a number of stray thoughts have started to converge together - I keep feeling as if there is some kernel, some hard nut in the center, or rather just over the horizon that I keep glimpsing but I can't seem to pull it out.
Style sheets seem to be the quick answer to accessibility but how do they take the place of tables as far as layout. how do might a user override a style sheet?
Jim W. says that technology "lends" itself to innovative teaching such as constructivism, problem based learning, multiple intelligences
visual tools and accessibility - how to resolve the text vs. images delimna for differently abled users. use text strategically, visually designed text - Nielson when talking about blind users talks about using headings so key them in to what's coming so that they don't have to "read" the whole section if they want to jump ahead or around
reading Morgan Walz's guided study about the ethics of computer games make me realize that most of the accessibility/usability stuff I have been reading has to do with business models - as Nielson says: only usable sites get traffic and loyal users are the only true value on the internet (p. 389) but is this necessary for web sites. This leads me to Sarah Horton and Web Teaching Guide as she describes the different types of educational uses of web sites (and Barry Jackson in stephenson covers this in different words as well) and I am left trying to define what type of site I want to use and want to advocate. The range from the static "archive" where instruction is not part of the site to the online course where instruction occurs through the medium. How to best use the technology to support the educational goals of the course. This leads me back to Morgan's paper - the gaming industry, he ranks first person shooters, simulations and narrative games (and this ties into the latest issue of wired and lucas's plans to create an online star wars environment) and discern different messages from each. Morgan goes beyond the obvious and demonstrates that the technology is amoral and we can control the messages of the medium. Particularly the narrative games give me ideas for my own web site to address the ownership of the site. More later.

 
few notes from Jakob Nielson's Designing Web Usability
Style sheets seem to be the answer for certain design problems but I don't completely get this. I need to learn more. I use style sheets but they do not take the place of tables for position, except for indenting. They do help with font. Another question is how the user may override the designer's style sheet. Nielson recommends not have a fixed size with style sheet and for !important to be "reserved only for user style sheets and never for use in the website's style sheet." (p. 85
p105 - reduce text by 50% since people scan the web
p.111 - use the journalism practice of inverted pyramid to present the most pertinent information first, p.112 - "maybe 10 percent of users would scroll beyond the information that was visable in the window when the page came up
p.146 - in different usability studies a low percentage (42 and 26) were able to find a correct page within a site from a homepage
p. 206 - use breadcrumbs navigation list for hierachical information architexture
p. 221 - use site maps but include a "you are here" to orient the user
p. 302 - a detail within all the info about visual disabilities: long pages are problematic becuase it is harder for a blind user to scan for the interesting parts - to help with this use the HTML markup of headings, then a blind user can overview the structure of the page by having the headings read outloud and quickly skip an uninteresting section by instructing the screen reader to jump to the next lower level heading, for font size and style sheets do not set the fon-size atttibute to specific number of points or pixels, instead set it to a percentage of the default font size - the user can isse text larger and text smaller commands