Category: general-education

Useful links: 3D printing, Open Edu, Prosthetics

How 3D Printing will Impact the Web is speculation, but it’s fun to think about.

Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom On New Online Education Initiatives: “If This Doesn’t Wake Them Up, I Don’t Know What Will” Must reading for educators. Here’s one quote:

The Open Education Alliance can potentially be an extremely disruptive model because it addresses what Thrun and Newsom acknowledged repeatedly as one of the biggest problems that the higher education system faces: The skills gap. Today, education is geared towards assessment — towards preparing students for some illusory, state-driven, assessment-driven goals, which may have no relevance in the end to giving them the skills and preparation they need to thrive outside of higher education.

And while we’re on the topic of interesting and challenging new tech ideas to think about in a disruptive future, consider The Six Million Dollar Question: How Will The Future of Prosthetics Affect Human Performance and Self Esteem?

Useful Links: Responsive Recruiting, Yahoo logo, meta fizzy

Why Responsive Web Design Can Transform Higher Ed Recruiting. One of many interesting tidbits in this article: “According to research from Higher Education Consultants Noel-Levitz, 68 percent of college applicants have viewed college websites on mobile devices. And if a college’s website isn’t optimized for mobile, these potential students drop off: 24 percent of students would leave a website after a poor internet experience.”

Here’s a view of the changes that Yahoo! went through in building its new logo. It’s simple, and the exclamation mark is animated. What do you think of it?

I’m feeling just a bit cross-eyed after seeing the meta-fizzy effects created in MetaFizzy Effect with SASS at CSS Tricks. Let’s not all go out and do this, okay?

Useful Links: Girls in IT, wearable tech, early edu

Why schoolgirls are not interested in studying IT is an essay by a 13 year old English schoolgirl.

This bracelet could replace your passwords, your car keys, and even your fingerprints. This is the ultimate in cool and something a forgetful password keeper like myself thinks is a great idea. It’s also the ultimate privacy invasion. Since it can be anything, how long until its baked into something like Google Glass or whatever comes after Google Glass?

3 Tech Skills Every Kid Should Learn at School (but doesn’t) is right on the mark.

Useful links: SVG, Programmers, Old Electronics, Fonts

Usage of SVG for websites. I saw a link to this post and discovered there’s a website measuring all sorts of stuff about web traffic and usage.

We need a digital first curriculum to teach modern journalism. All journalism students must be programmers is among the provocative statements in this article.

Old Cellphones, Once Bound for Landfills, Now Bring Colleges Money. If your college isn’t using Funding Factory, you might want to check this out and let them know about it.

Type Wonder claims to be able to get you fonts from any available site with ease. I didn’t dig into the details about cost and copyrights, I am just passing along the info for any of you looking for fonts right now.

Useful links: gut instincts, information hierarchy, education costs

Trusting your gut instincts is an interview at .net with Steph Troeth. Learn something about this important leader and find out what a user experience strategist is.

A Hierarchy of Information Needs is from Content Strategy >n00b< and is a worthy read.

TechCrunch weighs in on Why Obama’s Radical Education Plan Could Finally Disrupt College. They make some interesting points, but the article is in the realm of speculation, not fact. What did you think of his education speech the other day?

Useful links: Zoom, Open Glass, Fluid Grids, MOOC Credits

Browser zoom great for accessibility is from AlastairC and talks about the accessibility difference in normal browser zoom and text only zoom. This is really interesting and can affect your results when zooming to 200% to test your WCAG compliance.

Open Glass Project Demos how Useful Glass Can be if You’re Visually Impaired. Fascinating and creative project.

Tom Green has a series of tutorials fluid grids on Dreamweaver 6 at WebDesign Tuts+, including the first in the series: Fluid Grids. He has downloadable files. And his video doesn’t blur out frequently the way the one I showed you from Adobe/Lynda.com did the other day. Thanks, Tom, for letting me know about these terrific tutorials.

A Universities offer of credit for a MOOC gets no takers. The article has ideas about why.