Misplaced
- Author: Tom Woodward
- Category: Reflections
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#UVaTeach Reflection
I had an interesting day at UVA a few days ago as part of their Innovation in Pedagogy Summit. I got the chance to talk to UVA’s Teaching Resource Center group and listen to some interesting educators talk about their practice. I was the closing keynote and I talked, as I have before, about what educational technology might be versus what it is. Essentially this was an extension and deepening of the It Could be Beautiful concept I did at VSTE a few years ago. It helps to see the depth of the perversion and misuse of educational technology before looking at ways it is working. Otherwise people tend to pretend it all sucks or it’s all going great (depending on their own stance). We seem to have created a populace, in the USA at least, that has a great deal of difficulty with things that are not stark examples of black and white. I don’t know if I should blame the media, capitalism, or standardized testing.It may be that these are all the same things. What made this particular iteration a bit stronger was starting off by asking the audience to do something right away that set the scale of what we’re endeavoring to do in education. I asked them to go and read their college/university/departmental mission and vision […]
- Author: Tom Woodward
- Category: Presenting, Reflections
Historical Will Annotation Continued: A WP API Experiment
The Judah Will Project (now with new URL!) has continued to grow as Ryan has been putting in serious work on the research and writing side of things. I have no choice but to step up my game and it’s been an interesting learning experience as it’s the first time I’ve tried anything sophisticated with WP providing the writing/data side of things while presenting that information somewhere else entirely. Headless? So here’s a recap of changes since the last update. More Obvious I talked to Jim about the project a few days ago. It became clear to me that it wasn’t obvious that the names in the will transcription were clickable prior to actually clicking on one. I fixed that with a simple dashed underline. This was one of those times where I was trying to keep the visual elements minimal but ended up going too far. I also threw in a modal popup for initial directions to make things more obvious. I just used this simple modal jquery plugin. It immediately drove me crazy by popping up all the time. So I looked around and found a solution to set cookies which I’d never done before. I also used a modal for the ever-growing family tree. When you have 12 kids in a generation, things get pretty wide. Permanent […]
- Author: Tom Woodward
- Category: Examples, Reflections, WordPress
- Tags: History, json api, judah will, project, rest api
4 Bad Reasons to Switch to Digital Content
There are good reasons to use digital content. They don’t seem to come up that often in the articles and posts I’ve been reading lately. Below, with some degree of hyperbole, I mock them. I’m not saying these arguments ought to be negated in their entirety but there are certainly better reasons out there. Granted, they aren’t as easy to chant or fit into pithy catch phrases. Physical texts are out of date by the time they’re published! Mars is not a planet! The idea that we’re regularly having major revisions in the kind of knowledge published in k12 textbooks is crazy.I also don’t care if you get the last leg of President X’s term. If it’s recent, wouldn’t I be better off using the actual real news? I also have no faith that any textbook company would do a good job updating their books aside, possibly, from fixing typos or pretending they didn’t say slaves were happy fighting for the Confederates. As a matter of fact, I’d rather have a textbook with errors assuming the teacher knows what’s right and what’s wrong and can help students challenge things. Digital textbooks will be more engaging!/Kids love technology! We wouldn’t expect crappy a writer to suddenly become awesome because they switched from printing their books to using ePub. Traditional textbook authors […]
- Author: Tom Woodward
- Category: Reflections
Comments on this post
But don’t you see how pretty and ornate the door is and how much time and effort we put into it? Of course we didn’t actually talk to anybody about its location or if it accomplishes the goal of a door we just came up with our own solution! I don’t see the problem.
You’ve got to get more frustration and self-righteousness in your voice but other than that you’ve nailed it.
The old school designer/planner in me so badly wants to use this image at a major conference presentation again. I just may. One day. Lovely!