Alexander Sperl » courses

It’s good design but I don’t like it.

Alexander Sperl — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 22:16:24 +0000

Last week, in my course Presenting Content there was one moment when we got it all right. We had a look at several websites in order to check whether they were designed well or not. One of the pages was the Apple.com homepage, which at the time featured the new MacBook Air and had a colorless air to it (excuse the joke…).

It was quite minimalistic and we only had one Mac user out of nine people attending the course. So, what they all agreed on was: “It’s good design but I don’t like it.”

Now, I’m not a Mac user and I still like the website. The attitude of Apple is tending to get on my nerves and I still like the website. They are somewhat confronting the web dev community with facts that are hard to swallow: App Store policies, no flash please, no Java please etc. and I still like the design of the website. What is more: I think that the Apple website is a perfect place to go if you need a quick example for [insert your favorite web design rule here].

But that’s not actually the point that I wanted to make here. What is the point, however, is that we had an epiphany when the sentence in the title of this post was uttered. There is a difference between taste and good design. If, of course, you are a designer then this is your daily bread. This is still not something that you get across to your students easily and I think this sentence will do exactly that.

As an extra for my course: Here’s how the last slide should have looked like…

Set in St Ryde Regular and Adelle Basic Bold

Update: I’ve put up the presentation on Slideshare.com:

Aspects of good design

View more presentations from Alexander Sperl.

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Oncoming: New Semester

Alexander Sperl — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 20:13:50 +0000

Oh my, it’s that time of the year again. The semester is almost here. Knee-deep in preparation work again. Here’s an overview of the courses I’m going to give this semester:

Presenting Content – Group 1 (LA) on Wednesdays

Presenting Content – Group 2 (MA) on Thursdays

Techniques of Scientific Work on Fridays (three dates)

Web Technologies on Mondays

Starting tomorrow we’ll—Anna Maria Schäfer and I that is—be holding an HTML/CSS preparatory course until Friday for MA Linguistics and Web Technology students.

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New Semester Starts

Alexander Sperl — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:39:41 +0000

I’m not writing as much as I would like to write in this blog. This is mainly because of the work I do at the University of Marburg and the courses I teach there. So here is a post about exactly that: the courses that I teach in summer semester, New Media in Foreign Language Education and Presenting Content.

The first one is supported by a blog I keep especially for the course and an online course at the VCT. The second is also a blended learning course with its online component at the VCT. Both are starting next week and therefore I will be off in a moment to go on preparing them

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Winter semester courses are online

Alexander Sperl — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:20:09 +0000

The courses I will teach in winter semester 2008/2009 are now online and ready to be signed up for (if you have registered for them already via the online Vorlesungsverzeichnis of the uni). I will teach the following courses (class pages in the Virtual Center for Teacher Training):

New Media in Foreign Language Education (Group 1 and Group 2, both together with my colleague Anna Maria Gallus)
Presenting Content
Web Technologies

Additionally, I will be part of a group of three to teach the course “Techniques of Scientific Work”, which will be an online course with four in class session throughout the semester.

The New Media in FLE course is also accompanied by another blog I will keep for this course only, which is hosted at WordPress.com.

If you’re one of my students: See you in the first session the week after the next one.

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