ALT Lab

"There's no shortage of crises to attend to. But by providing new technology and tools, Refugee Open Ware might make refugee camps a space where those at the epicenter of a crisis can send out shock waves of good."

"The chances that any given reader knows more about that subject than the person who just wrote it are slim. ... On the other hand, the chances that any given reader knows something related to that subject are very high."

This has some real potential. h/t Stan

Very good: "Web Design: The First 100 years" http://t.co/wu8jzT6Pq6 (although "the web" is not the right frame, but, details.)

Worth checking out this really brief workflow video on presentation creation

"In Unflattening, Nick Sousanis writes that we need to "discover new ways of seeing, to open spaces for possibilities. It is about finding different perspectives." Stereoscopic vision reveals "that a single, 'true' perspective is false." "

"I'm slowly getting the hang of using my 3D printer to make useful things. Last week, I made sliders for the legs on our pool chairs. This weekend, I made a doohickey to hold our freezer's ice cube container lid in place."

I don't think this is cognitive bias but it's interesting.

h/t D'Arcy

"This report presents an overview of current video practice: the widespread use of video and its costs, the relevance of production value for learning, the pedagogical considerations of teaching online, and the challenges of standardizing production. Findings are based on a literature review, our observation of online courses, and the results of 12 semi-structured interviews with practitioners in the field of educational video production. "

Slick chart building tool

"What's neat about this is that I didn't have to use any special software while I was writing to make this "video" possible. I was working in plain old vanilla Google Docs. And to show you this one paragraph I liked, I didn't have to present you with the whole document (all 39,154 revisions of it) - I could extract bits and pieces that I thought were interesting, and interleave them in a blog post. Imagine what a high school English teacher could do with that. Imagine what you could do with that if instead of a minor effort by ol' Somers here you had, say, a piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates. (I've always wanted to watch how TNC writes. If he's ever used Google Docs, it's now possible.)"

I love this: "I worry that most people aren't as good writers as they should be. One thing is that they just don't write enough. Another is that they don't realize it's supposed to be hard; they think that good writers are talented, when the truth is that good writers get good the way good programmers get good, the way good anythings get good: by running into the spike. Maybe folks would understand that better if they had vivid evidence that a good writer actually spends most of his time fighting himself."

"Dr. Moorman conducted a study focused on what meaning VTS had for students exploring how they used VTS in patient care.  Guided by a series of 3 questions, a facilitator chose a work of art and asked students the following questions: 'What is going on in this painting?' 'What are you seeing that makes you say that?' (requiring students to give visual evidence), and 'What more can you find?' (requiring them to look again and scaffold off of others' comments).  Students found their observational skills improved and that they were more open to hearing other's opinions.  They found that they were more likely to give detail to back up observations in their clinical situations and listen to others during report. They also found they used the same line of questioning that the facilitator used when they were seeking more information during clinical rotations during patient care.    "

We had a faculty member who took our students to the VMFA every year for this exercise. The students loved it. I didn't understand its point at the time, but this makes a great deal of sense.

h/t David C.

h/t Joyce

h/t Stan