Iterate Me: Brian Klaas: Blog - Educational Technology

On App Inventor: Speaking the Language of Novices

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 09:08:00-0400

Google's App Inventor is a great idea. Empowering consumers to create is always a good thing. Visual Basic was the key to Microsoft's long-time success. Map making tools are the reason why Warcraft III and Starcraft still sell on retail shelves, more than a decade after their release. iMovie, Windows Movie Maker and its counterparts have helped make YouTube the site for almost every Web meme of the last five years. Visually-oriented IDEs are a great way to develop software quickly. Visual Basic and Delphi are two classic examples of this, and their tradition of partial WYSIWYG views carries on to Visual Studio and Flex Builder today. (I've also made the argument that if Adobe wants CFBuilder extensions to really take off, they need a visual UI to create them.) They've even evolved to have a similar visual language: panels spread out on the screen which allow for inter-panel communication and interaction, playing off visual and interaction patterns common to many IDEs. When you fire up Eclipse or Visual Studio, you, as a programmer, can say "Oh, I know the basics of how this IDE works because it looks like other IDEs I've worked with." All of those tools, however, expect that the user has some kind of fundamental understanding of the basics of programming: simple data structures, simple logic controllers, and so on. You simply can't get by without them. Now let me say that I've had minimal direct experience with Google's App Inventor. I don't think that's a problem here because I want to talk about first impressions, as those mean a lot to the average, non-technical user at whom Google is targeting the product. Take a look at this screenshot from the product's home page: The focus of the UI is on the simulated phone screen in the middle of the window, as it should be. Take a look at the list of controls under "Palette," on the left. There you'll see titles for controls such as "Canvas," "ListPicker," and "TinyDB." Although there is a question mark next to each which, when clicked, tells the user what the control is, that text (and other text on the screen) is very much the language of the programmer and not the user. A non-technical, non-programmer, average, everyday Android phone user (who is the target user of App Inventor) would probably look at that and say "What the heck is a ListPicker?" I've worked with a lot of "non-technical, non-programmer users," and know pretty well that when any "programmer-ese" comes in to play in the UI, users tend to be taken aback and almost immediately take a combative approach to this UI written in a language other than their own. This programmer-centric language works its way in to other elements in very subtle ways. Look at the properties you can manipulate in the "Components" and "Properties" panels. The text which describes the properties you can manipulate, while clear, is written in camel case — a programmer's, not average user's, convention. "CheckBox1" could just as easily have been displayed as "Check Box 1." The same goes for "BackgroundColor" and "BackgroundImage." I know this sounds trivial, but it's clearly the work of programmers who expect that users will get or, at least, grow accustomed to the way software is written by programmers, not "average end users." I also have to wonder if the basic assumption of the standard IDE UI as the default UI is an appropriate one. In my experience, users are task-focused. They want to be able to make a movie from video on their camera and upload it to YouTube. They want to write a letter to their congressman about an issue that is important to them. They want to set up a quiz for the students in their class to take. As users are task-focused (and not document focused), an application should start with smart defaults and help a user accomplish basic tasks quickly. Instead of showing the standard IDE UI at startup, App Inventor may be better served with a "Start Screen" which could ask:

What kind of application would you like to build?

One that uses data from my Twitter account.

One that uses maps to display places that are important to me.

One that lets me chat with my friends.

None of the above.

The options presented here, when selected, would then pull together some of the basics for the application, saving the "average user" quite a bit of time and lay out most of hte plumbing required to get their desired application off the ground. This "Start Screen" could be turned off in the application's preferences for user who don't want to be bothered with this kind of getting started page. The blocks tool that the team has devised to map out the internal logic of the application is really smart. It makes visualizing the logic clear and it's easy to drag and drop components in to the right order. No-code development environments like this are key to getting "average users" to use the tool to create applications that do what they want. I've used "average users" in quotation marks throughout this entry. That's because I don't think the real audience is "average users" — meaning someone who owns a smartphone but hasn't developed software before. The tool was developed by university-level faculty and targeted towards students at various levels (elementary, middle, high and university) but in the context of teaching software development. As such, I believe the tool makes the fundamental assumption that you have to have some knowledge of the art of programming. That assumption informs the design of the UI and how users interact with it. It makes it vastly simpler for individuals to develop applications (even me!), but it's not a tool that can be used by just anyone with experience with smartphones. App Inventor was created by a lot of people much smarter than I. It's also still in beta and something I know that the team will improve upon over time. I just have to point out that if they really want to create something which allows the average user of a cell phone to build their own applications, they need to create a UI that, from start to end, reads in the way that an average, non-programmer user would understand.

Flowgram: Next-Generation Demonstrations

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 08:57:00-0400

Flowgram is a really nifty new, Flex-powered service that takes Web-based demonstrations to the next level. I don't get impressed by many training tools any more as I've been exposed to way too many that do the same thing in less and less interesting ways. Flowgram isn't just a screencasting or video demonstration tool. It actually brings up the Web page that you are trying to demonstrate. It's the full Web page and the viewer can interact with the page because, well, it's live! This goes way beyond simple screencasts where you can watch, but not participate. It's much closer to what you can achieve with Adobe Captivate in terms of providing training for desktop or Web-based applications. Because you're dealing with live Web pages, you will run in to the issue of logins preventing users from getting inside a site that requires authentication, but theoretically, you could show them how to create and account, log in, and go from there. Captivate's simulation mode works around these issues, but you have to deal with changes to the Web pages you're demonstrating in Captivate, which can be time consuming and expensive. (Granted, Captivate can do a whole lot more, including branching, which isn't even in in Flowgram's playbook.) You can also add in annotations to the Web pages you're demonstrating, add still images, pull from Flickr and and Facebook image sets, import PowerPoint files and then mix it all up. The service itself uses a Flex app with and a whole lot of <iframe>s to get the job done, but the experience is really quite seamless and really darn interesting. Like all Web-based services, there's the Flowgram branding and site redirection that you pretty much can't get around, and, of course, you run the risk of your content going away if Flowgram goes away. It is, however, a really interesting service for those looking to create Web-based demonstrations of (mostly) Web-based properties. I'm definitely going to be using this for some of my future training content creation, though I'll still rely on Captivate for demonstrations of desktop-based applications.

How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law, or, How the Law is Raising a Generation of Criminals

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 09:14:00-0400

Larry Lessig, of EFF, Creative Commons and Net copyright battle fame, gave an excellent talk at TED in Monterey, CA, earlier this year. In this talk, he makes a pretty good, common sense argument about how the law is trying to strangle creativity. More interestingly, and the part that spoke very clearly to me, was how the law was corrupting our culture and turning many of us, especially those on the younger side of 40, in to those who live their lives against the law.

His argument (and, again, watch the 20 minute video, as it's excellent) is that the law, buttressed by conglomerate lawyers, proactively seeks to punish those who remix and rebuild content in to something new. He's not defending those who steal content outright and sell it as their own (which he should not). The side effect of this is that this strangling of creativity has a corrosive effect on our culture, and that it is raising an entire generation who live their lives (at least their creative lives) against and outside the law. If you post something on your MySpace page or make a hilarious video remix and post it on YouTube and use someone else's (copyrighted) content, you're breaking the law. But this (and this is critical and key) is how many, many young people communicate their lives. As such, they begin to see their lives and the key ways in which they communicate their lives (their photos or music on MySpace) as against, or outside, the law.

As a gay man who can still get fired from my job without any legal protection in 26 states and who can get jailed or killed in many parts of the world for holding my husband's hand, living against the law is something I'm familiar with. Until a few years ago, I could be arrested in any state in the country for having sex with the man I've chosen to share my life with (and in some parts of the country, men still are, even though it's clearly in violation of U.S. law). Living against the law diminishes you as a person, and, in very subtle ways, it makes you devalue your contribution to society.

In a culture where thugs are glamorized and where more and more youth express disaffection with the simple fact of work and societal contribution, anything that directly forces them to live against the law because they want (or need) to express themselves in the medium that makes the most sense for them is both troubling and disturbing. If society, represented by its laws, says "You are not allowed to be yourself, to express yourself, to share and communicate and collaborate about your life in any way that we don't expressly proscribe," why would people want to participate in that society? Where will the next generation of artists come from? What great stories will go untold because we aren't allowed to tell them?

Again, like Lessig, I'm in no way advocating wholesale copyright infringement. That's just not cool. Artists deserve (fair!) compensation for the work they create. But the impulse to create, to contribute back to the community, to make everyone feel welcome and whole and part of society, should be our priority, rather than embedding in generation after generation the idea that their only life is one that must be lived against the law.

How Do You Know I'm a WoW Geek?

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 18:26:00-0400

I may not be the best player in WoW, but I do play quite a bit. I talk about it with my friends, much to my partner's chagrin, but here's how you know I'm a WoW geek: I let it seep in to my work all the time.

In addition to developing some pretty mean Web apps for eLearning at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, I also end up doing training for some of those apps. I'm a decent public speaker and if you have a technology person who can also communicate clearly and enthusiastically with the user base, you've got someone who's in fairly high demand.

So I'm prepping some training materials for a quiz/assessment tool that we're rolling out, and all of my example questions have to do with WoW. The screen shot on the right shows this (if you can actually read it). I'm curious to see with this new training material if anyone actually gets the references.

Hammers and Nails

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 16:05:00-0400

When a new content-creation solution gets rolled out in online course systems, I've seen a tendency at many higher-education institutions to try to turn the tool into the solution for every problem or perceived problem in online courses. Take, for instance: Macromedia (now Adobe) Breeze. It's an awesome product, and we use both Breeze Presentation and Meeting in our online classes.

Since we've rolled out the tool, however, some people see it as the solution to all of our content delivery issues. Some examples:

"Can't we add some videos to the Breeze presentations?" Well, sure, but is that the right environment for delivering 6 minute videos when Breeze only does progressive download of videos? "But it sure would be nice for the students to watch videos inside the lecture presentations. See what you can do."

"How about if we move our exams out of our testing system and in to Breeze presentations? They can do basic testing, right?" Well, yes, they can, but is that really the right environment to deliver exams? You'll have to give up things like randomization, pulling from a question bank and a bunch of other things that our testing system can do. "Oh, well, it sure would be nice for the students if they could take their quizzes right after they watch the lecture all in the same place."

"Can we put the lab exercises in to Breeze? Breeze makes everything look so nice and it looks more like how it looks in Word than HTML does." Well, I suppose you could, but is converting 7 printed pages worth of text, tables, and images directly into PowerPoint and then Breeze really the best thing for learner comprehension? "Well, the students are very used to Breeze, so it would be nice to have things presented in a familiar way."

I'm not knocking Breeze, really. I've seen this happen with tools we've built (assessment/testing systems, simulation builders, file storage and organization tools, etc.) as well as with other tools pushed out across the educational enterprise.

It's great that some faculty and staff will push a tool to its limits and try to get it to do things it was never really designed to do. But there's a big difference between what you can do and what you should do.

Make sure that the tool is right for the job. There's a saying in software development that goes "If your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail." Now, some people could level that accusation against me, and they wouldn't be totally off-base, because I use ColdFusion for all of my development work. (Because CF lets me get a lot more done in a lot less time than say, JSP/J2EE, or PHP, or, heaven help me, ASP, and is really quite robust and has nifty stuff built in for rich forms, speaking to Java/J2EE systems, pdf generation, and truly allows for rapid application development.) That said, I also know that as wonderful as a given tool may be, it's not always going to be the right solution for every eLearning problem. You have to mix and match best of breed tools, and then you'll have something that works well, makes sense, and provides a truly rewarding learning experience for your users.

It's All About the Experience

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 16:04:00-0400

Experience matters.

I've heard that time and again from bloggers, pundits, and my many ventures to Macromedia MAX conferences. Adobe talks about the "engagement platform," but it's still all about the experience the user has with your Web site.

This is especially true of eLearners -- more specifically, the working professionals for whom I build solutions. The don't have time to learn and re-learn complex interfaces and systems. They want knowledge and collaboration and they want it now. Customization is swell and all, but if the organization and navigational structure of every online learning experience from an institution is different, things get real old real fast for these folks. If you've got 15 minutes to download the reference readings for an assignment, you don't need to waste those 15 minutes hunting around the class Web sites for the appropriate .pdf file because in the last class you took, downloadable readings were in one location, but in this class, they're in a different location.

At my job, we don't use a commercial course/learning management system like Blackboard or WebCT. We don't even use Moodle or Sakai. We use a custom solution built and maintained in-house. Is that more expensive? Perhaps. Does it provide a better user experience for the people paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to take courses through our system? You bet. We consistently receive feedback from students who have taken online classes using other (insert big vendor name here) systems, and those students tell us that ours is not only simpler and easier to use, but, aesthetically, a whole heck of a lot nicer to be a part of.

Not only do we get to build a system that meets the needs of our faculty and students and not have to wrangle the system into kind of/sort of fulfilling some needs, but we also get to build a system that looks good, that is visually welcoming, and that helps users get tasks done in a consistent matter. They have a better experience with our courses and our technologies, and, as such, are much more likely to keep shelling out the big bucks to take classes from us.

It's not just the content. It's not just the multiplicity of tools available. It's the whole experience that matters.