Arranged Delirium

You need to imagine Stephen Colbert doing his bit to get the real humor in this. But,

I Did It! I Did It! Woot!! I Did It!

Both regular readers of Arranged Delirium will remember my criticism of Facebook’s unannounced UI changes. Thanks to me and all my readers’ incessant lobbying, FB naturally made modifications. Its good to know that one person can make a difference. Here’s a screen capture of the new interface that we’re all able to enjoy now:

The interface allows you to chose for yourself how you’d like to make use of the return key - either as a return, or as a mechanism for entering your comment. Imagine that - giving users the choice of what they want to do! What a novel approach for Facebook…

Of course, this was done months ago, but I’m only now getting around to blogging about it. Thats because I’ve been so busy on the media circuit taking responsibility for instigating this change. You’re welcome.

There’s an interesting OpEd piece from the NYT that underscores the dichotomy within higher education: do we train for employable skills, or educate people so they can learn for themselves? Is is a focused skill-set that people need, or a broader sense of developing knowledge? It’s basically a piece contrasting the educational views of two well-known and successful college drop-outs: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. If you click through to the discussion link, there is a series of responses you can read. I’m particularly taken with Trachtenberg’s statement: “Gates is studying the science of education. Jobs is creating the art of learning.” I think that’s at the heart of the current conflict of education - but its hard for me to see why there isn’t room for both approaches…

Follow-up: Through the comments, I found my way to Snow’s essay Two Cultures, which you can read via Google Books. But there’s a short re-cap and exploratory article published in The Telegraph. While the debate was central to Britain, it more-or-less reflects the dichotomy we see in higher education in the US today. In these times of budget cuts, the conflict is made more clear as resources go to specific programs, which in essence emphasize specific ways of learning. The question becomes is this being well-thought out as a matter of curriculum design, or is it a response to student demand?

A lot of my colleagues complain about our students needing too much hand-holding; but I tend to take a different approach. I think there is a lot to be learned through failure. But that means you also need to be able to tell someone when they are not performing well. It seems to me that a lot of today’s student’s don’t always take that criticism well - and a lot of my colleagues concur. The problem though is that critiquing someone’s work doesn’t mean that they are a horrible person. It just means that they could improve is some ways. I can hardly think of any area in my life where I couldn’t do something better. (Aside from teaching - obviously I’m great at that!) I struggle though with that fine line between real encouragement and valuable critique.

In any event, this has been on my mind a lot lately, and I recently read The Modesty Manifesto - an OpEd piece by David Brooks. In it he pulls together statistics from several studies but sums it all up here:

there’s abundant evidence to suggest that we have shifted a bit from a culture that emphasized self-effacement — I’m no better than anybody else, but nobody is better than me — to a culture that emphasizes self-expansion.

...and there seems to be some evidence for that. I’m not trying to make the whole “this generation doesn’t respect…” argument, but I do think that the obsession of self that we see reflected through “social” media is rather evident and pervasive within culture today. I’d even suggest that it isn’t simply about youth: the majority of Twitter users are actually over 30.

Brooks continues to extend his point to the prevalence of the individual over the concept of the virtuous citizen. I’m not trying to continue that discourse, but the article did make for interesting reading.

One great thing about web development over the past couple of years, is that we’ve finally seen a breakdown of the IE hegemony! IE is still over 60%, but at least most folks are running version 8. (Really? Why are you still using IE?) But its made testing and developing web sites a bit more of a chore. Add in the recent explosion of varying mobile devices, and suddenly you’ve got a couple dozen viable operating systems and browsers to support. (Or, at least to think about supporting.)

As a professor at a small college, its become beyond my abilities to support and maintain multiple testing kits - even with dual or tri-booting machines, it’s too time consuming. So, I’ve decided to outsource. There are two compelling services that I know of off the top of my head: Litmus and CrossBrowserTesting. I decided to test both, and both are quality services. I think that if you were running email marketing campaigns, Litmus might have an edge for you. For general web development, I found both services adequate. In the end, I decided to go with CrossBrowserTesting, primarily because: 1) it was cheaper, 2) did everything I needed, and 3) had a more robust free trial period which made for a better evaluation.

Best of all - this is going to speed up certain elements of my grading in my web development courses…

Other Notes: Most everything works on the Mac OS with each browser. Linux/Unix boxes running Firefox are all good; some of the ancillary browsers are problematic, but do a good enough job of rendering most valid CSS and constitute such a small market percentage it’s not worth addressing. Windows machines are much more problematic; but if you are running a recent version life is better. IE versions before 8 remain the biggest problem. The question now is: do I add browser detection and route folks to a different style sheet, or just forget about it? IE 6 & 7 make up about 24% of the general web viewing population, and about 8% of the folks that access my content.

There’s a nice article by Kevin Carey in the Chronicle of Higher Education examining the benefits of studying computing. It also bemoans the loss of majors in computing - a trend that we’ve seen throughout most of the last decade, although that seems to be improving over the last couple of years. (Fortunately we haven’t seen that drop-off in majors at W&J; my guess is that its the result of our interdisciplinary curriculum.) I especially liked some of his examples which I though did a good job of relating the activities of computing to other fields. I think I’ll keep it around and perhaps link to it as a resource for students that are considering study in the field.

The comments to the article are - as typical - both helpful and negative. What do you think? Can you see the value in studying computing? If so, why have we been seeing the decline in enrollments across the country?