Bill Brandon of Learning Solutions magazine has an article of predictions for 2010 that have some similarities to my own:

Tool vendors will also be under increasing pressure, and some will suffer for their inability to adapt to changing demands. Most notable is the shift of high-cost applications to the Web/cloud. In most cases, this will involve substitution of tools: photo, video, and audio editing, for example. Most of the new editing tools are not yet as powerful as their desktop counterparts, but they are “good enough” for many purposes.

Hey, we even picked (some of) the same words. But in my defense, I didn’t read it until today. This “good enough” trend is something I think that will be ongoing. Paul Thurrott keeps talking about how Microsoft’s version of Office in the cloud will somehow blow away what Google Docs can do in terms of UI and features and such. I think this type of thinking is a bit backward – software is no longer going to be judged purely on how long the feature list is. The real questions are going to be about reliability, access, and portability. Can I be certain that my data is secure? Can I take my data and plug it in somewhere else? Can I share that data with someone else and collaborate on it?

With the new year upon us, I suppose it’s not surprising that media outlets everywhere have been killing us with “best of” lists, for both the year and the decade. I’ve been trying to think of an interesting thing to post, but seeing as I’m no less lazy than most media outlets, all I can think of doing is my own decade wrap up:

Moore’s Law still a law: electronics get cheaper, faster, smaller, etc. Was it really a surprise that this age-old law pretty much kept pace? There were a couple pundits on the most recent episode of TWiT who brought up how Moore’s Law has managed to continue. I suppose it is personally mindblowing that I can buy a 1 TB drive for about $100, or that broadband internet has finally reached a price that I can afford (at the start of this decade I was still slumming it in 56K). But I really hate it when people start saying stuff like, “back in my day sodas cost just a nickel.” Just because people do it with tech doesn’t really make it interesting. So I’ll leave this one alone.

The power of “good enough”: I suppose this is not as surprising, given the shambles our economy has been in, but it’s interesting how it has changed the computer industry. Nearly all non-Mac computers sold in the past year falls in the super low-priced and small-sized netbook category, from which we can probably infer a couple things: 1) When it comes to computers, people (aside from gamers and the one or two graphic designers who haven’t had their jobs outsourced) don’t really need much power. 2) The web/cloud has taken over much of what we do on our computers. I won’t go so far as to say application-based computing has been completely replaced by the cloud (I doubt it ever will be), but it’s likely that the more interesting things that come out of the next decade will be cloud-based.

It’s also interesting what this will mean for the education space. Historically, the drive is towards bigger, better, faster, but I think this move towards “good enough” may drive down the desire for more complex, immersive learning spaces. Whenever there is talk about the future of learning, it almost always ends with some discussion of virtual reality, Second Life, etc. (I know I have been guilty of writing some papers that end like this). It’s not surprising, since I think we all yearn in our hearts for that super-cool holodeck experience that science fiction has taught us to hope for (we all yearned for the flying car, and look how that turned out). But reality is a bit more complex. Second Life is not exactly the most intuitive system – both for the end-user and the developer – and it demands a computer with some power behind it. The few Second Life classes I have been in have been in were so wracked with technical difficulties, I barely got anything out of it. I think by the end of the next decade, we’ll drop the hype surrounding immersive learning and realize that it’s only worth the hassle for a few specific applications.

Of course, this doesn’t apply if you happen to be a student athlete at USF, where they give away computers for nothing.

The ubiquity of mobile devices: This is probably the single biggest change that we’ve experienced in terms of technology. Cell phones were already pretty common back in 2000, but now they’re everywhere (case in point: I now have one), and they do far more than just make phone calls. For this, we can probably thank the iPhone for making simple and user-friendly what was previously complex. Browsing the web with Mobile Safari is nearly identical to browsing on the computer, and it is a far cry from the clunky, tiny, text-based mobile sites that you would have to access on a dumbphone. Additionally, the growth of low-cost applications for the iPhone platform has transformed the phone into what is essentially a handheld computer. There’s some interesting movement in the education space with this aspect, as some medical schools are using iPhone apps to provide instruction and Stanford is using iPhones to make music.

In terms of cost of access, however, the cost of a mobile data plan is still to high for the likes of me. This is probably the reason that, despite its impact on technology as a whole, the use of mobile devices in an educational context is still fairly limited. There’s been a lot of hype about podcasts, mobile applications, etc. in this space, but it hasn’t amounted to any significant change. A lot of podcast in education research found that even though students can listen to them practically anywhere on their mobile phones or media players, most of them still listened to them at home, on their computers. In order to take advantage of the mobile nature of these education technologies, the context still has to be right – if you’re just listening to a lecture, you’re probably going to get more out of it while listening in a quiet room than anywhere else. With some of the more advanced GPS capabilities on Android phones, I’ll be intrigued to see if educators will take advantage of these technologies for more location-based instruction.

Though the web offers us an abundance of important, entertaining and useful information, occasionally it shows itself as a dumping ground for old crap. Quite a bit of that crap, unsurprisingly, comes from me.

Case in point, this excerpt from an article by Susan G. Strother in the November 2, 1997 edition of the Orlando Sentinel:

With a click of the mouse, William Chinda caused images to flicker across the computer screen.

He saw a shopping mall, a man in Mickey Mouse ears, the same man laughing hysterically and waving his arms. The frenetic scenes, titled ”Inertia: An Examination of the Narcoleptic Cyborg,” lasted for several minutes until William moved on.

”This is pretty cool,” said the Cypress Creek High School junior. ”But it’s a little weird.”

Welcome to cyber-culture, where the computer is as much a part of art as traditional paints and canvas. The Orlando Museum of Art this weekend is home to more than 50 pieces of computer-driven artwork – composed by people who call themselves ”digital artists” – in Art & Technology ‘97: Beyond the Virtual Edge.

Really? I have the opportunity to make a statement that will somehow encapsulate the importance of technology on the future of creative endeavors and the best I could come up with was THAT?

When I was 16, I desperately wanted to do something with my life that would involve art and computers, and I remember really looking forward to that exhibition. Unfortunately, what I found was fairly uninteresting, and the Sentinel reporter caught me completely off guard.

—

Of course, when I did know exactly what to say, the results were not much better. This is a letter to the editor, published on February 3, 1999, in the Sentinel:

FOR NEARLY 10 years, I have lived in the suburban wasteland midway between downtown Orlando and Disney World. What I see every day driving these neighborhoods is disturbing: traffic jams, lack of trees and a general feeling of artificiality. It reminds me very much of Los Angeles – a city full of people who found the American dream in nice cars and suburban houses but lost touch with the city.

Light rail won’t guarantee that Orlando won’t become New Los Angeles, but it may just slow the process by stopping the dreaded sprawl monster that is responsible for the decline of American cities. William Chinda, ORLANDO

That was off the charts on the pretentiousness scale. It actually reads more like an artist’s statement (I’m pretty sure it was adapted from one) than anything else.

At the time, I remember reading nothing but architecture magazines and articles about new urbanism. I also spent my days slogging through traffic to get to school, dreaming of the day when I could get out of Orlando. To me, the city felt like a backwater that would be left even further behind without any serious reconsideration of its transit scheme, which was being vehemently debated at the time. A decade later, things still seem contentious and unclear.

—

Before the Internet, I remember going to the library and being amazed by the vast number of drawers that held nothing but microfiche of newspaper articles. The machinery was so damn complicated, I never quite figured out how to work it, having to bug the librarians for help anytime I wanted to look for something.

But now I can find any article I want, “with a click of the mouse.”

Unfortunately for me, I won’t be able to write a blog 10 years from now complaining how my terribly pretentious and nonsensical writing from now is still on Google.

Thanks to Chris Coyier’s fantastic tutorial site, CSS Tricks, I’ve managed to take my first foray into Wordpress design. I’m still working through the bugs, so apologies if things are occasionally a little wonky. It’s still based on the blass2 theme that I’ve been using since inception, so there’s probably a little more code cruft than I would like, but it’ll do for now. Eventually I’ll try my hand at building a theme from scratch.

The messy style is a bit of a change of pace for me, but it’s in line with my idea of this blog as a dumping ground for projects and ideas.

That’s a video from Penn State professor Christopher Long (via Cole Camplese). Nothing new, but it efficiently sums up everything there is to know about the use of blogging as a teaching tool.

I’ve read multitudes of blogs for years, but the motivation for doing one myself came out of a Distance Learning course I took several years ago. If nothing else, I’m grateful to have learned that the web is a powerful medium for not only consumption, but also creation.

Well, after a small amount of patience, and the occasional whiny tweet, I’ve finally managed to get my invite to Google Wave. It looks intriguing, but I think it may take some time before I can wrap my head around it entirely. From the various waves I’ve been reading, the consensus is that it’s a weird amalgamation of Google Docs, Wikis, Twitter and a message board that no one quite knows what to do with. In addition to being a technological mutt, it’s also rather slow loading and prone to crashing (this in spite of my Fios connection and a fairly recent computer).

The best resource I’ve found so far is Gina Trapani’s Complete Guide to Google Wave, which I’ve slowly been making my way through.

More to come on this.

I should probably do more with this blog than just link to stuff, but I’ve just redesigned my portfolio site, so I think I’ve hit my upper limit for producing web content in a week.

This is a really great read from Wired: one of their writers, Evan Ratliff, essentially became a fugitive for nearly a month, attempting to avoid being caught by an online community being lured by a $5,000 prize. You can probably take two things from the story:

1) It’s pretty damned hard to disappear if someone really wants to find you
2) Being on the run is pretty damn lonely if all you have for friends are Twitter spambots

I used to listen to podcasts of speakers at educational conferences on a fairly regular basis. This was, of course, until I came to the realization that I would fall asleep at regular intervals in the course of listening to them (I probably would have been okay with this, were it not for the fact that I was listening to them at work).

There wasn’t anything about them that was particularly awful, but I definitely noticed a tendency for them to turn into hour-and-a-half ramblings that involved dropping as many buzzwords as humanly possible.

Web2.0openlearningsocialnetworkingfacebooktwittergoogle.

So it was a pleasant surprise to hear this talk by Jim Groom, Brian Lamb, and Tom Woodward from the recent NMC symposium. In the format of a late-night call-in show (a la Art Bell), they host a chat with a man from the “future” to discuss where education is headed. In a word, that future is: insurance.

Just like health care, insurance becomes a necessity for obtaining an education, given both its skyrocketing cost and its importance of education in determining one’s success. Additionally, you’re protected if you can’t finish your studies, or your degree turns out to be useless in landing you a job.

*coughcough*artdegree*coughcough*
*coughcough*studentloansfromprivateschool*coughcough*

Excuse me.

During the discussion, future man also manages to rip to shreds the arguments of every wacko caller who drops all those buzzwords that we know and love.

Open education? Sounds wonderful, but higher education generates such an incredible amount of money, that it doesn’t make sense for institutions to open things up and provide instruction for free. In fact, they profit primarily from their exclusivity, the source of their prestige.

Innovation in teaching? Beaten down by standardized testing (as well as the divestiture of funding after the Zombie Apocalypse of 2012).

Technology? Google owns everything.

It’s an unsettling vision, and one I hope never comes to pass. And as silly and entertaining as it is, the sad thing is that it’s certainly plausible.

I just hope the deductible’s low.

I recently saw American Splendor, a movie about the life of the underground comic book writer Harvey Pekar. It’s a fantastic movie, and currently sits near the top of my favorite movie list. I’ve never read any of his comics (I was a fan of the typical superhero comics back in the day), but after seeing this I’ll probably be picking some up. A particularly powerful monologue is delivered near the end of the movie, and if not for the cruel mistress that is American copyright law, I would probably post a video clip. Unfortunately plain text will have to do:

My name is Harvey Pekar – that’s an unusual name – Harvey Pekar. 1960 was the year I got my first apartment and my first phone book. Now imagine my surprise when I looked up my name and saw that in addition to me, another Harvey Pekar was listed. Now I was listed as “Harvey L. Pekar”, my middle name is Lawrence, and he was listed as “Harvey Pekar” therefore his was a – was a pure listing. Then in the ’70s, I noticed that a third Harvey Pekar was listed in the phone book, now this filled me with curiousity. How can there be three people with such an unusual name in the world, let alone in one city? Then one day, a person I work with, expressed her sympathy with me, concerning what she thought, was the death of my father, and she pointed out an obituary notice in the newspaper for a man named Harvey Pekar. And one of his sons was named Harvey. And these were the other Harvey Pekar’s. And six months later, Harvey Pekar Jr. died. And although I’ve met neither man, I was filled with sadness, ‘what were they like?’, I thought, it seemed that our lives had been linked in some indefineable way. But the story does not end there, for two years later, another ‘Harvey Pekar’ appeared in the phone book. Who are these people? Where do they come from? What do they do? What’s in a name? Who is “Harvey Pekar”?

I work with phone books all day long, and I rarely give much thought to the significance within its listings (familiarity and contempt and all that). But this made me think about how we create such intricate and complex systems that organize our world, making connections that we might otherwise not notice.

So thanks to the magic of Google, I bring to you this random collection of things which share my name, but nothing else (in the course of searching for these things, I’ve found Chinda to be a very common first name, so I’ve limited it to surnames and business/place names):

Chinda Barbeque: a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant in Glendale, CA.

Chinda International: a toy company in LA. We found one of their stuffed animals at a local florist a few months ago.

Chinda Institute International: a martial arts dojo in what looks to be Pittsburgh. I’m pretty sure that guy isn’t related to me.

Monalisa Chinda: again, I’m pretty sure there’s no relation. Apparently she’s a fairly well-known Nigerian actress who has been in more than 80(!) movies. Her recent divorce has apparently stirred much emotion among her fans.

Yuk Chinda: I guess she is some Cambodian Television journalist? There’s a ridiculous amount of her videos on Youtube, and somehow they are all 5 star rated.

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Chinda, Honduras: a municipality in Honduras with a population of about 3,000, almost all of whom are Lenca subsistence farmers. The charity Water for People does work there to expand sanitation (PDF).

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Fine Chinda and Gifts: somehow I feel this is a typo. Unfortunately (for both me and this business), it’s a typo that occurs all the freaking time.