Friday, October 2, 2009

Compatibility issues

Found this following quote in a paper... Formative Evaluation for Implementation: Evaluating Educational Technology Applications and Lessons

"Many compatibility problems are invisible if usability evaluation is only conducted in a controlled setting with ideal hardware and operating systems, but become glaringly obvious when the application or lesson is placed in a school."

No truer words...

I developed the web-based application for my dissertation study using desktops in the computer lab and tried to run a pilot study on 7-8 people using the laptops...

5-10 minutes after... everyone started having problems.... apparently, the work it takes behind the scene is above and beyond the capacity of them laptops...

Lessons learned through the failed pilot test and the waste of perfect study participants, I ran my experiments only on desktops from then on.... and with Internet Explore or Netscape (me really old... 8-O lol)... I think... ... because, somehow, only one of these browsers could handle all the data collection process in the background....

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