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Mommies on a Blogging Mission! (But is it the right one?)

Ever wonder what happened to that cute little girl who became famous from the 1980s hit TV show Punky Brewster? Me neither but I’ll tell you anyway because it leads to an interesting discussion. A few months ago I came across an article about Soleil Moon Frye (aka Punky Brewster) and her post-Punky success as a “mom-treprenuer.” The article went on to explain that Moon Frye more or less left her acting career to be home with her kids and now makes big bucks blogging about mommy hood products that she loves. Others moms, not necessarily former celebrities, have also encountered success at this money making opportunity.

Towards a typology of second-screen Apps

There's a cliché used in academia for titling papers presenting a tentative or incomplete theory or typology. Scholars can get away with a lot by simply beginning the title with "Towards a..." as in "Towards an existential-phenomenological psychotherapy." So my post today is "Towards a typology of second-screen Apps."

User testing: An unnecessary hassle? Not quite

A few weeks ago, I attended World Usability Day 2011 on the IUPUI campus. While most of the presentations were the standard fare one would expect to see at a conference of usability professionals (presentations on usability basics, panels on design strategy, and fun interface mock-up exercises), one speaker left me somewhat puzzled.

A Simple School Improvement Model: Unlock the Powers of the Internet

Last month I attended the Center of Excellence in Leadership of Learning (CELL) conference in Indianapolis. The theme for this year’s conference was, “Indiana’s Future: Navigating New Demands and New Directions.” There are many reasons why we need to “navigate new demands and new directions” in education. There’s emerging media, testing, access, national economic competitiveness, and many more factors influencing the current dictate to change how we reinvent education in the 21st century. There’s also, in my opinion, a more pressing driver for change — to eradicate boredom.

Reconsidering My Views on Privacy Thanks to A New Book: Public Parts

In his book Public Parts: How Sharing In The Digital Age Improves The Way We Work and Live, Jeff Jarvis declares that there are enough advocates for privacy, and not enough for publicness.

Eliminating the lab: Designing a UX testing space to create a naturalistic setting

Designing a user experience testing environment to support both participant comfort and researcher needs has its challenges. Researchers from Ball State University’s Center for Media Design transformed an aging residential property near campus into a usability and user experience research lab with an authentic home environment.

Media convergence blurring boundaries between platforms and content

Sometimes we call it media convergence and sometimes we call it "blurring the boundaries" — but perhaps the more descriptive label is decoupling platforms and content. Late baby boomers like me grew up in a simpler time when content could be identified by platform: TV shows played on the TV from broadcast or cable signals; radio was what played on the radio; newspapers and books were printed on paper. The digital revolution decoupled these traditional platform/content connections. Now we can access TV content on our desktop computer, laptop computer, tablet and smartphone.

Video: The Future of TV

Ball State Digital Storytelling students, Jeffery Hendrix, Junliang Wu and Josh Schweigert submitted this video depicting their vision of what the future of television may look like for the Cable Mavericks Student Technology Challenge. The team was named Grand Prize winner after competed among other schools at the Cable Maverick's Masters Forum in New York City!

Facebook’s popularity in India: A cultural perspective

Facebook has become the most popular social media platform in India. With 31 million active users (as of August 2011), India trails only the United States and Indonesia in global usage. This has surpassed the orkut (social networking site by Google) users, which was the most popular before 2010. Nevertheless, Facebook has conquered the social media networking in India, just as it has in almost all countries now.

Thinking Aloud: The Best Strategies for Eye Tracking in Usability Studies

Over the last week I have been following discussions on think aloud methodologies to go along with eye tracking usability research. Say you’re testing the usability of a software application by giving your participants a list of tasks to complete while being eye tracked. With this type of study, using a think aloud method would be appropriate because the eye tracking will still not necessarily provide the emotional response to the task result or explain why the participant is looking in a particular area. The difficult question to answer is how do you implement a think aloud method without compromising a natural response to task completion and visual attention? Will think aloud take away too much of the actual time on task and, as a result, throw off the eye tracking?

Posted on January 17, 2012

Mommies on a Blogging Mission! (But is it the right one?)

Posted by Jacqueline Martinsen in category Uncategorized

Ever wonder what happened to that cute little girl who became famous from the 1980s hit TV show Punky Brewster? Me neither but I’ll tell you anyway because it leads to an interesting discussion. A few months ago I came across an article about Soleil Moon Frye (aka Punky Brewster) and her post-Punky success as a “mom-treprenuer.” The article went on to explain that Moon Frye more or less left her acting career to be home with her kids and now makes big bucks blogging about mommy hood products that she loves. Others moms, not necessarily former celebrities, have also encountered success at this money making opportunity.

Read more

Posted on January 9, 2012

Towards a typology of second-screen Apps

Posted by Michael Holmes in category Viewing +

There's a cliché used in academia for titling papers presenting a tentative or incomplete theory or typology. Scholars can get away with a lot by simply beginning the title with "Towards a..." as in "Towards an existential-phenomenological psychotherapy." So my post today is "Towards a typology of second-screen Apps."

Read more

Posted on December 19, 2011

User testing: An unnecessary hassle? Not quite

Posted by Ryan Carney in category New & Noteworthy

A few weeks ago, I attended World Usability Day 2011 on the IUPUI campus. While most of the presentations were the standard fare one would expect to see at a conference of usability professionals (presentations on usability basics, panels on design strategy, and fun interface mock-up exercises), one speaker left me somewhat puzzled.

Read more

Media is a constant and pervasive
presence in our lives, saturating nearly
every environment and interaction. Insight and Research at the Center for Media Design (CMD) is charged with exploring a continuing and evolving relationship with media and their impact on our lives.

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