1. Add more informative labels to the “Available Widgets” pool. Leave the column of available/used/unused widgets along the left side of the screen, but move the brief descriptions of widget functions (currently taking up space in the middle of the screen) underneath their respective widget icons (or into tooltips?), and add a note describing the current placement of the widget, e.g.the “Add” link could toggle with something like, “Currently added to Sidebar Three”
2. In the space that has opened up, allow users to display controls for up to six widgitized areas simultaneously, each in its own “Widget Area Management Box,” just like the “Current Widgets” single display. If the theme does not have that many widgetized areas, or you don’t need to work with more than one or two, the extra Widget Area Management Boxes can collapse, like the boxes for tags and categories below the post editing window. Uncollapsed boxes can display a widget area, or can read “none selected.”
3. Allow users to decide whether each Widget Area Management Box will display its widgets in a column (portrait orientation) or a row (landscape orientation).
4. Make everything draggable. Allow users to move individual widgets back and forth between the from the available pool and the currently displayed Widget Areas, and maybe even allow us to move the Widget Area Management Boxes themselves around in relation to each other.

And here’s the release announcement for the new software. (Watch for the New Widget Interface section of the video at 1:15.) I’d say three out of four science-based recommendations ain’t bad!

Much of the reasoning behind my recommendations involved freeing up working memory to focus on the problem at hand, the correspondences between the blog editor and the final product. That principle of not overloading working memory–and eight others–is brought to bear on teaching & learning by Daniel T. Willingham in Why Don’t Student’s Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. I’m currently reading through this book with an online group of educators in Group 4 of this summer’s CASTLE Book Club hosted by Scott McLeod. Please do drop by and share your thoughts!

I was born in a university hospital in 1967, and in the absence of real military personnel, my childhood consciousness of soldiers (beyond the cartoon villains of World War II) was formed in the cultural echoes of Vietnam and the My Lai Massacre. Military service seemed to me to be something to be avoided, a potential moral failure, connected with American arrogance, dishonor, and injustice towards the world around us. If you truly wanted to serve the country and do good (and I did!), you should go to the city and work for the poor. Speaking of the Vietnam War in his 1967 speech, Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence, Martin Luther King, Jr., said:

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

This past January, listening on the radio to Dr. King’s brilliant (and still relevant!) outline of the tragic historical and moral circumstances of the United States’ involvement in that conflict, I realized how deeply the specific criticisms of that particular time (and the pain of them, more than their call to high American ideals) shaped me, without my ever having been involved in any real sense.

Because of course that tarnished era was ending. By the time we were in Jr. High, Vietnam was too old to be news, too recent to be history, and too painful to be explained to kids.¹ America was finding other distractions. “We were the uncalled generation,” says my brother David, born two years after me. “No one asked us to do anything but buy stuff and watch TV. We were left to salvage an identity for ourselves from the rubble of the Sixties’ culture wars.”

For Nicole, things were different. Her Grandpa Joe received a Purple Heart in the African Campaign in World War II, and the memory of his service has been honored and treasured by his descendants. Her father and all his brothers served in the military (one of them as a career chef), including among them time in Vietnam, Korea, and Germany. No one died. In 1967, she was born on a military base in California, like her father before her. She grew up seeing military service as almost a matter of course, the honorable thing for young men to do for their country when they got out of high school. For her, military service was not traumatic, but a connection with honor and duty and family.

Now we have kids of our own. They’re doing choir and Scouting and little league–and their uncles are going to war. Chris, my brother-in-law’s older brother, died in Afghanistan. Phil, who we just invited over for turkey dinner, may spend Thanksgiving in Tajikistan. Yesterday, our young Scouts planted flags on veterans’ graves and walked in a prairie restoration on the University campus; today we paddled kayaks at Brat Fest; and tomorrow Nicole will train for the Chicago Marathon before joining us on the parade route to watch the marching vets & Scouts & marching bands. Maybe catch the Cubs vs Pirates game in the evening.

About a week ago on Twitter, @TheCubsInHaiku shared an Email From Iraq:

There is nothing more

American than watching

The Cubs from Baghdad

Here is what Memorial Day means to me today: it means remembering the connections we have to those who are elsewhere, remembering that the small things we enjoy here at home exist in a larger system of past and present service, sacrifice and justice. It means both honoring the work, risk, and loss our soldiers are required to bear, and taking responsibility for our decision to require it of them. It means striving to understand the work & sacrifices of soldiers in partnership with the work & sacrifice of builders, programmers, engineers, teachers, storytellers, musicians, journalists, politicians, peacemakers, and parents. It means recognizing the countries and peoples with whom our soldiers interact, examining carefully the economic, cultural, and spiritual relationships we have with them, and repenting when we see we have been in the wrong. It means listening to all the different voices of our histories, so that the sacrifices we’ve made may be truly honorable, and truly honored.

Harwood’s 100 Days Citizen Test asks us as citizens to reflect upon and discuss five questions:

1. Do you believe the nation is moving in the right direction and, if so [or if not], what do you point to?

2. To what extent do you feel the first 100 days is generating “authentic hope,” and to what extent do you see “false hope?”

3. Is your confidence in the ability of government to act effectively [and appropriately] growing or not — and why?

4. How do you feel about those who have different views from the president: are they providing an effective opposing voice — and, if not, what would make them more effective in terms of a healthy public debate?

5. Do you feel there is emerging common ground among people about how the country needs to move forward?

The reason why I believe questions like these are important is because when change occurs, it is often hard to see, confusing to interpret, and for every couple of steps forward there are steps backward. So, on balance, what do you make of what’s happening? How does this current period feel for you?

Head on over to Harwood’s blog to post your answers, or feel free to chime in right here! And if you think (as I do) that he might be on to something, go get yourself a free copy of his most recent book, Make Hope Real

“Five designer aromas — 100% DRM compatible!”

So in the last couple weeks Ian Stewart linked to Scott Wallick’ tales of his accidental (and spectacularly successful!) plunge into the WordPress learning community in On Selling Something I Sort of Own and his encounter with the learner as community member in An Ideal WordPress User; and at Portable Learner, Shanta Rohse shows how she decorates her Thematic WordPress Theme Framework That makes three. header logo for Christmas and Darwin Day.

Meanwhile, Luke Holzmann of Sonlight Curriculum reminds us in Feeding the Problem that learning in community sometimes means coping with frustration and making the effort to work out your own solutions; and Dana Hanley, in What My Daughter Has Learned Through Blogging, tells how her 10 year old has taken ownership of her learning as she designs her new science e-zine for children, The Science Mouse. (Mouse is looking for contributions for the upcoming issues. Visit her list of themes to see how you can be a part of her learning community!)

Finally, Rob Glazebrook of CSS Newbie encourages his readers to buy some books for a good cause at the SitePoint Victoria, Australia, Bushfire Relief Sale. Through this Friday, February 13th, 2009, Melbourne-based web developer community SitePoint is offering FIVE of their well-regarded books (in PDF format) for the price of one — just US$29.95 — and all proceeds will go to the Australian Red Cross to provide relieve for the victims of the worst brush fires in Australian history. I’m picking out my titles already.

And for all of you named here, and many others unmentioned, who make learning communities happen at home, at work, and on the web — thank you!

• Is blogging killing communication? » Principled Discovery – Maybe it is the nature of the blog and the internet. A million voices are shouting through the noise and the easiest way to attract a following is to market outrage. The e-newsletters I receive never merely outline an issue, provide some background and offer suggestions for organizing against an action. Mixed in with this purported goal of the newsletter are hyperbolic statements about the end of America. The end of homeschooling. The end of the family. The end of worker’s rights… Everything is sensationalized. There is never a middle ground. There is always a call to arms.
• E-Books—This Time It’s Real » The Platform by Peter Osnos – In the face of the latest headlines—“Barnes and Noble Had Weak Holiday” (Wall Street Journal); “Putting Off The Ritz: The New Austerity of Publishing” (New York Times) and, grimmest of all, “An Autopsy of the Book Business” (The Daily Beast) by the correctly described “publishing legend” Jason Epstein—I feel like Voltaire’s ridiculous optimist Pangloss in saying that there is significant news to report that is wholly positive for anyone who cares about books.
• NEA Study Shows Reading on the Rise, No Idea Why » Booksquare – Hallelujah and pass the ammunition! Cultural decline is not inevitable. Romans, we are not…If you’ve been hanging around [Booksquare] long enough, you’re not surprised that I’m not surprised that adding online reading to the mix increases the percentage of adults who engage in literary reading, though the range of who, what, when, where, why remain wide open for studying.

Continuously, unnoticeably, at the rate of one second per second, the world turned from what it had been and into what it was to be.

–John Crowley, The Solitudes (Aegypt)

The future of reading

So they encounter Homer, Thurber, Kipling, Asimov, Bradbury, Sturgeon, Tolkein, Borges, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Virginia Woolf, Ursala LeGuin, Staislaw Lem, Connie Willis, Piers Anthony, Susan Cooper, Beowulf. I am passing on my own personal version of my family’s culture, and it takes the form of printed books.

Texts like these have shaped my family’s vision of the world over generations. Yet in today’s brave new digitized world, those books themselves are no longer simple givens. We are, perhaps, living in the time of a publishing revolution to rival that of Gutenberg, when the rich printed heritage of the old is being thrown up against the gleaming possibilities of the networked new. In such a world, are books and reading as we have come to know them — as we have come to know ourselves through them — doomed to obsolescence? What does it mean for kids these days to be readers?

Two Visions

To be young is digital heaven!

Digital publisher Bob Stein at if:book (the Institute for the Future of the Book) imagines authors engaging with readers like professors around their topics. He gives us “an anecdotal report regarding reading in the networked era,” arguing that we should count all of these activities as reading:

A mother in London recently described her ten-year old boy’s reading behavior: “He’ll be reading a (printed) book. He’ll put the book down and go to the book’s website. Then, he’ll check what other readers are writing in the forums, and maybe leave a message himself, then return to the book. He’ll put the book down again and google a query that’s occurred to him.”

Stein’s vision of reading flows from his efforts to understand the use of books beyond their physical form, as conversations situated in a dynamic social network. He argues that the printed & bound form of books obscures the social nature of reading & writing.

The key element running through all these possibilities is the author’s commitment to engage directly with readers. If the print author’s commitment has been to engage with a particular subject matter on behalf of her readers, in the era of the network that shifts to a commitment to engage with readers in the context of a particular subject.

–Bob Stein, “A Unified Field Theory of Publishing in the Neworked Era”

Turn it off — before its too late!

Meanwhile, Emory University English professor Mark Bauerline, author of The Dumbest Generation, argues in the Chronicle of Higher Education that the physical form of text makes all the difference. Citing data from Jakob Nielsen showing that reading online differs dramatically from the reading of printed matter, both in the actual behavior the screen evokes and in the habits of mind that this behavior reinforces. It is good for some things, but not for others.

Once again, this is not so much about the content students prefer — Facebook, YouTube, etc. — or whether they use the Web for homework or not. It is about the reading styles they employ. They race across the surface, dicing language and ideas into bullets and graphics, seeking what they already want and shunning the rest. They convert history, philosophy, literature, civics, and fine art into information, material to retrieve and pass along.

That’s the drift of screen reading. Yes, it’s a kind of literacy, but it breaks down in the face of a dense argument, a Modernist poem, a long political tract, and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention — in a word, slow reading….

We must recognize that screen scanning is but one kind of reading, a lesser one, and that it conspires against certain intellectual habits requisite to liberal-arts learning…Digital technology has become an imperial force, and it should meet more antagonists. Educators must keep a portion of the undergraduate experience disconnected, unplugged, and logged off.

–Mark Bauerline, “Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind: Slow Reading Counterbalances Web Skimming” in The Chronicle of Higher Education September 19, 2008

Like Robert Gu, poet protagonist of Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, Bauerline worries that a digital “paraliteracy,” whatever its particular strengths, will cripple and displace the deep and personal engagement with enduring texts that is the hallmark of traditional liberal-arts learning.

In the face of all this excitement, both pro and con, Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Anarchist in the Library and the forthcoming The Googlization of Everything, argues that digital literacy is not really generational, but based on opportunity and practice, and worthy of an “accurate and subtle” understanding not easily provided by simplistic generational theories:

As a professor, I am in the constant company of 18- to-23-year-olds. I have taught at both public and private universities, and I have to report that the levels of comfort with, understanding of, and dexterity with digital technology varies greatly within every class. Yet it has not changed in the aggregate in more than 10 years…

We should drop our simplistic attachments to generations so we can generate an accurate and subtle account of the needs of young people — and all people, for that matter. A more responsible assessment would divorce itself from a pro- or anti-technology agenda and look at multiple causes for problems we note: state malfeasance or benign neglect of education, rampant consumerism in our culture, moral panics that lead us to scapegoat technology, and, yes, technology itself…Too often we reach for easy, totalizing explanations for cultural phenomena, constructing cartoons of digital youth that have a tone of “gee whiz” or “shame, shame” to describe these new and odd creatures.

–“Generational Myth” in The Chronicle of Higher Education September 19, 2008

So what should we do? Should we worry about teaching our children how they should read? Should we hurry to embrace the radical, digital new? Should we fight to prevent the loss of the unplugged, organic old? When the books we have are no longer the books we knew, who will teach us to read?

Writing, too, provokes these questions, and there, perhaps, we can find a clue:

Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know.

The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you to write.

–Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

As with writing, so with reading. Where we engage, we learn. The page, the page, the eternal text in all its infinite variety, with all its ancient verity, in all its ever-renewing form; the page with its subtle complexity; the page with its shape and smell and texture; the page with its links, connections, and tools; the page we seek and ask for connection, for comfort, for joy, for truth; the page of our parents, the page of our children; the page of our heart, soul, mind, and strength; the page that was, that is, that is to come — that page will teach us to read.

Entrepreneurs are entrepreneurial, as differentiated from managerial or strategic, because they think effectually; they believe in a yet-to-be-made future that can substantially be shaped by human action; and they realize that to the extent that this human action can control the future, they need not expend energies trying to predict it. In fact, to the extent that the future is shaped by human action, it is not much use trying to predict it ? it is much more useful to understand and work with the people who are engaged in the decisions and actions that bring it into existence.

–from “What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial?” (http://www.effectuation.org/ftp/effectua.pdf) by Saras D. Sarasvathy, Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, and author of Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise

For my part, I’ll be delighted if they make it possible to display two or more widgetized areas (”sidebars”) on the widget management screen, and to drag and drop widgets between them.

I explored the cognitive psychology behind that design strategy in an earlier post, WordPress 2.5 Widgets?Taking the Load Off Your Mind. Here are the takeaway design suggestions:

1. Add more informative labels to the “Available Widgets” pool. leave the column of available/used/unused widgets along the left side of the screen, but move the brief descriptions of widget functions (currently taking up space in the middle of the screen) underneath their respective widget icons (or into tooltips?), and add a note describing the current placement of the widget, e.g.the “Add” link could toggle with something like, “Currently added to Sidebar Three”
2. In the space that has opened up, allow users to display controls for up to six widgetized areas simultaneously, each in its own “Widget Area Management Box,” just like the “Current Widgets” single display. If the theme does not have that many widgetized areas, or you don’t need to work with more than one or two, the extra Widget Area Management Boxes can collapse, like the boxes for tags and categories below the post editing window. Uncollapsed boxes can display a widget area, or can read “none selected.” [Users could also decide how many boxes to display in the first place.]
3. Allow users to decide whether each Widget Area Management Box will display its widgets in a column (portrait orientation) or a row (landscape orientation). [This allows users to visually match the management screen display with the display of each particular sidebar on the blog.]
4. Make everything draggable. Allow users to move individual widgets back and forth between the from the available pool and the currently displayed Widget Areas, and maybe even allow us to move the Widget Area Management Boxes themselves around in relation to each other.