Arranged Delirium

I’m teaching mobile app development next term. There are actually dozens of development platforms to pick from and I’ll admit it’s been hard to narrow down the list. I’ve worked with Appcelerator, Played with PhoneGap, and even explored the reintroduction of Dreamweaver as options. Another set of tools that I keep coming back to is appMobi XDK. Its an IDE from appMobi that let you employ both the PhoneGap and AppMobi’s API’s, which in conjunction with what you already know about HTML 5, CSS, and javascript, makes for a fairly straight-forward and compelling development platform for new developers (i.e. students). The emulator is quite nice too, making this a nice tool for developing once for many platforms regardless of OS. There’s an infoworld article that summs it up pretty well - you can access it here, after an annoying ad (click the upper right-hand corner to skip).

Students in ITL 275: Web Design and Development are developing a new site for the ITL department here at W&J. Part of the process includes determining the audience and identifying who you are trying to serve. This seems like a good point to remind everyone of NetMarketShare which hosts monthly breakdowns of web content access by device and platform:

Some interesting notes - IE still makes up over 50% of desktop browsers. This isn’t as horrible as it once was, since both IE8 and IE9 are acceptable browsers; but 13% of users are still employing IE6 and IE7, meaning that there’s a whole lot of content that they can’t get to unless the developers are conscientious enough to query for the browser version and push out a different stylesheet.

Another resource for students is the Web Style Guide (2nd). Ignore the third edition - it goes too far afield for the work we’ll do this term.

The Archaeological Institute of America sent along a link to their Google Earth Layer for Archaeological Sites in the US and Canada. You can Access it here where there is also a press release.

This went live just last week for National Archaeology Day and they hope to get feedback and suggestion this year and have them implemented for the next National Archaeology Day in October 2012.

With the newmedia server being down for the foreseeable future, I’m sending student to the blog for assignments. Today’s homework challenge? Edit this message from Netflix into something less insulting. First some background: a couple months ago, Netflix changed its pricing structure and split its services into streaming and DVD delivery. This raised a bit of an uproar because customers were paying more for less. But it was also problematic because they never announced how they were going to do it. Anyway, following a barrage of bad press on the web and complaints from various directions, they changed their model. As a customer, I received this email:

So, what’s the problem? Well, for one thing, the initial communication never mentioned Qwickster. The only reason I knew about it was from research online. Same for the two web site concept. So, I’m presented here with a rather insulting email “It is clear for many member two websites would make things more difficult…” that is poorly worded and struggles for focus and organization. [BTW, It’s not more difficult, it’s inane - don’t waste my time, Netflix. I happen to think its much more valuable to me than your service.] OK. I’m done ranting…

Anyway, as a student in ITL 275 your homework assignment - should you chose to accept it - is to re-write this message into something that is clear, concise, and respectful. Oh, and you have to do it in less than 100 words. And while I would think I shouldn’t have to say this, you don’t want to take their text and just slim it down. You’ll only earn the full point allotment if you actually think it through and completely re-work the text.

Students in my new media courses have been studying representation and (hopefully) thinking more deeply about how the media reflects ideology back to us, and thus influences our own ideological beliefs. Gender is always a deep topic of interest in this debate, since we all see representation of ourselves in magazines and on television (among other places). There’s a good film on the topic regarding how the media reflects the notion of ‘woman’ back to us in Missrepresentation. You can watch a trailer for it here:

Thinking of gender, there was an article in the Chronicle lately entitled Saving the ‘Lost Boys’ of Higher Education, which supported my own anecdotal observations that female students are typically much better than male undergraduates. I’m concerned that more young men aren’t interested in taking their future seriously. I say this as someone who did not have his act together his early undergraduate days; but eventually got there. I’m beginning to fear for a generation of young men who aren’t getting there before they get out of school…