Embracing the science…

For this week’s assignment I found myself very much being the scientist that Gaddis seemed so convinced history scholars could be.  I spent a better part of the week trying to decide how I would transcribe the notes I took on the atlas’ I looked at into something coherent.  I though about taking all of my notes and putting them in the standard “college paper assignment” format but didn’t really feel like that would make it easy for me to compare and contrast the differences between the maps analyzed.  For initial analysis, I created a document with a section for each one of the areas Dr. P asked us to look at, kind of like an observation sheet a scientist would use to record certain results from different things examine.  This document allowed me to go back and forth between the maps I was looking at and compare and contrast.  I thought, in light of the reading from last week, I might just keep my final analysis in the format in which I had been doing my initial observations in, albeit, a cleaned up format.  It occurred to me that this assignment crossed back and forth between the lines of scientific analysis and historic analysis, so why not create a finished product that does relatively the same thing.

Gaddis-The voice of reason for Hist 615

Those of us that graduate Clio II together last semester and bellied up for another round this fall realize what we’re in for. The impression I get is that most of the “repeat offenders” have simply taken and deep breath, sighed the sigh of complete surrender (which only a student fresh out of Clio II can do) and offered our souls to the MAC gods for yet another 5 months of sleepless nights, dejected looks by significant others, and blissful conversations/shouting matches with inanimate objects that can’t possibly understand what it is WE want THEM to do for us.

It’s not that we fear learning the new programs of this semester, or that we think said learning will be terribly difficult (really, can it get much worse then learning Dreamweaver in a matter of weeks?) Our “deer in the headlights” looks has been replaced with an air of cockiness that only comes from a web design student who has four or five hacks up their sleeve and now clearly thinks him/herself a master of the universe. All this is not to say we approach 615 afraid of nothing. What I, and I assume many of my fellow “repeaters,” fear is selling our souls to yet another project that will never meet our expectations. While our final project may wow the class, the Clio II graduates know true personal zen will not be accomplished. In the end, we will end up ripping ourselves away from what has become an obsessed goal of trying to address every little detail for fear of imminent lose of sanity. My fall semester resolution…listen to John Gaddis.

“We avoid the literal in making maps, because to do otherwise would not be to represent at all but rather to replicate. We’d find ourselves drowning in detail: the distillation that’s required for the comprehension and transmission of vicarious experience would be lost.” (p. 32) Avoid replication…fresh out of Clio II…doubtful. Clio II students LOVE detail…we spend hours making sure things line up perfectly in different browsers and rollovers are timed right, and font and color are pleasing to the eye (an, of course, are screen readable.) The nature of many aspects of my Clio II projects were replication. Replicating design element, replicating code for rounded edges and drop down nav bars, etc, etc. I plan to keep this in mind as I start to drown in the detail of my projects this semester. Gaddis also writes “despite their obvious utility, there’s no such thing as a single correct map.” (p.33) Important to keep in mind come November when I become convinced that there is only one way to do an architectural reconstruction. I pledge to also come to terms with the concept of simulating a historical narrative based on limited generalizations (which I think will prove to be easier said then done with the sort of projects we’ll be working on.) Finally, I’m going to learn to say “when,” to appreciate the concept that at some point, according to Gaddis, you have to stop tracking a historical event or risk introducing “diminishing relevance” into a project. (I suppose this is a good principal to keep in mind as you design a website. You can have a site riddled with cool little design tricks, but do they actually take away from the true message of the site if only employee because it took you a week to learn how to do them.)

I think Gaddis had us over-achievers from Clio II in mind when he wrote Landscape of History, and I don’t want to disappoint him. So, as I feel this post has reached a point of diminishing relevance, I’m going to go to the pool…

rollovers and java

I know I’m not supposed to use java in my site…but why, oh  why does Dreamweaver make it so easy to create rollover images in the toolbar?  I struggled with whether of not to fix my rollovers in my assignment tonight, but decided I’d get the opinion of the class before I did so (which, I’m sure I’ll regret.)

It’ s not a lot of java, but its probably enough to irk the powers that be…

Leaving learning to kids…

I’m the child of two life long public school teachers, and over Easter someone made the mistake of mentioning how great Montessori school and public charter schools were at the dining room table, which set off a conversation that ended in a lot of red faces, shaking fists and empty bottles of wine.  I forget exactly what was said (all I know is I didn’t start the fire) but it was something along the line so of “isn’t it great how some of those charter schools let children decide how they are going to learn a lesson, and what they are going to learn about.”  My parents are not against Montessori schools or charters schools, but they have definite opinions about the manner in which children are taught and what they are taught.  I don’t think I’ll be sending them James Gee’s article, Learning by Design, to read…I’ll never hear the end of it.  (You can find the link to the file at: http://www.archiva.net/hist697ay07/hist697ay07_schedule.html)

I agree that “different styles of learning work for different people.” I don’t agree that “classrooms adopting the principle would allow students to discover their favored learning styles and to try new ones without fear.” And I definitely don’t buy into his argument that, “in the act of customizing their ow learning, students wold learn a good deal not only about how and why they learn, but about learning and thinking themselves.”  What a load!  I understand that Gee is promoting the “free choice learning” (fancy museum education term) concepts used in video games in the classroom, but teachers  would be eaten alive if  every school day consisted of a series of “choose your own adventures” to teach a lesson.  Kids have to have structure, and a majority of the instruction they receive has to be structured-they have to be told how, what and when they are going to learn something.  There are, of course, students are physically/mentally unable to respond to structured learning…but I’m not really addressing them here.  I  don’t think your average child can be relied on to create their own learning experience as Gee suggests.

You can learn from video games (although I still haven’t learned a thing from Myst) and the concepts of identity, learning by design, customization, etc, etc, are interesting concepts to introduce and use to a minimal degree in the classroom.  Video games are not a solution to lessons students find boring though.  I hated historiography, and I’m not sure I’d like it any better if I was learning I through a game (what would that be like…The Sims: Appleby, Kuhn, Siad, and Ulrich-Thatcher?-scary.) I had to learn it though, and whereas I though it was boring as hell, I respect the way a difficult subject was taught to me by a trained professional.

My mind is mush…

I’ve been looking at a computer for just a little too long this week…it’s turned my mind to mush, which has, in effect, blurred my vision. My design assignment for Clio II is up and running and is completely to blame for my sorry state.

As I was checking my site on various browsers, I’ve found that it won’t come up right on anything less then IE 6 (I know this because the U.S. Navy still insists we use IE 5.) At what point do you give up and decided to stop making deesign tweeks for people (like my grandparents) that refuse to update their browsers because the whole process scares them? I’ve kind of reached the decision to stop trying to tweek a perfectly good project that looks good on a perfectly good compliant browser for folks that refuse to leave 1995. Unfair, tough love policy? Maybe…

Other random observation for the week:

Web design is soooooo much easier when you don’t overly complicate the process trying to do a lot of fancy s#$% you don’t really know how to do.

My name is Karin, and I’m a “lurker…”

I fully admit…I’m part of the 90% of people that look around the internet, read, but don’t really participate.  At least until this week.  We has to look as some awesome websites for homework.  Love the Lost Museum…it had just what I was looking for-a map!  It kind of reminded me of Who Killed William Robinson, but it was way more fun to play with.  This is my kind of computer game.  Clear purpose-find out who burned down the museum, do so by finding clues in the room (which you can easily navigate because you have a map!)  I  loved the British Museum site too…would have been better though if there was a mystery to solve.  A combination of the Lost Museum and the British Museum site would have been interesting too.  I loved the magnify tool on the British Museum site…wicked.  My major problem with the Lost Museum was that even when you zoomed in, it was still difficult for me to get a good look at the object details and read the text more then a few inches away from the screen (not good for the visually impared-although there was an audio component of the site.)  Both sites were awesome example of what could be done with a museum and archival material  online though.

The Historic Tale Construction Kit was fantasitc, but  I really wanted to find the museum, historical society or university it was linked too and couldn’t.  For some reason that made it seem less scholarly-kind  of missed the archival material.  Still, could have spent hours making vitural comic strips about the Battle of Hastings.

Where’s the map? Where’s the question coin boxes?

I’ve come to the ad realization this week that I’m old and just not as down with computers as I thought I was.  I’m definitely not a gamer either, at least not in the modern sense of the word.  I’m still very much a gamer in the classic sense…I love my old school Nintendo and possess masterful skills when it comes to Super Mario Brothers.  I know all the little secrets, can spit fireballs with the best of them, etc, etc.  Plus, I get Super Mario Brothers.  My job is to save the princess while collected as many coins (points) as possible along the way.  Clear cut…I love it.

I tried my hand at Myst IV: Revelation this week, an it was an awful experience.  I don’t get it, and frankly, it made me a little motion sick.  I listened to the background story of the game and established that I’m supposed to help make a decision about whether some corrupt brothers, who destroyed a bunch of mythical worlds, should be let out of mythical prison.  Armed with a camera and journal, I’ve been tasked to take pictures and records notes, and maybe solve some puzzles along the way.  Right.  So, I can play along, do the whole imagination thing, but  for the most part I thought the game was so complex that it just frustrated the hell out of me.  There was o map to help me around the mythical world, which really pissed me off and my tour guide, Aragus gave me a bunch of orders (including babysitting his kid) and took off, leaving me to find the shut off valves for water pumps, work some crystal monitor thing, and then transport myself to him, all of which he assumed I could do lickety-split as I had been to the mythical world so many times.  Again…no map on where any of this stuff actually is (although I did learn the code is in the journal on the desk…damned if I know how to open the journal though.)

I don’t  like taking orders, especially not from the bossy mythical man.  Mario never ordered me about.  The program ran so/so on my  computer, mostly, as my interns (who got bored of watching me struggle from room to room and took over playing the game) tell me is because I refuse to buy a $500.00 graphics card to make the program run.  The program, btw, is 8GB.  I don’t have that much free space left on my computer!  So to get it to run properly, I was forced to completely reorganize the contents of my hardrive.

It was fun walking into all the different rooms and taking pictures, although I’m not sure why  I was doing it in Myst.  I could see a web designer creating a virtual museum as intricate as Myst that allows visitors to walk from one room to another, take pictures of art or objects, record notes, share those notes, etc.  I would be a very cool project.  It should also be one that everyone understands, not just people who spend hours playing “Call of Duty: Iwo Jima” or have taken the time to visit the first three Myst worlds.  I don’t expect visitors to my museum to just find their way around.  They get a map, and to a point, we guide the experience of the folks that aren’t comfortable doing it themselves.  I would expect that a virtual museum would do the same thing.  If I was designing something like this and expected visitors to come to a conclusion about their experience, I’d make it easier for them to gather tools and information.

All and all, I  think I became frustrated with the program from the get-go as it was difficult to use and get accostomed to, and there was very little learning curve.  Things slowly went downhill from there and in the end  wasn’t really sure if I cared about the corrupt brothers staying imprisoned or not.

Exploring how the disabled use computer

I have to admit my exploration of this subject lead to a great deal of frustration this week.  The first time I logged onto the screen reader simulation, I was so confused by the flurry of information that poured from my computer speakers that I had to shut it down, take a deep breath and start all over again.  Bless the folks that have to use JAWS (like Jackie from the Dive Into Accessibility article) …I have no idea how they can listen to someone talking that fast and navigate their way through websites, especially for research and scholarly purposes.  I tried to get the screen reader simulation to work on two different platforms.  Neither MAC nor Windows versions worked perfectly, so I guess I can relate just a tiny bit with the frustration disabled computer users face on a day to dy  basis.

One of the useful things I picked up from the Dive Into Accessiblity article was that websites do exsit to check the site you’ve created for accessibilty to disabled users.  I ran my site through VisCheck to see how it would look to a color-blind person and wow!  Recording Historical Travels looks a little different if you have a form of red/green color deficit.

I wondered, as I read through the material for this week, exactly how much control a web designer has in making a page accessible to the disabled before it comes down to the brower and the platform the user is using?  If the designer has done all of the checks to insure their site meets most, if not all, of the WC3 requirements, is there still a possibility that browser or computer will make it hard for the disabled to use a site, and what if anything, can be done about that?

After a two weeks of constant clicking in Photoshop, either using the magic wand, magnetic lasso, paintbrush, healing brush or dodge tool, I’ve developed the perfect trigger finger.  My eyes hurt, my head hurts, but I’m images are up and running at www.his2re.net on my image assignment page (I’m currently writing from the business center at my apartment complex and the pop up for creating links in WordPress is blocked by “Net Nanny”-I’ll link to the page later at school.)  If you’d like to see what I’ve been working on. please take a look.  I’m still having issues with variable with-for example, the two screens I tested the site on today showed it coming up fine; the screen I’m looking at now is smaller and some of my images are getting lost.  I’m going to try and figure this issue out this week…stay tuned.

If I were going to have a dinner party with my favorite photoshop tools…

I’d invite…magic wand, magnetic lasso, magic rubber stamper, “the burn,” the “lollipop,” paintbucket and the sponge. It’s funny how you become stuck on your favorite Photoshop tools…a bit like wearing the same comfy jeans out at night even though your sister tells you they are completely out of style.  You love your comfy jeans…they’re like an old friend…you’d never feel as safe in new jeans.  Same thing with my Photoshop favorites, as you see I’ve given some of them their own little nicknames.  I’ve been playing with this program, in one version or another, since 2000.  I started with Photoshop 4 in my undergraduate multimedia courses (the highest level at the time…a mere seven years ago).  Currently I shuffle between versions 6, 7, and CS2 (evidently the Navy doesn’t feel that Photoshop 7 has been tested well enough to download it onto my computer…I have to wonder what 18 year old that let make that decision.)  Something fun has been added with each new version, yet I usually do most of my Photoshop work with my seven favorite tools.   Much to the dismay of Photoshop professionals and Adobe as a whole, I give my interns a lesson in Photoshop when they first come on-board.  Needless to say, there are countless individuals throughout this country right now that say “oh, it was easy…I just used the lollipop tool to make that section lighter,” or in more eye-raising explanations of digital manipulating, “first I burned, then I sponged.” (Hopefully that hasn’t gotten anyone fired…or slapped.)  I forced myself to experiment with all CS2’s tools this week, and realized I quite like the “bandaid,” the patch and the “background cutter” tools.  Change is good, and makes certain tasks sooooo much easier.  I still look at quick mask at a Photoshop “villain”-despite new versions of the program we continue to have a hate/hate relationship.

Whereas all the reading for this week contained some great tips and shortcuts that I’d never played with before, I loved the link for Red Labor off of Cameron Moll’s Authentic Boredom website.  Particularly useful was the download for the PSD file they used for the header graphic.  I’ve always found it useful to looks at how designers layer the elements to their projects.  A design you assume is very complicated may prove to be very simple when you see how the overall project has been built.  One of the things I’m dying to do is download some of the exchanges available from Adobe.  I had a tough time getting the downloads to start this evening…maybe I’ll have better luck tomorrow.