Revisions, sex, porn and public information
In August I start teaching at a very changed study. We have expanded to a three year study, but since at least one of those years is to be open for the free choice of the student, we don't have to deliver more than two years of teaching. There will however be quite a bit more administration, since we have to administrate three classes rather than two, and all students within these three classes theoretically can have different choices and specially designed tracks of study.

I find myself thinking about this as a linked text rather than a linear text. I understand how to organise the semesters with all the different options as if they were a labyrinth and not a road - or perhaps a house where the doors stand open. When I worked with computer games and sexual information, I found Bianca's smut shack at bianca.com.

No, I don't link to Bianca's any more. When I found it way back when, it was a series of chats and message boards where the metaphor was a building, each chat-room a room in this building - in the cafe there were tables of course. This was expressed graphically like a map, in a time when the convention was that all links were displayed as a list in the margin, normally to the left. To the right, or perhaps even on top, was daring design....

Today Bianca's has changed into a place where you're not just encouraged to pay for a handle and some benefits, but the code has been set up to demand that you join. They sell the emails of their members, and support robots that track ip's in order to collect email addresses. The structure of Bianca: the design and the way to navigate, as well as the chat-system hasn't changed for 8 years, perhaps more. Or if it has changed it has become less interesting: the map of the house no longer is the most efficient way to navigate the site, it demands more clicks and in that way creates longer corridors between each room. It's no longer a shack, it's an appartment building where the stairways, lifts and corridors are not particularly well designed.

The days when the porn-and-sex-sites were the best designed pages on the web is past. There is too much which has to be displayed - rather than being tempting and nice little budoirs, they are huge unwieldly monsters where the browser is used ruthlessly to trap you and hold you in with all the insistance of a desperate prostitute. Today the most interesting and manouverable sites tend to belong to academic organisations and research organisations, with non-commercial gamers sites and public information pages as a close second. These places offer information rather than push it, and as such rely on being open and easy to use rather than on forcing the user in one particular direction.

This is how I have to think about organising the study as well. Of course, there are things the students have to study. There's a minimum of topics which we have to control, in order to give them a bachelor's degree. But when in the next three years they study certain topics can only be controlled through what we make available, not through what we insist on. The design has to be logical and open, and the links between the different topics have to be easily and clearly visible. OK, so I don't want to build a smut-shack, but I do want to build a house where entrances and exits are clearly marked, where it's easy to understand why certain rooms are on the same floor, and where the stairwells and elevators don't get clogged by students who insist that they need to be somewhere else.

And no, I am not planning on selling their email-addresses. At least not to commercial interests...