Matt Hampel | matth.org

Michigan Marketing and Design responded fast to Jacob Nielsen’s post on all-caps, right-justified navigation (the RC hasn’t, yet…)

I’m surprised he didn’t mention the 50 pixels of wasted space on either side of the navigation (highlighted green in the image below). Whitespace is necessary, I understand, but in this case it could be well used to increase the font size (and therefore readability) significantly.

A post on the University of Michigan’s Community Information Corps (CIC) website announces the launch of Open.Michigan.

The CIC is a place for School of Information folks that “provides students with readings, lectures, practical engagement service opportunities, research projects and social and professional networking connections to launch them into careers as public interest information professionals”

Here is the Open.Michigan homepage. From this screenshot, what is the purpose of the site?

Heaven knows.

Design lesson: explain the purpose of the site on the homepage. “Connecting the global learning community” is not a sufficient explanation.

Ostensibly, it:

represents the diverse collection of Open initiatives on campus – from open access publishing and open archives to open source software and open standards. The site provides greater visibility to the various projects and attempts to expand the dialogue between campus participants and external collaborators.

That is not really a global learning community. It’s an internal site for the people who are already in the system. Cf. the text of the about page, which (unlike the homepage) actually says what the project is about:

Open.Michigan provides a clear view of the many places and ways U-M contributes to our world’s knowledge

…

the U-M Health Sciences Global Access project and the dScribe project; in open source software, the Sakai and SiteMaker projects; in open archives and publishing, Deep Blue, digitalculturebooks, MBooks, and OAIster projects; and in open standards, the IMS Global Learning Consortium work and conferences.

Do you know what any of that stuff is? Browse further, and woah, you’ll actually learn! I’m not quite sure that the site is so much a “part of an emerging paradigm for participatory education on a global scale” as it is a static collection of project abstracts, but it’s a start. A first prod at some sort of aggregation at Michigan, and a laudable one.

Some of the descriptions need a buzzword pruning, though:

This new program will combine continuous, formative and summative assessment of higher order educational outcomes with flexible learning paths for achievement in nine defined competency domains.

One thing interesting from the introductory post on the CIC is a link to a Wiki on some bizzaro Med School server that has lots of training documents. Of note: we learn that rich presentations are converted into (get this) JPEGs for dissemination through Open Courseware. Beautiful, and very Michigan.

City Farm sells produce to high-end restaurants, runs a CSA program, has a market stand (7 June to 11 October),  trains homeless folks in agriculture, will help you convert one of Chicago’s 11,000 abandoned lots into a garden, sells (among other things) Power Ranger cards, printer paper by the inch (thick), bubble wrap: http://cityfarmchicago.org/

The Experimental Station in Woodlawn runs a bike co-op, community garden, community buying club, lots more: http://www.experimentalstation.org

(do you know of a buying club in the Burns Park area?)

Cityfest / Tastefest posts their lineup as a Word doc, some upsta frees the info.

I’m really surprised we don’t yet have a good, cheap corner bakery in downtown Ann Arbor. Sure, there’s Zingerman’s but that doesn’t really count. I’m looking for something like the bakeries in Chicago’s Chinatown, or Detroit’s Mexicantown, where I paid $7.50 for this delicious box of treats:

(how much do you think that would have cost at Café Japon?)

In France, there’s a smart little bakery on every corner. Same in Germany, but they’re generally national chains with Stehplätze (standing tables) only. You can still get your sweet roll for 40 euro cents, though.

(photo above from David Ortman, by-nc)

Molly D. is writing in from China this summer. She’s staying longer than planned, and I’m looking forward to reading her updates — particularly, a yet-unpublished comment on the western media’s treatment of Tibet and civil unrest. Also, she has my luggage.

I was sent a link to an older UM School of Information project today, and I just had to share it with you. It’s called Community Lab, and here is its abstract:

Despite extensive experience, eliciting contributions in an on-line community is still largely a matter of trial and error. This project will develop theory to predict contribution behavior in on-line communities and will help transfer that theory into practice by using it to develop a set of on-line community design guidelines. The project brings together three teams of researchers (from the University of Michigan, Carnegie-Mellon and the University of Minnesota) with diverse areas of expertise (including economics, social psychology, and on-line recommender systems).

The research team will start with existing theories of voluntary contribution to collective efforts, conduct a set of experiments to test the validity of these theories in the domain of on-line communities, and develop a new, synthesized theory. The experiments will be conducted in the MovieLens community with thousands of active users and an average of 30 new users joining each day. The key scientific significance of this work lies in using Social Science theory to guide design. An interesting broader impact of that approach is the development of a cadre of graduate students with interdisciplinary research experience who will be ready to guide the next generation of on-line community research.

I think this is the sort of project that’s emblematic of the way the School of Information often chooses to approach problems.

The first sentence (“eliciting contributions in an on-line community is still largely a matter of trial and error”) is pretty true in my experience. Of course, we don’t yet know what kind of contributions the study is talking about — monetary, content, time, civic engagement…

But things get bad pretty quickly. The project intends to:

… develop theory to predict contribution behavior in on-line communities and will help transfer that theory into practice by using it to develop a set of on-line community design guidelines.

Which is both a noble and a futile goal. The field of sociology is pretty much past the phase of making general covering laws to apply to underspecified objects. It’s just ridiculous to assume that actors among groups (a) act the same, even if the statistics suggest that they are similar, (b) have similar motivations, and (c) that forms of interaction will be generally appropriate for different groups.

I highly doubt there are significant high-level parallels between the action of the Arabic bloggers Juan Cole reads, the commenters on ArborUpdate, and product reviewers on amazon.com. It might be useful to identify a shared repertoire of actions (I’ll be working on that issue in a more focused form this summer). But we certainly won’t get that from this study, because they are “testing” their (ostensibly generally applicable) theory on one community devoted to…. movie recommendations.

I don’t doubt, though, that they’ll have a good idea of how that one movie recommendation site works when they’re done.

On literature review and theory background, the abstract says:

The research team will start with existing theories of voluntary contribution to collective efforts…

Which is fairly well borne out. Out of 120 or so citations, a couple are for genuine social action research. And throw in a bit of the Tragedy of the Commons and Bowling Alone for good measure. Also cited is … a study of the efficiency of on-campus housing. I’m printing that one now, will report back on how it’s relevant. (perhaps because one of the authors was on the project?)

It seems that the real intent of the project is in the last line:

…the development of a cadre of graduate students with interdisciplinary research experience…

(The 1.2 million continuing NSF grant through UMN that is funding this project is apparently tied to several other initiatives. I’m curious what came out of it)

from the aanews:

Under the living-wage law, groups that have contracts with the city of $10,000 or more must pay above-minimum wages. That wage level is now around $12 an hour for employees who don’t receive health benefits

…

But upping the grant would increase the festival’s cost by some $19,000. And City Council Member Chris Easthope, who’s promoted the change, argues that the festival’s seasonal employees – almost all students – are not the kind of workers the wage law was meant to protect.

Thanks, Chris, for your beneficent leadership.

The University of Michigan Administrative Information Services (MAIS) seeks a creative IT professional with strong business systems analyst experience in security administration and access management.  The selected candidate will join a team of customer service-focused BSAs to support multiple software products and functional areas.  They will be involved in a variety of projects with exposure to new technologies and process improvement.

Translation:

AARGH MAIS CRUSH DESTROY SOUL CRUSH