Info Arch: Readings

Going over this Wurman reading made me think of another reading. (Which I can't remember anymore because we've been reading a lot lately! But I think it was that hefty one that Tyler gave us). Since we've been going over creating an experience in almost all of our courses, while sketching out some wireframing ideas I noticed I seemed to be organizing information in ways which I think I would like to experience them. (In doing so, helping the user to go through the site and experience the information similarly to the way that I did.) But like Wurman said, every user brings their own cultural background, biases and perceptions to the table. Whether or not the user will really experience the information the way I did is out of my control in that sense, but I think that's what's great about things like these. Everyone will bring their own information and leave with something different than someone else.

That being said, I'm interested in seeing how digging further into the readings by having to organize them for someone else to experience will alter my perceptions of them. I chose Paula Scher and Gordon Salchow's education readings, mostly because how we learn and how people think we should administer that learning is something that interests me. At the moment I don't think I lean towards either Paula or Gordon's essays-- in my opinion, we all learn differently, and to say that even a specific subject can only be learned in a particular way seems ignorant. Each way seems to be one solution: and in my experience as a student, to get the best of both worlds makes for a pretty well-rounded understanding. Back to Wurman's point, I found it interesting hearing what everyone had to say during our class discussion-- while my classmates and I seemed to share a general consensus for what was in the readings, Michael had a lot of things to say from his experiences actually being a teacher that none of us would've been able to think of, and Paula and Gordon's essays of course were based on their experiences as teachers and professionals as well. All of these things of course, were based on our own backgrounds as those who are learning, those who teach, and our amount of experience in the field itself. It made me wonder a bit if there were just some things I couldn't understand as a student that a teacher reading the essay might pick out differently.

As far as comparing these essays, I seemed to be breaking it down either by a few points that I had noticed being brought up in both essays, by designer, or by a more exploratory system that would break the essays down in a more outline-like format using quotes from the readings. They also all seem to play with the amount of text being shown on the screen at one time. I think I'm more fond of the idea of being able to toggle text on and off-- just because I think having two huge essays along with supplementary information side by side is overwhelming.