The BLOG is dead -------------------- long live the blog

MATHS

Maths learning is a big problem with both students as well as teachers. The fundamental reason for this being the fact that maths has to do very less with what a new student already knows, unlike history or science or English.

The student is updating a lot of his existing knowledge with concepts of structures and entities unlike ever before. Maths as per me is the real beginning of visualization. A student begins creating or re-producing unique patterns that he cannot see, feel or compare easily to what exists. Although this becomes a common place for him after few years.

How can ‘maths’ be taught in a simpler fashion. That could aid students, atleast in their early stages. I am making two assumptions based on my experience and psychology. Cognitive psychology speaks a lot about human beings having very similar structures to learn/understand/react. We are a lot more similar than we think we are. And hence though there might be people more adept at something like analysis and number crunching. Most of us learn and relate in a very similar fashion. A proper structure learnt out of analysis might be very helpful to getting to the desired level of users being both interested in maths as a subject and having a better style of learning.

From my experience I remember helping a younger friend of mine learn basics of accounting. My efforts in the beginning, where in vain. He was fresh out of school and just couldn’t relate to accounts. Not having any previous experience at teaching people helped me in finding new ways of teaching. Instead of presenting step by step task flow kind of teaching.

I began teaching in a macro-level approach. So this is the entity, when you do this to it this happens, and when you do that – that happens. Arriving at gross profit and understanding the nuances of debit/credit became a lot easier for him. And he soon dint need me to teach him anything anymore. He began relations to data and could use any of the rules to get smarter.

I was wondering if this can be applied to maths even at basic levels. Where various changes to the states of numeric value ‘2’ with addition, multiplication, subtraction etc are displayed.



These structures are learnt over a period of time. and hence it is easier for dads to figure out some of the stuff in maths that kids can't. I guess cognitive science looks at life in a very unique way, making us both humble and learnt at the same time.

CMM Takes a 'U' Turn

When we speak of software development we look at the different methodologies that can help support our endeavors across different platforms. We got agile, iso, cmm, six sigma and so many others. And then we have the ‘U’ or usability as I call it which supports all of these very neatly.

Usability Maturity Model. Hmmm….
But as usability is growing as a practice and as an essential element of Software Development there are newer ways of looking at usability itself as a unique factor in business.

Link

Personally this is a great move, to give UCD a better shape amidst growing non-clarity

Some links for your enlightenment:
(BTW : I read that UMM is based on 18529)


http://www.idc.iitb.ac.in/~anirudha/institutionalizingHCI.htm :
http://www.usabilityviews.com/uv003824.html : the pdf link has a article
http://www.processforusability.co.uk/Usability_test/html/umm.html : the ISO 18529
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/eusc/r_usability_assurance.html
http://www.usability.serco.com/trump/documents/Maturity_assessment.ppt.pdf
http://www.kessu.oulu.fi/HCI2000_Jokela.pdf : A must read

comment anyways on what you think where usability or rather UCD is headed

Television and Information Design

Usability professionals earning their bread and butter from the IT world. Often commune to speak about universality of usability. And why it is of such a concern to the world today.

Well this blog points in a similar direction. All this began with an incident. I watching news on television and my friend freaks out. “shuttle has crashed – 10 people dead”. I couldn’t believe my ears, the last time shuttle tried landing a few astronauts had left the domain as well. It took me a little time to understand that it was a mis-interpretation.

No shuttle had crashed. The landing had been stalled for weather conditions. The culprit was the news scroller appearing on the news channel. The top one spoke of some current feature while the one right below it had news flashes. At the time when my friend saw the news he interpreted them together. Shuttle couldn’t land and ten dead in bihar.

Most probably he dint read well. But I saw a glaring defect in that screen. The two bars were so colored that they almost looked like more information tabs. And unless the news was very different anyone could mistake them to be part of the same thing.






Looking further than just news information in form of the way text appears on television in different programs, some calling attention to ads, and some others to essential information on the screen. The cricket match, or program aids displaying ‘whats coming next’.

How much of real attention is paid to these. Most users complain of ads while cricket happens. Some even complain about the irritation messages cause. Can we not have a happier user and a popular channel.

I guess for news channels and sports, a happier customer should be welcome. That what the advertisers pay for. So here you are brethren charge into the mighty media industry.

CSS Markup Guides

Adding some comfort to the age old style of preparing css and html is the small and short article by http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/.

We at UCD use a lot of wirefarming from the initial phases of requirements gathering to the low-fidelity mockups. Somewhere down the line production starts, what next?

Volumes of html and css go up and down between large teams. Bigger the application larger the change in the mock-ups.

so here is a good way taking style guidelines a little further.

URL : http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/

This article can be summed up by just the two pics displayed on the site.

Gmail - POP Service

Google comes to my mind right next only to TATA's, one of the biggest public oriented companies. Google is changing the rules for most of the other providers and giving more than what any of them can afford.



Guess what? Google now offers pop mail, you can receive/send mail directly from your Outlook/Eudora or others. The thing is free and gives you 1GB, thats more than what any of the other providers provide - Hotmail/Yahoo put together.

Google does not stop just yet, it is gifting some of the coolest tools for free. check out more on google. If you dont have a GMAIL yet, just leave a comment i will send you an invite.

Ro

Excerpts from my Whitepaper - Indian Government Websites

Web serves as a medium to communicate. With spate of commercial, communication and entertainment websites it has also turned into an important medium for ‘transactions’ and ‘information sharing’.

The governance system is India is increasingly using the medium of web to share information to the public. Which was helped improve the services and transparency within the system. But within this framework there is a large need for standardization for presentation of information. Which can promote both ease of use as well as strong branding for the government?

These gaps are largely due to autonomous approaches in different bodies of the government publishing such information. As a result large amount of content published by these government bodies contain different approaches for displaying relevant content, divergent branding approaches, and usage of standards for usability and accessibility.

A study of more than 100 government websites, legislative bodies, departments, and corporate bodies have revealed large differences in dealing with the India Government Brand. Some of the large pitfalls appear to be loosely-drawn information architectures and even lower importance to standards, accessibility etc.

We look at some of these key factors which can promote better ease-of-use among these sites. These include UCD, Accessibility Guidelines, W3C Standards etc. we also look at the current branding scenario for the India brand as well as compare these with similar sites in United States and Great Britain.

India Culture study

I have been doing some interesting cross-cultural studies lately. Trying to understand how cultures differ and how people behave differently and why.

Hostede’s and Schwabs research in this area gave me a lot of understanding about cultures. Not only in the field of human factors for interaction design. But also in general life and in management.

Let me begin with some of this with the Indian perspective. How are western cultures different from ours here in India (Western – imply American that’s wild-wild-west). To begin with, we have analog cultures. Westerners have digital cultures. Their communication styles are low-context while ours are high-contextual. We mean a lot of things at the same time and we have strict behavior norms as to what is right what is wrong.

Have you observed that in India individual is normally on the highest rung. What this means is, most of our companies and governments are leader based. I mean most of the large companies in India have started and run by entrepreneur and not by managers. In the west it’s different. Most companies are run by managers and individual leaders are more based on rationality and not strict adherence.

In India leaders are followed without questioning, while in west leaders better have a nice way of getting things done. Leaders are more managers.

You can look at any website or company profile. In the west they speak of the brand and achievements as its force, while here in India we have the chairman’s message on the first page. We give more importance to leaders. Its here in cricket too, we believe more in Sachin then in team. Australia is different, they have great players but it is represented by the ‘team Australia’ be scared not its ‘Sachin’ be scared.

Let’s not blame bad players it’s in our culture. Its here in our blood we don’t believe in team culture. Our expectations are based on great leaders – Shivagi, Gandhiji we are very group oriented follower type of people. We place leadership views above rationality. Germany stands worse then us, no wonder Hitler has such a wild run everywhere.

But we are moving towards the digital world just like the Japanese are. Obeying parents and bosses is slowly reducing?. So is the fact that rank and position is not derived from age instead from qualities. We really are not observing so many of cultural reasons just for the heck of it any more. We are saying more things so that we are understood through emails, sms instead of the earlier you better comprehend what I am saying style.

My study is not so exact, my writing skills are still worse. All the same these are based on understanding of hofstede and his study of cultural dimensions. Which is text book for me for some time.

The Monk who sold his tricycle

Really appreciate the effort in writing a book and reaching out to such great levels of audience with the sivana system (is it trademarked?)

Well although Sivana system has existed for a thousand years with the monks, so has the system of bringing the next great way to solve all your problems on the right hand. And each of them speaks of self mastery and learning yourself better. And living a hundred years easily by doing what you like and giving time for special things.

There was Seven Great habit and before that Carnegie and others. And now a story right from the foothold of Himalayan’s describing the amazing culture and the amazing people (dude let other do it not us)

My questions are simple, why are successful people so highlighted i mean why not reach to everyone not just the Ferrari class. You might now those are universal principles but hey dude you said Ferrari first. So marketing won’t let you go down to simple people.

Dudes’ leave us alone we are much better in the self created circles of defeat. We are very happy being here with all the troubles we just enjoy showering ourselves with.

If you are still interested in doing more than just this, write a book which does not carry five hundred other quotes to some other authors. Remember shrinks top the list in suicides – must be the cognitive load. ?