Code, Berlin, design, poetry, information, travel, learning …
Oh my friend ambition
makes me not
makes me sleep nights no rest
till tomorrow I am
never happy
to thirst on plans
for fulfillment for-ever-on-ward
with no hope in my heart but hope itself
will blue lines meet red lines?
when happiness is such a tea
cup-cake
Layouter: One who does layout such as in a magazine, newspaper or any publication. Job doesn’t necessary involve artistic ability/taste.
I am doing a spot of Flash work and have an object that handles layout of items to some algorithm. Looking at the start of magazines I couldn’t see a job description for this task so I have made one up. Interestingly enough ‘edit’ is derived from the word ‘editor’ and not the other way round.
Layouter. My first addition to the English language. Enjoy.
I just finished setting up a plugin for this blog that displays my del.icio.us RSS feeds in the sidebar (to your right, and my left if I’m the webpage. hAR hAR). Now I’m thinking of doing the same for my Flickr accounts ‘photo stream’. I have accounts all over the place, most of which have RSS feeds (or will soon).
But why am I doing this?
Its because I’ve come to think on my blog as a sort of focus of my online identity. A central site which someone can see most of the things I do online. It presents a single face like a so called ‘Avatar’, or is it more like a Hydra, with many heads but one body.
It could also be a prof of identity. Zeldman once complained that someone had posted a snide comment on a popular blog and used his name, which caused a bit of a stink. If you only post comments via trackbacks and pingbacks then nobody can claim to be you who wasn’t.
So why not get rid of the blog all together?
Since nearly every portal/friend network/fanzine site you join now days offers you a blog, and all of these offer RSS feeds, why have your own blog at all? What you really want is some sort of interface to a feed aggregator that uses FOAF to store your list of feeds that are you. It would be even nicer if instead of setting up a new account with every site you want to post on, they would just ask you for a URL to a FOAF and suck all the info they needed off that.
Practicalities:
So it breaks down to FOAF out, RSS in and trackback/pingback as a sort of protacol for comunication. A web of entities instead of just websites. Now all we need is an interface to editting a FOAF and taking many RSS feeds and arranging on a page (like a ‘Planet’ I belive they call it now).
Note: It would be handy if RSS items had tags sent with them so that the feeds could be organised by some sort of metadata grouping.
This is a summary of the article titled ‘Criteria for the Assessment of Foreign Language Instructional Software and Web Sites‘.
This article develops standards ‘for assessing language-learning software and Web sites’. It gives examples of assessments using these standards of all the note worth language packages/websites for the learning of Russian.
A note on general language acquisition:
research in second language acquisition shows us that learners need to have good, authentic input—listening to and reading comprehensible texts—and many opportunities to practice speaking by using the language to negotiate meaning in situations that resemble culturally authentic communicative contexts.
Three criteria for effective learning software are stated to be:
- More of the students will reach higher proficiency levels in one or another modality in the same amount of time. (This is a cognitive goal.)
- More of the students will be sufficiently engaged and energized in the learning process to want to continue for a longer period of time. Students will thus attain higher proficiency levels in one or more modalities than they would have if they had stopped the learning process earlier. (This is an affective goal leading indirectly to a cognitive goal.)
- More of the students will be able to organize their studies and thus achieve better learning outcomes. (This is a metacognitive goal leading indirectly to a cognitive goal. Software and Web sites that meet this criterion usually put at the learners’ disposal resources that might otherwise not be available or as accessible, such as online dictionaries and strategy tutorials.)
Also stipulated are:
five characteristics of pedagogical design for multimedia applications or classroom lessons:
- Learners must know what they are expected to do and what goals they are expected to achieve by completing the task.
- Learners must be adequately prepared to begin the task.
- Learners must be adequately trained to complete the task.
- Learners must be adequately tested to assess their completion of the task.
- Learners must be given opportunities to expand their learning beyond the task.
Finally he offers ‘two caveats’ for software designers in addition to the above which are:
Sound advice.
The hope here is to produce some software that can be used as a learning aid that can not only track the students progress but adapt to it and augment it. Ideally such a method could be applied to subjects other than language acquisition providing students with a completely personalised teacher that uses continual testing to provide feedback and direction.
Continue reading ‘Pedagogy and Customized Curriculum’