Saturday, October 07, 2006
Due to a scheduling snafu, I had to teach the second full-day session of my Information Architecture course at the U. of T. on the Thanksgiving long weekend. I was pleasantly surprised to see all of my students there, thinking I might not even have half the class turn up.
Afterwards, with no family to return home to (everyone had gone up north to the cottage at Deloro for the weekend, I decided to head over to the nearby Royal Ontario Museum and take some pictures in an unhurried manner. Here's some of what I took:
Protective cladding is being applied to the angled surfaces of the "crystal".
Jousting mural in the southwest quadrant of Samuel Hall/Currelly Gallery. The image features the Directors of the museum at the time it was painted in the 1940s, and features Currelly himself (the man behind the tapestry).
A Hadrosaur skeleton "stranded" in the Samuel Hall/Currelly Gallery while the new dino gallery is being built.
"Just arrived!" says the sign in the lower-left: A Triceratops skull giving a tantalizing glimpse of some of the new things to expect in the renovated dino gallery to come.
More signs of change as this glimpse of the former Insect Gallery, in the middle of being dismantled, shows.
This was a shock: finding that the European/Mediterranean ancient civilization galleries were closed and being renovated.
Bust of St. John the Baptist in the European Medieval Gallery
One of the Haidi Totem Poles -- with nobody on the stairs! (the place was far from full when I visited).
There was an installation in a newly opened gallery on the ground floor by the Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa. This and the next image are panoramas I stitched together from several photos of a couple of his larger pieces. This one greets the visitor to the gallery, and is a model of a fictional urban complex made out of rice-paper lanterns.
This one is called "Negatividad", made up of wooden toy trains.
The magnificent mosaic ceiling in the main foyer of the R.O.M.
Labels: Carlos Garaicoa, Hadrosaur, Haida, Information Architecture, Royal Ontario Museum, totem pole, Triceratops
Friday, September 22, 2006
Yesterday was my deadline for prepping the material for my next Information Architecture course for the Faculty of Information Sciences at the University of Toronto. What I have found from previous classes is that there are usually students who have problems with the school's own ftp site for downloading course materials, and usually I have to set up a directory on one of my Web sites for them to grab material from.
So I decided to simply register another domain and point my students to that instead. I would have liked to get the informal name "InfoArch.com" or the .net or .org variants of the same, but they were already taken. "InformationArchitectureCourse.com" was available, but the longer the name, the more likely spelling errors are likely to creep in. So I ended up registering "InfoArchCourse.com", put up the necessary files the school needed, and whipped together something simple, using a pre-existing CSS template I ran across that I liked.
I have to hand it to BlueHost, in that they make the process easy -- certainly easier than my previous web host provider did. Registering is quick and painless (and relatively cheap at $10 U.S. a pop), and then parking the new domain to an existing one (in this case it is linked to a subdirectory of this blog site) is accomplished in a few easy steps.
At this point my ambitions for the site are modest and largely functional: a place where my students can easily find and download materials relating to the course, which so far are contained within a couple of encrypted zip files. There is also some basic promotional materials relating to the course, and I've taken a stab at adding the sites I reference in the course, and that's about it. The text content is derived largely from what's on the equivalent FIS site describing the course, cobbled together in haste last night after putting the kids to bed.
At the moment the site is a far cry from what I would say would be an ideally constructed site based on Information Architecture principles, so I have my work cut out for me.
Not much to see as yet, but it's there and functional, which is all I need at this stage.
Labels: BlueHost, CSS, domain, Faculty of Information Sciences, InfoArchCourse.com, Information Architecture, University of Toronto, web site
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