Juliette/SF

I grabbed this screenshot from an amusingly unhelpful page of help documentation.

Want to learn more about how to set up and manage a user research program within your organization? If so, you are humbly encouraged to vote for our panel for inclusion in next year’s SxSW: Developing Super Senses: Tools to Know Your Users. My partners in crime are Mark Trammell (Digg), Carla Borsoi (Ask.com), […]

Educational technology of the future - unfortunately, this is pretty close to where we are with most online learning tools in 2008. (From boingboing.com)

Film Based Teaching Machine. Student pushes one of four buttons to give answers and his score appears on paper slip at upper right. Teaching machines, expected to boom in the next […]

There have been lots of good ideas being floated around at the
O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference for Publishing but I just heard one of the best.
At the conclusion of one of today’s sessions, an audience member asked the panel about the danger of releasing textbooks into academic environments without DRM. Ben Vershbow turned the question […]

Last evening’s jaunt to the Mission Cliffs climbing gym was successful in that I completed more bouldering routes than the number of mild injuries I sustained. I pushed myself to the limits of what I was able to do, just as all of the other climbers were pushing themselves to their limits, as well. In […]

Inspired by Salman Rushdie’s recent knighting, I fished out the Word file for my BA thesis on Rushdie and Pham Van Ky and shoved it into HTML.
Here, for your reading pleasure: Writing Beyond Words:
Metamorphosis, Schizophrenia and Hybridity in Ky and Rushdie
Watch out for the few pearly grains of interesting ideas nestled in a bland soufflé […]

Seen on slashdot:
What does SAS CEO Dr. Jim Goodnight have in common with 47% of high school dropouts? A belief that school is boring. Marking the 50th anniversary of Sputnik with a call for renewed emphasis on science and technology in America’s schools, Goodnight finds today’s kids ill-served by old-school schooling: ‘Today’s generation of kids […]

On Confessions of a Science Librarian: an interview with CJ Rayhill, Senior Vice President at Safari Books Online
Excerpt:
“The future of the textbook market is clearly shifting. You have products like SafariU, iChapters, and CourseSmart beginning to emerge to solve a difficult issue — the high cost of textbooks. In addition, most higher-education courses involve exposure […]

“Help” is a pretty unhelpful navigation label. What’s even less helpful is if instead of saying “help” you say “H” and then put “help” in tiny letters underneath.

Now, the instructional designer for this online course needs to explain that you need to click “H” to get to “help” which is where you’ll learn “how to […]

(originally posted to linoleumjet.com)

Originally uploaded by beth h..
A colleague recently shared this wonderfully creative and effective example of using flickr as a teaching tool.
The instructor put notes directly on the image, and the students provided comments of their own. The discussion is mediated by, rather than peripheral to, the image.
I’m thinking about about […]