Don Norman's jnd.org / Designing the Infrastructure - 1 views
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The infrastructure of our computer technology can be overwhelming. My computer's infrastructure gets more complex each year, and all this complexity requires attention. Upgrades and security modifications. The need to change passwords for many accounts, and the need to keep my list of passwords up to date, synchronized across all my computers. The need to reboot, defragment, do continual scans for viruses and malcontent software, the need to renew batteries and accounts. Backup files. It seems that every day I spend considerable time on the infrastructure. Because the ability to maintain infrastructure is seldom designed with care, each simple activity can become daunting. Each new device purchased requires installation, complete with registration, agreeing to unread but undoubtedly onerous legal conditions, and finding space and sockets for all the communication and power cable. Did I mention that these invariably require stopping all work, saving everything, and rebooting, after typing in a long, complex registration number? I should have.
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Infrastructure is taken for granted. It is time it is given as much attention as the primary applications, else maintaining the infrastructure will itself become our primary activity.
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It is time to work on infrastructure. It threatens to dominate our lives with ugliness, frustration, and work. We need to spend more time on the designs for infrastructure. We need to make it more attractive, more accessible, and easier to maintain. Infrastructure is intended to be hidden, to provide the foundation for everyday life. If we do not respond, it will dominate our lives, preventing us attending to our priory concerns and interests and instead, just keeping ahead of the maintenance demands.
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When I think about "infrastructure", I normally think about roads, wires, sewerage and so on. But how about educational technology and instructional design? From reading Don Norman's musings about infrastructure, I realized that if we want our technological implementations to be successfully adopted, very often it's essential to also consider the infrastructure needed to support our tech designs and implementations. Personally, I think infrastructure for education and instructional design need not always be physical things. They could be intangibles such as having to update a database, notify the relevant people in charge, call this person or that to come unlock the computer lab, etc. My mum's been a teacher for 40+ years. She's great. But she really hates the computer. Not because of the learning needed to use Microsoft Word. She's quite fine with it. But it's all the non-Microsoft Word things that she has to do - reboot, turn the computer on, manage the files, etc... - that makes her scream. "It is time to work on infrastructure. It threatens to dominate our lives with ugliness, frustration, and work. We need to spend more time on the designs for infrastructure. We need to make it more attractive, more accessible, and easier to maintain. Infrastructure is intended to be hidden, to provide the foundation for everyday life. If we do not respond, it will dominate our lives, preventing us attending to our priory concerns and interests and instead, just keeping ahead of the maintenance demands." - Don Norman Food for thought: What are some underlying "infrastructure" (tangible and intangible) that I may encounter in an educational technology project? Are there existing infrastructure that I can take advantage of to minimize time and $? How can we minimize the amount of infrastructure maintenance needed?
