Art, Science, and Magic: What Really Happens During User-Centered Design?
This article looks at the psychological concept of subsumption as it may be applied to the methodology of user centered design (UCD). The idea of subsumption is that you place new experiences or new entities under existing categories. Thus, if you see a creature for the first time and it looks like a cat, then you would think of it as a type of cat. In UCD, this concept expresses itself as the use of existing forms of design to represent new information. More...

The Father of Modern Spam Speaks
This link is probably more of a personal interest to me because I remember the day Canter and Siegel's "Green Card Lottery" messages flooded the Usenet system. More...

At 13, He's at Helm of School Newscast
OLDaily readers will be familiar with my own experiments with media when I was a kid and so won't be surprised that I list yet another example of a 13 year old taking the media into his own hands, in this case, an eighth grader at Glenwood Middle School who writes, films, produces and packages in a high-tech, real-time a school newsletter for parents every week. More...

Board's Vote Starts Plan for Privatization
I guess there's no real debate about the divide between public and private schools if the whole system is privatized. That's what's on the verge of happening in Philadelphia as the School Reform Commission took the first step yesterday toward putting the city's public schools into private hands, appointing a series of consulting firms to handle different components of the transition. More...

High School Student Helps Launch Internet Telescope Network
This is pretty cool. Students can create a (free) account and book time to use the Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope in New Mexico over the internet. The service, provided by the Student Telescope Network, allows students to manipulate the telescope and take actual pictures. More...

Moving Slowly Toward Light-Speed Technology
This is the sort of article that gets me thinking. For example, if you had a room completely composed of perfectly reflective mirrors (walls, ceiling, floor) and you flicked a light off and on, would the room ever get dark again? Somewhere, I'm sure, somebody has tried this. More...

Thumbs are the New Fingers for the GameBoy Generation
People make fun of my two finger typing (actually, two fingers and two thumbs). But this interesting article that shows how young people - who grew up using new technologies - have adapted physically to their new environment. More...

Bleak Future Looms if You Don't Take a Stand
It's a bit of a manifesto, but tech writer Dan Gillmor's stand on copyright and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act echoes my own. In a nutshell: "Here's my message to the record industry and its allies: I'm not a thief. I'm a customer. More...

Super Synchronous SMEs: Subject Matter Experts as Synchronous Trainers
The author, an experience hand in the field, provides some background and sound advice for subject matter experts (SMEs) working as online trainers in a synchronous environment (such as a webcasting or conferencing environment). One of the most valuable tips: use a producer. More...

Cirrus Advances 802.11e for the Home
If you thought it was bad enough deciding between 802.11a and 802.11b, there is a whole alphabet soup waiting to pounce on you in the field of wireless local area networks (wireless LANs). This article introduces you to Cirrus's Whitecap product, which incorporates the 802.11e standard. More...