Category Archives: Web Tools

I Could Say Bella, Bella, Even Say Wunderlist

When we started the Mobile Learning Initiative (MoLI) at DePaul a few years ago, my MoLI teammates and I agreed pretty quickly that our mission was not in finding “magic bullet” apps for faculty so much as it was encouraging learning activities that make use of the unique functions of mobile devices.

Our mission, however, didn’t stop me from seeking my own magic bullet apps. Early last year, at the recommendation of my teammate Joe Olivier, I started using the free version of Wunderlist.  Little did Joe know, I have nurtured a list-making habit from an early age. It started with my mom’s yellow legal pads in the 80’s, and it’s been a fire hazard ever since.

Joe’s app recommendation made a huge difference in my everyday life. I’ll explain how in a moment, but first:

After I confessed to my mom that I had eschewed legal pads and Post-It’s for “this amazing app” (and begged her to follow suit) she sent me the link to The Wall Street Journal piece where she first heard about Wunderlist: The Best To-Do Apps for Feeling Productive. Continue reading →

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Can Project Management Achieve a Zen-like State?

“Huh?” you ask?  The typical project management state of mind is angst-ridden and chaotic.  There are too many projects with too many tasks and too many people to manage.  Then there is the inventory and handling of the content in order to check-off completed tasks to complete the projects.  And so it goes, until the mind becomes a tangled mess that brings on the dire need for a cup of coffee and a candy bar.

Three weeks before the beginning of a new quarter became the trigger point for inducing this project management panicked state of mind.  The bits of content and emails started rolling in which prompted growing task lists, phone calls, and meetings with my production assistant.  We couldn’t seem to get the information contained in any organized way where we felt in control.  We also found that in this morass of information, we were making mistakes.

Then along came Asana.   Asana is a cloud-based project management tool whose tag line is “Teamwork without email. Asana puts conversations and tasks together so you can get more done with less effort.”  YES!  Continue reading →

Cool Creative Commons Collections for Class

I am not very original and I like to find materials on the web to ‘spice-up’ my hybrid and online courses. However, I frequently find things that are wonderful, but I am never sure as to their usability with regards to copyright and fair-use. Fortunately, there is a wealth of resources out there that are available under some very clear and user-friendly licensing.  So, let me first briefly discuss Creative Commons licensing and then point you to some wonderful web sites that support either Creative Commons licensing or clearly stated licensing materials for use in your course.

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that has established some legal tools to allow content authors to share their creative works under six different licensing schemes. The schemes are outlined on the website. In the simplest of terms, all of the licenses require, as a minimum, attribution. This means you give credit to the author for the original creation. The rest of the licenses add on one or more of these attributes: NoDerivs, NonCommercial or ShareAlike. Rather than go into the detail, the site provides complete descriptions of the licenses in both a human-readable format (License Deed) or the less-friendly Legal Code. Below are a few sites where you can find some really great content licensed under CC.

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Highlights from the 2014 ELI Conference

One of the best things about the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) annual meeting is the broad spectrum of institutions represented, from the Ivy League to large public and private universities to community colleges and small liberal arts schools. If you’re looking for colleagues who are grappling with the same challenges you’re experiencing at your institution, chances are you’ll find them at ELI.

The ELI audience is as diverse as the institutions they represent and includes instructional designers, faculty with a passion for technology, and IT professionals working in higher education. Unlike conferences that focus primarily on distance learning, ELI attracts a large proportion of CIOs and people passionate about the intersection of technology and physical learning spaces. As a result, the conference typically includes ample hands-on time with new gadgets and hardware. On Tuesday, I learned more about Arduinos during a hands-on “maker-space” session that left me missing my old Capsela set. At breakfast on Wednesday, I had a chance to chat with remote conference participants who roamed the venue using a device designed by Double Robotics. And just before heading to the airport, Jeremy Littau, an Assistant Professor at Lehigh University, let me test-drive Google Glass.

Of course, you don’t have to be on a first name basis with the staff of your local Radio Shack to get something useful out of ELI. The annual meeting agenda is brimming with presentations on everything from faculty development for online learning to predictions on the future of open-source textbooks and MOOCs. Here are a few highlights from some of the sessions I attended.

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My Oversharing Adventure: Travel Notes from the Land of Millennials

I give you my word that by the end of this article, you won’t feel bad about yourself. You won’t feel behind the times because you refuse to tweet course announcements, or follow your students on Instagram, or friend them on some new app that tells you what they had for breakfast.

I care about your feelings because I understand your pain. I was born in one of those years that generation X and millennials have agreed to treat as a demilitarized buffer zone. Part of me feels a kinship with those who came before me. I share their concerns about online privacy. I’m a little worried about those NSA data bunkers and the fact that kids today don’t return phone calls. I even hesitated to list the year of my birth in this very public blog post, which is probably a sign I’m not a true millennial.

On the other hand, part of me longs to burn my gen-X passport and defect to the reckless frontier that is the Republic of gen-Y. To learn what I’ve been missing, I recently embraced my dual citizenship and spent a few weeks living as a native among the millennials. Within days, I went from shaking my fist at Miley Cyrus, with her twitpics and her twerking, to sharing artsy photos of melted ice cream and Vine videos like a true gen-Y artiste. I also created a profile on Vizify, which took my yawn-inducing data from LinkedIn and transformed it into a slick collage of photos and infographics. (For more on that, view the video below.)

I like that my Vizify profile peels back the professorly veil just a bit without leaving me overexposed. Continue reading →

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Mixed Content makes for an Interesting Course Experience

For a while now, both Internet Explorer (IE) and Chrome have been blocking “mixed content.”  In the last few weeks, the most recent Firefox release (Firefox 23) has also begun doing so.  So, what is mixed content and why should you care?

When your web browser connects to any webpage, the webpage is sent to you by another computer called a server. Your web browser and the server know how to connect by way of a set of digital rules, or a “protocol.” There are two types of protocols your web browser can connect through:

  • HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or
  • HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS)

Secure webpages start with https in their URLs.  These sites have their connections to the webservers encrypted, making the information shared on them more secure from sniffers and man-in-the-middle attacks–in other words, from people who are up to no good.  Sounds good, right?  When you are making a purchase online, accessing your bank account, or taking an online class, you want your data to be secure.  So what then is the problem? Continue reading →

In the Cloud(s)

I still shudder when I think of standing with my father curbside watching his laptop being carried away in the trunk of an anonymous city cab. We couldn’t chase the cab, we had no recollection of which cab company it was, and my dad had paid the driver in cash. Everything on his computer was instantly, mercilessly gone. All we could do was stand there and watch, slack-jawed.

That was a decade ago.

Just last week, I had a harrowing experience of my own: I spilled water on my laptop, completely destroying it. The Macbook Pro was pronounced dead on arrival at the Genius Bar.

I felt horrible and lamented my carelessness to my partner. He just shrugged and said, “thin client; no biggie.” Continue reading →

Low-Cost Student Assessment

Student X has done the reading all term, they promise! It just happens they missed [concept covered in reading] and must’ve been [doing a good student-like activity] when you talked about [concept covered in lecture]. Now it’s finals week, Student X has no idea what is going on, and it’s going to hurt to fail them. If only there were a way to ensure they were doing the reading (or at worst, have documentation when the grade challenge comes)…

I have been working with James Riely, who teaches a hybrid Data Structures course in the College of Computing and Digital Media, to develop a series of low-value quizzes so he can painlessly assess student reading, lecture attention, and concept mastery. Not only are these quizzes useful for James, but they also allow students to self-assess their grasp of the concepts so they can reach out if need be. Continue reading →

Quick and Easy Responsive Web Design

Not so long ago it was relatively easy to give your online course content a consistent look and feel. With some knowledge of HTML and CSS you could create a sophisticated page with carefully determined layout, colors, images, and dimensions. Sure, there were some browser issues, most notably with Internet Explorer, but by and large you could create tightly controlled web pages with the comfortable assurance that your viewers would access your content on a screen with predictable orientation and pixel dimensions.

Those days are long gone. With the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets comes the need to design web content that will display properly on a wide variety of screen sizes. That means your inner artist will need to give up some control and learn to embrace responsive web design. Companies like Internet Zonei are leading the way in creating visually appealing and functional websites that adapt seamlessly to any device. In another case, companies looking to elevate their online presence can truly benefit from options that include ongoing support and site management. These cost-effective monthly website solutions are designed to offer high-quality digital experiences while easing the financial strain of building a strong online platform. If you need high quality, affordable websites, then you may get expert help from professional services like web design aurora.

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Effects of Web Fonts in Online Learning

Google Web Fonts makes it easy to customize the typeface you use in your online documents. You just search or browse through Google’s offering of fonts (there are hundreds!), then select and add them to a collection. You place some code provided by Google in the head of your web page HTML, and presto: you (and your readers) now have shared access to fonts that were heretofore unavailable. It’s an easy and effective way to control the typefaces displayed on your online content. What’s not easy is determining whether this is a good thing for online learning.

Why? Because research has shown that font selection has a demonstrable and statistically significant effect on learning and the perceived truthfulness of a text. Some of the findings are surprising.

One of the normally unquestioned principles of usability in web design is to facilitate ease of reading, and font selection is a key factor in the achievement of that end. Some fonts like Verdana and Georgia were designed for the web and are easier to read than others, making reading faster and less fatiguing. This facilitates the scanning for information that typifies much online activity.

There are also affective or branding considerations. A serif font like Times might be selected for an article on Renaissance literature because of its associations with academia and the humanities, while a sans-serif font like Arial or Helvetica might be chosen for a scientific journal. Choices like these influence how a message is perceived and evaluated, and for skilled Web design Twickenham  designers they are intentional decisions.

Where things get more complicated is in online learning. While it’s generally accepted that ease of reading is a highly desirable goal in most web based applications, it turns out that this is not necessarily so for online learning, where the goal is to comprehend and retain knowledge. Research in 2010 by Princeton University psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer and reported in The Economist demonstrated that learning retention was improved by making text harder to read. In other words, choosing fonts that slow down a reader should aid in their retention of difficult material. To achieve better website design and functionality, it is advised to work with experts in memphis web design and development.

There’s also research on the effect of typefaces on perceived truthfulness or authority of information. Errol Morris reported in a two-part New York Times series on the results of a study designed to test whether certain typefaces influence the credulity of information. He argues that the form of writing can’t be separated from its content, and that the selection of a typeface has a direct impact on the believability of information. His study demonstrates that this effect exists and is statistically significant.

The upshot is that while web font services like Google Web Fonts (and Adobe Edge Web Fonts) provide an easy way to manipulate the typefaces used on web pages, this ability comes with an increased responsibility of designers to carefully consider the context of their use. If your goal is to make it easier for your students to remember difficult material, you should consider making the information harder to read. And if you want them to believe what you write, don’t use Comic Sans.