To my mind, the design of a website is as much an act of pedagogy as the design of a course: the goal, in both cases, is to present information, encourage interaction, and foster an experience in a way that facilitates learning. Because of this, I tend to keep an eye open for web apps that can enhance the CTE website, and for layout ideas (from other university websites) that might further improve the navigation or presentation of our own site. I’ve cobbled together some of these potential enhancements in a version of our home page that can be previewed here, and which can be compared with our current home page here. As you’ll see, the “new” version makes use of a triple column “newspaper” layout, in an effort to succinctly display important information, and to maximize the real estate of the screen; as well, the RSS widget that appears below the three vertical columns now spans the entire width of the main content area. That RSS widget also now makes use of “tabs,” in order to pull in dynamic data from three (rather than one) sources: namely, the RSS of this very blog; the RSS of the CTE Diigo Group; and the RSS of a Twitter feed (which will pull in any “tweet” that contains “#uwcte” as a hash tag. If you have a moment, please compare the current home page with the potentially new one, and let me know what you think. You can do so via the comment feature of this blog posting, or by emailing me at mmorton@uwaterloo.ca.
Author: Mark Morton
As Senior Instructional Developer, Mark Morton helps instructors implement new educational technologies such as clickers, wikis, concept mapping tools, question facilitation tools, screencasting, and more. Prior to joining the Centre for Teaching Excellence, Mark taught for twelve years in the English Department at the University of Winnipeg. He received his PhD in 1992 from the University of Toronto, and is the author of four books: Cupboard Love; The End; The Lover's Tongue; and Cooking with Shakespeare.
Word Frequency Visualization with Wordle – Mark Morton
On the lower left-hand side of this blog you’ll notice what is called a tag cloud: it’s a cluster of the words that people who have posted to this blog have “tagged” their postings with. For example, I’ll probably tag this posting with words like “technology,” “web 2.0,” and “wordle.” These tags allow other users to search the archive of the blog: if someone is interested in learning technologies, they can do so search for the word “technology” and all the posting that have been tagged with that word will appear. Tag clouds take all those tag words and display them as a cluster; moreover, the more times that a tag word appears, the larger it will appear in the cluster. That way, you can tell, at a glance, what are the popular themes across the blog postings. Continue reading Word Frequency Visualization with Wordle – Mark Morton
More about using Pop-Ups for Educational Purposes – Mark Morton
A while back, I posted a note on this blog about a method I had devised for creating pop-up “roll-overs” for text-based web pages. In other words, the method allowed users to put their mouse cursor over a word in a web document, causing a small pop-up window to appear containing more information. My reason for doing so was related to second-language study: for example, an instructor could upload a page of, say, a German text, and every word on that page could have a pop-up associated with it, which would not only define the word in question but would also clarify the relevant grammar. My method of creating those pop-ups was a bit cumbersome, so it’s fortunate that I recently upgraded from Dreamweaver CS3 to Dreamweaver CS4, and discovered that the later version of that program includes a feature for easily creating text-based pop-ups. The feature uses something called Spry Tool Tips, which is an Ajax-based web-development framework.
With Spry Tool Tips, you can easily create any number of pop-up roll-overs, without having to look at even a smidgeon of HTML or Java code. Moreover, the pop-ups can contain hyperlinks to other web resources (something my previous method couldn’t do), and can also include images. You can also easily control the size, colour, and placement of the pop-ups. All in all, it’s a great tool for instructors who are interested in creating teaching resources for their students.
You can see an example of Spry Tool Tips in action at a page that I’ve made here. Just roll your cursor over some of the Arabic words on the top right side of the page, and pop-ups with explanatory text should appear.
Student Laptop Use in the Classroom — Mark Morton
The Centre for Teaching Excellence has nearly a hundred succint, pragmatic, and evidence-based “Teaching Tips” on its website. Moreover, we continue to develop new Teaching Tips as the need arises (and as resources permit). Down below is a Teaching Tips document that I recently drafted, pertaining to students using (or misusing) laptops in the classroom. I’ll eventually add this document to our “official” list of Teaching Tips, but I thought I would first post it here, and invite anyone who is interested to give feedback on it. Continue reading Student Laptop Use in the Classroom — Mark Morton
App Happy (or, the iPod Touch)
Two years ago when I bought a netbook — an Asus EEE, about the size of hardcover novel — I thought that I had finally acquired the perfect technology: it was small enough that I could slip it into a little satchel that I carry, but big enough that it had a full-size qwerty keyboard that I could easily type on. It also had enough CPU power to meet 95% my needs: word processing, browsing the Internet, sending email, and watching videos. I was so pleased with my netbook that when Apple came out with its palm-sized iPod Touch, I wasn’t even interested. What, I opined, could it do for me that my netbook couldn’t do? Continue reading App Happy (or, the iPod Touch)
Reading at 900 words per minute – Mark Morton
Here’s an interesting new piece of software: it’s called RapidReader, and it purports to allow you to double or triple your reading speed by flashing a document onto your computer screen one word at a time, at a rate of up to 950 words per minute. Being a skeptic by temperament, I was surprised to discover that the program actually works: I was able to read an online newspaper article at about double my normal reading speed. Continue reading Reading at 900 words per minute – Mark Morton
Cognitive Surplus and Web 2.0 – Mark Morton
I heard an interesting interview with Clay Shirky on CBC’s Spark last week. Shirky is the author of the book Here Comes Everybody, and one of the many ideas he puts forth is that of cognitive surplus. In a nutshell, he proposes that in the past half century, leisure time has increased to such an extent that people now have a surplus of cognitive resources on their hands – that is, they not only have brains, but they now have time and energy to use that brain on things other than making ends meet. Unfortunately, says Shirky, this increase in leisure time and cognitive surplus coincided with the invention of television – and so for the past fifty years the cognitive surplus of hundreds of millions of people has been devoted to the passive consumption of I Love Lucy, Happy Days, Law and Order, American Idol, and so on. Even watching ostensibly “high brow” television shows like Charlie Rose, Meet the Press, and the nightly news is, according to Shirky, merely a form of passive consumption. Continue reading Cognitive Surplus and Web 2.0 – Mark Morton