I’m pretty interested in incidences when the theory we read about becomes pertinent to “real life.” I’m sure a lot of people saw the article on the front page of the New York Times on Friday about the growing number of high school AP courses that use virtual experiments (like dissections) in lieu of physical labs. The College Board took a pretty hard line against virtual experiments, claiming that it just didn’t match up to the real thing. After online schools threw a fit, the Board has softened a little bit and agreed to look into these virtual classrooms. Complicating things further is that many students are drawn to online classes because their own schools lack the resources to offer AP classes. As someone who took AP classes (all non-science) online because my own high school didn’t offer them, I sympathize with kids who want these online science classes. However, a picture of a dissection, even if you can manipulate the images, doesn’t seem to compare to the real thing. Then again, does it really matter? Certainly the high schoolers taking all these optional AP classes will have a chance to conduct experiments in college.

I'm wondering whether or how people reconcile the creative visuality of sites like the wefeelfine.org recommended by Shock and Awe with the uniformity espoused by usability experts like Jakob Nielson and Vincent Flanders, here in conversation over sticking to standard things like underlined blue links.