By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Get Out Your Snow Shoes-Severe Snowstorms Hitting TV
What tipped the balance for me was the showshoe metaphor, accompanied by Wayne Hodgins's bold declaration that he's Canadian (nice to see - it always irks to see Alex Trebek turn his back on our country). Anyhow, according to Hodgins, the "'Snowflake Effect' (mass personalization) is deeply affecting TV." Yes, and about time. So long as it doesn't take away my morning news, which is really the only TV of any significance I watch. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Mobile Technology in Medical Education Bibliography
This week's most popular file on ITForum: a bibliography (MS-Word Document) of papers describing the use of instructional technologies, and especially PDAs, in medical education. Very comprehensive, though readers of these pages will find nothing really new there (the typical paper: we tried PDAs in such-and-such a class or application, it looks like they have a lot of potential, can increase data input, etc.). The big weakness is that there are no URLs- either these papers are not online or the bibliographer didn't think their location was important. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Expressing Dublin Core Metadata Using the Resource Description Framework (RDF)
The RDF version of Dublin Core is open for comments. I still have a fondness for RDF, despite what I've said about the Semantic Web because, after all, RDF is about relations. Connections. But I sometimes wish I could keep the standards people away from it. Take, for example, the integer '43'. Here's how I express it: 43. RDF-DC? It takes seven lines. We have to stop trying to specify the exact interpretation in the document and let users apply their own interpretation in the context. In programming, this is called Duck Typing. "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck." We need to allow that, if it looks like an integer, it probably is an integer. At most, if we've specified the schemas in the header, we should need to do no more than "age = 43" in the body. Using the appropriate brackets for RDF or JSON or whatever we're working with. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Experts: Ed Tech Must Change Its Message
Supporters of educational technology need to change their message when talking with stakeholders, and they need to advocate more forcefully for change in higher education." This according to Past Board members of the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN). The change, according to the article, is that educators should "shift the focus in the national dialogue about educational technology from the technology itself to the changes it enables in teaching and learning". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Laws of UX
Jon Yablonski, 2019/02/11
This is a set of 19 key tenets of User Experience (UX). They're nicely summarized and illustrated, and each one has a 'More' button linking to an extended description and links to more resources. Each also has a nice downloadable poster suitable for framing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dawn or dusk of the 5th age of research in educational technology? A literature review on (e-)leadership for technology-enhanced learning in higher education (2013-2017)
Deborah Arnold, Albert Sangrà, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2019/02/11
The first four 'ages' ae defined by Winn (2002) (21 page PDF) as the studies of instructional design, message design, simulation/interaction design, and (the new) learning environment design. The 'fifth age' is proposed by Jameson (2013) (27 page PDF) and is the focus on "more critical, selective, strategic e‐leadership approaches to the adoption and use of educational technology." This paper is an update of that 'fifth age' and is "an exploratory review of the literature for the period 2103-2017." The result is a pretty good paper on work in educational technology management. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. CSS Specificity — An overview
Vaibhav Khulbe, Medium, 2019/02/11
This post explores the weeds of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the language that creates the design for web pages. CSS 'specificify' rules to the method web browsers use to select which CSS declaration to apply to a particular part of a web page. For example, if you said the default text style for your whole page is 'Arial' and the default text style for this paragraph is 'Times New Roman', your browser needs to make a choice (and will choose the latter, according to CSS specificity). More...