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"Published on March 18th, 2013 | by Guest Author [Kate Lee] Infographics are becoming an increasingly popular method of communicating information quickly and clearly. Great designs can reduce the complexity of information, making a process, product or service easily understandable and accessible to the general public. And a good infographic means that all of that information is presented in a way that is aesthetically pleasing to boot. But have infographics become too good at streamlining information? Have they become the fast food of graphic design - quickly digestible, but lacking in substance? Infographics: Guilty As Charged The web has lots of criticisms levelled at infographics and it's true that many are poorly created, failing to fulfil their purpose, using Papyrus or other crimes against design. The main complaints when it comes to infographics are: 1. Creates confusion: the data is presented in a manner that takes a long time to interpret, is difficult to follow and creates additional complexity instead of providing clarity. 2. Inaccurate information: [...] 3. Too long: [...] 4. General ugliness: [...] The problem with infographics is that so many people think it's easy to create them, when in fact it's a particular subset of skills in an already specialised profession.[...] Data Visualisation Requires Thinking That being said, there are truly great infographics out there that tick all the boxes: accurate information, presented in an effective visual manner that helps the audience interpret and understand quickly. And so we come to the point of this post: with complex information rendered so comprehensible, without the need to read long reports and with the ability to look at pictures and share it with all your friends - is there a danger that infographics cause the audience to stop thinking? In short, the answer is no. In most cases where the audience needs to think, the data isn't simple anyway. The mission of infographics is to re

Titolo volutamente provocativo. Ottima presentazione delle "infographics", di cosa dovrebbero e potrebbero essere ma purtroppo spesso non sono, e degli risvolti cognitivi del loro uso.

"Scheda del corso Paddi A                     Cos'è Il corso è suddiviso in cinque moduli orientati alla conoscenza del mondo digitale e, in particolar modo, delle risorse che questo ambiente offre alla scuola e alla formazione in genere. Ha lo scopo di aiutare le insegnanti e gli operatori della scuola ad integrare progressivamente le risorse del web e della tecnologia in genere nel loro percorso didattico. Una delle scelte progettuali di tale percorso sposa la filosofia FREE o Open source proponendo l'utilizzo di materiali, risorse e strumenti di libero utilizzo. Il discente potrà quindi fruire direttamente dei materiali e le risorse senza alcun costo aggiuntivo di licenza o acquisto.      Il corso propone una libreria di soluzioni e materiali che, per sua stessa natura, non può essere esaustiva, ma va utilizzata come spunto per la ricerca e l'aggiornamento periodico.    "

interessante! mi piacerebbe proporlo ad alcuni miei colleghi, ma non ho capito bene come ci si iscrive e quanto costa... Grazie!

Attorney General Eric Holder Speaks at the E-books Press Conference Washington, D.C. ~ Wednesday, April 11, 2012 "Earlier today, we filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, against Apple and five different book publishers - Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster. In response to our allegations, three of these publishers - Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster - agreed to a proposed settlement. If approved by the court, this settlement would resolve the Department's antitrust concerns with these companies, and would require them to grant retailers - such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble - the freedom to reduce the prices of their e-book titles. The settlement also requires the companies to terminate their anticompetitive most-favored-nation agreements with Apple and other e-books retailers. In addition, the companies will be prohibited for two years from placing constraints on retailers' ability to offer discounts to consumers. They will also be prohibited from conspiring or sharing competitively sensitive information with their competitors for five years. And each is required to implement a strong antitrust compliance program. These steps are appropriate - and essential in ensuring a competitive marketplace. Beginning in the summer of 2009, we allege that executives at the highest levels of the companies included in today's lawsuit - concerned that e-book sellers had reduced prices - worked together to eliminate competition among stores selling e-books, ultimately increasing prices for consumers. As a result of this alleged conspiracy, we believe that consumers paid millions of dollars more for some of the most popular titles. During regular, near-quarterly meetings, we allege that publishing company executives discussed confidential business and competitive matters - including Amazon's e-book retailing practices - as part of a conspiracy

"March 19, 2013, 1:00 pm By Prof. Hacker [This is a guest post by Lisa Rhody, who works for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University as the project manager for WebWise 2013....] From early posts about scholarly uses of social media to more recent entries on its usefulness for improving student engagement, there seems to be a general consensus among ProfHacker writers that the use of social media promotes the widening of scholarly networks. Keeping in mind that online social networks extend beyond the obvious Twitter and Facebook-blogs, podcasts, wikis, and photo/video sharing sites are a few other forms of social media-the vexing question to answer has been how to quantify the scope or significance of one's participation in social media to a wider scholarly conversation."

"E poi tutto quel giorno La mi condusse intorno A veder l'officina. Mostrommi a parte a parte Gli strumenti dell'arte, E i servigi diversi A che ciascun di loro S'adopra nel lavoro... (Scherzo, G. Leopardi) È con questa immagine in mente che rispondo ad un commento, riproducendo il percorso e cogliendo l'occasione di mostrare altro, qua e là. Così si capisce anche come non riesca mai a non deviare dall'ultimo proposito, che tre giorni fa era di rispondere a tutti i commenti in un solo post… La cosa inizia con un commento che non ritrovo più… mi ricordo che era di luciab, o qualcosa del genere…"

Sottotitolazione dei tutorial video al 25 maggio 2013 http://www.amara.org/en/videos/4Qs2p7hI3RTo/info/cercare-fra-i-commenti-di-un-blog-in-wordpresscom/ sottotitoli da fare http://www.amara.org/en/videos/K85utRHvDf35/info/embedding-di-un-video-in-wordpress-e-blogger/ sottotitoli da fare http://www.amara.org/en/videos/rtSzcExoQMmq/info/embedding-di-video-flash-in-wordpresscom/ sottotitoli da fare http://www.amara.org/en/videos/0MpeIW3mmLvt/info/ (Paolo Ferri sui nativi digitali) sottotitoli da fare

eLearning Papers nº 33 [May 2013] "...This issue aims to shed light on the way MOOCs affect education institutions and learners. Which teaching and learning strategies can be used to improve the MOOC learning experience? How do MOOCs fit into today's pedagogical landscape; and could they provide a viable model for developing countries? We must also look closely at their potential impact on education structures. With the expansion of xMOOC platforms connected to different university networks-like Coursera, Udacity, edX, or the newly launched European Futurelearn-a central question is: what is their role in the education system and especially in higher education? This special issue of eLearning Papers brings together in-depth research and examples from the field to generate debate within this emerging research area." Author(s): Yishay Mor, Tapio Koskinen Anche in italiano e altre lingue

IRC  If you are a newcomer or veteran, tech-savvy or not, this page is intended to show how to get connected with others in the Mozilla project for online chat. The page also serves as a listing of IRC channels that are frequently used, with descriptions of their general purpose. There are also instructions for the non-technical folks on how they can join an IRC chat.

Google Faces searching for faces on Google Maps,  The way we perceive our environment is a complex procedure. By the help of our vision we are able to recognize friends within a huge crowd, approximate the speed of an oncoming car or simply admire a painting. One of human's most characteristic features is our desire to detect patterns. We use this ability to penetrate into the detailed secrets of nature. However we also tend to use this ability to enrich our imagination. Hence we recognize meaningful shapes in clouds or detect a great bear upon astrological observations. Objective investigations and subjective imagination collide to one inseparable process. The tendency to detect meaning in vague visual stimuli is a psychological phenomenon called Pareidolia, and captures the core interest of this project.  video tutorial: http://vimeo.com/66055499#

"Features No programming skills required Just choose interaction formats, enter contents, set the app design and with one click generate your apps. Multiple interaction formats You can choose several formats like tests, flashcards, video, audio, plain texts and more. Multiple publishing platforms Create your apps for users of Apples iOS, Googles Android, HTML5 and soon even more platforms. Brand your app Make your app individual by using your own designs. Or just choose one out of many predefined professional designs. No access limits There is no need for an IT infrastructure. Build your apps in the cloud, no matter where you are or what time it is 24/7 updates Upload or change any contents and update them for your end users in real time."

Trovato perché mi ha seguita su Twitter. Troppo bello per essere onesto? Però se il prodotto deve funzionare su tutte quelle piattaforme, questo dovrebbe comportare una benvenuta semplificazione della struttura, no? La quale dovrebbe facilitare l'accessibilità? Ci proverò.

Mm però il tutorial YT fa proprio schifo, nello stile "ti mostro ma non dico niente così [non] funziona in tutte le lingue", con musichetta del cavolo.

Il progetto Virtual Science nasce dalla voglia di condividere con altri docenti e con il mondo della formazione la mia esperienza nell'ambito delle scienze ed in particolare dell'applicazione delle nuove tecnologie nell'insegnamento, nella "didattica virtuale" e nell' e-learning in genere. Da sempre appassionata di informatica sono approdata da qualche anno nei mondi virtuali ed in particolare Opensim. Molte scuole e Università stanno da tempo cogliendo questa grande opportunità.  Nel campo della didattica ed in particolare nell'ambito scientifico-tecnologico è utile nella simulazione di fenomeni, nello studio della geometria dei solidi, nella ricostruzione di ambienti naturali. E' noto infatti come la modellizzazione dei fenomeni scientifici è un passo importante per la loro comprensione, senza contare come un ambiente "ludico" e motivante sia fondamentale per l'apprendimento.

"Cos'è Google2SRT? Google2SRT è uno strumento in grado di scaricare i sottotitoli "non integrati" (Closed Captions - CC) dei video di YouTube/Google Video (se presenti) e convertirli in un formato standard (SubRip - SRT) supportato dalla maggior parte dei player. I sottitoli "non integrati" di YouTube/Google Video (i cosiddetti CC) anche oggi non possono essere scaricati in modo semplice. Anche scaricandoli, questi non saranno usabili in nessun player video (software o DivX domestico) poiché sono codificato in un formato proprietario di Google. Ecco perché Google2SRT permette di scaricarli e convertirli in un formato riconosciuto dalla maggior parte dei player video (SRT) e possono essere successivamente convertiti in altri formati conosciuti come SSA (SubStation Alpha) or SUB (MicroDVD) usando altro software disponibile su Internet. (...) A quali condizioni posso usare questo software? Google2SRT è un software gratuito ed open source, rilasciato sotto i termini della GNU General Public License (GPL). In breve: puoi scaricare, copiare, modificare, dare e vendere questo software come vuoi ed a chi vuoi, a patto che tu distribuisca il codice sorgente originale ed, in caso di modifica o riuso del codice stesso, anche il nuovo codice sorgente sotto le medesime condizioni."

Particolare vantaggio: consente di scaricare anche i sottotitoli automatici prodotti dal software di YouTube. Anche se fanno schifo, ciononostante a volte sono abbastanza poco schifosi da poter essere corretti per farne qualcosa di atto al consumo umano.

"Instructions‎ > ‎ School Mode Contents 1 How does school mode work? 2 Installation 3 Generating class folders 4 Bulk Operations in School Mode 5 Quota Limitations 6 Do's and Don'ts"

"Posted by Dario Taraborelli on August 2, 2012 Improving the quality of articles has long been one of the primary aims of contributors to Wikipedia, and is one of the Wikimedia movement's 2010-15 strategic priorities, but measuring it objectively has remained a challenge. In 2005, Nature famously reported that Wikipedia articles on scientific topics contained just four errors per article on average, compared to three errors per article in the online edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Britannica objected to the report, but Nature stood by it, and the report remains widely cited today. Since that time, however, there have been relatively few independent analyses of Wikipedia article quality, despite the enormous growth of the project. Wikipedia today counts more than 23 million articles across languages (more than 4 million articles in the English Wikipedia alone) compared to 3.7 million total articles in 2005; today it ranks 6th by overall traffic according to Alexa, while it ranked 37th in 2005. (...) The Wikimedia Foundation is announcing the release of a pilot study conducted by Epic, an e-learning consultancy, in partnership with Oxford University - "Assessing the Accuracy and Quality of Wikipedia Entries Compared to Popular Online Alternative Encyclopaedias: A Preliminary Comparative Study Across Disciplines in English, Spanish and Arabic." The study compared a sample of English Wikipedia articles to equivalent articles in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Spanish Wikipedia to Enciclonet, and Arabic Wikipedia to Mawsoah and Arab Encyclopaedia. 22 articles in the sample were blind-assessed by 2 to 3 native speaking academic experts each, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The small size of the sample does not allow us to generalize the results to Wikipedia as a whole. However, as a pilot primarily focused on methodology, the study offers new insights into the design of a protocol for expert assessment of encyclopedic contents. For our editor community a

"EFS 693B - STANFORD UNIVERSITY Advanced Listening and Vocabulary Development (...) TED Talks Introduction Below are groups of TED Talks, curated from http://www.ted.com and organized roughly by level and topic. You should do a full group (divided across several sessions if desired) and see if the integration makes them easier to understand (especially the later ones). Be sure to interact with them--don't just watch all of them straight through. However, you can do all or parts of some more intensively than others. Use your best judgment, and return to previous class notes as needed. Note that you are provided with the following information about the talk: 1. length 2. the overall speed in words-per-minute (WPM) 3. the vocabulary profile by percent of words at set frequency levels of the British National Corpus (3K, 5K, 10K, and more than 20K (off-list=OL)) 4. Accent (US, British, etc.) 5. Comments 6. Brief description of the content (from the TED website) (...) Last modified November 12, 2013, by Phil Hubbard"

Molto interessante e sopratutto utile grazie!

Grazie, Fabrizio, Ho taggato con "EFS_Stanford" - tra altri tag - questo webquest e i video ivi elencati dopo un webinar con Phil Hubbard organizzato via hangout da Vance Stevens domenica scorsa (8 ottobre). Nel webinar Hubbard ha insistito sul fatto che la forma di webquest direttivo era meglio delle forme di collaborazione sociali come tagging e condivisione, perché gli consentiva, da esperto, di dare informazioni coerenti. Allora taggare queste sue risorse TED su Diigo è anche un modo di esprimere il mio dissenso ;-) In effetti a proposito di http://www.ted.com/talks/gel_gotta_share.html , elencato in questo webquest, dice di non poter indicare le parole per minuto "perché non c'è trascrizione". Invece c'è, se si va alla pagina YT originale del video embeddato. Ora se invece di un webquest statico avesse condiviso questa risorsa con i suoi studenti in un gruppo come questo, c'è da scommettere che almeno uno di loro avrebbe rimediato all'errore in un commento - come d'altronde ho fatto in https://groups.diigo.com/group/ltis13/content/tag/EFS_Stanford%20GelConference ...

"...Teachable moments As is often the case in awkward cases - where the system does not quite work as intended - a few things can be drawn from this episode. YouTube's Content ID system - http://youtube-global.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/improving-content-id.html - is, in fact, intended to act as a buffer between the sometimes conflicting interests of content holders and uploaders: rather than forcing content holders to either ignore infringing content or go straight to a DMCA takedown notice. YouTube compares content that is uploaded to huge numbers of files of copyright works supplied by content owners, as do external agencies contracted to content owners. Content owners are able to set their own parameters, and determine what action YouTube should take - whether that is allowing, monetizing or blocking the content. One problem with this setup is that mechanical systems, while necessary to sort the vast amount of content being uploaded to YouTube and other video sharing sites every moment, are short on nuance. One can make assumptions and built rules based on quantifiable properties - if there are five minutes of rightsholder-owned content scattered across a 30 minute video, for example, that content is more likely to be being used for illustrative purposes in a review than uploaded in an infringing fashion - but ideas like fair use are generally decided by humans, and can only be approximated by mechanical systems. So, the rights holder, the agency pursuing monetization on the rights holder's behalf, the uploader and YouTube have connected but not identical interests. This may go some way to explaining the lacunae which took this example from a formality to a three-month epic. And, in this particular case, there are unusual elements - for example, the double claims, for first audiovisual and then visual content. The system is not intended to enable this kind of double jeopardy

Daniel Nye Griffiths descrive un caso reale di disputa sul copyright nel caso di un remix video pubblicato su YouTube. Da lì, spiega come funziona il sistema YouTube che individua possibili violazioni di copyright ma consente anche di contestare tali individuazioni. Ci sono anche link alle fonti dirette. Cosa buffa: il caso reale riguarda il copyright di una serie TV intitolata "The Twilight Zone", l'area crepuscolare tra giorno e notte. Sono capitata su questo articolo cercando di capire se un episodio del 1960 di questa serie era ancora sotto copyright oppure era caduto nel pubblico dominio. Prima avevo provato con lo strumento Digital Copyright Slider dell'associazione delle biblioteche US - http://librarycopyright.net/resources/digitalslider/ - che aveva cautamente risposto "Forse", con una nota che spiegava che dipendeva se il copyright originale era stato rinnovato, e link a lunghi e complessi documenti su come fare per scoprirlo... quindi sono tuttora nella "Twilight Zone" in merito.

"Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users. Here is a sample Flash tutorial created by Wink."

Brief.ly is a simple way to share a "bundle" of links at the same time. Enter up to 30 links and captions you want to share (one per line or click the wrench for more options). Brief.ly will generate a unique URL. When opened, a Table of Contents page lists the sites included. When you open the bundle, each site appears and tabs appear along the top of the page that allow you to easily jump from one recommended site to the next. This site is very easy to use and helpful for all ages, as long as they can read. With your membership, you can edit the contents of your list later, without resending it or changing the single link. tag(s): organizational skills (84) TeachersFirst review

"UNESCO Young Digital Creators (YDC) Educator's Kit   The YDC Educator's Kit is designed to help teachers and educators working in schools, youth clubs, community centres, and training institutes to generate and manage project-based learning activities with young people. "

"Embedded audios in a website generally display a simple control bar with navigation buttons to play, pause, rewind and so on. While this is great for audio libraries, it can be so much more. In this tutorial, I'll show you step by step how to add a poster image, a watermark and subtitles, using JW player from LongtailVideo."

" TED Open Translation Project Our languages Our translators FAQ / Help for site visitors Becoming a TED translator Quick Start on Amara Working with other translators Style guidelines for translators Terms and Conditions FAQ / Help for translators Style guidelines for translators It's important for translations on TED to be extremely accurate, and also to reflect the spirit and flow of the speaker's style. Different languages pose specific challenges, but we offer here some general rules of thumb for approaching translation on TED.com."