Humorous writing has its place in school

Q. As a senior in high school who reads for pleasure, I find that many of the books assigned by teachers and the way they teach them take the joy out of reading. We're presented with characters and authors of questionable relevance in works that seem dated and deliberately difficult. So what are teachers thinking? Why don't teachers integrate books ... Continue reading ...

Many-Eyes.com Visualization Tool

I first read about Many Eyes in the business section of the Sunday 8/31/08 NY Times, where it was described by the Times writer Anne Eisenburg, "Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways to Sift Data." Eisenburg argues that Many Eyes does for users of data displays what YouTube does for videos and Flickr for photos: "Now they can share more technical types of displays: graphs, charts, and other visuals they create to help them analyze data buried in spreadsheets, tables, or text." Many Eyes was created by IBM scientists and developers to provide sophisticated visualization tools for data analyses and displays. The site should be of interest to students and to instructors, and to the general public. One of the most important contributions of the Web-- beyond quick communications and ready access to information, advice, and opinion-- is the access to sound, video, photo and other tools that were previously the province of specialists. (One caution--because Many Eyes is experimental the server is not always up, sometimes it is closed for development and updating.) ____JH

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About Many Eyes

"Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to 'democratize' visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project.

All of us in CUE's Visual Communication Lab are passionate about the potential of data visualization to spark insight. It is that magical moment we live for: an unwieldy, unyielding data set is transformed into an image on the screen, and suddenly the user can perceive an unexpected pattern. As visualization designers we have witnessed and experienced many of those wondrous sparks. But in recent years, we have become acutely aware that the visualizations and the sparks they generate, take on new value in a social setting. Visualization is a catalyst for discussion and collective insight about data.

We all deal with data that we'd like to understand better. It may be as straightforward as a sales spreadsheet or fantasy football stats chart, or as vague as a cluttered email inbox. But a remarkable amount of it has social meaning beyond ourselves. When we share it and discuss it, we understand it in new ways."

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Short Course on Structured Course Development, LOs, and Standards

Short Course on Structured Course Development, LOs, and Standards

This excellent online course is available for free from CAREO (a Wiki version of the course is also provided for readers who might like to contribute to the presentation). The course was developed by the Resource Pool Project. The topics covered should be of especial value to developers of educational resources and resource repositories.
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Course Overview

This short course is intended to provide a basic overview of structured course development, learning objects, and e-learning standards and specifications. This course is meant to be non-technical in nature, although it is hard to make it so.

Course Goal

A Short Course on Structured Course Development, Learning Objects, and E-Learning standards will provide an introduction to using a structured language such as Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) or eXtensible Markup Language (XML) as a basis for producing a learning design and describing course content, activities, and assignments. The course will tell you what SGML and XML are and distinguish them from HyperText Markup Language. You will understand the concept of learning objects and the issues related to their use in e-learning, and you will learn about the standards and specifications initiatives that are shaping the e-learning world.

Key Concepts

• Semantic markup languages
• Instructional design using a structured approach
• Characteristics of learning objects
• Learning objects and metadata
• The difference between a standard and a specification
• Why standards and specifications are important
• E-learning standards and specifications initiatives