Introduction

Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel insightfully discuss some of the implications of digital technologies for education in their article "Do we have your attention? New literacies, digital technologies and the education of adolescents." In one particular section, Lankshear and Knobel refer to the work of Richard Lanham and his 1994 article "The Economics of Attention" and Lanham's perspective on the challenges of "the information economy" as it replaces "the goods economy." Lanham's main interest is in the development of "attention structures." Lanham sees one of the challenges of the information age / information economy as finding a way to process and interact effectively with an overwhelming amount of raw information. Lanham's "attention structures" sometimes serve as "information structures" in their actions of prioritizing and organizing information. Ultimately, Lanham emphasizes the need for an informational architecture to form gateways that enable users to function in this overwhelming informational world.

At the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA), there are several areas that may be seen to function as informational gateways. The UAA website is a prime example of an informational gateway that serves to sort and arrange a wide variety of information into architectural structures that serve the needs of the diverse individuals who access it. The Blackboard system could be seen as another more specific gateway, which also serves to organize and distribute information to select users. I would suggest, however, that the Blackboard system could be significantly revised to better serve students and faculty.

The main idea of this set of blog entries is to perform a close analysis of the current Blackboard system and to begin to explore ways that the informational structures in Blackboard could be improved. In this exploration, I am particularly concerned with two areas: first, I am interested in the wide range of digital technologies and literacies that exist in today's digital world and how they might be integrated in to Blackboard to improve its existing functioning. Second, I am interested in informational design structures that allow for easy access to and use of these new technologies.

The following blog entries focus on specific aspects of Blackboard, including detailed explorations of several Blackboard pages. Numerous screenshots are provided - if you click on the sceenshots, they will expand to fill the screen. To return to the blog, simple use the back button on your browser. A final entry summarizes this exploration.