Desert of My Real Life

{December 28, 2011} The Problem with Educational Technology

I don't think anyone would accuse me of being a Luddite. I began to learn to program in the late 1970's when I was in high school, majored in computer science, worked as a software developer and got a PhD in computer science. I love my tech ~~toys~~ tools and think that overall, we are better off with the technology we have today than we were before it was available. But I am often a skeptic when it comes to educational technology.

I was reminded of my skepticism about a month ago when I cam across this photo and caption. For those of you who won't click through, I'll describe it. It is a photo of a classroom smart board being used as a bulletin board, with large sheets of paper taped to it, completely covering the smart board itself. The poster of the photo asks a number of questions, including whether the teacher who uses the equipment in this manner should be reprimanded for educational malpractice. The comments on the photo imply that the fact that the teacher is using this equipment in this way is evidence that the teacher is resistant to using the equipment appropriately. I was happy to see that the poster of the photo also asked some questions about why a teacher might use the equipment in this way such as not enough training. But I think the issue really is that the teacher has not had the right kind of training and the probable reason for that is that the promoters of educational technology are almost always focused on the technology itself and not on the education that the technology can provide.

The fact that someone would consider reprimanding a teacher for using technology in this (admittedly inappropriate) way is part of the problem that I see in all corners of educational technology. When we engage in technology training for teachers, we almost always focus on how and not why. That is, we focus on how to use the technology and don't engage in meaningful discussion of the pedagogical advantages of using the technology in the classroom. The impression then is that we want to wow our students with this new technology, to do something flashy because the flashiness will capture the attention of the students. I see several problems with this idea. First, if students are using similar technology in all of their classes, the newness of the technology wears off and the flashiness disappears. Second, we should be in the business of getting students to actually learn something and if we don't have proof that a particular technology (used appropriately) improves learning, perhaps we shouldn't be investing in such high-priced items. In other words, I do not see technology as a panacea to our educational problems.

I'll give my own example of how this has played out in my own teaching. A few years ago, my University purchased a bunch of clickers. I went to several training sessions for the clickers, hoping to hear a pedagogical explanation for why the use of the clickers might improve student learning. I heard a lot about how to use the clickers (technical details) as well as the cool things I could do to survey my students to see where their misunderstandings are. But even this last point didn't convince me that the technology was worth the cost or the effort to use it because I already have ways that I can survey my students to see where their misunderstandings are. In fact, I've been developing those kinds of techniques for years, without the use of technology. So what I wanted to know was how the technology will improve on those techniques so that my students learn better. And no one could provide me with those answers. This summer, however, I went to a technology institute for faculty in the University System of New Hampshire. One of our presenters told us about a learning framework which might help us think about technology use in the classroom. He cited several studies that sought to identify why individual tutoring of students is so effective at improving student learning. The results show that students learn best when they get immediate feedback about their learning (the more immediate the better), can engage in conversation about their learning (that is, when they have to try to explain what they learned to someone else) and have learning activities that are customized to their needs (so that they are not wasting their time going over material that they already understand). What technology can do, he argued, is help us provide individual tutoring learning experiences for large numbers of students cost-effectively. Therefore, we can use clickers, not to provide the teacher with information about student learning but rather to provide the students themselves with information about their own learning. That is, the clickers allows us to ask questions of the class, have all the students answer simultaneously and then when we reveal the answer(s), the student can see how he fared compared to his classmates and compared to the correct answer(s). This immediate feedback provides an individual tutoring type experience only if it is done with an eye toward making sure students understand what they are supposed to get out of the use of the clickers. But too often, clickers are used in the classroom because they are cool, and new, and innovative.

So back to the question of whether the teacher who used the smart board inappropriately should be reprimanded. If, instead of having students write on big pieces of paper which she taped onto the smart board, the teacher had the students type their items into a computer and then she had displayed them on the smart board in the "appropriate" manner, we would not be having this discussion. But in neither case have we asked what her pedagogical motivations were for the exercise that the students engaged in. That to me is the important question and the one that would determine whether she has committed "educational malpractice." And before we spend tons of money on smart boards and iPads and clickers and and and..., I think we should focus on the learning improvements that might be gained from the use of such technology. In most cases, I don't think we have a whole lot of evidence that it does improve learning. And I definitely don't think we're training teachers to use it in a way that takes advantage of the ways that it might improve learning.

{November 13, 2011} Software Development and the User

I've been thinking about software usability a lot lately, mostly because I encounter so much software that isn't particularly usable. There are two pieces of software that I use a lot right now which drive me crazy for their lack of usability. And yet, I still use them. Perhaps that's why the usability doesn't improve. Anyway, here are some thoughts.

The software development company that I worked for right out of college was The Geary Corporation, founded by Dave Geary in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. It doesn't exist anymore because Dave died of MS and not too long after, his family sold it to Keane, Inc. But while it was around, Geary was an awesome company to work for and one of the things that distinguished it from other companies at the time (and apparently, companies now) was its focus on the user. We did a lot of development for Fortune 500 companies, which have a lot of middle management type people. Dave would not deal with those folks as we developed our software and this is a lesson I learned well. He would make the contract with the folks at the top of the decision chain and then he would go straight to the users. We might deal some with the users' direct supervisor but all decisions about how the software needed to work were passed by the users on the front line, tested by them and approved by them. I learned this lesson so well that it is a central tenant of the software engineering textbook that I co-wrote.

I think about this a lot when I'm using Facebook. It's a great tool for social networking but as time has gone on, I think the folks at Facebook have forgotten the user. The latest example of this is their recent upgrade of the Newsfeed so that it is no longer presented chronologically. Instead, Facebook decides what to show you. The Facebook site explains that this is for people who don't visit Facebook very often and so Facebook tries to predict what will be most interesting so they don't have to wade through a lot of minutia. That's fine but did Facebook test this out with folks who use Facebook every day or multiple times a day? Given the subsequent uproar, I would guess not. To their credit, Facebook recently announced that they'll be rolling out another update to give users an option concerning how they want their Newsfeed to appear. I keep using Facebook because the advantages outweigh the disadvantages (so far) but I have installed a cool app that gives me more control over my experience with the site. The app is called Social Fixer (used to be Better Facebook) and although it doesn't work perfectly, given that it's created by one guy in his living room, it's awesome.

The other piece of software that is giving me fits is the tool that we use at PSU to search for courses. It's always been ugly and clunky and not easy to understand but we have such a shortage of IT folks to help fix these things that I've never officially complained about it. We recently decided to stop printing a paper list of our courses which forces everyone to use this search tool. And so someone recently decided to upgrade the tool. To do the same search now requires more clicks and more scrolling than before. That's a sign to me that whoever did the upgrade didn't talk to faculty about how they use it. I suspect that they also didn't talk to students. What a horribly inefficient use of time--why would you spend time upgrading a tool so that the result is less usable? If someone had come to talk to me for ten minutes, I would have explained, for example, that searching for courses by department is not an "advanced" use of the software and so I don't want to have to click an extra time to get to that option.

None of this probably seems like a huge deal. But when you think of the amount of time we spend developing software and then using that software, it seems crazy to me that we would not take a few minutes early on to get user input as to how the tool can be most efficient and effective.

{November 10, 2011} Play, Standardized Testing and Wall Street

A student from my Creating Games class came to my office today to talk about the keynote speech from a conference he had recently attended. The speaker was lamenting the fact that kindergarten has become increasingly focused on "preparing children for first grade" rather than socialization through play activities. Because we talk a lot about play and its importance in life (even adult life), he wanted to know what I thought about this.

We had a great conversation and in the middle of it, I had an epiphany that many of our society's ills stem from the very philosophy that encourages (or even requires) kindergarten classrooms to be structured around preparation for first grade. I think the philosophy comes from capitalistic tendencies to focus on "efficiency," "productivity," and "progress," all of which are defined in a very narrow sense. And the more I think about this, the more I see it everywhere in our society.

My original thought was that we are forgetting the importance of play because we are so focused on short-term, immediate, measurable outcomes. We have few resources and so we need to use them efficiently in order to make progress toward some short-term goal. Any "unproductive" use of resources is discouraged as wasteful. That is, if we can't see the immediate consequence of the use of those resources, the resources have been wasted. So children engaging in unstructured, "unproductive" play in kindergarten is wasteful because they aren't learning to read, something they must know how to do when they enter first grade. We need to test our students regularly (using standardized tests) to measure their "progress" and if they aren't all making the same "progress," someone must be punished (with loss of funding or firing). So we eliminate art programs and physical education and other extra subjects so we can focus our resources on getting students to perform well on our measurement tools.

As I thought more about this, I started to see this idea everywhere. Because money is the only measurement tool that matters for the stock market, if a company is not making adequate "progress" (which means increasing profits every quarter--profits which stay the same are not "progressing"), it will be punished by shareholders leaving them (well, maybe not in this particular economic climate). So companies engage in practices which make (or save) money in the short-term but which might not make sense if we had a longer view. And mathematicians and fund managers design financial products that will increase in profits every quarter. If we had a longer view, we would recognize the risk of these products and wouldn't allow them to take down our entire economy with their collapse. We won't fund basic research and development because it isn't immediately clear what the benefits are. And so we won't learn more about how the universe and the world works just for the sake of learning those things today but which tomorrow might lead to amazing technological advances. I could go on and on.

This kind of thinking is the root of many of our societal problems. Kids engaging in unstructured, unsupervised play is important to teach them skills that can't be easily measured and whose benefits may not be visible for years. They will learn to entertain themselves. They will learn to focus on an activity for more than a half hour at a time. They will use their imaginations. They will learn to navigate the world on their own, without some external force guiding them to the next "correct" step. These things may take years to learn and are definitely not easily measured. But it seems to me that those are not valid reasons to give up on them. Yet, I think we have largely given up on them. Just as we've given up on many of the things in my list above.

I realize I probably sound like a curmudgeon longing for "the good old days." Or that I think we shouldn't measure anything in the short-term. But that isn't my point at all. My point is simply that our societal focus on ONLY measurable, short-term outcomes has consequences. And I would argue that those consequences are mostly bad. They lead to less creativity and fewer workers prepared to adapt to the ever-changing world and economic collapses and fewer technological advances and and and. Focusing on these other things, these things we can't measure or see the results of immediately, is risky. We might "waste" some resources. But sometimes, what seems like a "waste" today turns out to be life-changing, society-changing, at a point in the unknowable future. And the really sad thing is that if we don't invest in these "wastes," we'll never even know what we might be missing.

{October 10, 2011} Qwikster Part II

Although it is not a personal email written by founder and President of Netflix Reed Hastings, I was happy to receive the following email this morning. Perhaps "the Netflix team" will start doing some market research before they make big announcements. But at least they listened to the overwhelming majority of their subscribers.

Dear Cathie,

It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.

This means no change: one website, one account, one password…in other words, no Qwikster.

While the July price change was necessary, we are now done with price changes.

We're constantly improving our streaming selection. We've recently added hundreds of movies from Paramount, Sony, Universal, Fox, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, MGM and Miramax. Plus, in the last couple of weeks alone, we've added over 3,500 TV episodes from ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, USA, E!, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, ABC Family, Discovery Channel, TLC, SyFy, A&E, History, and PBS.

We value you as a member, and we are committed to making Netflix the best place to get your movies & TV shows.

Respectfully,

The Netflix Team

{September 19, 2011} Quikster

Like all Netflix subscribers, I received an email from Netflix founder Reed Hastings this morning. I will post my comments on their blog but I also decided to post the my response here. I'll follow it with the original email so those of you who have already left the company can see what prompted my response. The upshot? Netflix is screwing up again.

First, my response:

Dear Reed,

Although I know that you personally didn't write this email, I'm going to respond as though you did. You are making another big mistake. You are giving the impression with this email that you expect Quikster will go bankrupt and out of business (did you deliberately choose Borders as your example so soon after it's going out of business?). I believe the separation of the two websites and therefore, the two queues will simply hasten the demise of your DVD business. It's probably too late to stop the forward motion of this separation but just in case it isn't, I'm writing to you to suggest that you not move forward with that part of your plan. It has nothing to do with improving customer experiences which is what you should be focusing on right now, especially in the wake of your previous "mistake." You seem now to be focused on issues other than your customers and their experience of your company. If you put customers first, we will stay with you. If you put the "very different cost structures, that need to be marketed differently" first, you will lose us. I just hope it isn't already too late.

Cathie LeBlanc

Now, the email from Reed Hastings:

Dear Cathie,

I messed up. I owe you an explanation.

It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology. Let me explain what we are doing.

For the past five years, my greatest fear at Netflix has been that we wouldn't make the leap from success in DVDs to success in streaming. Most companies that are great at something – like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores – do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us). So we moved quickly into streaming, but I should have personally given you a full explanation of why we are splitting the services and thereby increasing prices. It wouldn’t have changed the price increase, but it would have been the right thing to do.

So here is what we are doing and why.

Many members love our DVD service, as I do, because nearly every movie ever made is published on DVD. DVD is a great option for those who want the huge and comprehensive selection of movies.

I also love our streaming service because it is integrated into my TV, and I can watch anytime I want. The benefits of our streaming service are really quite different from the benefits of DVD by mail. We need to focus on rapid improvement as streaming technology and the market evolves, without maintaining compatibility with our DVD by mail service.

So we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are really becoming two different businesses, with very different cost structures, that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently.

It’s hard to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to “Qwikster”. We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery. We will keep the name “Netflix” for streaming.

Qwikster will be the same website and DVD service that everyone is used to. It is just a new name, and DVD members will go to qwikster.com to access their DVD queues and choose movies. One improvement we will make at launch is to add a video games upgrade option, similar to our upgrade option for Blu-ray, for those who want to rent Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360 games. Members have been asking for video games for many years, but now that DVD by mail has its own team, we are finally getting it done. Other improvements will follow. A negative of the renaming and separation is that the Qwikster.com and Netflix.com websites will not be integrated.

There are no pricing changes (we’re done with that!). If you subscribe to both services you will have two entries on your credit card statement, one for Qwikster and one for Netflix. The total will be the same as your current charges. We will let you know in a few weeks when the Qwikster.com website is up and ready.

For me the Netflix red envelope has always been a source of joy. The new envelope is still that lovely red, but now it will have a Qwikster logo. I know that logo will grow on me over time, but still, it is hard. I imagine it will be similar for many of you.

I want to acknowledge and thank you for sticking with us, and to apologize again to those members, both current and former, who felt we treated them thoughtlessly.

Both the Qwikster and Netflix teams will work hard to regain your trust. We know it will not be overnight. Actions speak louder than words. But words help people to understand actions.

Respectfully yours,

-Reed Hastings, Co-Founder and CEO, Netflix

p.s. I have a slightly longer explanation along with a video posted on our blog, where you can also post comments.

{June 25, 2011} Technology in Education

I just got back from a three day workshop on academic technology. As a computer scientist, I was intrigued by the idea of this workshop but I was worried that it would be a disappointment because so many of these workshops focus on what I consider to be the wrong things. I am so glad I attended the workshop because I learned a lot and was inspired by a lot of what I heard.

The reason I'm often disappointed by technology workshops and technology training for educators is because they are often led by people whose focus is on the technology and teaching the participants how to use that technology. This is definitely an important task but it is one that I typically find tedious because I'm comfortable with technology and want to go faster than the workshop usually go. And I want to have conversations about more than "how" to use the technology. I want to talk about "why" we should use the technology. We discussed this topic quite a bit (more than I ever have) at this technology workshop.

My big take-away from the workshop concerning "why" we should use technology came from the Day 2 keynote speaker, Michael Caulfield, who is an instructional designer at Keene State College. He presented research that shows that average students become exemplary students if they can have conversation about the topic they are learning, can have instruction that is customized to them and what they are not understanding, and can receive immediate feedback about their learning. Basically, if every student can have a full-time, one-on-one tutor, she can move from being an average student to being an exemplary student. Sounds great, but who wants to pay for that (especially in this economic climate)? So, Caulfield explained, we really need to figure how to provide "tutoring at scale." That is, we need to figure out how to provide each student with conversation, customization and feedback in classrooms that have more than one student. Caulfield then discussed various uses of instructional technology (which was called "rich media" at this workshop, a phrase that I'm still processing and deciding whether I like) and how to leverage technology to provide "tutoring at scale." Caulfield's talk gave me a great perspective through which to view all of the activities we engaged in during the workshop.

My one critique of the workshop (and it is a small one) is that we didn't sufficiently separate faculty development of "rich media" artifacts for use in providing "tutoring at scale" from faculty development of assignments that require students to create their own "rich media" artifacts. It feels like the issues are related to each other but are also quite separate, with different things for the faculty member to consider.

I would strongly encourage my PSU colleagues to apply to and attend next years Academic Technology Institute. It is well worth the time!

{June 15, 2011} Tumblr Review--Part 2

It has taken me more than a month and a half to write the second part of this review. I think it's because I said in my last post that I would write about THIS topic in my next post. Since that promise (or threat--take your pick) seems to have stymied me for a while, you can bet that I will never do that again.

I've been looking for a long time for a tool that would make it easy for me to implement a web site that looks the way I want it to and organizes information in the way I want it to. When I first came across Tumblr, I thought I had found a tool that was pretty close to what I wanted. As I read what the site promises, I realized that it wasn't exactly what I wanted. And then as I started to use the site, I realized that the developers of Tumblr hadn't delivered on what they said Tumblr was going to be and so the tool is even further away from what I'm looking for than I realized. The first part of my review of the tool focused on the things they promised but didn't deliver. I should point out that Tumblr no longer offers the options that I complained about in the first part of my review. And despite my extensive contact with the technical folks at the company, no one has contacted me about how they've decided to resolve these issues. Perhaps it would be difficult to contact a customer (even a non-paying one) to tell them that their complaints prompted you to remove options rather than fix them. In any case, I think my dissatisfaction with Tumblr arises from my overall dissatisfaction with Web 2.0 in general and the values embraced by the people who develop tools for this environment. So in this second part of my review, I'm going to focus on the main difficulty I have with Tumblr. I should point out, however, that I am critiquing Tumblr for not doing something they have never promised to do. I just wish the tool worked differently.

I am one of the few people my age who actually grew up with computer technology. I started to develop computer software in 1978 when I was a sophomore in high school. Although the Internet existed then, the World Wide Web did not (trivia: the birth year of the World Wide Web is debated depending on which event you use to mark its birth but it was sometime between 1990 and 1992). Developing new tools and content for the World Wide Web was somewhat challenging and required a deep knowledge of how it all worked as well as significant programming skills. In other words, I have been producing content since the days of fairly difficult content production. In those days, the line between content production and content consumption (viewing of that content) was pretty clear.

Gradually, however, tools were developed to allow the creation of content by more and more people. Together, these tools (things like blogging software, photo sharing sites, wikis and so on) make up Web 2.0. I personally believe that the addition of these new, less technical content producers is a positive thing, leading to more diversity of content on the Web. But when all of these new, easier-to-use tools entered the marketplace, I recognized that the underlying values of the tools were changing. I'm only now beginning to fully understand the implications of these changing values.

One of the new underlying values involves a changing understanding of the word production. I have always thought of production as the creation of new content. Increasingly, I have come to understand that in Web 2.0 content consumption is in itself a kind of production. In fact, this is the primary underlying value of Tumblr. As a user browses the Web, she will inevitably find content that she finds interesting and wants to share with her online friends. Tumblr makes sharing incredibly easy. In fact, my unscientific review of Tumblr sites suggests that the vast majority of them are sites where the owner reposts content that she has found elsewhere on the Web. In other words, the Tumblr owner is producing a new site that is idiosyncratically hers. Her unique Web content consumption results in the production of a mashup, a site made of pieces of other sites. For example, this Tumblr reposts items from around the Web that the owner finds "the most entertaining." None of the individual items is created by the owner of the Tumblr. Instead, the owner produces the unique combination of these individual items. This understanding of production by combining sites is very different than what I had been looking for when I found Tumblr. Because I wanted to combine my various sites of production (on which I produce the individual items) into a single site, I was looking for something that would automatically grab content from those various sites of production. Because Tumblr is designed for a human to make qualitative decisions about which content to include (from sites owned by a variety of people), the automatic grabbing of content is not as critical to Tumblr's designers as it is to me. As an aside, I am really interested in how this idea of consumption as production is affecting my students and their understanding of things like research and citations and intellectual property and originality. It's difficult to know if changing attitudes about these issues is driving changes in technology or vice versa. In any case, this difference in understanding of the word production is the main reason I am dissatisfied with Tumblr. What would I be satisfied with?

I would like a tool that automatically consolidates all of my other production sites while also allowing me to easily share Web content produced by others that I find interesting. And I would like to be able to fully customize the layout of the site into what I will call "channels." That is, I'd like a "channel" that shows the content from this blog, another "channel" that shows my Flickr feed and so on, and I'd like to be able to arrange the "channels" on the page in a variety of ways. And finally, I'd like the tool to allow me to customize how items appear in the various channels. Another of Web 2.0's underlying values is the privileging of recency. That is, the most recent items on a site are the most important and, therefore, appear first. I've written about my concerns about this value before. Some sites, such as Twitter, take this focus on recency to extremes by deleting any tweets that are more than a few weeks old, which, of course, makes it really difficult to go back at a later time to find tweets that you found interesting in the past. Therefore, I would like a site that allows me to override the default order of items and to provide my characterization of what is most important. This last requirement leads me into an entirely new discussion about information organization that I think is an unsolved research problem for the technical world to tackle. But I want my next blog entry to take me less than a month and a half to write so I won't promise that that discussion will appear in my next entry.

{May 1, 2011} Tumblr Review-Part 1

As I wrote in a previous post, I have been testing Tumblr as a way of consolidating my web contributions in one place. After using the site for a couple of weeks, I'm ready to write a review of it. My review will come in two parts. In this, the first part, I will review the site regarding the intentions of the designers of the site and how well (or not) those intentions have been implemented. In the second (future) part of my review, I will explain what I wish the designers would change regarding how the site is supposed to work.

Tumblr bills itself as a micro-blogging site, which would make it a direct competitor of Twitter. Unlike Twitter, Tumblr provides two interfaces for each user. The first is the page on which the user can post short statements. This page is called a tumblog. This interface can be customized with a variety of themes that determine how the page is to be organized. Twitter has no interface that is equivalent to this so this portion of Tumblr is really more of a direct competitor to WordPress or Blogspot, a more traditional blogging platform. The second interface is a dashboard, similar to Twitter's interface, providing a mechanism for the user to post items that will then appear in the newsfeed portion of the dashboard as well as on the user's tumblog. The user also has the option of following other Tumblr users so their posted content will also appear in the user's newsfeed, again in a manner very similar to Twitter.

One of the most obvious ways that Tumblr differs from Twitter (besides the use of a tumblog) is that in Tumblr, it is very easy to post content of all different types. In Twitter, for example, there is no easy way to post a photo while in Tumblr, it is quite easy to post a photo. This is a welcome development and the tumblog themes integrate the variety of content types quite nicely to create a nice-looking blog site. This means that people can follow you either through Tumblr, in which case your posts will show up in their newsfeeds on their dashboards, or by checking your tumblog, which is given a unique URL so it can be easily viewed outside of Tumblr. My tumblog, for example, has the address of http://cathieleblanc.tumblr.com.

The thing that excited me most about Tumblr when I first began my investigation is that a user can easily import RSS feeds into her tumblog. I immediately saw the potential for this feature for integrating my web contributions into one location. For example, I have a Flickr page for my photos and every Flickr page has an RSS feed. So I figured I could easily set up my Tumblr account to post any new photos from my Flickr RSS feed on my tumblog. In addition, Tumblr has built-in support for Twitter so that any tweets a user posts can automatically be also posted on her tumblog. I immediately set my Tumblr account up to post from this blog, from my Flickr account, and from my Twitter account. I then posted a blog entry here, posted some pictures on Flickr and wrote some tweets. And then I waited for those posts to appear on my tumblog so I could how everything looked. And I waited. And waited. And waited.

This is where my issues with Tumblr arise. It doesn't work as advertised. I read the (pretty pathetic) help files on the site to discover that Tumblr tries to check the feeds from which it is supposed to update every hour or so. But, they go on to say, they recognize each feed's "need to live." And by the way, now that I go back to their help files to get an exact quote, I see that they've removed all references to their RSS feeds and how they are updated. I engaged in an extended email conversation with the tech support folks at Tumblr and found them to be pleasant but pretty useless in terms of giving me help. They had a lot of (illogical) suggestions for things for me to try to get the updating to happen in a timely manner. Eventually, when I pointed out that they were being very illogical, they admitted that there is a problem with the automatic updating of RSS feeds. In other words, it doesn't work.

A second problem with Tumblr is that they say you can set things up so that your posts automatically appear on Twitter and Facebook. This also doesn't work. So right now, Tumblr is having significant communication problems both coming into and going out of the application. As I did more research into this, it appears to have been a problem for at least a year. And still no resolution.

In my email conversation with tech support, I found out that Tumblr is designed so that if a user does not update within the application at least once a week, the automatic updating of RSS feeds will stop (if they ever get that working). In answer to my question about the rationale for that design decision, Danii (from tech support) told me that they want to make sure that people don't just use Tumblr to recycle material that has been posted elsewhere. The problem with this answer is that their solution doesn't ensure that original material will be posted on Tumblr. As long as I don't use the RSS feeds to post the material to Tumblr, it will be seen as original material even if it is really a reposting of material from elsewhere. My guess is that the Tumblr folks want to make sure people sign into the application for some other reason, likely related to whatever plan they have for eventually making money.

My experience with Tumblr so far has been less than satisfactory but it has helped me to articulate for myself what my ideal application would look like. I'll write about that in part 2 of my review of Tumblr.

{April 25, 2011} New Tumblr Site

Because I spend my time thinking and writing about today's online media, I have a fairly significant web presence. I write this blog. I have a web site and a PSU web page. I use Twitter and Flickr. I'm on Facebook, Linked In, and My Space. I use a variety of Web 2.0 tools, some of them often, some not so often. I have been experimenting with a variety of tools, looking for something that will consolidate the content I create in one place. Ideally, this tool will allow me to easily customize the look of the page that my followers will see. I've tried a number of tools and have not found any that I really like (for reasons that I will explain in a future post) but, based on a tip from Ann, I recently came across Tumblr, which has some of the features that I want but contains some annoyances and is based on a mental model that means it really won't do exactly what I want it to do.

What is Tumblr? It is a micro-blogging platform, similar to Twitter, Plurk and so on. These sites allow users to create short content and share it with their followers. Since I'm already a Twitter user, the micro-blogging aspect of the platform was not what I was excited about. Instead, I was excited about the fact that Tumblr makes it really easy to share content of all types, not just text. In addition, Tumblr has a feature which allows the sharing of RSS feeds, that is, content from other sites. So I thought that perhaps Tumblr might be the simple solution to the problem that I've been trying to solve for a while now--how to aggregate all of the web content that I create into one site. Here's my tumblelog (yes, that's what Tumblr sites are called and yes, it's dorky).

There are a couple of annoyances that come with using Tumblr. It is indeed easy to set your site up so that it reposts feeds from other sites. So, for starters, I set mine up to automatically repost anything I put on this blog, my Twitter feed or my Flickr photostream. The first annoyance is that there is no way to force Tumblr to go out to your feeds to determine whether there is anything on them that should be posted to your tumblelog. The documentation says that when Tumblr searches your feeds, it will automatically repost anything that is less than two days old. So I have a fair amount of content on these sites that should be showing up already on my tumblelog. But only the content from this blog is currently showing there (I hope that changes by the time you're reading this post). When I first set up the feeds, Tumblr told me they would be updated in an hour. But that hour counted down on the site and no update occurred. Further research suggests that perhaps these feeds will be updated soon--one source said it sometimes takes 12 hours--but I'll just have to wait and see. That leads me to the second annoyance of using Tumblr: there is no way to test how your feeds will look on your tumblelog. I can test out how each media type will look but I can't test an actual feed because there is no way to force an update from that feed. This seems as though it would be a simple coding change from the folks at Tumblr so I'm putting in my request right now.

Beyond these annoyances, Tumblr still doesn't solve the problem that I want solved because there is a fundamental mental model behind the way Tumblr works that is an obstacle to solving my problem. I've encountered this mental model and its limitations in the past--actually, I encounter it just about every time I try out a new Web 2.0 tool. I'll write more about that in my next post.

In the meantime, enjoy my new tumblelog.

{April 24, 2011} Games and Lessons for Life

I am a sucker for stories about the relationship between games and life. When I was a graduate student, a story in the Tallahassee Democrat about the life of Warrick Dunn, a star football player whose police officer mother was killed in the line of duty while he was in high school, brought me to tears. I love movies like Sea Biscuit and Brian's Song. I have myself written blog entries ruminating about what we can learn about life from playing games.

So you would think a story that I heard on NPR this morning would be right up my alley. Weekend Edition Sunday host Liane Hansen interviewed Dan Barry, author of a new book called Bottom of the 33rd about the longest baseball game ever played in the history of US men's professional baseball. This particular game was played in 1981, between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings, farm teams of the Boston Red Sox and the Baltimore Orioles, respectively. The teams played 32 innings in 8.5 hours before the owner of the league called the umpires to tell them to halt the game. That was at 4 in the morning on Easter Sunday and there were 19 people left in the chilly stands in Pawtucket, RI. When the teams reunited 2 months later to finish the game, nearly 6000 fans showed up and over 140 reporters from all over the world came to cover it. Pawtucket won the game in the bottom of the 33rd inning, a mere 18 minutes after the game resumed.

The subtitle of Dan Barry's book is Hope, Redemption and Baseball's Longest Game. I expected the interview on NPR to touch on hope and redemption and perhaps something about how this longest game can teach us something about perseverance. Instead, the interview focused on the facts of the game, including the fact that Cal Ripken, Jr., who went on to set the record for consecutive starts in the Major League, played all 33 innings and that Wade Boggs, future Hall of Famer, tied it up for Pawtucket in the twenty-first inning. Barry also told us that the original 19 fans who stuck it out for those 32 innings in April were annoyed that nearly 6000 people could now say they saw history being made when they really only had seen the last inning of that historic game.

But nothing in the interview touched on hope or redemption. Or perseverance. Or anything of importance. Which annoyed me. Not every sports story is a story about life, about issues larger than the game itself. A book about a particular game that is the longest in professional history is probably of interest to baseball fanatics. The fact that NPR picks the author of that book as someone deserving of an interview implies there is more to the story, something that we can all learn from. As far as I can tell, that is not the case with this particular game or this particular book, the hyperbole of its subtitle notwithstanding. Adding the words "hope" and "redemption" to the subtitle of a book will not make that book interesting for a general audience. I realize I'm judging the book by its interview. Maybe that's not fair. But neither is it fair to promise us a discussion of what a game can tell us about hope and redemption and instead waste our time with the facts and statistics of a particular game. Come on, NPR. With all the real, inspiring sports stories out there, we deserve better. Did you choose to tell us about this book simply because the game went into the wee hours of Easter morning, 1981, which happens to be 30 years ago today? That coincidence also doesn't make this story interesting for the general reader.

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