Group items tagged

I dislike the term accessibility. It is an accurate enough term. It just conjures up the wrong preconceptions. When you talk about accessibility people's eyes glaze over. They are either imagining wheelchair ramps or WCAG checklists. Either way, it does nothing to capture the truth about accessibility. Accessibility is not about designing for the few. It is designing for us all. Tweet this That is why I have started talking about inclusive design instead. Accessibility is about designing for everybody, not the few. It is not about designing just for the disabled. It is about designing for every one of us.

"The Columbia Film Language Glossary is a teaching tool designed to enhance the study of film. The Glossary features key terms in film studies selected by Columbia faculty and illustrated with detailed explanations, film clips, and visual annotations. Browse Terms "

"bring about these changes in students. Hence it is clear that a statement of objectives in terms of content headings…is not a satisfactory basis for guiding the further development of the curriculum. The most useful form for stating objectives is to express them in terms which identify both the kind of behavior to be developed in the student and the … area of life which this behavior is to operate." pp. 45-7."

Effects of long-term systematic educational development on the beliefs and attitudes of university teachers.

"In order to make it easier to track activity in Hypothes.is, I created a program called Hypothes.is Collector. The idea is that you can type in user name, a URL, a tag, or a group ID and click the button to see all of the related annotations. The program will create a new sheet with an archive of up to 200 annotations based on the search terms.  It will then create a third sheet that will count how many of these annotations were made on each URL in the set by each user."

"In 1998, a National Science Foundation report made a remark that begins to hit the mark a little closer: "It is important to understand how individuals assess their own knowledge of these subjects. For many purposes … it is the individual's self-assessment of his or her knowledge that will either encourage or discourage a given behavior." This starts to tear down the wall of judging people based on how "well-informed" or "attentive" they are (terms that permeate these statistics reports) to science, and instead places more significance on an individual's assessment of themselves. To go further, I'd argue that "knowledge" isn't as telltale of a measurement as "experience"."

": Hansen's study comes via a nontraditional publishing decision by its authors. The study will be published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, an open-access "discussion" journal, and will not have formal peer review prior to its appearance online later this week. [Update, July 23: The paper is now available.] The complete discussion draft circulated to journalists was 66 pages long, and included more than 300 references. The peer review will take place in real time, with responses to the work by other scientists also published online. Hansen said this publishing timeline was necessary to make the work public as soon as possible before global negotiators meet in Paris later this year. Still, the lack of traditional peer review and the fact that this study's results go far beyond what's been previously published will likely bring increased scrutiny. On Twitter, Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist whose work focuses on Greenland and the Arctic, was skeptical of such enormous rates of near-term sea level rise, though she defended Hansen's decision to publish in a nontraditional way."

I/we need to consider this with our team and education more broadly. "Theory 1: Nothing we "know" about software development should be assumed to be true. Most of our tools, our mental models, and our practices are remnants of an era (possibly fictional) where software was written by solo practitioners, but modern software is a team sport. Theory 2: Technology is the product of the culture that builds it. Great technology is the product of a great culture. Culture gives us the ability to act in a loosely coupled way; it allows us to pursue a diversity of tactics. Uncertainty is the mind-killer and culture creates certainty in the face of the yawning shapeless void of possible solutions that is software engineering. Culture is what you do, not what you say. It starts at the top. It affects everything. You have a choice about the culture you promote, not about the culture you have. Theory 3: Software development should be thought of as a cycle of continual learning and improvement rather a progression from start to finish, or a search for correctness. If you aren't shipping, you aren't learning. If it slows down shipping, it probably isn't worth it. Maturity is knowing when to make the trade off and when not to. I had some experience with this at Flickr, and I wanted to see how far you could scale it. My private bet was that we'd make it to 50 engineers before things broke down. Theory 4: You build a culture of learning by optimizing globally not locally. Your improvement, over time, as a team, with shared tools, practices and beliefs is more important than individual pockets of brilliance. And more satisfying. Theory 5: If you want to build for the long term, the only guarantee is change. Invest in your people and your ability to ask questions, not your current answers. Your current answers are wrong, or they will be soon. "

"Big data, while a term that is in common use, is a bit of a misnomer: big data is not simply a matter of size. The notion of big data comprises volume, size, and velocity, and also poses the questions of how to move large data sets around and define a vision that makes sense of them.3"

"While technology is still at the core of the model, the kernel in the center of that core is games and "game-like" learning. In the process of finding its feet, Quest ditched the "school for digital kids" tagline and replaced it with "Challenging students to invent their future." A "challenge," in fact, is a key component of any game, one of many game terms that all Quest students master. Game-related activity - such as creating an overarching narrative for a unit of study, inventing a board or other "analog" game or performing a dramatic role-play exercise - is the container for all curricular content, from algebra and sex education to memoir writing and conflict resolution. "

Lovely post by an ED PSY 607 student "We talked in class about the importance of connections or clues and how the more connections and clues a student can develop towards a new idea, the better that new idea or concept is understood and processed, or moved to long term memory. "

"A major affordance of video is the ability to produce multimedia elements and create dynamic learning artifacts. This may be self-evident, yet often instructional videos are produced without much design devoted to sound or imagery. Students repeatedly described the audio/visual elements of video as useful aspects of online course videos. Throughout the interviews, all participants evaluated charts, graphs, photographs, and other visuals relevant to the content area in positive terms. Conversely, a couple of students voiced their dissatisfaction with videos that they did not perceive as a value-add over text (they said videos they viewed did not include useful audio/visuals and that they could have just as easily read a transcript for the same information)."

This study has identified the extensive theoretical and literary diversity surrounding the term "digital competence". We have shown that authors and researchers, in attempting to coin new concepts, have provided multiple definitions: some are similar, others are quite differentiated, and many are redundant. Our review shows that digital competence and digital literacy are closely related but not identical.

""One thing I've been thinking about lately is that the way I present myself in the online course is pretty different from how I present myself in the face-to-face course. In the first iteration of the course, I presented myself in a way that I assumed would be most effective." She described emphasizing a scripted, polished presentation and a no-nonsense persona of clarity and precision. "Now I am concerned less with my authority as a teacher in an online environment. Before, I presented myself in a more authoritative matter, which was not as effective, because I had a certain feeling of a barrier between myself and the class." She explained how she was willing to risk "being more effusive, more warm in written communication, more bubbly for lack of a better term" than her initial impulses dictated. "

" twXplorer, which allows you search for a specific hashtag or term, giving you the most recent 500 tweets along with some basic analysis of the content found therein."

"Nelson goes on to say that "Education ought to be clear, inviting and enjoyable, without booby-traps, humiliations, condescension or boredom. It ought to teach and reward initiative, curiosity, the habit of self-motivation, intellectual involvement." This reminded of this course. So far I can honestly say that I have thoroughly enjoyed this course. Many of my previous online courses were extremely repetitive and the assignments were very bland. We did the same thing over and over again every week. Read the article and write a post about it. We are taught to question things in this course. We are pushed to be creative and research topics that we cannot find easy answers to. We are not punished for our opinions, rather rewarded for getting our creative juices flowing. One of my favorite assignments was the one where we had to search a question that we already knew the answer to. I had no idea that my question about the S on superman's chest would lead to gender equality. It taught me to always take a deeper look. This course is the kind of course Nelson was talking about. It's unique, and definitely meets his criteria." h/t Jon

" also share a lot of your concerns about specifics, but I think I've found a way to work my brain around it. You're absolute right; we've been conditioned to think in terms of exact numbers. We're used to being told our posts should be 200 words with 4 paragraphs and exactly 8 links to external sources, so that's how we've learned to function. I think this class has been great for me to retrain my brain to think creatively rather than within the confines of instructions. For length, I just make sure I answer the question. I ask myself if I feel that my answer is appropriate, or if I should go into more detail. It helps me if I stop focusing on the grade (as hard as that is) and instead focus on the assignment itself. If I can answer the question with detail in two sentences, I feel like two sentences is a perfectly fine entry. Most of the time, my entries are 2-3 paragraphs. I just write down what I'm thinking, rather than trying to filter through "Is this what Dr. Becker wants to see?" I think my work looks a lot better when I'm focused on what I think looks respectable, rather than trying to mold myself to what I think others may expect of me." h/t Jon

""In terms of trying to assess authentic student learning," he says, "it's the most ambitious effort ever.""