Here are a few tools I’ve discovered recently and thought merited sharing.
Many Eyes is an information-visualization tool that turns data sets into informative and stunning graphics. Here are a few examples:
Today is the 14th Annual DePaul Teaching and Learning Conference. The conference focuses on ways that personalism plays out in various teaching practices at DePaul. Eric Iberri, Melissa Koenig, and Jeanne Kim (as “iddresources”) will be liveblogging Dr. Punya Mishra’s keynote, “Blurring the Boundaries, The Personal and the Professional in a Webbed World” and a few other sessions if time and technologies permit.
I’m nursing a head cold and have a blog post due. Can I put something together in small tweets of 140 characters or less?
Wondering about the Web literacy of our online students. Some have to be told to scroll to see content "below the fold." Why is this?
Resisting the notion of designing for users who are Web illiterate. Does designing for the few diminish the learning experience for most?
DePaul IDD consultant Daniel Stanford has written about user tech illiteracy. I’m currently thinking he’s onto something we should consider.
No one likes to read learning objectives. Okay, this might be too extreme a statement. Let me rephrase to make it sound more academically correct: no one, other than instructional designers, academic creditors, faculty/syllabus-writers, or students who are bored to tears, likes to read learning objectives—unless they are short, punchy, and, hence, super retainable!
As an instructional-design professional, I fit into the category of learning-objectives reviewers. I have a tendency to browse through the objectives portion of various documents: course syllabi, training brochures, webinar announcements, and even activity notices from my kids’ school. I look at them not to learn purpose of the events but rather to catch “violators” of our learning-objective rules: “to understand”… vague word; “to improve” … but how; “to be able to” … under what condition!