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Category: Random Thoughts

Doing Something Well

Published by Iris on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

We’ve all heard the phrase “victims of their own success.” An instruction program takes off and suddenly librarians run ragged trying to meet the demand. A web app gets so popular it crumbles under the weight of it’s adoring fans. A person becomes known as Someone Who Gets Things Done Well and suddenly ends up on every committee known to man. These things happen all the time, and they usually throw the person or service into a state of frantic instability followed by an uncertain period where it looks like they won’t be able to escape with their good name intact.

A fair number have seen this happen with Twitter lately. Things got so unstable that finally, last week, a bunch of librarians fled to FriendFeed. I don’t often post about this kind of site, mainly because I’m really not in the market for more followers, but last week this whole saga got me to thinking about what it was we liked about Twitter, what it is that I don’t like about FriendFeed, and how this resonates with similar sagas I’m witnessing elsewhere in my life (namely, the Impending Moodle Bloat, and the Continuing Adventure of the Library Catalog).

Since nobody needs to know everything I think about Twitter and FriendFeed, here’s the key difference as they apply to my needs and my preferences. Twitter does a small set of functions and (when it’s functioning properly) does them well. It concentrates on reverse-chronological order, brevity (which forces a certain kind of creativity), and makes its other features slave to those two governing laws. FriendFeed is intended to aggregate stuff and allow conversations to spring up around that stuff. If I wanted, I could share all my bookmarks and photos and blogs and twitter stream and, and, and… basically anything with a feed and a few things without feeds. It’s kind of like the Facebook of microblogging. You can add all kinds of things to it and it does it’s best to present all that stuff in a way that makes sense. And for me, this overabundance of features diluted the site’s effectiveness (though I know others who love it). It ended up eating up more of my time than I wanted (even after I “hid” pretty much everything that people added to their lifestreams) because I had no good way to mentally mark a conversation as “read” since there might be new comments on it, and while I was reading things the screen might reorganize itself so I’d have to go back and figure out what was new and what was old all over again. Non-static reverse chronological order takes more mental energy than I would have thought.

Well, all of this reminded me of some of the worries I have for Moodle. As people come up with all kinds of new things that it could do and new ways to feed information into and out of it and new roles it could fill, will it lose focus enough to hamper its ability to do core functions well? What are it’s core functions, anyway? As it moves from being a “course” management system to a “learning” management system, will it go through Twitter-ish frantic instability?

And, of course, when I think of systems that try to do too many things and therefore fail to do any one thing well, I immediately think of library catalogs and the ILSs of which they are a part.

So after I’d convinced myself that every application should strive to do one thing or a small set of things, and do those things really well, I realized it’s not that simple. The tricky bit is that not everyone’s workflow and preferences are the same. So how do you build a system with mass appeal that only does a few things?

And since I have no answers for these questions, I’ll leave you to answer them for me while I ponder the temptation to do all things for all people after learning that you do one thing really well.

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Relaxing

Relaxing

Published by Iris on Friday, June 27th, 2008


I’m well and truly on vacation and have been all week. And, for the first time ever, I’m taking two weeks of vacation in a row. That’s right. I was on vacation this week, and I’ll also be on vacation next week. Hard to fathom, I know, but it’s true.

It’s not a vacation where I’m doing anything special. I’m mostly sitting on the couch, reading (I have a supply of fiction and a whole stack of New Yorker magazines to read), petting the kitty, watching episodes of Rosemary & Thyme on DVD, and generally being a slug. Today I even took a nap (not one of my talents, and not something I’d planned on doing, but something that ended up being really nice). And you know what? After a full work week spent not working, I’m starting to feel a little bit more like myself again! Maybe this means that next week I’ll have my brains back enough to start my Japanese lessons back up.

Oh! And I’m really excited to learn that we’ll be getting clickers for our library classroom! I’ll have to read up on Knowledge Surveys and see if I can combine what I’ve learned about clicker pedagogy with that kind of assessment. The ideas are bubbling!

Which reminds me, I still need to write about Knowledge Surveys, which I heard discussed very compellingly at the NITLE Moodle meeting I went to earlier this month. Hmmm…. and that reminds me that I still haven’t written much about Moodle and the crossroads I think it’s reached, and there are one or two other topics I haven’t covered yet from last month’s conferences. Maybe next week will be a week of blogging as well as Japanese lessons. Maybe. If I’m not too busy being a slug.

(Image credit: “Hammock” by Listen Missy shared under Creative Commons)

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Glad to have gone – Glad to be home

Glad to have gone – Glad to be home

Published by Iris on Friday, June 13th, 2008

I’m just home from a NITLE workshop on Moodle that was held in Tacoma, Washington. For being off the beaten path compared to other conferences and workshops I’ve gone to (I took notes on everything from upgrade paths and sysadmin tools to statistical analyses of pedagogical approaches and web 3.0), this workshop was surprisingly enjoyable to attend. Of course, a lot of that had to do with the hotel NITLE arranged for us to – er- experience. It’s the first time I’ve stayed in a hotel that operated under the impression that it was a modern art museum. (I’ve got more pictures in my Flickr stream.) The University of Puget Sound is also a beautiful campus, so going there for meeting every day didn’t feel like a chore at all.

I was a little less thrilled with the fact that NITLE sent out directions that landed us all on the wrong street as we hunted for the hotel, and that they kept promising more detailed information about parking that never came… but the hotel, university, and food were all top notch. Oh, and most of the sessions were pretty good, too.

I’ll write something substantive about the sessions later, but for right now, here’s an overview of my flights there and back. I got to the Minneapolis airport only to find that the parking ramp was full, so I had to park at the out-lier terminal that’s a mile or so away. Getting back main terminal involves lots of walking, a train, a tram, and lots more walking. In fact, it takes so long that the flight was delayed by nearly an hour as we waited for most of the passengers to make their way from their cars to the gate. Once in the air, I was treated to a most unusual family dynamic behind me. The family was made up of two kids (3-ish and 7-ish), two parents, and two grandparents (the mother’s parents). The kids behaved just fine. The mother, though, must have asked 4 or 5 times how much longer we’d be in the air. She also wondered, repeatedly, what time it was, and what time that would be in Seattle time, in Minneapolis time, and Seattle time again… She also did that thing that kids do where she’d say “Mom… mom… mom… mom” until her mom would respond. As icing on the cake, she turned to her 7-ish daughter and said (and I quote), “You’ve had a long turn with the iPod. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it at all yet. I think it’s mommy’s turn now.” Excuse me while I go find my jaw…

The flight back was much better, and even arrived 2o minutes early! This was greeted with much joy by my near neighbors on the flight, as we had been treated to the non-stop chatter of a 13-year-old kid flying without the benefit of parents. I didn’t mind so much. I grew up with lots of siblings and can pretty easily tune out chatter and read a book. My neighbors, though, were a little less skilled at that, and a little more amazed at the capacity of a 13-year-old to talk for 3 hours, absolutely non-stop.

Oh, and because I find this amusing, here’s how I spent my time since leaving the hotel today: 45 minute drive to the airport, 45 minute walk to the gate (including the time it takes to check in and go through security), 1 hour wait for flight, 3 hour flight, 1 hour trip from the gate to my car (which, you’ll remember, is a walk, a tram, a train, and a walk away from my terminal… thank goodness I didn’t have any checked luggage), 45 minute drive home, finished off by a half hour cuddle with my neglected kitty and then a half-hour session spent writing this over-long account of the least important aspects of my trip to Tacoma.

I promise, my next post will say something substantive, like maybe a discussion of community and how I’ve come to see that as Moodle’s main challenge.

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New Phone!

Published by Iris on Monday, June 9th, 2008

I arrived this morning to find a brand new phone on my desk at work. Or rather, I found a new phone manual on my desk, wondered why somebody would leave me a manual, paged through it for a bit, and then realized that the phone sitting there was not my old phone, but a new one, complete with caller ID, conference calling, and the ability to go hands free!

Finally, I’ll be able to tell if my in-coming calls are likely to be questions, random calls from people not affiliated with the college, my co-workers, or (horror of horrors) a vendor. Finally, I’ll be able to pull more than one person in on my calls. Finally, I’ll be able to participate in those webinars that make you call in and participate online without choosing between full participation and a spasm in my neck.

This kicked me out of my Monday Mood for the rest of the day. Well… this and the first sunshine in weeks, and a glorious walk with co-workers to lunch, and the fact that it’s the last day of finals here. All in all, I guess it was a pretty good day.

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