Eye Tracking in Facebook
I found this picture today on failbook.com (though I believe it originated on Reddit; I'm not too sure). As much as the picture is presented as a criticism of Facebook Timeline, I genuinely wonder what kind of an effect this has on users.
Reading through the Timeline doesn't flow as well as with a simple list view, that's true. But what does that mean? Does that mean that the user, like the one who made this image, becomes frustrated and annoyed? Or does it mean that the user slows down their quick page-scanning behaviors and takes their time on truly digesting the site? Alternately, does the user begin skipping around in the site where previously they read beginning to end, and they ultimately end up sampling the content, rather than reading comprehensively?
I'm sure that whatever the case may be, Facebook is well aware of it. I'd like to pick the brains of the people who came up with the timeline view, to see what their purpose was behind arranging it like this.
I personally tend to skip around on the timeline now; I don't try to read anyone's timeline like a book. I get a general sampling of what they've been up to lately and not a comprehensive report. It may be accidental, but I feel like this represents humans and the complexity of their lives better - before, it was too easy to get a sense that by reading that list of updates start to finish, that you knew everything about them, and that all that life activity existed in a single stream.
Another interesting question: Information Architects know very well that most people don't read websites like books. This is why Information Architects spend so much time carefully crafting the layout of a site - they want to make sure that when a user is jumping around a site and quickly scanning for things that are relevant to them, they still come across the important information, and the information they're seeking.
So if that's the case, why is Facebook different? Why is this user so concerned with reading through all the status updates in order, when the current understanding of web use says that he/she is probably just skipping around and scanning on the rest of the web? What is it about Facebook that sucks users in on this level?
Wordle – text representation tool
I am kind of in love with Wordle, which allows users to create a word cloud based on a block of text or a URL. It's interesting to enter a web address and compare what you think the site is about to the output.
I entered this blog into the tool, and look what came out:
It's very interesting to see how big 'time', 'school', and 'work' are on this image!
Full time vs. Part time school
For those of us who didn't go straight from undergrad into an MLIS program, the choice of when and how to complete our degrees can be challenging. So far, Ive tried it both ways- part time school and full time work, and full time school and part time work.
I cant say that either way is better than the other. They'll work differently for different people, depending on working habits, budgets, and career goals. Here is what I've learned over the past year.
Full time school is more challenging than you may expect.
When I decided to go to school full time, I thought my reduction in working hours would accommodate my need for study time. However, I found I needed a lot more of it than I'd expected. In addition, balancing three classes worth of work is a lot more than just one or two. Its not simply double or triple the work; it also takes planning, organization, and focus to get through three classes at once.
In addition to all that, the difference between undergraduate and graduate school is a lot bigger than I expected, as well. I spent a lot of my time in undergrad slacking off, but certainly can't get away with that now.
Experience in your future field is important.
Some of the advice I've heard repeated most often is that students need to get experience as soon and as much as possible. Depending on your career goals, this may mean different things. If you are interested in public librarianship, in particular, starting with a job shelving books somewhere will help you out in the long run. They may give you extra responsibilities. You may be able to do some networking. This was the big reason I had planned to leave my tech job before.
However, if you are interested in non-traditional librarianship, you may be able to get experience in some unexpected places. Once I decided to change my focus in school, and study information architecture instead, staying in my current job was easy. My current job description doesn't align perfectly with what I want to do, but I still find lots of opportunities to work on data or information related tasks. With my future career goals, shelving books is not a very good place to start. So that is something to consider when deciding how to support yourself in school.
Taking your time may not be the worst idea.
Before, I was in a hurry to finish up my degree, and was impatient to get to the next part of my career. But with my chosen path, perhaps it would be better to take my time, work on lots of projects, and slowly work on gaining experience and other related job skills while I am finishing up school a class or two at a time. If you are interested in school librarianship, you maybe right to get to your practical experience as quickly as possible. But if your goal is something you can get more experience in along the way, it may be a good idea to take your time and really develop those skills over a longer period of time.
There are so many options when deciding to go back to school. Full time? Part time? Online, or on-site? It can be a tough decision to make.
Digital Library Project – Complete!
I'm putting the final finishing touches on my digital library project for my Organization of Information class. I've been working on this project with three other classmates, who have been contributing content to the site.
While putting together this site, I learned a lot about working in WordPress. I used a free theme called Threat to Creativity, and modified some of the templates to make it look more like a website and less like a blog. The root address no longer points directly to a list of entries, there are no dates on the entries themselves, and I removed some of the standard navigation, to control it manually myself instead.
I've also gained experience selecting additional plugins to meet the needs of the site. WordPress has pretty good tagging functionality, but I wasn't happy with the options for displaying a tag cloud on the navigation bar, so I selected a plugin to help me accomplish my goals.
Additionally, regarding actual organization of the information, I created the site map, I implemented tag links to attach to images on the home page, and I created the categorization system. The site allows a user to browse through the content of the site in a variety of ways, including by category, by person, by using the site map, or by navigating the tag cloud.
Overall, I have learned some new things about working in WordPress, but I have a lot left to learn about doing non-standard things. This was good practice for me and I look forward to the next project. In Spring 2012, I will be taking a class focused purely on digital libraries, so I look forward to doing a more comprehensive project.
A link to the project can be found here.
Representations, Sense-Making, and Recall Strategies – Lecture Review
On October 28, 2011, I attended the lecture Representations, Sense-Making and Recall Strategies with Lynne Howarth.
Dr. Howarth presented some results from the pilot stage of a research study involving Alzheimer's patients and recall of memories using physical items as tokens. In this stage of the study, she performed an interview with an early-stage Alzheimer's patient whom she nicknames Chuck. After talking with him at length about some of his personal memories, she selected several memories to focus on, and chose a token to represent each item.
The items selected were not directly representative of the memories he discussed, but were closely enough related that she hypothesized his memory would be prompted by the items. For example, in response to a story he told about the Dow Jones breaking 1,000 points when he was in school, she brought a chart illustrating the Dow Jones industrial average over a period of years. The period was not the same as in his story, but when he saw the chart a few weeks later, his memory was recalled, and he told the story again in almost the same way he did the first time.
Not all of the tokens had this effect, though. Perhaps had they been chosen by the patient they would have had a greater resonance. One token had no resonance at all, and another had a delayed resonance of several weeks.
Dr. Howarth emphasized that the goal of the study was not to test accuracy of these memories or to compare them against previous statements or statements of family members. She says she is more interested in helping patients to experience a better quality of life, whether that involved living independently for longer, or simply holding onto their memories and their sense of self.
In the future, she says, she intends to use different senses to trigger memories. In the pilot study, the researchers use only visual cues, but they may be interested in using smells, sounds, or other senses to trigger memory recall.
One attendee of the discussion brought up what I thought to be an interesting point: How similar is this to indexing? In this case, Chuck, the patient, may be considered the "author", and the researchers, the indexers. Indexers do not always choose terms that the authors would entirely agree with, or that the general reader may find valuable, but they usually get close. Can we "index" memories inside of people's brains, using these tokens? In which cases will the tokens be useful?
There is a video of the discussion linked on the SOIS event listing.
Digital Library Project
This semester I'm working on a digital library project for my organization of information class. My group decided to use WordPress to create the library, which I'm excited about. It won't be complete for the purpose of the class until about halfway through December, but I'm looking forward to getting some content up as soon as possible.
Internet Use and Memory
According to an article in the New York Times, internet use may affect memory. Subjects were asked to do a series of tests, including typing facts into a computer. Those who believed they would be able to see their typing later on did a poorer job of recalling those facts later without computer help than those who didn't think they would have access.
What does this mean for education? Some may liken this to calculator use. Why spend time learning simple math operations when you will always have a calculator nearby? However, Alexander Halavais, in his book Search Engine Society (2009), says,
"If we assume that all knowledge can be available on the web, and that such knowledge can be effectively indexed, the idea that we are becoming search-engine-minded is not troubling. If, on the other hand, we take it as a given that knowledge is not just a process of accumulating facts, but involves the experience of learning by doing, the idea that answers are always as near as our favorite search engine is problematic."
So not only is it concerning that we may no longer be as good as remembering individual facts, but if that is so, it is true that we will no longer be as good at drawing conclusions from facts if they are stored online rather than in our brains.
None of this is new, though. The same arguments were made about the written word, thousands of years ago. In Plato's Phaedrus, his character Thamus says, "It will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
