Daily Bookmarks 06/26/2007

No more school as council opens ‘learning centres’ – Independent Online Edition > News  Annotated

  • A school district in the UK is closing their secondary schools and replacing them with learning centers where students can learn independently. It’s hard to tell exactly how this will work from the brief article, but it’s an interesting concept. It appears that teachers will give daily assignments but that students will have individualized education paths and will be able to work on projects without a given schedule.
     – post by christyinsdesign

The style of learning will be completely different. The new centres will open from 7am until 10pm in both term-time and what used to be known as the school holidays. At weekends, they will open from 9am to 8pm.

Youngsters will not be taught in formal classes, nor will they stick to a rigid timetable; instead they will work online at their own speeds on programmes that are tailor-made to match their interests.

Using CATs in Online Courses :: Terry Morris

  • CATs are Classroom Assessment Techniques. Some of these could be used as discussion board questions (like One-Sentence Summaries and The Muddiest Point) but they might work in our courses as variations for the Facilitator Feedback messages at the end of each workshop too.
     – post by christyinsdesign

A List Apart: Articles: Human-to-Human Design  Annotated

  • Design pages to create great experiences for the people on the other end.
     – post by christyinsdesign
A beautiful design will give the user the impression that the site is easy to use, whether it is or not.

    WCAG Samurai Errata for WCAG 1.0

    • These guidelines are based on WCAG 1.0 and attempt to create a more realistic and practical set of standards than the WCAG. WCAG guidelines which are unworkable are specified as rules to ignore, but other standards are stricter in these guidelines than in WCAG.
       – post by christyinsdesign

    A List Apart: Articles: Testability Costs Too Much  Annotated

    • In the proposed draft of WCAG 2.0, all criteria must be considered “testable” by either machine or humans. Can a machine test whether an alt attribute actually reveals any information? Would 8 of 10 people come up with the same alt for an image? The focus on testability has removed focus on what’s actually helpful.
       – post by christyinsdesign

    The problem with testability is that even the most reasonable of success criteria can be non-testable—and if a success criterion is not considered testable, it isn’t included in WCAG 2.0. Whether the criterion is an otherwise useful technique that improves accessibility is now irrelevant to whether it gets included in WCAG 2.0.

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