Sherman Lee's Report 4: analyzing the generational curriculum psy 409b

REPORT 4:

ANALYZING THE GENERATIONAL CURRICULUM



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DIAGRAM OF GENERATIONAL CURRICULUM



ANALYZING THE GENERATIONAL CURRICULUM


What are the implications of this site?


Since this site is a natually expanding phenomenon, it will forever be evoloving. I think of the generational curriculum like a time-machine. If you go through the generations starting from G-1 to the present you can see definite trends in each generation. What happens is that each generation builds upon the works of the prior generations because of the advancement of technology. Each generation not only benefits from the works of the other generations but adds to the knowledge pool so that the next generation could continue this tradition of advancement.
For example, I was a member of G-3 in both the traffic psychology class and the cyberpsychology class. Since I am now a part of G-4b I have observered how this generation used the knowledge that I helped to acquire in G-3 to their works now. They now use cut-and-paste more because our generation discovered that it was much easier to use this system than to, for example, telnet information from uhunix to our papers.
I also observed the rate in which the generations worked at and it seems as if every new generation catches on to the concepts faster and better. I think I could attribute this to the fact that there is a generational curriculum. Without the use of the generational curriculum I believe that the rate of progression and evolution would probably stay constant.

What should be the approach to present a "front end" that can integrate this site?


Now that this site is growing at a phenomenal rate, I believe that there should be a practical way of accomodating the eager cybernaut that happens upon this site. There are many different approaches that can be used such as; Tour Guides, Indexes, and Search Engines.
I think tour guides are a great tool to travel through a site without getting lost. If I were to go through a site without knowing how large it is I could be missing out on some great pages without ever knowing it. That's where I think the use of tour guides come in. If you can think of a site like a city and you were only there for one day, what approach would you take to visit it? Would you just get on a bus and get off where ever you feel? Would you continue this pattern throughout the day? I don't think so, I think you would probably want to get the most out that day and take a tour so that you can see the best parts of the city. For this site I took Calvin Chung's Tour 1.I like it but I think it needed to be more focused because I tended to get lost in all the options that he gave me. I began to wander without guidance and soon I got lost. However, I like the idea and I'm sure the future generations will build on it.
I believe that indexes are a valuable source for any site. It allows the cybernaut to look at all of his/hers options on a page. The real value of an index is that you can always find what your looking for if you know it by name. However, Indexes are really not useful to the browsing cybernaut. If that's you I suggest the tour!
In my opinion search engines within large sites are a must! However, I think that some people think that just putting a search engine on their site solves the problem. When I talk about a search engine within the site, I mean that it is specifically used to search within that site and not any other.

How does this site differ from other sites on the web?


Well there are many different ways to describe how this site is different from many others. A good way is to evaluate it on set of criteria. The criteria consists of: (1)regualarity, consistency, and predictability, (2)elegant navigation and supports user task. I will evaluate how this site measures as far as this criteria is concerned, then if needed I will compared that to other sites.

Regularity, Consistency, and predictabilty


This site despite it's enormous size has a shared fuctionality. This means that all pages are consitent with the theme of the site. If you look through all the pages you will see that they all have ties to psychology, which is the focus of this site.
This site also has consistent options within all the pages which gives it a uniform and practical look. These consistent options are; Links to Dr. James' homepage and the students' homepage and an e-mail button on the end. You may think that these options are no big deal until you go through a large site and find these options missing in most of the pages.
There are also internal consistencies within each generation. For example, G4b students all should have a homepage, 5 reports up, and the links to Dr. James' homepage and their own homepages'.
As far as the whole site is concerned it is not very predicatable in the sense that you would know what every site is about by browsing through a few pages. This site is too vast for that. That is also why there are different front-end ideas that are being developed in order to address this problem.
As far as each generation is concerned it is very predictable because there is a certain standard that was placed on that generation.

Elegant navigation and supports user task


When it comes to navigating through this huge site there are few minor problems. As with any large site, getting from route A to route f could be a slow task. However, the options that are standard in each page make the journey easier. For example if I were going through pages of someones report in generation 2 and I didn't know how to get back to their homepage then I would simply scroll to the top and click on their homepage link which is standard in every student page.
As far as supporting the users' task there really aren't any criticisms because I found no problems in using this site for a variety of different jobs.

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