ALT Lab

""We find that students doing more activities learn more than students watching more videos or reading more pages. We estimate the learning benefit from extra doing (1 SD increase) to be more than six times that of extra watching or reading." "

"This past year, Davidson College introduced "A Domain of One's Own" to a portion of the student body through faculty willing to use it in their teaching. I saw two styles of 'Domains' rise out of the initiative. The first type of 'Domain' took audience into account, considering the implications of public scholarship, representation, and student agency. The second, in many ways, mirrored the traditional pedagogical structure by assigning papers or short answer assignments to be posted online through blogs. This is not necessarily bad, but also doesn't necessarily empower. The problems with the second approach can be wrapped up into two key questions beginning with: Why post an assignment online if…"

Also related to the distinction between having an eportfolio program and creating a domain of one's own; very different creatures that sometimes get discussed as if they're the same thing.

"This article is significantly longer than previous installments. It features 4 interactive slideshows, each introducing a new tool as well as related concepts around it. In one way, it's just another math guide, but going much deeper. In another, it's a thesis on everything I know about animating. Their intersection is a handbook for anyone who wants to make things move with code, but I hope it's an interesting read even if that's not your goal."

"The bottom line? According to multiple, peer-reviewed studies, simply being in an open network instead of a closed one is the best predictor of career success. In the chart, the further to the right you go toward a closed network, the more you repeatedly hear the same ideas, which reaffirm what you already believe. The further left you go toward an open network, the more you're exposed to new ideas. People to the left are significantly more successful than those to the right. In fact, the study shows that half of the predicted difference in career success (i.e., promotion, compensation, industry recognition) is due to this one variable."

Annotating the web

Remember to open with Kaizena in Google Drive

"Inline audio players. Easy to make. Seamless to publish." h/t Stan

"Crossfilter is a JavaScript library for exploring large multivariate datasets in the browser. Crossfilter supports extremely fast ( h/t Stan

": 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."

"We're creating a world where you can say "I'll send you everything I know about this", and be telling the truth."