As a student (neither undergrad nor graduate), I don’t think I’ve ever been under an attendance-taking process but I’m still intrigued at that question: Would required attendance actually improve learning?

And the follow-up question: What other processes would help to enhance it in either case?

Weigh in please!

Original article by Lee Bains on Switched:

High schoolers have long grown broad-smiled and wide-eyed when regaled with their older friends’ college stories — parties, sleeping late, football games, and, amazingly to think, no attendance requirements. While those youngsters need not fear that all-night ragers and tailgating will fade into obscurity anytime soon, it may be a different story with class attendance. At least one college, Northern Arizona University, has begun using electronic scanners to track students’ attendance at lectures.
“We do have to say to a lot of students that it really is important that you do show up to class,” NAU associate professor Brandon Cruickshank told NPR. “You are not going to do well if you’re not here.” Buttressed by the arguments of professors like Cruickshank, NAU has decided that, starting today (the first day of the academic year), students will be required to swipe their ID cards upon arrival at large lecture classes. Citing low graduation rates and large numbers of five-year students, the university may be secure in its decision, but many of its students are not.

“I don’t see why we need to be told what to do anymore,” junior Rachel Brackett told NPR. “I feel like it’s a move toward… treating us as though we were juveniles.” While we are pretty sure that, as college students, we would have reacted in a similar way, we are absolutely sure that, when we were college freshmen, we sometimes ignored the pleas of professors like Cruickshank, and inevitably paid the consequences. Take that for what it’s worth, kiddies. It will be on the exam.

“[HTML5] is in its infancy right now, but I think the browser will be the next widely recognized artistic medium. It allows such a larger dialog with the viewer. There’s actual two-way communication going on between the art and the observer.”

“In only a few short years, electronic computing systems have been invented and improved at a tremendous rate. But computers did not ‘just grow.’ They have evolved… They were born and they are being improved as a consequence of man’s ingenuity, his imagination… and his mathematics.” — 1958 IBM brochure

The Internet is a medium that is evolving at breakneck speed. It’s a wild organism of sweeping cultural change — one that leaves the carcasses of dead media forms in its sizeable wake. It’s transformative: it has transformed the vast globe into a ‘global village’ and it has drawn human communication away from print-based media and into a post-Gutenberg digital era. Right now, its perils are equal to its potential. The debate over ‘net neutrality’ is at a fever pitch. There is a tug-of-war going on between an ‘open web’ and a more governed form of the web (like the Apple-approved apps on the iPad/iPhone) that has more security but less freedom.

An illustration of a computer from a 1958 IBM promotional brochure titled ‘World of Numbers’

So what’s the next step in its evolution, and what’s the big picture? What does the Internet mean as an extension of human communication, of the human mind? And forget tomorrow — where will the web be in fifty years, or a hundred? Will the Internet help make the world look like something out of Blade Runner or Minority Report? Let’s just pray it doesn’t have anything to do with The Matrix sequels, because those movies really sucked.

Read more

You’ve hired the wrong guy. After reading David Airey’s forget about design and Andrew Maier’s User Experience Designer vs. Creative Director I’ve come to the conclusion that the role “web designer” is a cheap ass effort to fudge a graphic designer into a role requiring two entirely separate fields of knowledge.

Web teams still need graphic designers to communicate visually appealing messages. And graphic designers moving from a print team to a web team should stay graphic designers. What’s needed to compliment a web team’s graphic designer is someone to account for the complexities of human-computer interaction (HCI). Surely a manager in any field can’t expect staff to adopt a completely opposite, complex knowledge base overnight.

Welcome the missing link: User experience designer.

User experience design is a blend of usability, information architecture (IA), and user interface (UI) design.

A web-based user experience designer is charged with learning about users and creating interfaces that match website goals and user needs. They deliver interaction specs and simple mockups to the graphic designer as a framework for user-centered visual communication. Then, of course, the web developer makes the interaction work.

Don’t mix up the two roles, user experience designer and graphic designer. Neither should do the others’ job. They should never be blurred into “web designer.”

If you’re going to make the leap into a more complex communication channel, account for its complexities or it’ll bite you in the ass when your competitors “get it.”

I have always told my students that the best way to get backup help is to go to the bookstore, site down, and read 10 pages out of each book on the topic, and find the one that “speaks” to them. A teacher’s recommended text, the school’s required textbook, it’s rare that student find them legible or helpful (I think my logic teacher went out of her way to find the most confusing book on Earth). Find the book that they understand and start working. Work every day. Work at least 15 minutes or 30 minutes every single day, doing the exercises over and over, changing little things, until the whole concept is solved.

But not every great book can be found at the store. Of course there are the online standard – w3schools.com for example – and the plethora of smaller resources. But it is always a treat to find an online resource that has both extensive resources and is also an easy, if not opinionated, read.

Such is “Eloquent Javascript,” authored by Marijin Haverbeke. I remember coming across it a few years ago but a posting on DownloadSquad reminded me of it. It is available in its entire text online (in HTML) as well as via downloadable PDF. As with most good resources, I recommend grabbing the PDF (and if you’re ambitious, a local copy of the HTML) before the perishability of Web documents steals it away.

I am, along with the tenured and professional faculty of the Department, urging all students, and anyone who might agree and offer opinion, to write to the President, the university committees and the Board of Regents, urging them to reconsider keeping the department.

Update: selected letters written by students speaking out about the proposed cuts are here.

But I expect myself to be a leader of sorts, an instructor by example, and hence I am posting my letter here, openly, so that anyone who does not understand the dilemma might find it worthy of opinion.  For those who do not know what informatics is, you can read about it on the UNLV Informatics Web Site, but more importantly, here is a succinct explanation from Michael Dunn, the founding Dean of the School of Informatics at Indiana University, where Informatics as an academic college was incepted and created.  He says:

• Informatics studies the application of Information Technology to the arts, sciences and professions, and its uses in organizations and societies at large.
• Informatics is a response to the data/information/knowledge gaps caused by billions and billions of bits
• Informatics is the discipline of science which investigates the structure and properties (not specific content) of scientific information, as well as the regularities of scientific information activity, its theory, history, methodology and organization. The purpose of informatics consists in developing optimal methods and means of presentation (recording), collection, analytical-synthetic processing, storage, retrieval and dissemination of scientific information. Informatics deals with logical (semantic) information, but is not involved in qualitative estimation of this information. Such an estimate can be carried on by specialists alone, in the specific fields of science or practical activity.

Below is the letter that was posted on the UNLV website, posted here.

Sent via UNLV Official on March 22, 2010

Colleagues:

I have received a set of recommendations from Executive Vice President and Provost Bowers and Vice President for Research Smith to start the conversation on how we can reduce the academic budget by $4 million. This list (see below) was made after consultation with our deans and after reviewing various measures of productivity and cost. I thank them for their hard work on this thankless task. This was an extremely difficult set of recommendations to generate, and includes departmental elimination, sub-unit elimination and recommendations for differential tuition (which may ultimately reduce our cumulative need for cuts). The list includes more programs to be reviewed than we plan to cut at this time, thus allowing the Presidential Review Committee (PRC) the opportunity to offer their guidance on maintaining core institutional strengths.

This material has been transmitted to the PRC, chaired by Dr. Gregory Brown, formed jointly by the Faculty Senate and Administration. The PRC charge will be to review this list, along with cuts from the other VP areas, and to deliver a prioritized set of recommendations for program elimination and other savings or revenue enhancing measures by the third week of April. Their recommendations will be reviewed by the Deans and Cabinet, our student governance groups, and the Faculty Senate Priority and New Program Committee before we make final program elimination recommendations to the Board of Regents.

In addition to these “vertical” cuts, we have extended the hiring freeze on all current searches, with the exception of grant funded hires, self funded programs and areas that are absolutely essential for business continuity. Savings in these areas and our VSIP program may help mitigate the need for further cuts later this year. We are all deeply saddened by the need to resort to such drastic measures. If there are any other viable options for UNLV we will pursue them, but I expect little relief, and fear that without significant legislative intervention we will be forced to cut again next year. As we make these cuts, we will honor noticing periods and tenure, allow students to graduate from eliminated programs in a timely fashion, and hope to minimize the disruptive impacts these cuts have on faculty, staff and students.

I understand how much turmoil and distraction our budget situation has created on campus. For programs not on this list I ask you to focus on our mission by providing a strong education to our students and by pursuing scholarly growth so that we emerge from this as a stronger and more focused institution.

Sincerely,

Neal Smatresk
President

---

March 22, 2010

President Neal J. Smatresk Office of the President University of Nevada, Las Vegas Las Vegas, Nevada 89154

Dear President Smatresk:

It gives me no pleasure to either write or transmit this letter to you. Indeed, no one who loves and respects higher education could feel anything other than sadness in doing so. However, as you know more than anyone, over the past three years UNLV has had its state funding reduced by 30.9 per cent. No institution can continue to function normally when given such a dramatic reduction in resources. UNLV has made a large number of “horizontal” cuts university-wide but such cuts can no longer achieve the significant expenditure reductions required of us by the state. The University must now look to “vertical” cuts in departments and programs in order to achieve these results. As you have requested, I am transmitting to you recommendations for the Division of Academic Affairs in three areas: (1) unit and subunit eliminations, (2) additional administrative reductions, (3) departments and programs in which differential tuition has the potential to be successfully applied.

The Process
As you have mandated, each vice president, including the Executive Vice President and Provost, will be making recommendations for reductions and outright eliminations in their divisions. The target for Academic Affairs at this time is $4 million. In order to achieve shared governance between administration and faculty, the attached list represents a budget figure higher than the target. This allows the faculty committees to evaluate each proposal and to have a real voice in making these decisions, not simply a take it or leave it option.

Because any reductions in Academic Affairs will also affect research productivity, Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies Ron Smith was asked to sit in on my individual meetings with the deans. At these meetings deans were asked to provide possible eliminations and reductions in their colleges and schools. None of them were happy to do so, of course. It should not be assumed that any of these recommendations were initiated or supported by the relevant dean. The list that I am transmitting to you will not be met pleasurably by any of them. This list will be given by you to the joint presidential-Faculty Senate committee, the Presidential Review Committee, who will review these recommendations and forward those that they believe necessary to meet our state fund reductions. A similar process will be followed by the Faculty Senate Priority and New Program Committee. The recommendations will all go to you for decision, some of which may also require further NSHE Board of Regents approval. To the extent that there is any silver lining in this, it is that you have pledged to protect tenure and any tenured faculty displaced by these decisions will be reassigned.

These recommendations have been guided by factors including, but not limited to, cost, graduation rates, number of majors, student credit hours and FTE produced, scholarship/research/creative activities, external funding, and importance to the University’s mission.

Units To Consider for Elimination

• Educational Leadership
• Informatics
• Management Information Systems
• Marriage and Family Therapy
• Recreation and Sport Management (including Professional Golf Management)
• Sports Education Leadership
• Teaching and Learning Center
• Women’s Studies

Subunits To Consider for Elimination

• Clinical Laboratory Sciences
• Construction Engineering Management
• English Language Center
• Entertainment Engineering
• Gerontology and Senior Theatre
• Landscape Architecture
• Urban Affairs Advising Center
• Urban Horticulture Program

Further Administrative Reductions To Be Considered

• Executive Vice President and Provost: Do not fill Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education position
• Executive Vice President and Provost: Do not fill Vice Provost for Academic Affairs position
• Executive Vice President and Provost: Do not fill Vice Provost for Academic Resources position
• Executive Vice President and Provost/Academic Success Center: Eliminate 1 advisor and 1 classified position
• College of Education: Eliminate 1 associate dean position
• College of Education: Not seek NCATE accreditation
• College of Hotel Administration: Reduce to only two academic departments
• School of Nursing: Return to campuswide semester instead of trimester system
• College of Sciences: Reduce costs of Department of Geoscience
• College of Urban Affairs: Combine School of Journalism and Media Studies and the Department of Communication Studies

Differential Tuition and Registration Fees
There are some programs nationally that are either extremely popular or extremely expensive to operate in which the market will bear differential tuition/registration fees. This tuition/fee is an additional revenue source that can be used to bring down the costs of delivering such instruction to the institution. Not all programs and departments can successfully implement differential tuition/fees (i.e., those in Liberal Arts come to mind) and that is not a possibility for them. For those programs that can implement differential tuition/fee structures, the additional tuition/fee must be sufficient to offset the additional costs of instruction. The following colleges and schools are among those nationally that charge differential tuition/fees and, should NSHE and UNLV determine to pursue that tack, extensive research will be required to determine the appropriate price point for each of them. There may be others that are not on this list that can be further discussed by the faculty committees reviewing these proposals.

• School of Architecture
• College of Business
• College of Engineering
• College of Hotel Administration
• School of Nursing
• Department of Physical Therapy

Conclusion
None of us are unmindful of the effects that these proposals will have on our campus, our colleagues, our staff, and most of all, our students, if they are adopted. However, these proposals are merely proposals at this point and we should look forward to the continuing discussions that will occur in the faculty committees and with students prior to final decisions being made.

Regretfully,

Michael W. Bowers
Executive Vice President and Provost

With the Pwn2Own hacking contest coming up at Vancouver’s CanSecWest security conference later this month, Italian computer security blog OneITSecurity took some time to interview Charlie Miller. Miller, in case you’re not familiar, is a security expert who has won Pwn2Own two years running by hacking Apple’s Safari browser with incredible speed. Safari isn’t the only target — this year, all major browsers and a selection of mobile operating systems will serve as Pwn2Own challenges – but it’s fair to say that Miller knows a thing or two about keeping your browser secure.

Here are the highlights from Miller’s interview:

He thinks Windows 7 will prove more secure than OS X Snow Leopard this year, in part because it doesn’t have Java and Flash enabled by default. Windows’ full ASLR (address space layout randomization) also gives it a security advantage.

When asked what he thought would make the safest OS and browser combo, he opted for Chrome or IE8 on Windows 7, with no Flash installed, although “there probably isn’t enough difference between the browsers to get worked up about.”

For my money, the juiciest quote from the interview was “The main thing is not to install Flash!”

On the mobile side, Miller guessed that the iPhone 3GS would be more easily exploitable than the Motorola Droid, mainly because the iPhone’s been around longer, and has been subjected to more extensive security research.

You can check out Miller’s full answers (in English or Italian!) at OneITSecurity.

If elephants are the Jackson Pollocks of the Animal Kingdom, then orangutans may be the new Ansel Adams of the jungle… or the drunk, trigger-happy sorority girl.

Nonja, an orangutan at the Vienna Zoo, now has her own Facebook page dedicated to the photos she takes herself with a digital camera. Armed with a Samsung ST 1000, all the 33-year-old Nonja has to do is click and whatever her eye sees is automatically uploaded to her Facebook page. Even though she’s nearing senior zoo citizenship, her fan base continues to grow by the day; she’s already hit the 20,000 fan milestone, and the page only launched on Tuesday.

[courtesy of me]

Like this is something new?  I have at least 15 orangutans in one of my classes posting to FB on a regular basis already! 

J/K - have a nice holiday break all!

PS – For INF400 students – the course textbook is posted on the (forthcoming) class page already so in case you want to get it over the break (that means ask mom and dad for an academic present this year).

Several sites are reporting that a major attack on WordPress blogs started yesterday. The latest version of WordPress, 2.8.4, is not vulnerable to this particular worm, so upgrading now could save you a lot of headaches. The worm creates a new, hidden administrator account on your blog, allowing whoever’s behind this thing to access the guts of your blog, databases and all.

How do you know if your site has been affected? Lorelle on WordPress offers two possible ways to find out:

There are strange additions to the pretty permalinks, such as
example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/.
The keywords are “eval” and “base64_decode.”

The second clue is that a “back door” was created by a “hidden” Administrator. Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognize.

WordPress has acknowledged the attacks and encouraged users to upgrade their sites. WordPress.com users aren’t affected, as the whole system has already been updated to 2.8.4. If you’ve already been afflicted by the attack, start on the steps in WordPress’ FAQ.

I’ve already done the upgrade and it is the same, painless upgrade as usual.  Just be sure (especially if you’re using FireFTP) that you set the transfer options to Automatic Mode (Tools > Options > Downloads/Uploads : top fieldset).

If you’ve ever read David Weinberger’s ”Everything is Miscellaneous” (ISBN10: 0805080430) as well as a host of other books and articles on Wikipedia, it’s almost as if Wikimedia is doing a 180 on its own founding principles.  Since the beginning, the founders strongly defended and imposed the concept that the community itself was the police and at no time should an editor be the final say…this to extent that a founder removed himself as an editor for changing an article without the consent of the community (consent being reached by culminating responses and critique any time an article change was made or requested).

“We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks,” said Michael Snow, a lawyer in Seattle who is the chairman of the Wikimedia board. “There was a time probably when the community was more forgiving of things that were inaccurate or fudged in some fashion — whether simply misunderstood or an author had some ax to grind. There is less tolerance for that sort of problem now.”

Not that I am necessarily opposed to having these types of sanctions, but at the same time, it gets to the core of defeating the point of the community based system.  The community, as I’ve often maintained, can rarely govern itself over a long period of time.  If it could, governments wouldn’t exist.  But by the same token, where does the power and authority end?  Should the Wikimedia board not consider that instead of a single editor, at the very least, possibly three or more editors should have to consent to the alteration first?

Advocates of the system point out that [it] provides an extra layer of insurance to prevent false posts and improve the overall accuracy.  But once again, at whose expense?  Is historical information not fact riddled by the opinion of the observer?  Who is to determine what is accurate?  While editors are, for sure, carefully chosen, aren’t VH1 game show contestants screened as well (ok, bad analogy but you get the idea – substitute radical terrorists in place of game show contestants and it’s a bit more frightening).  There is much at stake in this issue – freedom of speech, importance of historical record, observation and opinion – more than just the fact that Wikipedia could potentially end up more like Encyclopedia Brittanica (a system it sought to avoid) than the incarnation we’ve all grown to love over the last eight years.

While is why I am extremely proud of the evolution of the CMS that I designed and built for the Wimbledon Live player (see this post).

To understand the complexity behind designing the UX it’s important to understand the nature of the data and the critical effect of the workflow. First, video was being supplied from six sources, some to us using Saviant direct to our servers, some we pulled via FTP, and then of course the live streams (some HD and some SD). Then there were multiple parties…NBC (as the news reporter) needed editorial control over metadata, while iStream’s Managed Webcasting team needed to control the timeline over when items went to publication. My team, RnCS (Research & Creative Services) needed to insure that everything was tested before going live so we needed to throw the whole thing through a staging server before hitting a production server that then fed a cluster of edge servers on Akamai’s network.

So we structured it in several parts. First we put automated bots to determine when new assets had been dropped, specifically seeking out XML files that held the initial metadata, and dropped that into the CMS DB. Once there, the appropriate parties were notified by email (or in my case as PM, by SMS) – to update metadata, insert images, begin video transcoding, etc. Through the entire process, we designed screens to make it as easy as possible to follow the flow of assets, provide enough ability to each staff person so that overlaps in duties existed but that checkpoints assured data integrity throughout.

The grid above, for example shows the visual layout of the thumbnails that would appear in the cover-flow style playlist inside the player. Deep linking was provided so editorial users could create pointers on the MSNBC/NBCSports sites. Drag and drop allowed us to reorder objects to maximize the visibility of prominent players.

Each level of user had various modal windows to insert data. Even imagery was uploaded first to the staging, processed for size and then sent to production.

Because of the nature of edge servers, we also had to purge the cache after any update, so we provided a three-section grouping that allowed us to send the feed XMLs to production and clear the cache in one shot. And to make THAT process even easier, we built it so that it was accessibly by mobile phone so even if I was in transit, I could still update the CMS in a timely fashion.

Finally, the live streams had the ability to be toggled on and off so that the matrix of available feeds, particularly the Smooth HD stream, was optimized and prioritized. To be sure, there was still much room for improvement but given that the whole CMS was built in 6 days and now, five days into Wimbledon, has eased us into a steady, smooth workflow, speaks volumes for making it easy to use, intuitive (for example, the color designations on the player match the ones in the CMS, big text and extensive micro-transaction Ajax created an interactive environment), and overall a good experience.

It’s no secret that social networking as a whole fascinates me, but in a different way than most.  To this day, frankly, I still haven’t figured it out.  I’ve been in this game long enough to remember SixDegrees and watch the MySpace explosion, see the mess that Second Life and Facebook are becoming and now, there’s Twitter.  At least with SixDegrees and MySpace there was an actual theme, and even with Second Life and Facebook I can almost understand why, but Twitter is a conundrum in itself.

Being the professional that he is, I couldn’t say it all any better than he did, so here is Mr. Ridley’s post/comment:

At the risk of sounding like that old guy in Gran Torino telling those “young punks” to “get off my lawn,” it’s gotten to the point that whenever I hear somebody talking about Twitter or twittering or tweeting it just makes my little tummy want to hurl.

I haven’t tweeted once in my life, but I’m sick of hearing about it already. What once may have been the cool way of letting a hundred people know that you’re about to go mow your lawn now has the feel of a used-to-be-fresh means of communicating. So yesterday, like two-way pagers. And AOL.

To be honest, I think tweeting jumped the shark long before ultrahip CNN got into a Twitter match against superdown Ashton Kutcher. Back when politicians started live-tweeting responses to the president’s demi-State of the Union address, Twitter had already taken on all the cool of your mom getting a tattoo.

I imagine, I hope, twitterers are ultimately headed for the social networking retirement home that’s the current residence of Second Life and MySpace.

But my real issue with social networking sites isn’t their faddishness.

It’s the hypocrisy that goes with them.

We claim to be a nation of people who take our privacy very seriously. Just mention the idea of warrantless wiretaps and expect to get hit up with a congressional investigation.

But give somebody an avatar and a URL, and he can’t tweet, post or hyperlink enough personal information about himself to as many people as possible.

Seriously, does valuable broadband space need to be taken up with announcements in that creepy Facebook third-person-ese that “John is enjoying two-for-one margaritas with the rest of the IT Team at T.G.I. Fridays”?

Where is the expectation of privacy anymore? Or, more correctly, where is the expectation that people will keep their private nonsense to themselves so that those of us who still like to communicate personal information with one person at a time don’t have to get caught up in somebody else’s e-mail circles or listen to their one-sided cell phone conversations?

No, I don’t know what’s hipper; to Facebook or to Twitter. I just know for me, personally, discretion never went out of style.

To be sure, Mr. Ridley, like myself, operates a blog which most people view no differently than Twitter might be, but there is a distinct difference.  For him, the blog isn’t an outlet for sharing personal details and interacting in a social sense so much as it is a platform for discussing social concerns where technology comes into play, just like this blog is a sounding board for issues that affect areas that I teach.

Of course Mr. Ridley’s post was lambasted almost immediately in the comments.  The one that got my gourd was “I say keep your old-fashioned opinions to yourself and off the air.”  There is a certain virtue to old fashioned opinions, and just as the person who wrote the comment feels it appropriate to air his discontent over the post, Mr. Ridley certainly has the right to voice it.

[read "Keep Your Tweets To Yourself" here]