Developing Usable Experiences

December Rain

December 1st, 2006 8:23 am —  125 views

Here it is, the first of December. Its pouring outside. Cold and raining. Won’t be long before that rain turns to snow and the world gets a fresh coating of pristine white.

Next week is the last week of classes. This has been an interesting semester. This weekend I’ll be concentrating on writing the final paper for Social Systems and Collections. Oddly, I’m looking forward to it. As difficult as writing can be sometimes this one is taking shape in my head and draws upon my experience as a programmer. The goal is to bring my experiences into the light of the principles taught in the class.

All throught the semester the lessons in this class have resonated with me. I see the ideas virtually everyday I go to work. The concepts are at play at my work. The ideals are there but often not embraced. It is a challenge to have things revealed in a way that exposes weaknesses and new directions all the while being both encouraged to learn and discouraged to apply. I better stop there or I’ll reveal information that will only serve to undermine me.

Someone from Google was in lecture last night. Our discussion sessions brainstormed to come up with an idea that could leverage the MBooks project that is teamed with Google Books. It played off an idea that I had envisioned regarding annotations and highlighting of electronic texts by all readers. Being able to toggle annotations or to review in some controlled and ordered fashion the annotations of other readers would be very useful. I know its useful when working on code, but to see comments on a book, thoughts other had when reading it, would be very interesting. After the class I approached the person from Google, introduced myself, and gave him my business card. Can’t hurt can it?

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One Response to “December Rain”

  1. Dawn King on December 1st, 2006 1:21 pm

    So…what did the Google guy Ben have to say?

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