FAQ #1 – Advantages of using the Institutional LMS – Draconian policies in the guise of FAQs from U Toronto. It”s all worth looking at for the naive understanding of teaching and learning, for driving pedagogy by administration, and for the nasty way of passing their silliness off as FAQs. A good one: “Students may be disadvantaged if they are required to learn how to use and navigate multiple systems.” Response: Student *will* be disadvantaged if they do not learn to use multiple systems. – (LMSpolicycommonsense )
Fortune favors the bold and the italicized – A little upset here on the visual side: designing texts for difficult reading: "disfluency – the subjective experience of difficulty associated with cognitive operations – leads to deeper processing … Study 1 found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than easier to read information in a controlled laboratory setting. Study 2 extended this finding to high school classrooms. The results suggest that superficial changes to learning materials could yield significant improvements in educational outcomes." – (readingvizualizationvisualdesigndesign )
Fitzpatrick – The Pleasure of the Blog: The Early Novel, the Serial, and the Narrative Archive – Nifty thesis:" "All blogs, for Himmer, are in some sense literary, because of the nature of their readers’ interactions with them. … Such a claim begins to suggest that the reasons we read blogs may be slightly different than we have often imagined; through this understanding, blogs offer not simply a voyeuristic peek into someone else’s life — though, obviously, that numbers among their pleasures, too — but they also offer a form of writing that engages the reader by requiring her not simply to consume the content presented but also, in some sense, to produce that content, to complete what is present through a knowledge of what is past, an exploration of the ways that that present is situated, and a commitment to return in the future." – (bloggingidentitygenrenarrativereading )
New evidence that bullet-points don’t work : Speaking about Presenting – well-known principles: give both visual and auditory channels something to do, and reinforce the message with both. "When a presenter uses bullet-point slides, they’re not using both pathways as effectively as they could. The audience member has to read the words on the slide and listen to the presenter at the same time, leading to overloading of the language areas whilst leaving the visual cortex with very little to do." – (pptpowerpointvisualdesigndesigneducationaldesign )