legacy

Tutortrac/Learning Center Mashup

Students don’t distinguish between the Learning Center and Tutortrac. In their minds it’s one and the same. For this reason, where Tutortrac goes so does the Learning Center. It’s incumbent then for the Learning Center to be as involved in the development of Tutortrac as is possible. This thinking leads me to consider existing and ideal models for application development. It seems to me that the manufacturing model that consigns the user’s role mostly to signing for a receipt upon delivery is increasingly being abandoned for a more fertile and participatory end-user assisted development process. This latter process involves the user in every aspect of the development phase. The downside is a possible longer development time on the back end and the need to facilitate expert/non-expert communications, which is not always easy. The benefits would be an application with a better fit-for-use in both form and function. Greater buy-in from users and fewer calls for product modifications. It seems to me that one aspect of this shift to a modern application design model is the increasingly ubiquitous developer blog, eg., (1), (2). These blogs serve not only to keep users up-to-date on work being done on an application, but also humanizes the people and process of application design, which may seem mysterious to the uninitiated. Photoblogs are especially useful in this regard, eg., (3).

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Cool web tools

Billshrink helps you to pick a cellphone carrier and plan.

Watchmycell monitors your cellphone usage and alerts you before you exceed your monthly minutes.

Mymilemarker helps you to chart your fuel economy. You may enter data from your cell phone.

Dimetracker assists you to track your spending and, as does mymilemarker, provides a way to do so via cellphone.

Howjsay is a pronunciation dictionary. Type in your word and click submit and it will speak the word for you, albeit with a distinct British accent.

Gate2Home provides multilingual onscreen virtual keyboard emulation, allowing you to type in a language you specify on any computer.

SpokenText allows you to record PDF, Word, plain text, PowerPoint files, RSS news feeds, emails and web pages, and converts them to speech automatically. You can download your recording as an iPod book or mp3 file. Readthewords provides similar service. There are other such sites but these two seem to have better speech engines. I’d recommend submitting your own writing, as hearing your own writing helps you to catch your mistakes.

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Periodic Table of the Elements

This interactive Periodic Table of the Elements linked to Wikipedia is done in all XHTML so as to be scalable. Try adjusting your window size to see it adjust accordingly. Here is a non-scalable but equally well executed Table done in Flash and another flashcard type site for testing your memory of where on the table the elements fall.  This multimedia table includes videos and demonstrations.

update: Here’s more, ptable, webelements (click symbol for description of elements).

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Obama and Clinton debate

The New York times has made the 2/22/08 democratic debate between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama available as an interactive speech to text webtool. Making this tool available is helpful to voters looking to analyze the debate. FactCheck.org provides more useful analysis of the statements made by both candidates. The text to speech tool is interesting in and of itself. A similar application is MIT’s Lecture Browser which allows you to search and locate any of MIT’s online lectures that contain a search term. You may then drill down to the exact moment that your search term is referenced. You can follow each video lecture while a cursor iterates through the text of the lecture. The remarkable thing is that the text-file is generated electronically. Remarkable given the quantity of jargon and the range of accents and inflections with which to contend. The lecture browser doesn’t appear to to be supported in Firefox.

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