Do you know the percentage of people in the world who use mobile phones? In 1997, the answer was 4 percent. By 2007, it was nearly 50 percent. The fraction of people who are mobile phone users is the kind of fact you might read in a magazine and quote at a cocktail party. But years later the number you would be quoting would not just be inaccurate, it would be seriously wrong. The difference between a tiny fraction of the world and half the globe is startling, and completely changes our view on global interconnectivity.

Introducing the mesofact originally appeared on Portable Learner on March 2nd, 2010 Tweet this post.

Learning styles: Reports of demise exaggerated originally appeared on Portable Learner on February 19th, 2010 Tweet this post.

This morning I surfed the web like it’s August 2001. A couple of weeks before 9/11, and years before the mobile web, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 6, a web browser that was derided for its security issues and lack of support for web standards, and remained unimproved for years while Microsoft enjoyed a near monopoly.

It has been the bane of existence for web designers ever since, who are tasked with creating a design for the modern web, and then figuring out alternative designs for IE6, on which nothing works properly. It makes frequent appearances in “worst tech products of all time” lists. It inspires campaigns to bring down IE and for an IE6 death march. Still, on a recent web project, I insisted the web designers design alternatives to handle IE6 bugs. You must design the web for your visitors. The recent news that Google will phase out support of IE6 in 2010, that the security-conscious governments of Germany and France have asked their citizens to switch browsers to avoid security breaches, and that Mozilla and Opera have seen a surge in the number of people downloading their alternative browsers did not sway me. IE6 is still stuck on the computers of almost thirty percent of the the visitors to the site, whose companies that use the antiquated browser to run some of their intranet applications. Experts more qualified than I make security decisions. IE6 is a forced choice for those who do not have privileges to install applications.

This morning I also wanted to add an RSS feed to my aggregator. Unfortunately, IE6 does not have built-in support for RSS feeds. If you click on a feed icon or link in IE6, you may see an inappropriate security warning or you may see “code,” which means you are viewing the raw contents of the RSS file. You need know that you must install an external feed reader, or upgrade to at least IE7 (the current version is IE8) before viewing and subscribing to feeds. This means nothing to typical users who have lead a sheltered life on the intranet.

This does sway me. In my view, RSS feed support is not in the same class of IE6 deficiencies as PNG transparent support or minimum/maximum width constraints. It is more significant than layout consistency and pixel-perfect rendering; RSS is the gateway to Web2.0. RSS feeds are the foundation technology for aggregating, filtering and personalizing the world wide web of resources. Without RSS you are a bystander, not a participant in today’s internet. So, what can we do to inform the other subset of IE 6 users not trapped by their organization’s IT policies that their web experience is seriously degraded?

Even Facebook, which has done more to naturalize news feeds in the browsers of the uninitiated, encourages visitors to upgrade their browsers. Andy Clarke’s solution is to serve a universal, basic, IE6-only style sheet is especially elegant. The key idea is to hide fancy layouts from IE6 by concentrating on the content and its typography. It visually informs without penalizing visitors that their experience could be improved. This may not be an appropriate solution for professional websites, but it is a good solution for personal web sites like mine.

Andy Clark does not advise how to implement the universal IE6 CSS; here is how I have done it on this site. First I add a conditional snippet of code at the top of the page in the site’s (X)HTML markup that targets IE6 browsers with a special message:
[sniplet ie6-body-notice]
Other browsers will simply ignore its contents. Then, I include browser specific stylesheets in the head section of the web pages:
[sniplet ie6-head-stylesheets]
Browsers that are not IE6 (or older) will be served the regular, full-experience stylesheet. In addition, IE7 will have extra IE7-specific styles because it still has a few issues. However, IE6 and older will be served the Universal Stylesheet for Internet Explorer 6 hosted on Google Code.

To save you from launching any antiquated browsers, here is a screenshot of the home page for a visitor using IE6. Click on image for a larger view.

The Internet Explorer 6 Dilemma originally appeared on Portable Learner on February 15th, 2010 Tweet this post.

We used to think that we could publish speculative research which advanced interesting new ideas which may be wrong, but which were important to provoke debate and discussion. We don’t think that now. We don’t seem able to have a rational conversation in the public space about difficult controversial issues without people drawing a conclusion which could be very averse.…The 19th-century days where you could sit in the salon at the Royal Society and have a private conversation amongst your fellows just doesn’t exist anymore. So I think yeah, too much information in this particular case is a bad thing, which seems to go against every kind of democratic principle that we believe in. But in the case of science, it seems to be true.

But it is not. I can’t help but wonder if we had had this conversation, in public, ten years ago when the study was still “speculative research” we may well have averted the flawed decision to publish it in the first place. We need more information, not less, and more inclusive conversations, not narrowly confined to the medical community. The public may well have to engage the medical community in the public space “difficult conversations without drawing a conclusion that could be very averse…”

Vaccines, The Lancet retraction and open scientific debate originally appeared on Portable Learner on February 9th, 2010 Tweet this post.

Digital enthusiasts typically spend too much energy cheer-leading and no time focusing the world on the real problems and threats that the Internet has produced. This reading list is designed to as an antidote. It features a number of authors who realistically warn us of the risks of mindlessly embracing powerful tools before we understand them, without raising apocalyptic fears to scrap the undertaking altogether. HT to Siva Vaidhyanathan for triggering this list with her review of Delete.

Reading List

• To read
• Recommended
• You have better things to do

Information Abundance originally appeared on Portable Learner on February 2nd, 2010 Tweet this post.

Real body language originally appeared on Portable Learner on February 1st, 2010 Tweet this post.

Surprising gaps in your self-knowledge originally appeared on Portable Learner on January 31st, 2010 Tweet this post.

Atoms to bits originally appeared on Portable Learner on January 29th, 2010 Tweet this post.

When your Jeep spins lazily off the mountain road and slams backward into a snowbank, you don’t worry immediately about the cold. Your first thought is that you’ve just dented your bumper. Your second is that you’ve failed to bring a shovel. Your third is that you’ll be late for dinner. Friends are expecting you at their cabin around eight for a moonlight ski, a late dinner, a sauna. Nothing can keep you from that.

It is an engrossing read. Narrative experiences can be so powerful. Some will transport you to another place and time in a way that is so compelling it seems real. A narrative like this could provide the structure for an entire training program. The story offers an organizing structure for new experiences and knowledge. It could shift the focus from a rote memorization of facts in a textbook to a diagnosis of a real-world condition.

The cold hard facts of freezing to death originally appeared on Portable Learner on January 27th, 2010 Tweet this post.

I think what is really very important to recognize is that, when we look at the history of the world, we’re not looking at the history of different civilizations truncated and separated from each other. They’ve a huge amount of contact with each other, there is a kind of inter-connectedness. So I’ve always felt, not to think of the history of the world as a history of civilizations, but as a history of world civilizations evolving in often similar, often diverse ways, always interacting with each other. And this is a very different view from the clash of civilizations to which we were exposed some years ago, as a way to understand enmity in the world. Enmity has not been the general condition of the relationship between people across the world in history.

The programme is fully socially mediated, both online and offline with regional museum programs; it will be interesting to see if the stories sustain the momentum generated in these first episodes.

Telling a history of the world with objects originally appeared on Portable Learner on January 26th, 2010 Tweet this post.