Once Upon a Time, There Was a Girl
This Story is dedicated to Punya and Tianya;my team,
Three Priestesses and a Digital Monk, and my fellow classmates
in the CEP817f06, Learning Technology by Design, whose ability
to impart knowledge helped me grow and understand that
Beauty may lie in the eye of the beholder,
but is inseparable from the flower.
Once upon a time, there was a
lovely young girl named, Slow White, wholoved taking careof her family,
dog, cat, gerbils, fish, in their little cottage in DeWitt. She also loved
teaching in the district at the kindergarten center, elementary and junior
high schools especially when her children were attending these schools.
Slow White taught 8th grade English, 8th grade History, 6th grade Science
and 5th grade, 2nd/3rd grade multi-age classroom. She was happy but
longed to be a student once again and enrolled atthe University to study
technology. Her interest in after-school technology classes and summer
RegionalTechnologyAcademy classes led her seek out more information.
Each professional development class she attended seemed to answer one question but opened five more questions about using technology. She needed more information. One day she met her Fairy Godmother who sent to the land of eM eS You where lots of wizards taught. She signed up for a class entitled, “Learning Technology by Design”. Wizard Punyaintroduced this class to
Seven “special” Dwarfs: Bashful Purpose, Happy Form, Dopey Genre, Sneezy Structure, Sleepy Craft, Grumpy Surface, Bashful Purpose and Doc. This wizard had an apprentice, Tianya, who helped teach the class.Although SlowWhite never met the Wizard and his apprentice or these special dwarfs, they allhelpedher with the structure of thecourse. Funnything about this course, rather than speakingface-to-face with the wizard or his apprentice (becausethey did not communicate in person or through a crystal ball) but rather they communicated through the use of a rectangular shaped laptop computer. This wasthe first time SlowWhite tooka class that met through theInternet, the strange place thatcan exist anywhere you aremerely byusing this devise. The Wizard began the 14-weekclass introducing the dwarvesbecausethey would help her with her final project, an educationally designed website.
Bashful Purpose is the shyest dwarf. Whenever he begins to feel shy, his face turns a bright red. Bashful Purpose introduced the world of purpose to Slow White’s project. The class was instructed to read a book chapter in McCloud’s Six StepsUnderstanding Comics (Chapter 7). In this reading, the author (McCloud) stated that “the creation of any work in any medium will always follow a certain path, what he calls THE SIX STEPS (Slow White knows them as the 7 Dwarfs.)In reading this comic chapter, Slow White was introduced to several new concepts trying to answer the question, “What is Art?” McCloud stated that art’s path consists of IDEA/PURPOSE, FORM, IDIOM, STRUCTURE, CRAFT AND SURFACE.
Idea/Purpose – Consisting of impulses, ideas, emotions, philosophies, the purposes of art…in essence the work’s content.
Form – Is the product to be a book, chalk drawing, chair, song, sculpture or comic book.
Idiom – The “school of art”, the vocabulary of styles or gestures, or subject mater.
Structure – Putting all of this together, what to include or not include, arrangement and composition.
Craft – Constructing the work, applying skills, practical knowledge, invention, and problem solving.
Surface – Production values, “finishing the aspects most apparent on first superficial exposure to the work”. Slow White is awed by these dwarfs and their job functions.
The next day, Wizard Punya told her that to begin to understand all this; she would need to complete one of many tasks. Her first task was to write a story. She felt relieved by this simple task but was told that this story did have some parameters. The story had to be 55 words, no more, no less. She worked on the story, wanting it to be interesting and funny with a surprise ending. Wizard Punya would later explain that one of the purposes of this task was to demonstrate a creative act. He said that it is creative in that it brings into existence something that did not exist before. That explanation was understood, however, 55 arbitrary words on paper, if not communicative and aesthetic, would not be considered creative. The wizard read her 55 Fiction Story and although the story wasn’t particularly eyebrow-raising, he told her something that she would later hear throughout the course, “beauty or quality may lie in the eye of the beholder, but it is also inseparable from the flower.”
Slow White went home to mull all of this over. She understood it all in isolation but knew that she would have to really think more about looking at the big picture and how in the world would she be able to apply this to her project, the website.
Happy Form, the joyous dwarf is the fattest of the seven and always laughing. For the next assignment, Wizard Punya gave Slow White another task. She was to read Chapter l, “Rethinking Thinking” from Spark of Genius by Robert Root-Bernstein. This book is about the thirteen thinking tools of the world’s most creative people. The author discusses where ideas and insights originate. After much discussion and debate about how intuition (reacting to our gut feeling) and imagination are connected to each other. No matter what we do or who we interact with, it is important to learn to use our feelings, emotions and intuitions in our creative thinking.
Dopey Genre, the youngest dwarf and possibly mute as no one ever heard him talk. He’s often scared but very brave when he had to be. Slow White’s next task was to work with Idiom and Genre, “the school of art, the vocabulary of styles and gestures, subject matter, the genre that the work belongs to.” She was asked to read the, “Ten Fundamentals of Web design” by Patrick Lynch and Chapter 3 (Design Themes) of the Web Style Guide. Lynch referenced the Chicago Manual of Style which Slow White never heard of but was happy she will be able to use it as a future reference gallery and in her design of a high-quality website. Lynch’s ten fundamentals of Web design include 1) The site structure should be visible on every page. 2) Design in screens of information, not in whole pages. 3) Navigation pages and whole sites should show gradients of complexity. 4) “Non-linear” media require strong structures and content narratives. 5) Digital media erode identity. 6) Digital media are inherently unstable. 7) The Web is a new medium in an old context. 8) The Web is both a direct experience and a delivery medium. 9) To maximize effectiveness, design, function, and content are inseparable. 10) Effective sites can only grow from a healthy informational ecology. What it boiled down to was that the best design innovations are really adaptations of existing conventions and designed websites. Such conventions might include the table of contents, index or site map although search engines are being used, to aid in navigation.
Sneezy Structure had the shortest of beard of all the dwarfs except for Dopey who had none. He is so named as he is constantly sneezing as he’s allergic to flowers. The following week, Wizard Punya and Slow White discussed Structure and explored emerging technologies (Web 2.0). Structure is described as “putting it all together…what to include and what not to include…how to arrange, how to compose.” Structure depends on genre, audience and the information being looked for. Determining structure is a creative process. In Annie Dillard’s, “The Writing Life,” Chapters 1 and 5, she introduces two theories of writing. One theory is to perfect the piece as it is being written. Her other theory is the opposite, and not to attempt to perfect a work since “original work fashions a form the true shape of which it discovers only as it proceeds, so the early strokes are useless, however fine their sheen.” Slow White said that she painstakingly writes, she either revises the initial draft or completely starts over from scratch. In fact, she cannot recall ever creating the perfect piece of writing the first time, excluding grocery lists.
Another article read was “Physical, Cognitive, and Affective: A Three Part Framework for Information Design,” by Saul Carliner. Envisioning a triangle made up of three equal sides, Carliner’s framework demonstrates that website should include all three parts equally. A poor website would be focusing too much on one or two of the parts. Slow White’s project needs to weigh creativity, ability and content in equal parts.
New technologies were discussed such as wikis and blogs (Blogger and PBWiki), Collaborative real-time editing (Writely for text and Jumpcut for video, social bookmarking (del.icio.us and Furl), social software (Facebook and MySpace) and social libraries (LibraryThing and citeyoulike.org). Slow White enjoyed experimenting with these new technologies and how she can use these various technologies in her project, at home and work.
Sleepy Craft is always tired and has heavy eyelids and the longest beard. Poor Sleepy seems to always have a fly pestering around him. The next week, the Wizard and Slow White met with Craft. Craft being defined by McCloud as constructing the work, applying skills, practical knowledge, invention, problem solving, getting the “job” done.
In Slow White’s case, she is still learning the skills that she needs in her designing and is just beginning to determine what she needs to learn and how this learning will occur. She has been asked to read several articles:Chapter 2 (Interface Design), Chapter 4 (Page Design), Chapter 5 (Typography) and Chapter 7 (Graphics) of the Web Style Guide, and “Art from Randomness: How Inverso Uses Chance to Create Haiku” byM. J. Koehler and P Mishra. Inverso is a program that generates Haiku from random generated input phrases. Slow White is confronted with the thought, “Are we creating art when we design existing knowledge in a new way, or just using standard design conventions to organize and present? It is interesting to understand that even though the final product (Haiku) that was computer generated from a bank of meaningful phrases from the authors, that the end interpretation of the Haiku comes from the reader.
The gypsy moths swarm
She fears the simplicity
Winter is coming
The Web Style chapters previously mentioned consisting of graphic design and visual signature graphics are not just for visual stimulation because it creates visual impact but important to the user’s experience as certain combinations of words, design styles (shape and contrast), colors and fonts have an impact on the viewer.
Grumpy Surface is grumpy, just as the name suggests. He has a very large nose. He pretends not to like Slow White but cares most deeply for her safety from the Wicked Wrench (that’s another story). The Wizard’s next lesson was introducing Surface. Surface, as described by McCloud, consists of the “production values, finishing….The aspects most apparent on the first superficial exposure to the work. It’s the surface that people appreciate most easily, like an apple chosen for its shiny skin.” However, “the latest ‘fan favorite’ look better at a glance than the older artists who had the ideas, and created the idioms, but were less interested in surfaces. But often, if we bite into that shiny new apple…crunch… (it is) hollow.”
The Wizard asked Slow White to read several chapters (16, 17, 18 and 19) from the novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. The focus of these readings is to discuss the question of quality, we know that it exists but it is difficult to define. In referencing Slow White’s project, she has to determine if it has quality. The main character of the book, Phaedrus (a teacher) had complained that he was having trouble with his writing students who could not think of anything to write. He thought they were just being lazy but later came to the conclusion that “they just couldn’t think of anything to say.” So he experimented further with his students and found that the problem was that they inadvertently were trying to imitate rather than write something original and fresh. One particular student was having difficulty with the writing assignment write a 500-word paper. She choose to write about the United States. Phaedrus suggested to her that she narrow it down to just one street in the City of Bozeman. She came back to class frustrated and without a paper because she still didn’t know what to write. He now suggested that she choose to write about the front of one building, one brick at a time! The next day she handed in a 5000-word paper. He concluded that she was blocked in her thoughts because she was trying to replicate things she already heard but couldn’t recall anything worthwhile. When she started writing something one brick at a time, she was able to come up with her own original work.
Phaedrus experimented further with his students and decided to eliminate the grading system for one quarter to determine if students are somehow conditioned to work for a grade rather than for sheer knowledge. It was interesting to observe the evolution of the grade/no grade theory in that one could evolve from a grade-motivated person to a knowledge-motivated person. At the end of the quarter, the students were asked to evaluate the system. The “A” students were 2 to 1 in favor of the system, “B” and “C” students were equally divided and the “D” and “F” students were unanimously opposed to eliminate grades. Discouraged with the results of the survey, Phaedrus went back to regular grading.
The next struggle he had in his class was over the inability to define “quality”.
Phaedrus’s non-definition he posed to his students:
Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is
recognized by a non-thinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined.
….But even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is!
It then seemed to fit together, whether or not to withhold grades was suddenly irrelevant when the question of quality work was adapted.
Doc U Testis the last dwarf Slow White was to meet. Heis the leader and the oldest of the Seven Dwarfs. He wears glasses and often mixes up words when he speaks. Doc was in charge of testing. This week’s assignments was to test the design of our website from the user’s perspective. Three articles were assigned to be read: Maximizing Windows by Bruce Tognazzini at User Test Your Web Site: Five steps to find out how friendly your Web site really is by Keith Instone and User Testing Techniques: A Reader-Friendly Checklist from AllThingsWeb web site. Slow White thought that Maximizing Windows was an interesting article noting the importance of establishing your audience profile (novice or power users) as it may be wider than you think. The other two articles discussed ways to test whether or not your website is user-friendly. Slow White thought it rather ironic that when reading the article, “Ten Things to Avoid in Authoring a Web Page”, many items that made the list (i.e.) over-use of leading-edge technology, scrolling text, marquees and animations, non-standard-like colors, and the use of counters were the very things that Slow White thought she neededto make her website professional-looking. Slow White was instructed to find three naive users to test her site. She her testers consisted of her three sons and two of their friends. They may have been polite in filling out the questionnaire even though they were given the rare permission to say what they “really think”. One of the constructive criticisms was to eliminate animation because it was distracting. Slow White decided to leave it in because it was a small animation at the very end of the website which would not be too distracting.
The semester end draws near. Slow White has all kinds of new information in her head to which she will be able to put to use at work and at home. She has completed all the module assignments, participated in the thought provoking discussions on Good/Bad Designs samples and completed the website design project. She is amazed at the amount of work and time devoted to this class, despite which her family has not missed a single meal although the cottage could use a good dusting along and some postpones minor repairs. She’s going to wait until the Prince shows up to help her with that. She is going to pursue website design because she truly finds this challenging and fun. She has three more classes to complete before graduating in June 07.
At that time, she and her family will live, happily ever after.
Trivia:
Three other names for the dwarfs that were voted out:
BlabbyShiftySnoopy
The End
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