Ron Lusk's Radio Weblog

Friday, August 23, 2002

Some folks may not like to write because

It is a public display of facility they may not feel they have, and may not have; one correspondent was afraid his spelling was bad.
It makes folly as clear as wisdom, but is more persistent than a comment made in the hall
It takes time and thought (and a little hubris—per Larry Wall) to put words out for others, and to make them—and think them—good enough for public consumption.
I'm sure more ideas will come to me, later...enough folly for now.

Lessons learned from a large scale K-logging implementation. "A K-log is..." and lessons learned from a large-scale K-logging implementation.
I've learned a few lessons along the way, with (I'm sure) many more to come. They are:

Posting the information is a small problem. Organizing and retrieving it is a big problem. We're working on a shared ontology and RDF metadata.

Most people don't like to write. We've had a difficult time designing interfaces that encourage adding information instead of just reading.

There's no substitute for good, accessible writing. We have several people who write consistently for the system. The logs show that postings from one writer get far more attention and prompt far more linking than those from the other writers. "

[Seb's Open Research]

» These are really good points. The second is a bit worrying.
[Curiouser and curiouser!]

3:33:47 PM

Agree...the first looks helpful; the last...(or “the latter”—I elided the Regular Expressions book)...well, hard to say if it's useful.

Several books from O'Reilly that I'm going to buy.
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web 2ed. "We've updated the chapters on organization, labeling, navigation, and searching, and illustrated the interconnectedness of these systems in a new chapter on thesauri, controlled vocabularies, and metadata. And we've expanded the methodology chapters to include a more interdisciplinary collection of tools and techniques. We've complemented the top-down strategies of the first edition with bottom-up approaches that enable distributed, emergent solutions."
...
[No regular expressions today, thanks—rl]
...
Essential Blogging. "Written by leading bloggers, Essential Blogging includes practical advice and insider tips on the features, requirements, and limitations of applications such as Blogger, Radio Userland, Movable Type, and Blosxom. This book will get you up and blogging in no time." [toolbox]

8:54:32 AM

I like the example Desktop (Charles Miller) provides, and his suggestion for an environment that students can run their objects in. Had I not been standing in front of a room full of COBOL programmers seeking retraining in Java, watching their eyes glaze over during the first lecture, I might have wished, even planned, for something like this. As it was, I told them to start up Notepad and write HelloWorld.java. Next time?

public static void main(String[] args) considered harmful?.
In “Rethinking the Java Curriculum: Goodbye, Hello World!”, Daniel Steinberg talks about how non-OO current introductions to the highly object-oriented Java language are, and challenges us to come up with an alternative. I've taught a number of Introduction to Java courses, and I've long thought there must be a better way. Here's mine.

Update: Like all good ideas, it seems someone else has already had this one. I was thinking of something like BlueJ
[The Desktop Fishbowl]

That reminds me...that IT training company left me a message about doing training for them the other day. Let's see what they want...maybe I'll look into BlueJ, too.
8:49:42 AM