|
 |
Thursday, February 17, 2005 |
MoonEdit. Rod Savoie sent me this. "MoonEdit is a
collaborative text editor which allows many users over the
internet to edit the same document simultaneously. Every
user can modify documents at any place or time - without
restriction. You can watch other people's cursor movements
in real time as they make changes. Each user writes text in
their own color so you can easily tell who wrote
what." The software doesn't really work well with the
mouse, but it's otherwise pretty interesting. By Tom
Dobrowolski, February, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]
10:13:21 PM  Google It!.
|
|
Preemies at School - Why Sensory Processing Disorders?. 1
in 10 children are the product of premature birth, but parents,
teachers, and doctors, may be bewildered by the lack of specific advice
once they are school age. There are clusters of difficulties that are
more common because of the injury and reorganization of brain-based
sensory pathways. A common cluster of difficulties includes -
hypotonia, dysgraphia, auditory processing dysfunction, expressive
language difficulties, and emotional volatility. Many of these children
are also very intelligent, but they may suffer from visual
distractibility, poor sensory regulation, and a great deal of personal
frustration. Many can respond quite well to work accommodations in
school, adjustments in teaching style, and involvement of therapy
professionals like pediatric OTs. Periventricular
leucomalacia and preterm birth have different detrimental effects on
postural adjustments -- Hadders-Algra et al. 122 (4): 727 -- Brain Neurodevelopmental Consequences Associated With the Premature Neonate Periventricular leukomalacia affects sensory cortex white matter pathways Language Shift Among Adults Born Prematurely Auditory Processing and Language Difficulties in Prematurely Born Premature Birth, Corpus Callosum Size, and Verbal Fluency in Boys Prematurity and Disorganized Cortical Development Auditory Impairment in Preterm Infants
6:35:16 PM Google It!.
|
|
Why Visual Distractibility Often Accompanies Auditory Processing Impairment.
We often see parents shaking their heads - how is it that it's both
auditory and visual processing? But it's not some odd luck, the visual
and auditory systems are tightly coupled, and each makes up for the
other when some problem arises.
We shouldn't think of the brain
having "deficits" - because reorganization is the rule rather than the
exception, and generally loss in one domain, leads to compensatory
changes in the other. Auditory processing problems are accompanied by
increased sensitivities in other senses - and vision is one of the most
common to cause trouble.
The first breakthrough in our
understanding of the yin and yang of the brain's sensory system came in
research studies examining subjects who were either completely deaf or
completely blind. Before there was a technology to image these events
in the brain, neuroscientists had pondered what the auditory part of
brain might do in a deaf person, or what the visual part of the brain
might do in a blind person. Was it a specialized area of brain that
would just never get the right signal? Would it just sit there? Or
would it be collared into doing something else?
The answer: it got put to work by the other senses.
In
this remarkable figure, you can see that the outlined area of brain
(auditory cortex) has now gotten recruited to work for the visual
system. That's great you might say...if you can't hear, there are so
many things that can creep up on you - so increased visual vigilance
can protect you from danger. Yes -that's right, but increased visual
sensitivity also comes with a price. The deaf are also much more
sensitivity to visual distractibility (check out the teaching tips for
the deaf, including recommendations to avoid shiny jewelery)...and in
milder form, but no less significant, many children with central
auditory processing disorders suffer this same fate.
Visual Reorganization in the Deaf
Visual Attention to the Periphery Enhanced in Deaf
Deaf or Hard of Hearing - Teaching & Learning Supports - Trinity College Dublin By Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide. [Edubloggers Links Feed]
6:33:44 PM Google It!.
|
|
Sharing our tool-using behavior using screencasts.
Last January, when I first wrote about the medium that I've since come
to call screencasting, it seemed an odd-enough topic that I felt
obliged to justify it to my editor.
A year later it's clear that my instincts weren't leading me
astray. I'm now using screencasts -- that is, narrated movies of
software in action -- to showcase application tips, capture and publish
product demonstrations, and even make short documentaries. And I'm
seeing others around the Net starting to do the same. Now's a good time
to explain why I think this mode of communication matters and will
flourish.
...
If you think about it, we rarely get to observe in detail how other
people use their software tools. Now that it's almost trivial to make
and publish short screencasts, can we expose our software-tool-using
behavior to one another in ways that provoke imitation, lead to
mastery, and spur innovation? It's such a crazy idea that it just might
work. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
... [Jon's Radio] Captivate is and easy tool for capturing narrated tool use in a SCORM compliant learning object -- BL
6:26:41 PM Google It!.
|
|
IEEE Reference Guide for Instructional Design and Development. This is a well-organized, well-written introduction to standard ID
concepts, with many
useful reference links. The Guide is organized into six basic sections:
Assessing Needs,
Analyzing Learners, Writing Learning Objectives, Selecting an
Instructional Strategy, Developing Materials, and Evaluating
Instruction. The authors make clear that movement through the steps is
not always linear and that not every step is applied to every
development project.
Notice that the authors do not
include finding/examining/constructing LOs as an essential step in
Instructional Design, a regretable omission; nor do they include
references to LORs. (They do reference SCORM and the Advanced
Distributed Learning initiative.) The materials were prepared by the
Educational
Activities Board of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic
Engineers. "Instructional design is the
process through which an educator determines the best teaching methods for specific
learners in a specific context, attempting to obtain a specific goal. This reference guide
is designed to help you apply sound principles of design to the creation of your courses."
The resource is available as a pdf file and in html.
I have problems
whenever a formulation such as this one is applied rigidly to the tasks of
teaching and course design, but I do appreciate the clarity of this
work. The Guide provides an overview from which teachers can jump off
in their own directions according to their own judgements about the
subject and the learners. ___JH
(I first saw this resource in Stephen Downes' Edu_RSS feeds.)
[EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online]
6:23:25 PM Google It!.
|
|
Blog search with XQuery. Yesterday I said I'd try using Mark Logic's Content Interaction Server for structured search of blog content. A first version of that is now running here. If you've followed my adventures in this area, you'll know that I've used a similar service
to do the same thing for about a year -- against my own blog content,
exploiting some special XHTML coding conventions I use. The Mark Logic
server is one of a series of engines I've used to extend a more general
kind of structured search to all the blogs I read. ... [Jon's Radio]
8:13:58 AM Google It!.
|
|
Nokia and Microsoft Bridge OMA-WMA Gap for
Mobile Devices. This announcement is, as the author suggests, a
bombshell - on several fronts. One front is the obvious:
the mobile device industry is no longer banding together to
keep Microsoft out of its back yard. On another front, it
gives Microsoft leverage against proprietary formats being
offered by Apple and Sony. But of greatest significance to
educators: The OMA DRM is based on the open (and royalty
free) Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) (read more about
this here).
Readers of OLDaily will have seen this coming following the
announcement in January that a license was drafted under
MPEG LA to cover implementations
of OMA DRM 1.0 for mobile devices and content
services. So what does it mean for ODRL? Hard to say - but
it's probably not good. By Bill Rosenblatt, DRM Watch,
February 17, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]
8:08:35 AM Google It!.
|
|
© Copyright 2005 Bruce Landon.
|
