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 ;)