2,073 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2015
    1. Separating discussion about a page from the page itself is an essential step to free discussion.

      Sounds like separating content from format (à la \(LaTeX\)) and there are interesting parallels between annotations, metadata, and formatting. All of these can be described as “layers”, in the common metaphor.

    1. No joke is funny unless you see the point of it, and sometimes a point has to be explained.

      Sounds logical, in the abstract. But the explanation is often known to “kill the joke”, to decrease the humour potential. In some cases, it transforms the explainee into the butt of a new joke. Something similar has been said about hermeneutics and æsthetics. The explanation itself may be a new form of art, but it runs the risk of first destroying the original creation.

    1. Technology is the only way to dramatically expand access to knowledge. Why should students be limited to a textbook that was printed two years ago, and maybe designed 10 years ago, when they could have access to the world's best and most up-to-date textbook?

      Can serve well as an OER quote.

    2. If students use smartphones to copy and paste prefabricated answers to questions, it is unlikely to help them to become smarter.

      Asking questions which find easy answers online may exacerbate the problem, but the problem existed before the Internet.

    1. "One of the most disappointing findings of the report is that the socio-economic divide between students is not narrowed by technology, perhaps even amplified," said Mr Schleicher.

      Warschauer et al. have done a lot of work on digital divides, especially in education. One of the lessons is that it may not be about access to the tools.

    2. Students who use computers moderately at school, such as once or twice a week, have "somewhat better learning outcomes" than students who use computers rarely

      Sounds like those studies of moderate alcohol consumption and heart diseases. There might be an appropriate degree of technology use or it may be much more complex and contextual.

  2. Sep 2015
    1. Organizations like Reveal and ProPublica can keep investigative reporting alive because they operate as non-profits.

      New business models for journalism or the birth of new approaches to information?

    1. Download Digital Me's badge canvas

      Might be a bit difficult to do but it’d be nice to have an interactive version of the canvas, wizard-style. Going through the canvas with others does wonders to everyone’s understanding of what and why badging matters. But there’s a bit of handholding involved, in my experience.

    1. The W3C Annotation Working Group has a joint deliverable with the W3C Web Application Working Group called “Robust Anchoring”. This deliverable will provide a general framework for anchoring; and, although defined within the framework of annotations, the specification can also be used for other fragment identification use cases. Similarly, the W3C Media Fragments specification [media-frags] may prove useful to address some of the use cases. Finally, the Streamable Package Format draft, mentioned above, also includes a fragment identification mechanism. Would that package format be adopted for EPUB+WEB, that fragment identification may also come to the fore as an important mechanism to consider.

      Anchors are a key issue. Hope that deliverable will suffice.

    1. Expanding the learning landscape: what effects can open educational resources have on new learning spaces?

      Nice opportunity to like Open Education to Library work. Librarians are the heroines and heroes of the #InformationAge.

    1. cool-looking map

      Maps make a great case for SVG. There are some neat libraries and tools to play with SVG maps but, more importantly, maps make it easy to understand that an image can be semantic.

      A couple of weeks before Shepazu posted this, was playing with SVG maps of contemporary Africa’s political boundaries. (Especially those used on Wikipedia; including some which separate South Sudan.) Been teaching African Studies (on occasion) for years, and maps of the continent tend to become important quite quickly.

      Those SVG maps with which I started playing were pretty neat in several respects. The fact that they were vector drawings instead of bitmaps meant that they easily be resized without causing visual artifacts. More importantly, though, each country was drawn as a named outline, so it was possible to play with them as separate objects.

      One thing I was trying to do is create an animation which would show where each country fits in a region of the continent, using this United Nations geoscheme. Doing so, eventually noticed that Sudan and South Sudan had been classified as part of different regions, which is an interesting tidbit which could lead to useful classroom discussions.

      Haven’t retraced all the steps but, at some point, I’ve used a Public Domain map of Africa from Wikimedia Commons (itself based on another Public Domain map), and ended up creating a simple animated version using Tumult’s Hype commercial HTML5 editor.

      It’s flawed in many ways, but for someone with almost no background in this things, it’s a significant accomplishment.

      (Surely, the same could be done through SVG itself. Haven’t been able to learn how to do so.)

      Playing with those maps taught me quite a few things. For instance, the benefits of a well-tagged image. And some rudimentary notions of CSS-based animations. Or the limitations linked to selecting rectangular sections of an image (with a large overlap between Northern and Western Africa, for instance).

      Static Map of African Regions The experience also gave me all sorts of ideas. Such as annotating parts of a well-structured image. Or uses for Open Street Maps. Or ways to embed interactive content (including quizzes) in Open Textbooks.

      The key point, perhaps, and what led me to Schepers’s work (including this deeply insightful SVG-based presentation and interactive infographic about annotations) is that Open Standards can open up fascinating opportunities for learning.

      W3C Annotation Architecture proposal So nice to be working at a standards-happy learning technology non-profit!

    2. The borderlines seemed too crisp; weren’t many of these peoples semi-nomadic?

      My thought(s) exactly. The sedentary-centric worldview is quite dominant, but it blinds us to the obvious.

  3. Aug 2015
    1. Flexibility

      Some connection with SAMR, unbundling, “open learning”… With diverse learners whose constraints may affect institutions, there’s a fair bit of talk about new(ish) tech-infused approaches to distance education. As with many other things, not much of it is new. But there might be some enabling phenomena. Not sure how gamification fits, here. Sure, open play could allow for a lot of flexibility. But gamification is pretty much the reverse: game mechanics without the open-ended playfulness.

    2. Hands on

      This might be the most explicit link to constructivism and constructionism. Not only is it about “learn by doing”, but it’s about concrete action in the physical world. Can’t help but find it limiting and restrictive to mention “3D Printing” as the main component. After all, FabLabs got started without 3D printers and the Maker movement has a lot of stuff which has little to do with 3D Printing. But it’s hard to argue that 3D Printing haven’t attracted attention, in the past couple of years. Sexier than laser etching? As Makers often point out, there’s a lot in the movement which is really very similar to what was happening in shop class. Though the trend may sound new, it’s partly based on nostalgia. A neat aspect, though, is that much of it can happen through learners’ projects cutting across class boundaries. Sure, we’ve known about project-based learning for a while. You do a project for a class or a series of classes. But how about a personal pathway (cf. “individualism”, above) through which learners add learning experiences around a central project? Learning Circles can make that into something really neat.

    3. Individualism–

      Customisation: the “personal” era. What with “personal learning networks” and everything “self-”. Does sound like a major trend. What’s possibly most interesting, though, is the framing. To some of us, the term “individualism” may carry some negative connotations. It could be fairly neutral, in a context like this one, or deemed positive (prefixed with “rugged”), but it’s an interesting choice, here.