Audrey Waters has a thoughtful post on opening up LMSs for API development.

Educational data is stuck in silos, something fostered by educational software – administrative and instructional – that makes it cumbersome at best and impossible at worst to move data in and out of systems. As a result, there’s lots of extra clerical work that educators and administrators have to do – recreating rosters, copying grades, downloading CSVs, copying-and-pasting, and so on. All because educational apps and software do not, as a rule, talk to one another.

What’s the hurdle here? FERPA? Simple resistance to change? Exploring this issue I think would make for a great panel at a conference like AECT.

I’ve been working through David McFarland’s book on JavaScript and jQuery the last week or so and while the book itself is great (e.g., clear explanations, good tutorials), I’ve got a usability quibble with it.

I bought the digital version from Amazon. However, with no Kindle Reader, that meant the experience would be delivered through Amazon’s Kindle-for-Mac tool. But when I got to the sample code snippets, the font size was so small that it rendered it practically invisible.

From a learning standpoint, the code samples seem just about as important as the explanations that surround them. I guess in this sense, maybe it’s more than just a (usability) quibble.

Perhaps this is just a Kindle-for-Mac issue, but it would be nice to at least have a toolbar option for modifying point-size.

When it comes to finding stories of educators in higher ed who’ve tried Twitter in their classrooms, the Chronicle’s Wired Campus is typically a good place to look. However, every once in a while something will bubble up via rss and a few days ago it pointed me to acagamic who shares some reflections on his experiment with Twitter in his AI and HCI-Games courses. The post is rich and worth reading in its entirety, but the design nugget most interesting to me is his use of weekly pie charts to show students’ Twitter activity. Early on, the activity wasn’t quite what he had hoped for, but once he started doing this, the activity went up not only in volume but in consistency as well. Of course, it’s not easy to see if there’s any kind of causal argument that can be made here, but interesting nonetheless.

Creative Commons image credit: lefortune

Was doing some work in Ubuntu today and discovered an interesting little shortcut (or at least alternative for accessing files).

Quick Background
When I want to quickly navigate to a specific application, I usually press Alt+Tab … but what I didn’t know is what happens if I let the cursor hang or pause for a couple of seconds over an application that has more than one window open … it displays all the active sub-windows.

Example
So for example, let’s say I have the following applications open: Firefox, Libre Office, Thunderbird, and Banshee. And in Libre Office I have 3 documents I’m working on. When I Alt+Tab to skim through the open apps and then let my cursor hang or pause over Libre, the system will display all 3 docs (which I can then quickly access with a simple click).

… innovative thinking has less to do with original creations and more to do with creatively combining existing resources (p. 23)

via: (2010) Design Literacies, Learning and Innovation in the Digital Age

As the story was wrapping up, I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone suggested Kickstarter as a way to re-start it?

A quick post on a little idiosyncrasy with Zotero.

Normally, when I click the icon in the address bar, Zotero automatically downloads the cite to whichever folder I have highlighted (e.g., Instructional Design), but when using Gale this doesn’t seem to happen. Not a big deal in the grand scheme, … so I’d do a quick global library search, then find, select and drag it to the desired library.

Still curious, though, and looking for an opportunity to procrastinate, I did a little investigation. It turns out that the Gale cites are downloaded as a top-level item to the main, “My Library” folder. While it still requires a drag-and-drop, I’m spared the extra step of entering a title search.

Maybe there’s a work-around or something obvious I’m missing. If not, I hope this little tidbit is helpful.

… the problem was not that companies overpromise, but that schools often do not properly deploy the products or train teachers to use them.

Finger-pointing aside, I think there would be many teachers who would actually agree that one of the factors is the lack of training (and lack of money to make that training possible). Of course, training also has its detractors who argue over ROI. But where I think training gets a bad reputation is its short-sightedness. Instead of a quick one or two-day workshop to learn the basic functionalities of the software, why not also complement it with a more sustained learning initiative designed to facilitate creative strategies for engaging students? Why not have the teachers work with the tool on a regular basis and collaborate with their colleagues on different approaches to using it in their classrooms? Instead of setting it up as a workshop, perhaps a studio concept might be more appropriate?

Via Not[Trivial]

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