I had some thoughts after the first couple of weeks using the i400 blog and the course in general. Hopefully they’ll continue to listen and improve the course. It’s been pretty good so far, but as you’ll read has some kinks to work out like any beta production.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” — Henry Ford

Before I get into this week’s questions, I thought I’d offer a little feedback on the course and the blog system thus far this semester. Simply put- it’s in beta, which is why feedback is important so the teachers and capstone team can make improvements. Thankfully, I’ve already tried to give some feedback to Travis Brown, the AI, a few times and he’s been very receptive. It’s great! I wish more classes would take continuous feedback on the course instead of waiting until the end of the semester to be reviewed by burnt out students on vague scantrons.

For example, this week I told Travis that I thought he could save himself and the students some effort by simplifying the process in making announcements. He had sent out a few messages via Oncourse about the schedule of speakers and this week’s blog assignment being available under the Resources on Oncourse in PDF to download. Since the PDFs were nothing more than plain text I wondered why he didn’t just send that in the messages instead of going through the trouble of creating a PDF, uploading it, and then sending out a message about it. He thanked me for the feedback, but said not all students check their messages diligently enough and I respected that. For those less diligent, make it easy on yourself and just have your messages from Oncourse forwarded to your email. If I were Travis and the capstone team trying to drive more traffic to this blog and show its potential, I’d post all announcements here. Force students to subscribe to the RSS feed (or at least Travis’ posts).

The technical hiccups in the classroom are another sign of beta status. The real classroom wasn’t ready the first week and we all crammed into a much smaller classroom. No sweat. This week the sound quality was terrible, but I got the jest of what was going on. I’m sure the production will gradually smooth out. What I’m really waiting on are the video archives of talks to go back and review when making these blog posts.

I’ve seen a lot of progress with the blog in the past few weeks with the layout changing, sidebars filling up, and kinks such as the IE login problems being resolved. That’s beta for you. I’ll throw my two cents in about the blog because I really like the idea of it being used to organize a class.

First, the permalink structure should be changed to something more human readable and thus better for SEO (i.e. /?page_id=48 < /lectureres).

Second, it takes 2 seconds to create a contact form using something like cforms II that makes it much easier to give feedback and ask questions instead of emailing informatics.i400@gmail.com.

Third, there are duplicate links in the Pages widget (“Home” == “Welcome…”), not to mention the Pages widget has the exact same links as the main horizontal navigation bar that is directly above it. What is the purpose of the blogroll and calendar widgets? The blogroll isn’t made up of blogs and has two links that could go in the footer. The calendar just links to posts from that day which doesn’t serve any immediate purpose that I can think of.

Back to the “Bios of Lecturers” page, it needs some sort of sub-navigation to make it easier to find each speaker. A list of names at the top that links to their section of the page or to a new page altogether would be nice. In fact, the entire site could use a more elaborate layout to accommodate all of the content that it is and will be handling. When Travis asked in class if anyone had read the other entries, no one even knew they could let alone how to. Look to sites like Ars Technica, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, and the New York Times for inspiration on how to display and navigate lots of content.

I thought adding the RSS feed to my Google Reader might be a solution to managing all of the content, but it looks like it’s only feeding the last 10 posts. Is this the setting in the backend or was it only setup 10 posts ago? With 40ish authors posting weekly, this makes the RSS feed useless as of now.

I hope Travis, the capstone team, and even Mark Hill take some of this feedback to heart to improve the course this semester instead of waiting to retool it next year. If the capstone team is looking for another method of collecting feedback, I would suggest UserVoice that is used by a lot of beta/start-up sites.

I’ll start another post so Travis doesn’t think I’m filling my word count for this week’s assignment ;)