The last meeting of the EDRG was a “show and tell” of various calendaring tools used by the attendees. Among the things we discussed were the affordances of Yahoo! Calendar, Google Calendar, Oracle Calendar (provided by UIUC CITES) as well as Apple’s iCal, Microsoft Outlook and Palm Desktop. (see also the EMacs Planner Mode).
Of course what we found is that each of us has our own preferences and work habits that define what calendars we’ve come to use. For users like Mike, calendars are essential to keeping life in order. The cost of a corrupted calendar may be hours of work repairing what was lost. This often leads us to “dance with the devil we know” rather than playfully seek tools that better fit the way we work.

The lack of standardization also inhibits us from exploring different calendar systems. A basic incompatibility we discovered was between Yahoo! (that imports/exports CSV and Outlook) and Google (which used the iCalendar (RFC 2445) standard). In order to move from one to the other I may need to depend on questionable scripts to move between the two.

The EDRG Calendar

What had kicked off this discussion was our desire to create a calendar to remind us of upcoming paper submission deadlines and conference dates. Ingbert had started doing this using the WordPress Links database (see the current sidebar). This gave us a quick way to link directly to papers and conferences. However, I found this wasn’t enough “in my way.” I don’t (and didn’t plan to start) use the EDRG site as a way to plan my work. But I do use my calendar that way. (or as Ingbert said later ” the calendar doesn’t tell me what to do, it gives me options.”). Having our list of paper deadlines in a portable calendar format seemed to be the way to go.

For the moment we’ve decided to use Google Calendar for this (and we’ve added a GCal widget to the sidebar). However there are a few needs this doesn’t meet. Clicking on one the items in the GCal widget takes you to Google - not to the site with the paper submission information. While we can enter anything we like in the Description field here, there is no way to “tag” events so that we can view them by a category (e.g. “full paper,” “short paper,” “poster,” etc.)

As an alternative I took a look at 30Boxes. Compared to Google Calendar, 30Boxes has an impressive array of ways to connect to other social networking sites already built in (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Vox, LiveJournal, etc). I can also connect with calendar Buddies, etc. 30Boxes also has a nice features, like for letting me add tags to events and a natural language entry (similar to Leopard. Just type “EDRG meeting Thursday at 3:00″ and it will add the right event). Unfortunately it doesn’t appear that 30Boxes supports collaboratively edited calendars (let me know if I missed something).

Next Meeting

Out next meeting will be on Thursday (Feb. 14, 2007) at 3:30 2:00 pm in the ISRL (340 GSLIS). We’ll continue to look at calendar systems such as Mozilla’s Sunbird/Lightening and the Chandler Project. Poking around I also stumbled on Zimbra which was recently acquired by Yahoo!.

Ingbert will also introduce a research statement he’s working on.

And here’s a little something called hCalendar microformat, based on iCal that lets you embed a structured event record within HTML. Add the hCal Greasemonkey script to Firefox to click and add events to your Google Calendar.

Additional Resources

• doodle.ch
  a nice application for coordinating meetings among a group. This has been extremely useful for coordinating meetings among people who work in different institutions and can’t do automatic calendar comparisons.
• Timebridge looks like a more robust application that allows you to connect Outlook or GCal so a confirmed time can be added.

For keeping up on GCal Developments, lifehacker is an indispensable resource.

• Supercharge GCal
• GCal from the Command Line
• Integrate Gmail and GCal
• Better GCal Greasemonkey script

[This is more or less a copy of an email invitation sent out to a wider audience than our normal meeting announcements are sent to.]

In the next meeting of the Eclectic Design Research Group we will be talking about Calendaring Software, and general issues surrounding how we are able to, and how we would like to, keep track of events, share calendars, etc. We thought that these issues might have a broader appeal to members of the GSLIS community than our meeting topics normally have, so we thought we’d make a broader announcement of our meeting than we normally do. So please feel free to stop on by, and join us:

Thursday, February 7, 2008
2 pm to 4 pm (or any period in between that you can make it)
ISRL Commons (Room 340)

As usual, our plans are flexible, so feel free to bring any ideas, questions, or concerns you may have to the meeting. Topics we intend to cover include:

• Evaluating existing calendaring systems, including (most of) the following:
  • Google Calendar
  • Chandler
  • iCal
  • Yahoo Calendar
  • Sunbird/Lightning
  • Others? Oracle? Outlook? Eudora? Feel free to suggest something.
• Practice adding events to the shared Google Calendar we have created for the EDRG
  • Use this as an exercise to see what functionality the calendar is good for, and what is missing that we desire or need.
  • We may try this out on other calendaring systems as well.
• Quick-and-dirty evaluations of the usability of installing, and sharing between different calendaring systems
• Take a look at various calendaring standards
  • Including a quick-and-dirty survey of how widely they are adopted, what kinds of sharing they afford, etc.
• We will also discuss what kind of content we want to include in the calendar.
  • Originally, we intended it to keep track of submission deadlines, but we are also looking to add local talks and presentations that might be of interest to group members, including casual members.
• Other related issues? Feel free to suggest some.

Toward the end of the meeting we will also discuss some other issues,
such as potential submissions to publication venues, e.g.:

• Invitation to Champaign I-School Students to submit to the Doctoral Consortium at DESRIST

In any case, if you are interested, feel free to stop by. We will be happy to have you join us, both for next meeting, and on a more regular basis if you find what we do interesting. We will be having at least one more meeting that will be of a more general appeal this semester: looking into practices, tools, and technologies which people use to maintain their bibliographic databases. If you can’t join us this week, hopefully you can join us then.

Note: We typically go out for dinner after the meeting–you are welcome to join us for this if you are interested, even if you cannot attend the meeting.

Our proposal, Mapping the Design Space of Design Education in iSchools, was accepted as a Wildcard Session at the iConference, the (nearly) annual iSchools conference. Wildcards are supposed to be an opportunity to try something new in a conference setting, which is an opportunity we are trying to take full advantage of.

To this end, we have set up some electronic infrastructure to support our planning activities, and hopefully to keep persistent the conversation we hope to begin during the conference. Currently, this infrastructure includes:

• Design Edcuation Wiki
• Design Ed Google Group

Please check it out, sign up for accounts, and feel free to add content and/or send messages. As we update the site, we will occasionally post here with news.

In general, what we are trying to accomplish is to have a brainstorming session where we apply techniques which we have found useful for the other kinds of design activities we engage in, and apply them to the topic of Design Education. We hope that by doing this we will both be able to identify the accent with iSchools bring to design endeavors, as well as ideas for how to teach design more effectively (or at all) in iSchools.