My online syllabi are serviceable, but far from stunning. A tad embarassing, really, since I supposedly teach aesthetic as well as information design, and I should be paying more attention to the "user experience" of my students.
There are plenty of business web sites for me to look at for design ideas, but very few well-designed academic sites that I've been able to locate. Anybody out there with suggestions for good examples of online syllabi? Not training classes, but academic classes...with course outlines/schedules, readings, assignments, grading criteria, links to student work, blah blah blah.
I've hit designer's block on this, and need to be pointed towards academic eye-candy to get unstuck. [geez, does that sound like an oxymoron, or what?] I'm not looking for school or department sites, or for professor's personal sites. Just syllabi.
Thanks in advance for any links you can provide.
(suggestions as to functionality, content, and/or bells-and-whistles that you've seen and liked on syllabi are solicited as well)
After I raised the issue of bloggers doing collaborative research at Jill's talk, I've been thinking about how to legitimize such an activity. Of course, in technology fields, one of the holy grails of research respectability is NSF funding, so I took a look at upcoming program solications solicitations to see what might fit.
Found myself at the Information Technology Research (NSF 02-168) solicitation, which is written so broadly that it can be used to support a great variety of activities. And I think there's a lot of room here for potential impact of weblog publishing on scholarly activity and dissemination of information. So, how to put together a workable proposal?
Unfortunately, the deadline for "small" proposals is December 12 (small means no more than $500K for 3-5 years). But the deadline for "medium" proposals (up to $4 million!) isn't 'til February.
I suppose I could spend the break working on this, and try to get someting in next month. But I'm more intrigued by the idea of trying to do something larger and collaborative, and shooting for the medium version. Anybody want to play? (Alas, since it's NSF funding, we all have to be US citizens, I think.)
Ideas floating in my head involved designing new curricula, creating new professional publication models, sponsoring a conference, developing a new online resource center for microcontent publishing, etc, etc. Need to think more on the topic.
This morning in the shower I was humming a Christine Lavin song to myself. It’s called Rushcutter’s Bay, and in it, she’s singing about being in Australia. “I can’t believe it’s November, I’m upside down, The other side of the world.”
So then I start thinking about “being upside down,” in relation to location. And from there I wonder to myself whether compasses work the same way in Australia as they do in North America. (Yes, I realize as an educated person I should know this, but I don’t.) Which leads me to start thinking about the concept of compass point directions, and then maps. “How effective were maps before we had compass points,” I wonder. And since Joi Ito recently posted a comment regarding my post on mapping the infome, and I recently posted one to his blog about “maps” of social networks, I then get to thinking about Internet maps, and how perhaps the real problem with all these Internet visualization tools is that we don’t have shared reference points to orient ourselves on them.
As I wasn’t exactly in a place where it would be easy to blog this train of thoughts, I mentally filed it away for later. Then I found a trackback alert in my mailbox this afternoon, showing that Brandon Barr had linked to my post from his texturl blog. I followed the link, to his ghosts in the machine post. In it, he says:
The geographic and topographic metaphors are somewhat problematic to me. Joi Ito’s comment to Liz’s post touches on precisely what I find problematic: the utility of internet visualizations. The utility of Jevbratt’s visualizations is difficult to place, because her maps are counter-inituitive to what we usually think of as a map. I would contend that the power of maps requires a degree of permanence in what they represent—if highways constantly shifted, Rand McNally would be out of business. So, one sees utility in a project to visualize the backbone of the internet, while one might see less hard utility in a static maps of dynamic web information flow. There is utility, but it isless tangible. More like catching ghosts.
Fun stuff, this.
There was more serendipity in the process, as well. While trying to find the link to Joi’s social network diagram post, I stumbled on an other post of his in which he quotes Sean O’Reilly telling his brother Tim “Korzybski’s brilliant observation, in the latter half of the 20th century, that the map is not the territory morphed into the bizarre idea that there is no territory at all, which to most rational individuals is simply absurd.”
I’ve always loved that Korzybski quote—“The map is not the territory, the thing name is not the thing named.” I first encountered it reading Bateson’s Mind and Nature, which I’ve been wanting to go back and re-read lately in the context of the ‘net as an organic entity.
There’s an important thread in all of this, that I can’t quite grasp in its entirety yet. But it helps a lot to put this much into words. More later.
From The Volokh Conspiracy, via Instapundit:
de CroyÌs First Law of Government runs as follows: Concede no powers to your friends that you would not give to your enemies. If you are a Republican, the Law can be applied in the following form: give no powers of surveillance to the Bush administration that you would not be comfortable seeing in the hands of Hillary Clinton.
Read the whole post. It's an excellent discussion of the "Total Information Awareness" travesty that Poindexter et al are foisting off on a mostly unsuspecting public.
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