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Universal Design for Learning

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UDL

To meet Universal Design principles, educational processes should:
1.    Be accessible and fair.
2.    Provide flexibility in use, participation, and presentation.
3.    Be straightforward and consistent.
4.    Be explicitly presented and readily perceived.
5.    Provide a supportive learning environment.
6.    Minimize unnecessary physical effort or requirements.
7.    Ensure a learning space that accommodates both students and instructional methods.

The beneficiaries of Universal Design in education include:
•    Students with special needs, including those with disabilities.
•    Students with English as a second language.
•    The general population of students, all of whom will benefit from the application of Universal Design principles.

A great slide show by Eleonora Guglielman

E-learning and disability

What Do You Read?

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Glasses

I was recently asked what professional publications and social media I enjoy engaging with. I hadn’t realized how long the list has become. These are some of my favorites and regulars [in no particular order]:

Social Media:

  • FaceBook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • WordPress [and WordPress Community]
  • YouTube
  • Vimeo
  • Flipboard
  • SlideShare
  • Tumblr- from time to time

Reading and Research:

  • The New York Times
  • NPR
  • TechCrunch
  • Slate
  • Whitehouse.gov
  • TED
  • Wired
  • Higher Ed
  • iNOCOL: the International Association for K-12 Online Learning
  • iste: the International Society for Technology in Learning
  • Education Week
  • The Rapid eLearning Blog
  • Fast Company Blog
  • Open Culture Blog
  • Daniel PInk’s Blog
  • Seth Godin’s Blog
  • Various Instructional Design Blogs
  • Anything by Cliff Kuang -infographic guru

I am still adding…..so visit again…..after you have checked out some of these good reads….

Turning Social Media On Its Side

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The surprise star at Facebook’s f8 conference was Nicholas Felton, whom Facebook’s head product developer credited with inspiring the layout of the revamped Facebook.  How’d that happen?

“His work was a huge inspiration on a lot of the big ideas that we presented today,” Facebook VP of product Christopher Cox said yesterday. It was the f8 developers’ conference, and Cox was talking about Timeline, the hotly anticipated third-generation redesign of Facebook’s profile page. Timeline exchanges Facebook’s standard single-column, scroll-down format for a more horizontally oriented tile-based interface that’s designed like a “scrapbook-on-steroids,” as my colleague E.B. Boyd put it.

If Timeline is successful, it could alter how people absorb data not just on Facebook, but also on the rest of the Internet (making a lot of money in the process). How? Simply by turning everyone into Nicholas Felton.

Timeline aims to turn Facebook into even more of a central hub for your life.

Right now, your Facebook page discriminates against the past. That’s a design problem: Click on someone’s profile, and all you see are their latest updates, their latest likes, and their latest photos. You have to scroll and scroll and scroll to get any sort of sense about who someone is over any time period larger than a day. Facebook, according to Cox, was struggling to solve this problem before Felton came aboard: A prototype that he nodded to in his presentation, at a glance, seemed cluttered and busy.

Timeline, by contrast, includes an actual timeline, organized in tiles across two columns like a virtual noteboard, that lets you present your autobiography from birth to now. You do it in your own words and with your own pictures, which means you’re free to highlight the milestones (the wedding, say) and bury the embarrassing moments (the bachelorette party). Then you top it off with a mega-huge panoramic photo of yourself or, for the camera-shy among us, a “unique image that represents you best,” to quote the site.

The tiles within your timeline can also include apps: One for tracking your music (and letting others listen to it as well through Spotify), and another to track the movies you watched (with Netflix), and another to track the number of miles you ran, and even the precise route you ran (with Nike+). In short, it centralizes and publicizes all of the details in your life that you never fully log.

Humans of New York

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I learned about Humans of New York from my colleague and wanted to share with you this incredible project. Humans of New York began is a multi-year project to construct a photographic census of the city of New York. The goal is to gather 10,000 street portraits and plot them on an interactive map. In the end, the neighborhoods of New York will be viewable through the faces of their inhabitants.

Brandon Stanton has been passionate about the following things: saltwater aquariums, Barack Obama, reading, piano, filming, financial markets, New York City, and photography. He majored in History at the University of Georgia, where he served as the history tutor for several future NFL players. He traded bonds on the Chicago Board of Trade for 3 years. He made a lot of money. Then he lost it all. Once, he was arrested for taking photographs inside the South Beach mansion of late fashion designer Gianni Versace. It was 3 AM. He was intoxicated. He currently lives in New York, where he’s on a mission to find every interesting person in the city, and take their photograph.

Visit Brandon Stanton’s website and when you are next in New York, perhaps you’ll become part of the project.

Fairy

Brooklyn

Ballet

HNY CapeFlick

Pink

Humans of New York