By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Multi-Column Layouts Climb Out of the Box
Useful article that offers another approach to multi-column CSS layout. The problem faced by this designer was to create columns of equal height, and the solution was to use negative margin values. I use negative margin values myself, mostly for images and call-outs, and while I am still not completely comfortable with it, they seem stable enough to me. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Desktop Sidebar - Getting Rid of Desktop Widgets and Still Having It All
I pay little attention to web page widgets because I find they slow down the page and are much more interesting to the page owner than to the page user. Desktop widgets are more interesting, save that they're mostly an Apple thing and would be covered by my applications. Enter the Desktop Sidebar, which almost takes us back to the days of PointCast. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. LISTedTECH: New wiki site and great visualizations
Phil Hill, e-Literate, 2014/10/24
Phil Hill onmtroduces us to this interesting site that assembles statistics on technology usage in education, creating useful visualizations in the process. LISTedTECH wiki used to run on Drupal, but has since converted to a MediaWiki. This makes it a lot easier for people to add content (though sadly the RSS feeds are not useful). " LISTedTECH was created by Justin Menard, who is Business Intelligence Senior Analyst at University of Ottawa," writes Hill. "The site is broader in scope than just the LMS – there is a rich source of data & visualizations on MOOCs, university rankings, and IPEDS data. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Five Reasons #Gamergate Connects to Educational Technology
John Spencer, Education Rethink, 2014/10/23
We teach people this stuff. We who create technology and media, who shape thought and opinion, who set examples and and work in public - we are the ones who make it OK to shame and harass and threaten and all the rest.
Today I read that Felicia Day, creator of the (great!) online show about gaming, The Guild, has been doxxed for writing a post on #gamergate (to 'doxx' someone is to expose their personal information, such as their home address, online, thus opening them up to harassment and stalking). She had been mostly silent, she says, because "I have been terrified of inviting a deluge of abusive and condescending tweets into my timeline." It turns out her fears were justified. In this post, John Spencer directly draws the link between #gamergate and education. "People are way too quick to minimize the misogyny that exists online," he writes. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Secret Weapon to Learning CSS
Robin Rendle, CSS-Tricks, 2019/02/07
I've been thinking recently about what it takes to learn web technologies today. We've come a long was from copying the source on a web page. Even the sort of instructions we give computers have changed - we don't tell them to "let variable x be 12" any more - it's more like "imagine an infinite plane filled with objects" or some such thing. We need new mental patterns - "ways to frame the problem in our heads, so we can break problems into their constituent parts and notice recurring patterns." That's why our services are called things like Docker or Digital Ocean. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Study Finds No Difference in VR Learning Outcomes Compared to Other Modes
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2019/02/07
According to this study (4 page PDF) that compared VR with hands-on and computer-based activities in an astronomy class, there was "no difference across conditions in average levels of performance on a pre/post knowledge test." Now it should be noted that this is a small study in one particular class, and it would be improper to generalize based on these results (though the Campus Technology article doesn't try very hard to restrain itself). What's interesting, though, is that this result is consistent with the "no significant difference" phenomenon reported in the 1990s. More...