Presentation Zen: 10 Tips on how to think like a designer
Tips that can apply to instructional design, graphic design, web design, etc. They are broad, but it's helpful to have these kinds of ideas articulated clearly rather than being something that people do but can't explain. I especially like "Obsess about ideas and not tools."
A review of research on professional learning communities: What do we know?
Like the title says, a research review on PLCs, synthesizing results from 10 articles.
- All research supported the idea that learning communities change teaching practice, although not all articles were specific about what changes took place.
- In one study, teachers in PLCs developed more student-centered classrooms. Some other studies discussed specific teaching strategies used as a result of PLCs.
- All studies showed a change in school culture through "collaboration, focus on student learning, teacher authority, and continuous teacher learning."
- All 6 studies that looked at student achievement found that student learning improved. However, this was only seen when the focus of collaboration was student learning and not just working together.
- Their conclusion: "The focus of a PLC should be developing teachers’ “knowledge of practice” around the issue of student learning"
- "...working collaboratively is the process not the goal of a PLC. The goal is enhanced student achievement."
"Living and Learning with Social Media"
danah boyd on implications of social media for education, focusing on teens
Youth engage with others to work out boundaries, to understand norms. This is how they learn power and authority, how they learn the networked architecture of everyday life. It's easy to eschew this, to argue that this is irrelevant, but most people spend a decent amount of their time working through social issues as a part of being an adult in this society. We talk about it as "politics" usually but it's about people. And teen years are where this is worked out.
Since we're using social network sites as a case study, let me point out one of the places where they FAIL miserably. On social network sites, you have to publicly list your Friends and you have to have the functioning network to leverage it. What happens if you're an outcast at school? Does bringing it into the classroom make it worse? What happens if you're forced to Friend someone who torments you because you share a class? And then you have to face that person in your "private" space online as well? Bringing social network sites into the classroom can be very very tricky because you have to contend with social factors that you, as a teacher, may not be aware of.
It's critical to realize that just because young folks pick up a technology before you do doesn't inherently mean that they understand it better than you do. Or that they have a way of putting it into context. What they're doing is not inherently more sophisticated – it's simply different. They're coming of age in a culture where these structures are just a given. They take them for granted. And they repurpose them to meet their needs. But they don't necessarily think about them.
Educators have a critical role when it comes to helping youth navigate social media. You can help them understand how to make sense of what they're seeing. We can call this "media literacy" or "digital literacy" or simply learning to live in a modern society. Youth need to know more than just how to use the tools - they need to understand the structures around them.
Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: Guest Post by Gaurav Mishra: The 4Cs Social Media Framework
A framework for principles of thinking about social media, aiming to look at the underlying purposes and benefits of the tools without getting caught up in the specific tools or buzzwords.
4Cs of social
media: Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence
Collaboration can happen at three levels: conversation, co-creation and collective action
The third C, Community, refers to the idea that social media
facilitates sustained collaboration around a shared idea, over time and
often across space.
The great thing about collective intelligence is that it becomes
easier to extract meaning from a community as the size and strength of
the community grow.
WebAIM: Blog - WCAG 2.0 and Link Colors
The WCAG 2.0 guidelines for contrasting colors mean that if color is the only indicator of difference, you need to have sufficient contrast. It's really hard to meet the requirements with color alone, but if you underline your links it's OK.
Because of the WCAG 2.0 contrast requirements, if you don’t underline your links, there’s not much flexibility if you want to be Level AA, let alone Level AAA conformant.
