ALT Lab

Slick mapping visualization from our friends at the VCU Libraries. The Internet is going to be big some day...

Maybe something to work into the Spaces site . . .

"Lighten up your email with the Emotional Labor extension. Works on any email sent through Gmail. First write an email. Then click the smiley face to brighten up the tone of the email before sending. "

"Grading will be based on attendance, enthusiastic participation in class discussion, respectful project critiques of fellow students, and clear and detailed documentation of projects (30%). Participation includes speaking during class, being attentive and engaged, as well as commenting and critiquing online materials at the class website. The first 2 projects will be each worth 15%, and the final project will be worth 40% (including documentation). Each unexcused absence will result in a loss of 10% of total points. Each failure to do the assigned readings will result in a 5% loss of total points. Projects may be done alone or in collaboration. Collaborations must document the full extent of each participant's contribution and equal effort is expected per collaborator. The final project may build on one of the previous two. "

" Design is how it works and sketching in code is the only natural way to prototype a dynamic system. Building even the simplest of data visualizations means hours of work in languages like R, Julia or Python. When your content is data, poking around in Photoshop simply makes no sense. In some way, it's the direct opposite of design: prettifying without context. One important aspect of modern design products is their increasing demand for temporal logic, where a linear narrative is replaced by a set of complex states."

"But first it is about this question: What is web writing in 2015? * * * You know, web writing - that chatty, affable, ephemeral old thing. The thing that prized personality over pomp, the thing with feathers (and links). What does it look like?"

h/t Stan

Not far from our example site so something to look at for inspiration in format and for inspirational examples as well. h/t Prof Hacker in the Chronicle

"20 Day Stranger is an app that reveals intimate, shared connections between two anonymous individuals. It's a mobile experience that exchanges one person's experience of the world with another's, while preserving anonymity on both sides. "

"Results indicated that vertically unidirectional response options should be used when absolute judgments are being made using online-administered Likert scales. When relative judgments are being made, horizontally unidirectional response options should be used."

"There's solid research behind the idea. Most famously, MIT professor Thomas Allen's work has emphasized how important face-to-face interaction is for creativity, and found that people rarely even speak to coworkers who sit as little as 60 feet away from them in a traditional office. "

"Now, nearly 35,000 people are subscribed to SuicideWatch. Related subreddit, or sub, StopSelfHarm has 4,500 members; MakeMeFeelBetter has 15,000; the depression sub, which shares some moderators with SuicideWatch, has more than 100,000 subscribers. "

The entire article provides an interesting way to look at course design as well as ALT Lab website construction. "Grab the audience's attention visually. An enjoyable story offers a hook, a call to action, immediately, as soon as you open it."

Derek Buff's next generation learning spaces summary

To extend Friday's conversation even further . . . "The second type of busyness also results in health problems, but it is a sickness we bring on ourselves. Like voluntarily licking the door handle of a preschool bathroom or having a sweaty picnic in the Ball Pit at Chuck E. Cheese's. It's busyness we control. Self-created stress. Ever since my conversation a month ago, I realized that my busyness is this second type. Busyness we control. In fact, many times I create rush and worry where none exists. Any typical morning, you can find me riding my kids like a couple of three-dollar mules in a sea of marbles, begging them to move faster." h/t D'Arcy Norman

"Links are the connective tissue of the Web. When we suppress them, we prevent users from discovering unanticipated ways of working together."

"Deliberate rote memorization is an attempt to take a shortcut in the learning process… Instead of having people learn important facts by themselves through practice, we decide once and for all what the important facts are, we delay practice, and start with the memorization of the "important facts". "