Chi course

My course on human-computer interaction started a few days ago. This year, we’ll be using Designing Interactions as a textbook that the students will present material from. The students will work in groups of 5 and do projects on evaluation, design, paper prototyping and iterative development. The wiki for the course is up and running: all the groups have their own wiki pages and blogs (group 1, group 2, group 3, group 4, group 5 and group 6) where they will post all their work. My own material is on the wiki too, of course…

As every year, I very much look forward to the lengthy studio type sessions with the students: this is very much a “different” type of course for most of them, who are more used to technically oriented software engineering courses… If you’d like to, then feel welcome to contribute too!

From folksonomies to taxonomies

The domain of learning has a lot to learn from music. The often most interesting Duke listens! blog is a good place to get some inspiration, like in this recent post on deriving taxonomies from folksonomies in last.fm.

Of course, it isn’t exactly clear how scaleable the algorithm is that was used in the example above. That doesn’t keep me from wondering what would be the result if a similar approach was applied to all of delicious? A global structure for all of human knowledge? How would that compare against the likes of LCSH, UDC or DDC?

Music to my ears!

The recent post by Steve Jobs with his “thoughts on music” seems to re-open the debate (was it ever really closed?) on digital rights management for music.

In my view, an important argument that Jobs makes is that we can only have strong digital rights enforcement in a closed system (like iTunes). If we want to do this in an open system, then it is going to impact on the user experience or just not work at all. It seems to me that this translates well to educational content: if we want to restrict access, then we need to close content behind firewalls, user identification, etc. In other words, we will need to lock ourselves into a particular product – there is a certain analogy between iTunes and Blackboard/WebCT here…

Moreover, Jobs argues that there would be more innovation and, as this recent BBC news item suggests, more use (and sales!) of music if we just abandon DRM altogether. Again, the parallels with the learning context are clear: if we open up the educational content, then it will be much more widely used, adapted and enhanced than if we try to keep it “protected”.

Funny that the CEO of Apple sounds more “open” than some administrators of publicly funded universities these days…

update: I couldn’t express the basic point much better than Dave Goldberg, head of Yahoo music, does: “I’ve long advocated removing DRM on music because [...] it just makes things complicated for the user.”