I’ll Have 1,000 Words
It happened again. I followed a Tweet to a blog post promising some information that I’ve been looking for and found something I’ve come to dread: a video embedded where I expected text. Clever shorts can be entertaining and informative. Slideshows or video tutorials with voiceover can be effective as well. However it is boring to watch an ordinary-looking person wearing no makeup sitting in an ordinary-looking home office talking at the camera for five minutes or more. Even worse, being subjected to a long Powerpoint slideshow that the blog author reads verbatim. What’s...
read moreWhat is a Book?
Just began a project on a team revising a book. The title is old enough to contain vague references to “the World Wide Web.” The challenges: more visuals! use links to information that may expire! use interactive calculators online where there were previously worksheets! Some people insist that the Web is killing the book. I think this project is an example of the ways the Web enables us to let books be books again, of freeing them from the desktop publishing revolution’s legacy of easy, cheap books used as teachers. Eject the sensory content and interactivity from the...
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Barbara's Virtual World