I am totally convinced that blogging is the next "big thing" in technology--one of Kurzweil's exponential curves, just like e-mail, and the the web. So as a recent convert, I'm trying to tap my new enthusiasm to evangelize. I think we'll be reworking the undergraduate web design course to use
Thinking about making David Weinberger's book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, part of the required reading for the course.
Have been thinking a lot about how we teach technology, especially programming. University of British Columbia built a very cool "Virtual Family" game-like program for teaching Java to undergrads, which seems like it's exactly the way we need to go. Then one of my students showed me Terrarium, a really cool tool for learning .NET.
We need to do more of this. We need release time so that we can do more of this. We need to care about doing this. We need to tell people when we do this.
I knew it. And now studies prove it. Consumers don't really look at the quality of information on the web...they make their decisions based primarily on how it looks. Consumer Webwatch has released the results of two surveys--one from Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab, one from Sliced Bread Design, both showing that:
people claimed that certain elements were vital to a Web site's credibility (e.g., having a privacy policy), but our most recent study showed that people rarely used these rigorous criteria when evaluating credibility (e.g., they almost never referred to a site's privacy policy). We found a mismatch, as in other areas of life, between what people say is important and what they actually do.
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