Jared Stein – Education, Technology, Culture, and the Internet

I’ve been trying to sort out types of reading processes as types or modes that relate to differing goals. What I’m calling “types” differs from processes, strategies, and styles–but that’s another post. Let me summarize a handful of key identifications and distinctions that have been made in the research literature (more…)

Professional-grade commercial eyetracking systems can cost $15,000 (EyeTech) or more (Tobii). Renting is cheaper–about 10% of the retail cost of these systems for a month–but still considerable. And while commercial eyetracking software has advanced significantly in the last few years (e.g. headgear no longer required) and is continuing to advance at an impressive pace (e.g. integration with mobile devices such as laptops and tablets), there is also a growing community focused on open source solutions for eyetracking. The most interesting and consolidated of these communities appears to be around the ITU GazeTracker software, originally developed by the Gaze Group. The community congregates around an discussion forum to discuss the GazeTracker software, specific projects, and DIY hardware builds like Martin Tall’s $600 “Raven”:

The Raven is by no means the cheapest option, but it supposedly offers great precision. Since I’m not able to take any courses this spring, a little DIY building may be in order.

I just had the wacky idea that I could force users in an experimental situation to engage in movements that help track their reading behavior in a web browser. This method would employ Javascript and CSS–in short, the script would obscure text outside of the foveal vision area–the readable foveal vision area would be centered near the cursor, requiring the user to move the cursor with her fixations. Combine this with coordinate-based Javascript mouse tracking and user input that reports to a server via AJAX a la UsaProxy, and you’ve got an interesting, albeit limited, method of tracking eye movements (more…)

I was in diagramming mode this afternoon, thinking through different aspects of the processes and interactions of reading. One sketch led me to the following simple visualization of printed vs. digital media. This draft excludes forms and modes, and may only be useful as a component of my own understanding:

I snatched up this passage from Hawthorne’s “Blithedale Romance” for its fitting description of the state I sometimes wonder if we’re trapped in:

I was beginning to lose the sense of what kind of a world it was, among innumerable schemes of what it might or ought to be. It was impossible, situated where we were, not to imbibe the idea that everything in nature and human existence was fluid, or fast becoming so; that the crust of the Earth, in many places, was broken, and its whole surface portentously upheaving; that it was a day of crisis, and that we ourselves were in the critical vortex.

I appreciate how, with all his irresolution and weakness, Coverdale persistently pierces the novel with his voice of experience and reason, though to his colleagues this may be equivocated as cynical, lazy, uninspired, uncommitted, or even counterrevolutionary. I won’t say I’m like Coverdale–no “sagacious man” here–but I do often feel the same, and, too, desire to break out of and away from the groups in which I dwell.

Quotes and notes from from

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1998. Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books.

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Alright, so maybe “war” is overstating it, but as I argued earlier this year Apple is very much posturing itself against the idea of the open web and for the closed consumption environment controlled by its Apps. I stumbled on a couple follow-up posts that follow-up and nuance this debate (more…)

Late last week I spent some energy questioning and answering my current understanding of dual-coding theory and it’s distinction between verbal and non-verbal, vs. visual and non-visual (more…)