For the Capstone project of my Bachelor of Philosophy degree, I created a proposal for an open learning materials site, complete with preliminary sketches, wireframes, visual design, and even some usability testing.

Download the pdf or read the online version below…

The meanings of technical and industry terms discussed here will not all be immediately apparent from context. I’ve provided a partial glossary of concepts at the end of this document for anyone who may be unfamiliar.

In the summer of 2008, TechCrunch gadget blog founder Michael Arrington announced his intention to enter the world of product production by building a web-enabled touch screen laptop for under three hundred dollars. Obsessed over by gadget geeks as an object of technolust as prototype photos and technical details slowly leaked, the yet-unreleased CrunchPad is significant in multiple ways. Multi-touch technology is entering the mainstream and becoming more important as an emerging HCI paradigm. Storing data in a cloud rather than on a local disk is an equally fundamental shift in personal computing. But perhaps the most important part of the CrunchPad is that it represents the latest step in a movement that has been slowly developing for decades: we increasingly have access to more and more complicated—and simultaneously cheaper and cheaper—computing devices not only in our homes, but everywhere we go. This trend, along with some other marked changes in the world of technology and information, is changing the very way we learn.

One need not wait for the release of the CrunchPad to see small, cheap computers first hand. Prices for new, ultra-portable, web-capable computers are falling fast, and some are reaching mainstream acceptance. Recently the consumer computer industry has seen a skyrocketing demand for netbooks—small, ulta-portable laptops. Though underpowered by modern laptop standards, these are more than powerful enough for their intended purpose of basic web browsing and email, and can be bought for less than $300—comparable to the cost of textbooks for a year of college. Inevitably, these will be almost ubiquitous devices.

As prices for computers continue to fall, wireless network access is becoming more common, making accessing web content easier than ever even without a landline connection.

Budget limitations & the Digital Divide

Simultaneously, ever-present budget limitations, complicated by the recent economic crisis, and the increasing digital divide are causing headaches among the world’s educators. Too often programs like art classes and extracurricular activities—integral components of a well-rounded education—are jettisoned to allow for funds for preparing for standardized testing.

On a larger scale, a global digital divide is increasing along with internet literacy in the West. Solutions like Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child initiative, which aims to provide a cheap laptop to children in developing countries, seem to address the tech divide; but how are students meant to access content? Negroponte doesn’t make this clear. (As the introductory video to the project states only, “There’s neat stuff on the internet.”) Some have offered up Wikipedia as the principal educational content provider, but an encyclopedia is a poor substitute for a textbook. There exists no one online resource that provides an open, universally-accessible, community-developed repository for educational multimedia content. This presentation is a design proposal for such a system.

Goal

Though desktop computers and internet access have been near ubiquitous in United States public schools for about a decade, a standard portal for accessing learning content online had yet to emerge. Developments like these reveal a new opportunity for changing the way we learn for the better. In this document, I propose an alternative digital learning materials resource that addresses these issues. The goal is to create a community-driven, collaboratively created and edited online destination that provides the external materials necessary for an education—in any topic, and in any language. Not merely a website, this tool is meant to be a comprehensive platform for students, teachers, and researchers alike; open, extensible, accessible, and free of cost. Thankfully, the information is already available, waiting to be brought together in one place to become something useful.

Assumptions

Before we go further, it’s best to clarify a few assumptions this document makes. First, we assume that providing the world with a free alternative to teaching materials is a noble goal. It may seem trivial to describe, but if the project is successful there may be serious implications for an entire industry dedicated to making a profit from schools and students who pay a premium for content.

Secondly, it’s important to recognize that while the purpose of such an application is to provide content, that content is only a small piece of a complete education. Teachers are needed to teach. Moreover, formal education is by no means only about absorbing facts, but about learning to work with people and absorbing a million and one other lessons important to living one’s life. A collaborative learning resource may be able to provide content to help teachers, but it’s a poor outright replacement for schooling. This project is meant only to enhance education, not to replace it.

Lastly, any technologist must recognize the limits of a technological medium and design within that medium accordingly. Consider the limitations of textbooks, for example—heavy and fragile, texts don’t afford transportation and easy access, are susceptible to damage and aging, are not editable once published, are expensive, grow outdated, are unavailable to the less fortunate, and lack any means of embedding rich, interactive content. Unlike digital tools, however, textbooks don’t require batteries and a single paper text is available for instant use without purchasing a machine to decode and display its contents. We must always keep in mind that advanced technology does not always lead to an advanced experience, and that careful design and execution is required to make innovation worthwhile.

Attributes of the system

Free

Perhaps the most important attribute of the proposed system is the price point for users and contributors: free. Without a no-cost system, most of the other goals of the system cannot begin. Few users are willing to contribute to a cost-based system, and a system with any cost for the end user would make it prohibitively expensive for low-income students and communities with relatively low income compared to many in the United States.

Open

Like Wikipedia, all original content written for the site will be licensed under a Creative Commons License, which allows anyone to download, reuse, redistribute, manipulate, or even sell the material as long as the derivative work acknowledges the original source and is licensed in a similar manner. Such licenses are sometimes called “viral” licenses because forked versions of the original piece must retain the license and the terms spread from one original work out to many related pieces.

Also like Wikipedia, the source code for the site itself should be made open. This makes the transparency of the site complete, allowing anyone to not only duplicate the content of the site for a competing platform but the technological foundation as well, giving a competitor the ability to create a near perfect complete clone without technical or legal difficulty. An open-source backend requires its administrators to adhere to the founding principals of the platform because it allows for such easy duplication; if users don’t like the way something is being handled by the original founders, they can create a new site without trouble.

Collaborative

Without content, a learning site is of no use. Adding freely available material, like Wikipedia articles, will no doubt be helpful, but facilitating original collaborative development of content by a broad set of users is vital to the wiki model. The tool cannot merely be a collection of others’ resources—this is group effort, and Wikipedia-style debate and cooperation must be encouraged. The inclusion of similar, mostly-complete lectures on the same subject is vastly inferior to one excellent lecture with referenced sources and a variety of materials.

This is not to say there cannot be repetition of content; rather, there must be a reasonable logical divide clearly stated to justify separation of different lessons. “Jack’s Intro to Elementary Statistics” and “An Introduction to Statistics by Max” are redundant and should be combined to reflect the best of each. “An Introduction to Statistics” and “An Introduction to Statistics for ESL Students”, however, reflect two distinguishable goals and therefore two different lessons, although a large amount of overlapping content would be expected.

Comprehensive

Unlike a number of other online learning tools, the wiki must aim to be all encompassing if it is to become a “go-to” tool. Sites like AcademicEarth or MIT limit themselves to lectures, syllabi, or text; all of these and more are required for a full experience.

Though broad, the site should be careful not to be completely all-inclusive. Lessons should be thorough, but restricted to a length reasonable for a normal reader. For practicality’s sake, the scope of the content should not exceed a student’s patience, a teacher’s ability to teach, or an editor’s reasonable ability to moderate.

Culture-neutral

If bridging a global digital divide is one of the goals of the system, making material available in a multitude of languages is absolutely essential. A western-centric tool is only helpful to a relatively small percentage of the world, but a global resource can be achieved with a minor amount of additional labor. Efficiently, many learning sites and wikis are incorporating multi-language support, noting the that the implementation of the feature is not significant compared to the broad audience it brings in.

Rich

The two-fold goal is to first provide open, free learning materials (this is the goal of Wikibooks), and second, to provide enhanced materials that are able to be created because of rich media. Not everyone learns well by reading dry text, and giving students access to a variety of rich content (pictures, illustrations, animations, videos, games, integrated evaluation, peer discussion) helps everyone learn quickly in their own way. Different students learn different in ways, and a multitude of options allows everyone to absorb material in a manner that is most comfortable or advantageous to them.

Aggregative

Though original content is the central piece of this proposal, the availability of already open-licensed content or material in the public domain requires that the site be able to go beyond hosting its own content. The ability to embed or even host external content, preserving its license in its original form, is another way to expand and bring together many different kinds of media.

Usable

The system is complex and meant to be a large part of the experience, and so must be nothing if not usable. The visual design of the site must be clean, the navigation clear, and the design elements concise. A multitude of factors determine a site’s usability, and hundreds of books have been written on the subject. The architecture of the tool must be created with usability in mind from the start. Perhaps the most obvious part of ensuring proper usability is carrying out usability testing, simple observation of users accomplishing tasks.

Accessible

Presenting structure in multimedia format and in multiple natural languages is not enough to make it accessible for all learners. A site must follow the guidelines of accessibility, which organize and label the technical structure of the material to make it easy for disabled users to access. Learners with screen readers, for example, must be able to easily navigate the site without a sighted human aid. Spoken versions of text, downloadable in a common audio format, and closed-captioned videos both would tremendously aid learners who might not otherwise be able to easily access learning materials.

Web-based

Obviously, a system with the above requirements depends on the “internet” as it is commonly understood—as a distributed global network of computers, with servers storing the information, and users’ client computers requesting content from the servers and contributing content back. But not everything on the internet is on the World Wide Web, the familiar system of webpages accessed through an aptly-named web browser. Though an API will open the application to a number of different presentation methods developed by third parties, the main hub of the tool must be web based, meaning written in HTML and accessed through a web browser. The web is by far the de-facto means of sharing information across global networks, and conforming to modern HTML, CSS, Javascript, and online video technologies ensures the information available on the system will be available to the greatest number of users around the world. Web-based tools are also easy to implement because web programmers are common, and the system is not dependent on third-party software. Nothing about the technical specifications of the system require a platform-specific application; the lingua franca of the information world is by far the best choice as a technical foundation.

Semantic

Though semantic capability is still rare, the ability for not only users but computers to access information will likely be a common attribute in connected networks once it comes into common practice. Information must not only be put on the web, but given real programmatic meaning through standards like the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Allowing users to use these technologies in conjunction with traditional markup not only makes the resource future-ready, it will technically mesh nicely with the application’s API. Features like RSS filtering, embedding content, and finding meaningful content through complex search terms will all benefit from a semantic ability.

Exploring the competition

Has this already been done?

No product or service has combined all of the above attributes to date, although progress is being made in the area of open source teaching materials. Often, online offerings are either restricted by competitive licensing or rely too heavily on the traditional model of a textbook, providing little in the way of aggregated rich media.

Wikipedia is similar in a lot of ways, but—in Wikipedia’s own words—“The purpose of Wikipedia is to present facts, not to teach subject matter.” The purpose of this project is to help teach subject matter, not to act as a reference—imagine if one was meant to learn integrals by reading the Wikipedia entry “Calculus”! As any instructor knows, the functions of a reference and an instructional text are quite different. To be sure, Wikipedia is worth noting as a springboard not only for the concepts that inspired this site, but as a source of design inspiration and even a likely a source of adapted open-source content.

For a more detailed comparison of similar tools, see the chart at the end of this proposal.

Issues

Every technology has positive and negative connotations for its users and for the society that adopts it, and a broadly distributed portal for free learning materials is no exception. It’s important for technologists to understand as much as they can about the potential pitfalls of their product so they can make an effort to avoid or at least minimize damage for each

Risk of Homogenization

One large vulnerability in the proposal is that a may put learners at risk for homogenization. In fact, one of the very reasons one may want to offer lessons in a variety of languages, difficulty levels, and approaches is that different learners and different societies have different needs. But there’s an obvious correlation between what we put in front of children and what they learn. A unified source of material makes learning convenient to be sure, but, one could argue, might stifle varying viewpoints and restrict diversity. If all students learn history from the same text, for example, there is little room for historical debate. Such homogenization would become especially dangerous if the resource was controlled by one entity with a special interest; even one innocent mistake in materials could have dangerous ramifications. These risks are more reasons why keeping such a resource available with an open license and collaboratively developed by a community is important. In fact, the more contributors add to the resource, the less of a risk of homogenization by a singular extremist point of view.

Accuracy of material

Such an example highlights another area of concern: possible inaccuracies of the learning material, whether through malicious editing or simple mistakes. Though the inaccuracy of Wikipedia is often overstated, factuality of submitted data is a serious liability for wiki systems attempting to create a shared reference. The tool must require citations and a rigorous, standardized method within the administration community for dealing with uncited materials. Wikipedia aims for accuracy, but makes few claims as to its specific usefulness. With a learning platform, the need for accuracy increases along with the deliberate expansion into education.

Reliable availability

Even as prices for netbooks fall and the One Laptop Per Child program grows, overcoming even a two hundred dollar-per-student initial investment to access online learning materials will be expensive for many communities. Without a laptop for every single person on earth, paper printing must be an available option for materials, however discouraged. The very fact that the system depends deeply on a maintained global networking system to be accessed may put it at a disadvantage in some users’ minds.

Integration with current practices

Obviously content needs to be oriented toward learning, but to what extent should content be molded to fit the current format of learning materials being distributed by for-profit companies? There’s a balance to strike here—whether to integrate with the current school system or point in a new direction with the risk of sacrificing widespread adoption. The answer in this case is to err on the side of novel formats, even at the expense of smooth integration with current schools. The goal should be to try to alter learning for the better, and not restrict learning in a broad sense by conforming to Western schools’ current lesson curriculum requirements.

Managing sensitive information access

Providing evaluation materials without restriction creates a problem for teachers trying to administer tests that normally only they have the answers to. The solution again is to err on the side of transparency and openness. Even if answers were to be secured with some strict authentication scheme, there is no way to be sure students wouldn’t access it—and if they did, the guise of security would only be a harm. In the end, it is the responsibility of teachers to evaluate students in a fair manner, if quantitative evaluation is needed at all.

Technical feasibility

The last hurdle to be addressed is general feasibility. Though the site requires a huge amount of content and programming, nothing is beyond the development ability of a small dedicated team with the right talent and funding. In fact, nothing called for here hasn’t already been accomplished in another project. It’s just a matter of assembling the right pieces—and because the backend is open source, actual code components from other open-source sites like Wikipedia can in some cases be directly copied without fear of litigation.

Structure

Much like the open-source content management system Drupal, the site will consist of a large number of content Nodes, each with its own unique identifying identification number. Each node will theoretically duplicated in every supported language, each with an assigned level of difficulty, a unique URL for embedding in other pages, a permalink to reference the node at any time, and a detailed revision history enabling a user or administrator to revert the node to a previous state.

A node might be any type of content. Text nodes, whether written by the site community or referenced from outside sources, would offer traditional textbook-like instruction. Other nodes may house videos, text, animations, interactive lessons, or any type of content at all.

Nodes will be organized under a regular hierarchy for ease of maintenance and navigability. Schools, the most broad organizational structure, will contain any number of Tracks, or learning paths, for students to choose from. Tracks will contain Courses, each on a discrete subject matter. Each Course will contain a similar number of Lessons, each of which will be comprised of a collection of content nodes for text, video, interactive content, and evaluation, and be available as a compressed bulk download.

Each node will contain a forum for learners to discuss the content, filtered by participants’ geographical location and difficulty if the user desires, as well as a forum for only content editors who will require a place to debate what precisely deserves inclusion in the node. Similarly, each Lesson, Course, and Track grouping will support both Learner forums for discussing material broadly and Editor forums for developing curricula and managing content creation.

For example, a lesson on basic sticking techniques for set drummers might be a part of the Introduction to Drumming Rudiments course, itself a part of the Drumming track housed in the School of Arts and Music. Such a lesson might include music notation nodes for drum roll patterns, a video from an external site with a teacher describing the techniques, a technical write-up and visual illustration of how to hold the sticks, and downloadable metronome audio files for practicing tempo.

An entity relationship model diagram for the elements of the proposal, much like those used often in database administration and computer architecture planning. The crow’s feet symbols are standard notation indicating the numerical relationship between the nodes. For example, a Department (or School) contains at least one Track but may have many more, while a track must belong to one and only one Department.

Lessons may not be only a part of one course, nor courses a part of only one track. A introductory architecture course, for example, might fall into both the Architecture and Urban Planning tracks, much like a traditional college.

Users

Human-Computer Interaction is first and foremost about people, not machines. Although every designer wants to say “this application is for everyone!”, it is the responsibility of a User Experience Designer to define the expected users’ needs and to build an application to suit these needs.

Learners

The site will be targeted at potential learners of any age, whether enrolled in a traditional school system or seeking instruction through other non-traditional means. The system will be open to everyone, with levels of difficulty for simple activities starting at pre-school age, continuing through primary, secondary, and collegiate level lessons, all the way through to post-graduate-level material and generalized material for adult learners. Academics, musicians, craftspeople, and technicians will all find content suited to their needs.

To account for these varying degrees of difficulty, each node will be identified with a learning level, editable by administrators. Just like a Wikipedia article is duplicated for different languages, the platform will add another dimension, adding a simple selector allowing a user to set their default difficulty level. A prominent graphic element of the site will be color-coded by current level, allowing any users to determine the difficulty of the content being viewed intuitively and simply if they are familiar with the system.

Obviously not all topics and nodes will require a version at every difficulty level. Let’s take Electrical Engineering courses, for example, and see how they might translate to different users:

• Very Young: No content (batteries alone are hazardous, let alone wall mains power)
• Primary: Creating a basic circuit with a battery and a light bulb, adding some buzzers or more fun pieces
• Secondary: The intermediate basics of how a circuit works, introducing formulas for determining correct resistors, beginning work with microcontrollers
• Tertiary: A broad selection of topics, presumably all the content one would encounter in an EE degree program

Teachers and Contributors

Of course, teachers are another central piece of the central target. Though material will not be arranged around a traditional lesson plan format per se, designing access points for teachers to easily browse, download, and edit content within their field is vitally important. Non-teacher dedicated content contributors, too, similar to the community that edits and maintains Wikipedia, will be required to maintain an up-to-date, accurate, and useful site. Contributors of all kinds, whether they are writing with this particular tool in mind or merely publishing important information because of their own goals, are important as well. Administrators, trusted and powerful users of the site, are needed to oversee content, make tough decisions, and carry out changes that only those with special privileges can.

Gathering a critical mass

The project proposes a level of difficulty orders of magnitude more than Wikipedia, in which each article, in theory, has a companion article on the same topic in each language supported by the software. Each lesson and piece of media in this proposal is presented in multiple difficulties, each with multiple languages.

Inviting teachers to begin the transition from users to contributors will help maintain such a large collection. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, claims half of all Wikipedia edits are done by only a few hundred users. In the United States alone, there are more than five million public and private school primary, secondary, and university teachers—and more than 73 million students. If only a small fraction of these educators and students were convinced to become active members in the online community, the site would have an astounding number of dedicated contributors and editors.

Design Process

Once the principals of the design were laid out, work on the design itself began. Progress began with the information architecture of the site, laying out the structure of the materials and the relationship between logical entities. This is a very complex system—a wiki, course management system, online textbook, video sharing site, and social network combined. The challenge was how to make interactions intuitive and clear.

The name temporary name Libelo, latin for dragonfly, was chosen because of it’s similarity to the Latin root for free, liber. From a branding perspective, it’s also likely that users will associate Libelo with a library, giving the product a free academic source connotation without making an explicit claim.

Lo-fi sketches

A series of preliminary structure sketches with pen on graph paper helped to flesh out the basic arrangement of elements without committing time to details.

A few early sketches of the main lesson page, homepage, and video node pages. Actionable boxes are sometimes indicated with red or orange, page elements in black, and annotations in blue ink.

Wireframes

Next, the basic structure of the sketches was transferred into Adobe Illustrator using correct web dimensions and higher-fidelity prototyping commenced. Note that these are still relatively low-detail prototypes and do not show the final visual design of the site, but are merely meant to provide the structure of the page elements and basic interaction design specifications.

(1) Site title (2) Global navigation (3) Search box (4) User info (5) User taskbar (6) Breadcrumb navigation (7) Article title (8) Inter-page navigation (9) Settings box (10) Lesson tabs (11) Main content (12) Intra-page navigation (13) Node options (14) Global sub-navigation

Visual design

After wireframes were completed, one wireframe was transformed from a vector image into a raster file with real end-product styling. Actual learning content is substituted in for filler text.

Testing

Iterative design is the cornerstone of modern user-centered design. Rather than using a linear, one-way design path—the so-called Waterfall Method—of designing, building, testing, and releasing, iterative design advocates a cyclical process of repeated design, increasingly high-fidelity prototypes, and user testing throughout the entire process.

Two subjects were presented with in-browser mockups and asked to vocally announce thought processes as they looked for required tasks. All but a few tasks were completed successfully without delay. One user took a few seconds to find the home button and the “Save changes” command in the edit mode of the individual lesson. To enhance visibility, the Home button was made bold and a rounded underlay button shape, contrasting with the sidebar background, was placed under the “Save changes” link.

Next steps

Though my work on this project as a Capstone study is complete, I would like this project to expand beyond the umbrella of my academic involvement. To continue development, a programmer would need to begin coding and a team would begin to continue the process of designing, implementing, and testing. Eventually, it’s my hope that the project could provide information and media sources needed for anyone with access to the internet, anywhere in the world, to teach, take, or administer a class or educational path in any subject with the right content in their own language.

Though the project has a long way to go before it begins to make a difference for those seeking an education, the fundamentals of the project are strong and hardly out of reach of a small team of dedicated workers. The reason we haven’t had broadly distributed, crowd-sourced multimedia content before isn’t because it is a misguided way to present information—it’s because we couldn’t. In the past few years, we’ve acquired the tools, new knowledge, physical devices that are capable of supporting the effort, and most of all, we still have a need that has not been met.

The need is so strong that I’m confident something similar to this product is on its way—and in fact, new ways of collecting educational materials will fall into use even in the next few months. The questions that remain unanswered are: what content will it present, and what content will be ignored? Will it be user friendly? Will it be focused on Western users, or available for the whole world? Will it help close the digital divide or broaden it? Will it be open and free, or run for profit? If creating a project that’s designed well, open, and collaborative means that children and adults might have access to learning anywhere they please, or if it means funding can go to places like art and music departments, or if it means someone in a remote part of the world can have a chance to begin to close the technological divide, then a project Libelo is a worthwhile effort.

Glossary

Human-Computer Interaction (or HCI) is the study of the interaction between people and computers, incorporating elements of computer science, behavioral and cognitive psychology, and visual design, among other areas. Practitioners of HCI may fall under a number of related fields, including Interaction Design, User Experience Design (or Engineering), Human Factors, or Web Design. Such designers are primarily concerned with the interface between the user and system.

People who create software are often lumped into one of two categories, designers and developers. Designers tend to take care of things like determining user goals, information layout, interaction design, visual design, and so-called “high-level” issues. Developers write the code for the software, and are more concerned with technical aspects than with the human side of the design. This presentation covers design over technical issues, which would presumably be largely left to a developer.

We can discuss the design of a website in terms of its content versus its presentation. One could use the same presentation for many different instances of content (a Facebook profile, for example, looks the same but has different text and pictures for each user) or, conversely, show the same content with different presentation (the Zen Garden is a good example). Websites are usually coded with XHTML code (which describes hierarchical content) paired with CSS (which defines the layout and visual design for the markup elements).

User-centered design is a design philosophy in which the characteristics of the product being produced are based on user needs. Donald Norman’s book The Design of Everyday Things is the most famous work on UCD.

Open source software gives anyone the ability to download, compile, manipulate, and redistribute the raw, pre-compiled code of an application as long as they license derivatives under a similar license. Such software is often referred to as both “free as in beer” (ie, costs no money to use) and “free as in freedom” (there are few or no restrictions on how the code can be used). Recently, similar licenses have been developed for other types of written and multimedia content—Wikipedia, for example, licenses all of its text and media under the open Creative Commons license.

A web API (or Application Programming Interface) is a means of accessing data from an external web service. Programmers use APIs to get content from other websites; for example, Google Maps provides an API so developers can use Google’s code to create their own map on their own site or software application.

The semantic web is a collection of technologies that intends to combine programmed meaning directly into online content. Sometimes referred to as “Web 3.0”, the goal of the semantic web is to make content readable by machines, making the web less of a collection of documents and more like a large database.

The digital divide, generally, refers to a disparity of communications technology access between a privileged group and a non-privileged one. The presence of such a divide is often seen as an indicator or cause of a similar difference in education, knowledge, or opportunity to gain skills.

Comparison of similar products

]]> http://www.sampl.us/blog/124/libelo-online-learning-platform/feed/ 0 http://www.sampl.us/blog/185/joystick-and-guitar-hero-midi-scripting/ http://www.sampl.us/blog/185/joystick-and-guitar-hero-midi-scripting/#comments Sat, 22 Aug 2009 04:39:14 +0000 Sam PL http://www.sampl.us/blog/?p=185 For an Independent Study this past summer semester, I set out to tackle some novel approaches to controlling music. I ended up writing patches for the graphical programming language MAX/MSP that allowed me to receive signals from game controllers and convert them to MIDI signals, which were then received in my favorite music software: Ableton Live. After composing a track with digital instruments and samples, the setup allowed me to control any music parameters I wanted by pressing buttons, moving joysticks and whammy bars–even tilting a Guitar Hero controller (with an accelerometer inside).

An excerpt of my contribution to the Results and Limitations portion of our report:

Evidence of the Third Person Effect matched the predictions of the social distance corollary nicely, and the established theories of related semantic cognitive networks were supported with our priming data and the results of the IAT.

Because the findings indicated a difference in race attitudes when exposed to racist content–though barely below the statistic significance threshold–users and hosts of such shock humor should note that even offensive content posted in fun or without serious context can have real-world effects on viewers.  Our tests for Third Person Effects show that though one doesn’t think they are affected by racist imagery, they believe others are.  Together, these arguments provide evidence that, if one wants to avoid cultivating racist mentalities, humorous racist content is not insignificant.

Conversely, because our results did not reach statistical significance, hosts and providers of shock content may still argue that there is no conclusive evidence that content has confidently measurable effects.  Those tempted to jump to the conclusion that such content always has negative net effects should perhaps be more conservative and acknowledge that racist content may indeed be demonstrated as largely harmless.

A number of theoretical limitations remain as caveats to our findings.  First and foremost, practical limits on the race percentages of our subjects and limits on our ability to vary race in testing materials kept our findings from being further generalized; our experiment used only African-American versus White American preference Implicit Association indicators, ignoring possible effects of other races, and we did not have enough non-white subjects to attempt to find significance for any other population.  Even if we had had enough black subjects to mirror our conclusions about one’s preference for one’s own race through the IAT, our results largely ignore the research question as it applies to people of other races.

There were also validity limitations in expanding our findings to other instances of the shock site or forum.  We tested only one message board on one site, the Random page on 4chan, and our results have not yet been replicated on other sites to determine if the effect is universal.  Even our stimuli were not identical  to the normal 4chan forums—vivid pornography advertisements, internal links to other 4chan pages that include illegal material, and some racist text comments were removed to keep our study within the limits of our institution’s Internal Review Board for research and may have had a lessening or otherwise unanticipated effect on subjects’ responses had they remained.

Because of technological limitations, our survey relied on subjects accurately self-reporting their IAT results, leaving us unable to detect uneven bias in self-reporting if it existed.  The IAT, while operationally effective and generally representative of the effects we were examining, is itself an incomplete measure of the relatively broad concept of racism.  Our experimental design also did not measure tests over any significant length of time, leaving open the possibility that increases in racist attributes decayed rather quickly after exposure to the stimulus.

Further, we had no measure of determining the existence or level of behavioral change in subjects between conditions.  Although exhibiting increased cognitive association with negative attributes when exposed to members of a different race is an important effect from a larger societal perspective in its own right, being able to determine the actual effects of racism is also significant.