Three irritating things about over-designed websites

1. - if I click to a new page, I want to find something new, to the point and useful, not dribs and drabs of information already aired previously.

I’m experiencing navigation rage at the moment. One culprit is a well-known Spa site. All I want to do is find out what treatments a day includes. I’d expect that to be under the ‘treatments’ menu. But it’s not. It’s a bad design classic. It looked very clean and elegant, as you would expect and had zingy little pop up menus that led into an eternal loop of tantalising pseudo information, half repetitive of what I’d just read with, occasionally, a fraction of the information I needed to find. Also, for some reason they had links on the left side bar and some of the identical links in the main body. Why? do I have to click on both? Will they have different information. I’ll try it. Oh, how annoying, they’re both the same.

Another irritation: the type face itself is all a bit minimal even when reading it on a 22″ widescreen. as an overview it looks restful and elegant. but it’s a bit squinty for me. Why no easy magnifier?. This leads me to point 2. - I’m getting older, and so is the rest of the population, especially the bit of it that can afford spas. We need to be able to read it .

My final bitch is about pointless videos. Last week browsing for suppliers I found one that had a great front page. The first thing I clicked on was ‘About Us’ and it warped into a leisurely “Hello, my name’s, Kate. I’m the receptionist here at insanely misguided and self-absorbed productions.co.uk and I’m going to be your guide today on a tour of the company.” Click. No you’re not. I like video when it’s used well. I just want them to be easily optional and not disguised as ordinary links. If it’s leading to a video, tell me, and maybe tell me how long it is and why it takes forever to load. This one felt like the start of a half-hour national trust video so I left the whole site rapidly. Hence: 3 - If you don’t signpost it well, your company video halts the flow of discovery and leaves me with a bad feeling about your audience awareness being on a par with Sara’s from The Apprentice. I may want to see it later, once I’ve seen what you actually do and some samples of your work.

Guitar Hero and Learning

The physical learning aspects of Guitar Hero, Eye Toy and Wii Fit type games also point the way to more physical ways of learning abstract ideas. Could we see games develop that help children to calculate using very large spaces and movements, rather than sitting in one spot and tapping a keyboard or wielding a pen? Given big enough screens and classroom, learners could be put into situations that require whole body movements to generate data, so they interact physically with the academic curriculum. A mathematical series, or the periodic table could become part of the world that must be physically navigated for a successful outcome. It’s been hapening for a while for fun on the streets of Akihabara and on entertainment venue screens, as players compete on Dance Mats and virtual instruments. Does it have something we can exploit in the classroom?

Wii Fit and balance (Hemiplegia)

Tonight we tried out how it works out balance. The issue for someone who has right or left-sided hemiplegia caused by a brain injury to one side of the brain, is that it can leave a leg or arm underdeveloped, so that muscles and bone may not grow evenly with the limbs on the other side of the body. What is needed is a way of encouraging balance. And balance really requires that both feet be planted evenly on either side of the board. Aftre a series of attempts to cheat at this - eg by trying to balance with tip toes on one side and flat foot on the other (as some hemiplegics will do left unattanded) it seemed that the Wii could pick up the lack of evenness in the body and feed that back through the on screen display. Which suggests it could be useful for hemiplegics

Wii, Eye Toy and Literacy

The wonderful literacy expert Sue Palmer drew my attention to the way the alphabet can be taught using movement, with kids using their whole bodies to learn the shapes of letters - a bit like a massive use of the Magic pencil technique used by Clare Elstow in the BBC Words and Pictures series before she took over Cbeebies. Sue saw this technique used in scandinavian primary schools. The Wii and Eye Toy technology seems to me to be made for this.

Eye Toy and Wii Fit 2

And the Wii Fit takes this possibility a step further.  Another issue for mild cerebral palsy cases - and for many people without the condition - is posture and balancing the weight evenly on both sides of the body - the kind of balance you strive to achieve in an Alexander Technique class. A board that gives you accurate feedback about whether you are using both sides evenly is a significant development. The Wii Fit seems able to do this with an onscreen display to give you your level of wobble. Using this should in theory train you into recognising what your body feels like when you’re standing evenly. But does it know whether you have both feet flat on the board while you do this? Only one way to find out . . . 

Eye Toy and Wii Fit 1

I was cynical but the Wii fit is a great bit of kit. Like its relatively unsung predecessor, the PS2 Eye Toy, its potential for educational use is the most exciting thing about it. I first saw Eye Toy Play in 2003 on a six-hour stop-over in the otherwise barren airport lounge at Doha. No idea what it was. No instructions, but three bored boys taught my 8-year-old to use it and he taught me. At first simple games like Kung Fu and Wishi Washi seemed a harmless way of passing the time, but observing and playing them myself it seemed to me it was capable of development into a formidable tool for the rehabilitation of stroke victims and for other physiotherapeutic uses. The way the games motivate effort chimes with the kind of approach a Bobath therapist uses.

http://www.bobath.org.uk/TheBobathApproach.html

Briefly, a child with cerebral palsy may have limited movement from an early age. In order to improve, the child must be encouraged and enticed to use the parts of the body affected by the early brain injury. Otherwise, the longer a part of the body goes unstimulated, the more it loses its potential - use it or lose it applies in a major way to very young children with this condition. A child, whose right arm is affected will favour their left arm overmuch, and may ignore the right completely, leaving it to atrophy and greatly magnifying the consequences of the brain injury for the adult they become. Conversely, actively using affected limbs will reap big rewards. Cerebral palsy is a physical disability, not a mental disability and it can be alleviated and overcome by physical activity. Making very small children appreciate that is difficult if not impossible. But it’s in the early months and years that huge gains are possible.

Looked at in this light Wishi Washi and Kung Fu could be the perfect tool for making a child work both sides of the body evenly and spontaneously, as that’s the most efficient way to get the high score. So whether the child appreciates its benefits or not, it’s potentially an excellent way of getting a small child to literally play along with a physiotherapist. Or even possibly without one.

More to come on this subject

My internet bridegroom

I got married last year to a man I met on the internet in 1999. We’d got engaged years ago but we kept putting the wedding off because we couldn’t work out how to cope with our odd collection of family and friends. It was only the deaths of some of them that made us realise if we left it any longer they might all have gone the same way.

If you meet a man on the internet – and I do strongly urge you to do so – you leap over a lot of the stumbling blocks traditionally dividing couples; race, class, politics and so forth. In our case it left us with an interesting group of putative wedding guests.

Well - more than just ‘interesting’; they were an unruly and ill-matched bunch. Just like the bride and groom. Some of them mad, bad and dangerous. Others curmudgeonly and abrasive, quick to take offence and to dish it out. They came from all classes and temperaments, some of them embracing their fellow man like long-lost social workers, others with more than a touch of the Genghis Khans, so I struggled a bit with how to introduce them to each other.

I’d been to a lot of weddings before and they fell into one of two categories. There are ones where you get told where to sit. This means you have to last a four-hour lunch with people you’d run across a motorway blindfold to get away from. And the ones involving the informal meal you can eat with ‘whoever you like’.  I don’t know about you. Maybe you’re very cool about approaching total strangers but I always end up eating with the one other person in the room I know already because I came with them. I can’t possibly approach tight-knit groups of people I don’t know with my wilting ham roll and chicken drumstick.

So if you’re thinking of getting married soon and in keeping with the internet age, I think you should consider a third way to arrange your guests for maximum social interaction - a speed-dating arrangement. Serve five mini-courses, and rearrange the guests between each course according to your whims – age, height, month of birth …

Families must be deliberatley torn apart. Husbands and wives, girlfriends and boyfriends need to be separated and  set down next to people they’ve never met, and probably never will again.  You don’t need music or a disco, only odd speeches scattered through a very long lunch. A sort of teenager’s nightmare. This was how we did it and I couldn’t recommend it to you more highly. Shorn of their family armour, people blossom. Teenagers definitely need to be liberated from the disapproving eyes of friends who know them too well, As a result of this rough treatment our guests, even some of the teenagers, blossomed like a thousand flowers, or at least like a hundred really nice, interesting and friendly people. We barely recognised them.

By the end of the night we had to throw them out of the venue, and the next day once-cool teenagers sat on my sofa and asked when we could do it all over again. So  if you’re an internet bride getting married soon and your guests are causing you anxiety, stop sweating over the table plans, just herd them about like cattle between each course and force them to say hello to  strangers.  You can think of it as sort of collaborative thing - a Web 2.0 wedding. And it was so much fun I’m going to do it again next time.

The Convent

I watched the final episode of The Convent last night.
I’m surprised at how much I’ve enjoyed this series - utterly absorbing and exactly the right blend of tension, heroism and villainy. It makes a wonderful contrast to Big Brother in which we see a pack of unrelievedly infantile kidults who can’t quite see anything beyond the bottom of a glass or the celebrity endorsement, being cast into a pit to tear each other apart. This of course is entertaining and sometimes results in some interesting self examination but lacks the texture of the Convent.

http://www.poorclaresarundel.org/Pages/default.htm

In The Convent we see four youngish women, fairly representative of the women I know, some of whom are childish and petulant and seem incapable of accepting that anything can be other than their wishes, some of them genuinely open to the experience, all undergoing a life of contemplation for 40 days. The parallels with Big Brother are intriguing, but the main difference here is the intervention. The Convent’s reality stars have an unbelievable resource to draw on in the Poor Clare sisters- who, if they ever want to leave the convent and set up in business, could open the most successful psychotherapy practice in the Western world.

These nuns become gentle, loving guides and mentors, listening, and understanding all and offering compassionate questions and thoughts which demonstrate ably why religion in this deeper guise, deserves our attention. It shows that being a Christian can be more than an argument over who gets to do the church flowers and becomes instead a deep personal journey. Paradoxically, in surrendering to God, you can gain control over your self, and in denying and disciplining yourself, you can become what you are, seems to me to be what is demonstrated on the screen.

I’m surprised mainly because my friends and acquaintances who were brought up by nuns seem to have had universally bad and, in some cases, damaging experiences, but this series has offered a powerful other view .

If you catch it, make sure you listen to Angela’s poem at 36 minutes in.

I was a bit taken aback by what seemed the slightly absurd result of this life enhancing change. Angela, has been inspired to quit her high powered job and set up a “clothing 4 dogs” website at

http://www.clothes4dogs.com/rubber.html

I was particularly taken by the little rubber coats for dogs.

You can also read Victoria’s Convent Diary at

http://www.wildwomenpress.com/Site/The%20Convent%20Diaries.html

But I can’t be bothered yet.

Barnsley Thoughts

Watching re runs of the Young Ones and remembering the first time I ever saw Alexei Sayle, for some reason, puts me in mind of Charlie Williams,

http://ayup.co.uk/gods/gods0-4.html One of my first role models because he was a sucessful black man with a Yorkshire accent.

A further page details David Bradley, star of Kes, the first film I ever saw in which people spoke, on screen, with ordinary Yorkshire accents.

And Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Yorkshire_people - possibly not entirely accurate; it does claim that Billie Whitelaw is a Yorkshire woman despite listing her as “Born in Warwickshire” Maybe we own that now as well?

But best link - try out the Charlie Williams Joke Box here..

http://www.donny.co.uk/rovers/charlie.php

Barnsley Beckons

Redundancy has been drifting towards me for some time and is now nudging up against the shore line. I feel like I’ve spent forever leaving. It was first announced 17 months ago, and I’m very tired of answering the “when do you leave?” question. “Not soon enough”, is the answer. I have had a wonderful time working in this place for the last 16 years, but I’m really looking forwards to going.
More on this subject coming soon.

http://www.barnsleyandfamily.com/myhometownpage2.htm

a couple of interesting pics here of the Barnsley I remember