What I object to most are comments like this one (direct at me)

I think Michael Feldstein’s faith in market demand is touching (though naive) but I have some sympathy with his support for the common cartridge standard. Some. I need to look at it more closely, though, before I can say whether it does the job.

Or this one (directed at somebody else–maybe not in the last 3 weeks, but definitely in the last two months):

Animation of the e-Framework (a set of coordinated tools to support e-learning). After clicking through a bunch of links (including a link-loop for the unwary) you get a 23 megabyte Quicktime that won’t play on Linux. Which really in itself says everything you want to know (hint: YouTube exists now, we don’t need unplayable video any more).

These are gratuitously insulting and nearly content-free. What is the value here, other than your personal satisfaction from insulting something or someone you don’t like?

On other occasions you will go on longer rants which, while not quite as content-free, are still gratuitously insulting:

I have been sort of sympathetic to the concept of the learningmanagement operating system (LMOS) because, after all, the concept includes things that I favour: distributed resources, user access to the underlying system. But I began to falter when Michael Feldstein said “We don’t just want to offer many different affordances. we want to orchestrate them.” And following his link to Bernie Durfee has sketched out a first use case implementation sent me over the edge. I’ll say it bluntly, and apologize later: this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen. Durfee is describing what the rest of understand as ‘upload a file and base a discussion thread on it’. Something I did right here in about 10 seconds today. But he requires J2EE containers, portlet containers, service integration agents, native Java interfaces, a whole mess of stuff. Ridiculous. Absurd! That’s it - if that is what is meant, toast the whole LMOS concept.

These comments don’t invite thought and they certainly don’t invite dialog. In this last case, the guy you were criticizing (Bernie Durfee), happened to be a junior colleague with no blog of his own to write in his own defense. Luckily, Bernie happens to have a thick skin. But your comment certainly wasn’t conducive to encouraging a bright young programmer to think about the problem from your perspective. Nor did it encourage your readers to look at both sides of the discussion with open minds. Who would bother to go read something “absurd” and “ridiculous”? And by the way, you never did “apologize later.”

I’m not averse to good, sharp criticism. Lord knows I’ve thrown a few elbows on this blog. But I try very hard to write in a way that opens up conversation with the person I’m criticizing, and if I absolutely can’t see anything worthwhile about the content that I take issues with, I generally don’t write about that content. There are exceptions to this rule, such as when I’m trying to provoke a response from a large corporation that has been unresponsive on a high-stakes issue, but I try to be very aware of when I am making an exception, and I try to make sure that I have good reasons to do it.

Stephen, you and I have had some good, constructive online debates over the years. But we haven’t had any recently. And I don’t think it’s just me. The recent dust-up you had over Elgg and Open Source is another indicator. If people are taking your criticisms personally, maybe it’s because they’re a little too personal.

Read the archives for yourself: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/archive.cgi

Stephen, I write short posts too from time to time, but when I do so, I refrain from criticizing other people’s work. If I don’t have the space to offer constructive criticism, I try not to criticize. As a matter of fact, I try to do the same thing in my longer posts too, even (or particularly) when I’m “thinking out loud.”

There’s nothing to stop me from doing differently, of course. I have every right to write as I choose. But I choose not to do that sort of thing, because it’s self-indulgent. When I started this blog, I made a conscious decision that every post would be about trying to start a constructive dialog. As a part of that, every time I post–especially when I criticize somebody else’s work or words–I think twice first. I try to decide whether I’m writing because I honestly think what I have to say might be valuable to somebody else or whether I’m just expressing myself for the pure pleasure of self-expression. If it’s the latter, I tell my wife or my friends what’s on my mind, or I write it in my private journal, but I don’t post it on this blog, where I have made a commitment to the people who don’t know me and yet still are willing to take the time to read what I write.

Viewed from that perspective, I’m sorry to say that OLDaily has degenerated into little more than a series of drive-by shootings. Typically at least half of your posts on any given day are a couple of sentences of excerpts followed by a nasty one-liner. I seem to remember a time when your one sentence of commentary was more likely to be something that encouraged people to read the article you referred to and added some extra context that provoked thought. Maybe it’s just that I’ve changed as a reader and practitioner, but I find that I’m getting that value out of fewer and fewer of your comments these days.

Again, you can, of course, do whatever you want. But I’m telling you as one of your long-time readers that what you’re doing now with increasing frequency is not very useful to me and comes across as highly unprofessional. I suspect that you can live with that too. But I would be remiss in my own commitment to the purpose of my own blog if I didn’t call you on it.

Which is still ‘practice’ with an attitude.

Anyhow…

I’m not going to give you “criticism in concrete terms that are consistent with the…um…praxis of user-centered software design” because,

first, my criticisms aren’t that concrete, reflective of an uneasiness rather than a specific methodological objection, and

second, when the critiques are meta-critiques, as this one surely is, then a requirement that it be expressed in the terminology being critiqued is really just a fancy way of begging the question.

So - I was just thinking aloud, as I sometimes do. Not all of my thoughts have to be fully formed. People generally like it when I wonder, rather than aver.

The problem with use cases (and similar sorts of things, including best practices) is that they’re a type of design that works with specific instances in mind.

But the design of an application (it seems to me) is never the sum of the specific instances. This is because it has to be used by many people in many circumstances - far more than imagined by the use cases.

The best software design, it seems to me, is software that can be used in ways never imagined by the designers.

Use cases (best practices, etc) seem to imply that everying important about something can be known a priori. That is, in my experience, never the case.

Anyhow - you might not think this even an objection, much less a clear one. That’s OK. I’ll live with my uneasiness, and I’ll leave the use cases to others.