Category: Bookmark

Bookmarked Relative Font Weights Considered Harmful by Den McHenryDen McHenry (denmchenry.com)

Not exactly, but who can resist writing a "considered harmful" article when you can get away with it?

The real harm is that you can very easily conceal the semantics conveyed by font-weight depending on the font that's rendered, which is not always in your control. This all depends on how you define the base weight to which your relative values refer, and (1) whether that base weight is actually available in the rendered font and (2) which value is substituted if it isn't.

You get a webmention, and you get a webmention, and…

🔖 Why Is Digital Sociology? | Tressie McMillan Cottom

Bookmarked Why Is Digital Sociology? by Tressie McMillan CottomTressie McMillan Cottom (tressiemc)
Any attempt at knowledge production has to answer the basic question of what it is. But, before long, it must also address the question of why it is. As early as the 1990s sociologists were asking …

🔖 We’re @VConnecting from #OER19 on April 10-11 | Virtually Connecting

Bookmarked We’re @VConnecting from #OER19 on April 10-11 by teresa (Almost There ... Virtually Connecting)
We will be joining this year’s OER conference coming from Galway, Ireland where the focus is on Recentering Open: Critical and global perspectives. We hope to facilitate critical discussion of Open including asking difficult questions about open education: Why open? Open for whom? Whose interests ...
I want to attend! God bless Virtually Connecting!

🔖 ETUG 25 Call for Proposals now open

Bookmarked ETUG 25 Call for Proposals now open by Clint Lalonde (etug.ca)
The Call for Proposals for the 25th anniversary ETUG conference is now open until April 5, 2019.
Share your knowledge, projects and ideas with the BC post-secondary education technology community at TRU in Kamloops, BC on June 20 & 21st. Program Theme & Topics Our overarching confe...
Bookmarked Paperpile: Modern reference and PDF management (paperpile.com)

Manage your research library right in your browser

  • Save time with a smart, intuitive interface
  • Access your PDFs from anywhere
  • Format citations within Google Docs

… and much more

I know I’ve run across this tool in the past, sometime just after it launched. I remember thinking it was interesting, but it was missing some things for me. Perhaps it’s worth another look to see how it has evolved and what it entails now?

In some sense it does a lot of what I’ve been using Calibre for and is not too dissimilar to Zotero and Mendeley, though obviously all with some slightly different offerings.

hat tip: Kimberly Hirsh for reminding me about it.

🔖 CROWDLAAERS

Bookmarked CROWDLAAERS (crowdlaaers.org)
Explore any URL featuring Hypothesis annotation. CROWDLAAERS provides learning analytics about active participants, temporal activity (active days), collaborative discourse (threads), and also Hypothesis tags. Groups of individual annotations may be sorted by date, contributor, annotation, tags, and level (or the position of an annotation reply in a thread). Select any annotation to read the full content within CROWDLAAERS or in context of the source document. Or explore how CROWDLAAERS has been applied to curated sets of online texts by selecting from Projects.
Bookmarked Commons In A Box (CBOX) (commonsinabox.org)
Commons In A Box (CBOX) takes the complexity out of creating an online space, or digital commons, for your community. Our free open-source software provides an infrastructure that encourages discussion, collaboration, and sharing. Members of a CBOX community can create groups and media-rich websites, participate in discussion forums, edit documents together, share files, send messages, and make friendship connections. Built using the WordPress publishing platform, with BuddyPress for social networking, CBOX comes in two packages that can be customized to meet the needs of your community.

🔖 Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning by James M. Lang

Bookmarked Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning by James M. Lang (Jossey-Bass)

Employ cognitive theory in the classroom every day

Research into how we learn has opened the door for utilizing cognitive theory to facilitate better student learning. But that's easier said than done. Many books about cognitive theory introduce radical but impractical theories, failing to make the connection to the classroom. In Small Teaching, James Lang presents a strategy for improving student learning with a series of modest but powerful changes that make a big difference—many of which can be put into practice in a single class period. These strategies are designed to bridge the chasm between primary research and the classroom environment in a way that can be implemented by any faculty in any discipline, and even integrated into pre-existing teaching techniques. Learn, for example:

  • How does one become good at retrieving knowledge from memory?
  • How does making predictions now help us learn in the future?
  • How do instructors instill fixed or growth mindsets in their students?

Each chapter introduces a basic concept in cognitive theory, explains when and how it should be employed, and provides firm examples of how the intervention has been or could be used in a variety of disciplines. Small teaching techniques include brief classroom or online learning activities, one-time interventions, and small modifications in course design or communication with students.

hat tip: Robert Talbert

❤️ jmsclee tweeted I’m absolutely crying at this. Sound on. https://t.co/BibRtM10sc

Liked a tweet by Clee Clee (Twitter)
Bookmarked The Surprisingly Powerful Influence of Drawing on Memory by Myra A. Fernandes, Jeffrey D. Wammes, Melissa E. Meade ( Current Directions in Psychological Science)

The colloquialism “a picture is worth a thousand words” has reverberated through the decades, yet there is very little basic cognitive research assessing the merit of drawing as a mnemonic strategy. In our recent research, we explored whether drawing to-be-learned information enhanced memory and found it to be a reliable, replicable means of boosting performance. Specifically, we have shown this technique can be applied to enhance learning of individual words and pictures as well as textbook definitions. In delineating the mechanism of action, we have shown that gains are greater from drawing than other known mnemonic techniques, such as semantic elaboration, visualization, writing, and even tracing to-be-remembered information. We propose that drawing improves memory by promoting the integration of elaborative, pictorial, and motor codes, facilitating creation of a context-rich representation. Importantly, the simplicity of this strategy means it can be used by people with cognitive impairments to enhance memory, with preliminary findings suggesting measurable gains in performance in both normally aging individuals and patients with dementia.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721418755385