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I’m doing a guest lecture tonight in Larry Rowland’s IS 6000 course. My topic is action research, and I’ll discuss several methods that MSIS students can use to complete the professional paper sequence.

Here is a PowerPoint file with annotated slides that I will use during the talk.

Here are a couple of pages from this site during tonight’s talk:

I have a page full of information about writing papers in APA style. It’s listed as “APA style” on the main menu of this site. My example of an annotated bibliography is here, and is also listed under the section about Lesley University.

This page has two relevant sections. One is a discussion of how to write research papers. The other examines the concept of authority in peer-reviewed articles. This page is listed as “References” on the main menu of this site.

The New York Times ran an article today about adaptive aids for the baby boomers. Because I was born before 1964, technically I am a boomer, even though I don’t feel like one.

The Lucida font is one example cited by Times journalist Katie Hafner. The font was co-designed for Apple by Charles Bigelow to provide a highly readable font for low resolution printers and monitors. Lucida is the default menu font for Mac OS X and the Safari web browser, and has been included in Microsoft Windows since 1995. Wikipedia has a page full of examples.

Tiny fonts in web browsers? There’s hope.

Hafner mentions that Internet Explorer and the Mac have features to enlarge fonts on the screen. These are handy, especially when using a laptop computer. I’ve noticed that Internet Explorer sometimes compresses or mangles the page layout when displaying enlarged or zoomed fonts. In my favorite web browser, Firefox, fonts can be enlarged with the Ctrl+ keystroke on a Windows computer, or Command+ on a Mac. this method doesn’t always work, especially on sites that use Flash.

There are a few screen magnifying utilities for Windows users. I’ve used Magnifixer, a freeware product that is easy to install. Windows also has its own accessibility utilities, available in the Start, Accessories folder.

Mac users can find a Zoom feature in the Universal Access preferences panel. There is a built-in feature to enlarge the mouse cursor, but the results look awful. I use Pinpoint, a US$10 app, to display a very large mouse cursor on my MacBook Pro.

It’s much harder to enlarge the fonts on a mobile phone or PDA. A few models provide adaptive features, but most don’t. The Sidekick 3 provides no way to enlarge a font on the screen, and that’s been a sore point for a few of my colleagues. Larger screens can help, like the display of an iPhone. But a larger screen almost always increases the device’s size and reduces battery life.

Oticon’s Delta hearing aid was profiled in the New York Times on September 24. This model looks more like a fashion accessory, and is marketed towards users in the 40-60 age group.

Hearing aids that look like Bluetooth headsets

A blog that covers technology for older users, 50+Digital, posted an article last week about the Audeo. This hearing aid is marketed as a “personal communications assistant”. It looks like a large Bluetooth headset, but it is similar in many ways to the Delta.

Devices like the Audeo and Delta will become more popular, according to Don Aucoin of the Boston Globe, as boomers hunt for fashionable alternatives to traditional hearing aids and reading glasses.

I expect more younger users to adopt hearing aids, partly because they’ve blown out their hearing with their iPods. I’m always careful to keep my iPod’s volume at a level that will let me hear traffic noise.