Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Edubloggers and Usability

Oy.
One thing I have noticed among many of the edublogs is a significant lack of organization; many of these bloggers could use a session or two with a usability agent. Now, I'm not saying that I am a fountain of information on usability, but I know that important information should be stressed, covering every square inch of space with text is distracting, and that you should try to keep unrelated information from contaminating what is important.
It was difficult to figure out which blogs to subscribe to. There is no sort of measure nor ranking on the edublogger website. It is just a list. I'm not sure it's even difficult to get ON said list. After looking at the application to add a blog, I could probably get THIS blog on there without much trouble. However, I think that I have found several blogs that may be useful. None of them seem to be strictly applying technology in a classroom, nor are they apparently blogs about the class, which is what I'd really like to find. (If any of you found a blogger who keeps thoughts, notes, perhaps even plans on their blog, please let me know in the comments!) However, several of them have lists of tools that CAN be used, and some actually do give examples of HOW to use them.
I have added these blogs to my RSS Reader of choice: Google Reader. I HIGHLY recommend this method of managing feeds. I'll also see if I can post the feeds in my sidebar so others can check out what I thought might be useful.
I'm out for now, back to studying for Japanese.

2 comments:

Rebekah said...

Japanese is so hard! At least the written language is - I haven't even attempted to learn much speaking wise. Good luck on it!
(-:

Shauna Fox said...

I've been reading awhile and not commenting - I know, I know, just step in and say something - so I thought I'd give you an overview of my thoughts (and maybe add some specifics later); I am enjoying your personal struggles with the usability of internet resources and technology in general...it was definitely a problem I dealt with as well. The question is how do you solve the problem without becoming a part of it (just another blogger ranting about world)? Looking forward to more posts...