Top Right Quadrant

Posted at 11:18 on Thursday, 12 August 2010

ONLINE CULTURE For the past 2 weeks, flu be damned, I’ve been taking the HTML 5 Live online course from SitePoint. Lasting a fortnight sans weekends, the point of it was to learn what HTML 5 means to web developers and how to actually use it.

I’ve always been very interested in the possibilities of online learning, probably due to an insatiable need to broaden my mind and a frustration at public schools and traditional ‘offline’ education, so I enrolled out of interest to see how SitePoint would approach it (and out of interest in HTML 5, of course).

At such an affordable price, enrolment for the sake of investigation was no big deal, either. You could participate in the course for a penny under $10 — substantially less than it would run you for an evening course at your local college or adult education institution (and understandably so).

The course itself was hosted by one John Allsopp and consisted of a series of guided videos, with articles to read in-between and live Q&A sessions with the tutor at the end of each week to discuss what was learned over the past 7 days.

As the first lesson became available, the first thing that stood out at me was the poor quality of the videos. The content was a different issue, but you could both see and hear that the recorded narration was done so with an iSight webcam on a MacBook and nothing more. Not even any pleasant lighting to speak of.

Seeing the presenter is, of course, not the most important thing in the world, but it would have helped to immerse myself in what he was saying. There is a definite logical parallel between these and delivering lectures at a university, but these videos of a guy in his kitchen were simply not up to scratch and could not compete with that experience. The videos were even hosted on YouTube and embedded on the SitePoint site, which just felt lazy and detracted from the self-contained, tailored-for-me experience I would have liked.

As I say, the quality of the video recording isn’t entirely indicative of the quality of the actual content — that was a different story altogether. John, the presenter, was clearly very knowledgeable on the topic (assuming he had prepared the content himself, which I’m sure he did) and boasted some decent credentials. On top of having an awesome Australian accent, his tuition was very well paced on both the micro level, as his videos went into just enough detail; and the macro level, as the course didn’t attempt anything too ambitious with the 2-week timeframe.

The course was, I think, perfectly targeted to me as an “advanced” developer. There were many assumptions made in the planning of this course as the tone jumped very quickly to the importance of semantics — specifically the new features of the HTML 5 spec and their relation to semantic markup. To you and I, this is a perfectly logical way to direct the topic of the course. However, there are people I know personally to whom semantics mean very little. At their level of understanding good markup, lots of the course content would be completely lost on them.

It was not, as I had feared, just capitalising on Apple’s decision not to support Flash in favour of HTML 5. There was actually very little about video and media support at all, which was great. I even learned some new things about HTML 5 which was surprising, as I was expecting a very simple course from the outset.

The mix of video and written materials was nice, which helped to closely mirror traditional learning paradigms; like being assigned a textbook chapter to read. Although the accompanying articles were a little “chatty”. Feel free to have a one-sided conversation with me through video, but when writing educational technical content it didn’t feel right to read something so informal.

If the problems with the entirely unprofessional-looking videos could be rectified to bring me into the content a little more, I have no doubt that this new online paradigm of learning could be a big deal. I would love to see someone attempt a fully “live” (i.e. not pre-recorded) course over the ‘net with more traditional timing — I don’t think self-paced is the only way to go here.

A companion course on the topic of CSS 3 is also starting soon and was available at a discount bundled with this, the HTML 5 course. I have enrolled in that also, and I sincerely hope that because of the visual nature of CSS, video is employed in a much more effective manner.

This is a good start for online learning from SitePoint — a company whose audience is highly technical and likely to be more receptive to the idea than other groups — but honestly, some polish to the experience would go a long way. If charging me more for more value is what it takes, go ahead. With such aggressive pricing, they’ve got a lot of wiggle room to offer more of a ‘premium’ tuition experience.

It was a fun, new way of learning; but I’d rather drop 10 bucks on a book. SitePoint: Charge me more and give me more, you’re onto something cool here.

Posted at 06:51 on Monday, 21 June 2010

ONLINE CULTURE

After what averages out to be a pretty average weekend, I was cheered up this Monday morning by this little nugget of rectitude — in the alt attribute of today’s XKCD, no less!

News networks giving a greater voice to viewers because the social web is so popular are like a chef on the Titanic who, seeing the looming iceberg and fleeing customers, figures ice is the future and starts making snow cones.

Posted at 23:14 on Thursday, 18 February 2010

ONLINE CULTURE If you ever want to know in what year someone was born, what their first name is, whether they smoke mad joints on a daily basis or what football team they support; you need look no further than their Xbox Live gamertag.

The answers to those questions are invariably 1997, Kyle, “yeah, mate” and Liverpool FC.

By the way, I’m totally a Whaleosaurus. Rawr!!!

Posted at 22:40 on Thursday, 12 March 2009 — with 157 comments.

ONLINE CULTURE I remember a simpler time; a time when user interface designers weren’t so trigger happy, and I could happily choose between being a pirate or ninja.

I’m sure some people have seen this before today; but I logged into Facebook just a minute ago to behold the new monstrosity of a homepage – what used to be an amalgamation of status updates, group memberships, photo uploads (which happens to be the biggest beef I have, explained below) and other such miscellany. What do you see now? Just an endless feed of nothing but status updates.

If you’ve seen it, I’m sure you’ll deduce just as quickly as I that Facebook are “going after”, in very bad form, Twitter‘s market share of the social-mediasphere — it’s almost as if the two couldn’t coexist.

See the above — names have been obscured to protect the innocence of those who have not yet had this change rolled out unto them. Nothing but status updates from top to toe; and that’s not the only thing that suggests to me that Zuckerberg is all about the status line.

Can you distinguish between the above two which was a status update from me, and which was a wall post to me? Given the context, you probably can but barring the “wall-to-wall” link, there is absolutely nothing to differentiate between which – suggesting that Facebook is equating the two, or perhaps to add a feature it thinks Facebook should adopt involving a semi-private “status” message between two friends using what used to be known as a wall post.

All in all, I think it’s ridiculous. Facebook was, I thought, doing great and while there’s nothing wrong with refreshing your UI once in a while, it seems to me that they’ve reconsidered their platform with this change too. There’s no way in hell a “status update” is more important to the user than your friends uploading photos of their latest (in my feed’s case) drunken escapades through the local night clubs, and relegating these updates to be occasionally sprinkled on the right sidebar was a terrible move.

This may all serve to do nothing more than hasten the inevitable exodus from Facebook to Twitter — if you want to use a social network that just bases itself around status messages use one that does it right, right?

Just I thought I’d my throw my 2 cents into the font of the Internets and, judging by the consistent negative response of the community after each iteration of the Facebook UI, they’re probably landing right next to yours.

Update: Also, the rounded photo edges look silly.

Update 2: Further to my belief about their change of plan for “wall” posts, look at what just adorned my home page:

That’s a stab at twitter “@ replies” if I ever saw one.

Posted at 19:35 on Thursday, 18 December 2008 — with 1 comment.

ONLINE CULTURE Slide your focus to the right for a sec. You see that guy there? That’s me. I’m Edd, and I’ll be your geek blogger this evening.

You’ve stumbled across my new blog — formerly EddM.co.uk. My old personal website (which is actually still up and running) didn’t really illustrate me, and just wasn’t working as a vessel for me to talk about what I was interested in. Plus, it was completely getting inundated with spam and I wanted to have an address on the web to plonk an online CV or résumé.

And here, we have a fully customised blogging system build from the ground up in Ruby – and a design that I was finally happy with after so many hours of a blank canvas sitting in my head.

I look forward to picking up posting momentum over this Christmas period.