Here’s a quick roundup of what’s happening with usability and libraries: University of Minnesota Library holds a Usability Lab Open House Springer releases a new study on eBook behavior at Universities which was conducted in conjunction with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,United States; University of Florida, United States; University Library of Turku, Finland; Centre [...]
Monthly Archives: September 2008
Library Usability Roundup 9/26/08
26-Sep-08Reading Stephen Downes’ article today on Connective Knowledge I was struck by how strongly the following outline describing the distribution of knowledge across a network of connections reminded me of social proof: Summary: Connective knowledge is both: – knowledge OF networks in the world – knowledge obtained BY networks As I outlined earlier, Social Proof [...]
Persona Analysis of IR Users
15-Sep-08There’s a very good persona analysis in the latest edition of D-Lib called “Using Personas to Understand the Needs and Goals of Institutional Repository Users” out of the U. Colorado Boulder. A couple things caught my eye. Firstly, the persona study came across findings they didn’t expect, which is a classic result for user-centered research: [...]
An experiment in MOOC
09-Sep-08I signed up for the 10 week Connectivism MOOC starting this week. If you thought an undergrad class with 200 students was bad, try getting your bearings among 1,600 other students. I’ll be curious how this thing goes, and evolves, but I’m mostly interested in the topic. More details here.
I doubt this is the seminal instance, but I just heard an interesting On the Media podcast which talked to Cal Tech economics professor R. Preston McAfee about his textbook Introduction to Economic Analysis (ISBN 160049000X) which he has released using a creative commons license. This touches tangentially on a recent post I had on [...]
New e-book study announced
09-Sep-08This makes my day. I’m really looking forward to the results of this study, via the Chronicle: Sony wants Penn State students to help it figure out why more readers haven’t taken to e-books. The electronics company has provided the university with 100 e-book readers for a yearlong study of “e-book usage in a higher-ed [...]