I’m Matt Hampel, a student in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
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.
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)
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
The UROP program at the UM helps place students with professors in great research settings. I’ve gained a lot from my project.
Unfortunately, they also feel compelled to run a mandatory side program for all participants. It’s an insulting waste of time. Here’s an email I got yesterday:
Hey Scholars-
On Wednesday, we will be having the annual UROP Career Fair. The social sciences portion of the career fair will be held in the Dennison Building. There will be two session: 6-6:45 and 6:45-7:30. You are required to attend AND SIGN-INTO both. I have attached an Excel file with each of your names and the two rooms you are required to report to. Please let me know if you have any questions.
IMPORTANT: please write down the two room numbers of where you’re required to go b/c there will be a lot of people there. If you don’t sign-into both, you will not receive credit for attending. Sorry.
-Doug
Hampel, Matthew: 413 Denn 232 Denn
What will happen in those two rooms is a mystery. Good bye, 90 more minutes of my time.
Breaking news: CTools does not have an HIG document.
(raise your hand if you actually were surprised)
The new Palmer Commons / Life Science grounds on central campus are cold, uninterrupted, a flat passageway and a windtunnel, and that’s a shame:
Every few yards is another blue emergency light — it’s not safe to be here.
The green areas are raised, off limits, not for you. The ground has no texture. There are benches, hard, fixed, pushed to the side. Nothing is outside. There’s no reason to stop, to meet someone, to talk with colleagues or other students.
There’s a little stage area:
But no power plugs, or lights, or seating.
Compare to a similar intersection of major buildings on Central Campus:
Crowds of people walk here at all hours of the day. When it’s warm, a cafe sets up chairs outside, a hotdog vendor is open for business, political activists and panhandlers accost you. Benches and bike parking are everywhere. Artifacts: historical placks, posting boards teach you the past and the future. Ahead is the arch of West Quad, a transition to the Diag. It’s warm, even thought the temperature isn’t.
Why do we think that big, glass-fronted buildings with lots of flat space
will be pleasing?
They won’t, and they never will be.
The building is built, but there’s nothing stopping us from breaking up the flat:
Make the ground textured. Give it an end, and a narrower path:
Put in big objects, and small objects, and water, and wood:
Change the texture, change the color:
Who is planning North Quad?
Books new on the shelf in the last month-ish, categorized by approximate primary use:
Philosophy of Sociology, SOC 508
Actually a pretty awesome course on the nature of research methods and the formation of discipline. Professor curates changingsociety.org, does interesting video interviews with top sociologists.
UROP research
General Awesomeness
Christmas Sociology
And, finally:
How to Marry the Man of Your Choice (imagine the o in choice is a gold band) / Margaret Kent. Required reading for anyone entering a serious relationship. Sample chapter available.
College students are connected, diverse, and social. We have friends across the world, and they enjoy visiting us. In the dorms, though, their options are limited: all access is controlled by swipe cards and key codes. Rooms, especially single-occupancy rooms, are small. Cafeteria meals are expensive.
So, create a communal space where several travelers and their hosts can stay for a sensible amount of time. Offer beds, tables, chairs, and warmth. Encourage the socialization, not isolation.
Lend the guests restricted access cards, so they can use the bathrooms or enter the building. Provide reduced-cost meals for visiting and prospective students — more than the deficient three per semester currently offered in the standard meal plan. Create a set of reasonable guest rules, and enforce them well.
See also: Why upperclassmen do not return to the dorms (21 Dec. 2007)
Warning: very meta. And quite nearly out of date — there are two weeks left in this semester.
On the syllabus for this semester, number three at the University of Michigan’s Residential College, I have 6 classes: an introduction to Near Eastern religions, a survey of the concept of race from a biological view, a course on political economy, a small conversational German course, an undergraduate research project, and a program on symbolic and literary logic.
An economist on a train from CHI to ARB some time ago told me that the most valuable class he took at the RC was Carl Cohen’s Logic in Language. I’m liking it quite a lot. We alternate philosophy (Plato, Descartes, Hume, and Mill) with symbolic logic. Logic in Language was once a part of the RC’s core curriculum before the students voted out the Core system. Now, only the course guide designator, RCCORE 100, survives.
In the earlier days of the RC, around the late 70s and early 80s, the college had funding to do a number of focused research projects in the social sciences. A small group of students would elect to take a 12-credit course with one professor. These reports, ranging from “Women, hard drugs and natural highs” to “Conflict and Power on the Campus: Studies in the Political Economy of the University of Michigan” still exist, filed in the Bentley Historical Library’s Residential College collection. One, “A History of Jackson Prison,” became a part of Charlie Bright’s The Powers that Punish. A professor’s normal teaching load is perhaps 6 contact hours per semester, making these projects were prohibitively expensive, so once the federal funding dried up, the courses stopped.
Today we have the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, UROP. The project I joined involves integrating a county-level wiki with a service-level database; the details are as yet unclear.
This summer, I was able to spend two months taking intensive German courses at the Goethe-Institut in München (photos: on flickr). My written grammar still needs work, but I feel very confident about my speaking abilities. To stay somewhat in practice, I am enrolled in a conversation course in the German Department. Unfortunately, an hour a week is too little to realistically stay current.
I’m also in Political Economy, RCSSCI 220, with Frank Thompson. We cover micro and macroeconomics in a quick but thorough fashion, including some externalities (fairness, justice) that Econ 101 doesn’t notice. Mathematics is not a feature — that part “can be covered well with a fair amount of hand waving,” and it is.
Two other classes are also on my schedule: Race and its relationship to human evolution is a useful system to understand, and AnthroBio 360 does a good job of covering the basics. This is one of those large non-RC powerpoint-based classes; I have the urge to send the professor my copy of “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint“.
Near Eastern Religions, with E. Ginsburg, S. Jackson, and R. Williams, is an excellent introduction to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.
Just past us is the 40th anniversary of the Residential College at the University of Michigan. Many excellent photos have been collected in the Flickr pool. In the near future are plans for a centralized alumni network and an increased level of interaction; I hope the the momentum from the event continues.
I continue to gravitate towards collaborative and organizational technologies, partly because that’s what I’ve always done, and partly because they still are incredibly interesting to me.
Development of ArborWiki, the civic wiki for Ann Arbor continues apace, which means generally ad hoc. The Ann Arbor District Library graciously hosts our project on a new development server. It’s my hope that we reach a greater level of integration, with librarians (my old colleagues) and local historians officially joining as contributors.
Also on the wishlist is a real mapping system, one that allows for points, paths, and polygons to be attached to maps geocoded pages. This interface will take some work — the technology is out there, but no-one seems to have spent the time making it usable.
Even more limited peripheral participation for this semester involves a great interest in: the RC’s book forum and its plans to make the Benzinger Library a true student institution; a program run by a Neutral Zone alumna in Ypsilanti, and other projects around campus.