digitaldust

It occurred to me as I read the Clay Shirky essay on Situated Software that he was seeing/experiencing the same things as Michael B Johnson said the other night, when talking about writing internal software for Pixar.

We make scalpels not swiss army knives.

Good tools, for the right person, in the right context. They don’t need to do more than they need to. More examples of Why? in design rather than Why Not?

Have you got what it takes to be an academic?

We are looking for a new lecturer to join our team at the University of the West of England. Basically what we are looking for is an Information Architect, Interaction Designer, Interface type of person. The kind of person we are looking for has industry experience, not necessarily academic credentials - though obviously that is good. You would be teaching on stuff that contributes to the BSc Web Design and MSc Information and Library Management courses.

Now is a good chance to get in on the ground floor of the BSc Web Design course and teach at the intersection of design and technology.

You will be a dynamic enthusiast, eager to develop new areas of research and teaching in information architecture. By the using the term Information architecture we refer to the emerging discipline which includes some or all of the following:

• Content design and management for web sites
• Structural design of information space
• Organising, labelling, classification and navigation schemes within web based information systems
• Metadata development and taxonomies
• Developing principles of design to web based information systems
• Searching, finding and managing information
• Social media and Web 2.0 technologies and applications

An appropriately experienced candidate may be given responsibility for the further curriculum development in web design and information and library management.

Go to the UWE site to download the job spec and apply

If you’ve got any questions then leave me a comment of drop me a mail at dan dot dixon at uwe dot ac dot uk.

A great little find from Piers.

Brain Research and Teaching: “

The science behind learning, for me, is much more important than the politics. Just found a good list of 20 teaching tips derived from brain research.

1. The brain learns from its environment. Enrich the learning environment.
2. One’s personal, emotional state greatly influences what is recalled during a learning episode. Deal with emotional influences in your classroom before teaching.
3. Prime the brain for learning. Provide visual outlines or show select pictures representing different parts of the upcoming lesson.
4. give the brain time to process verbal information. Pause 3-7 seconds between important statements.
5. Wait 5 seconds after asking a factual question and 10 seconds after asking a complex question.
6. Present, rehearse, apply, then review.
7. Develop concept before content.
8. Teach by asking questions.
9. Teach pattern recognition. Often.
10. Research suggests that neurons need some downtime to consolidate information. Teach new information over time, providing periodic review.
11. The % of information remembered increases as the learning episode shortens and decreases as the lesson time lengthens.
12. Change the type of instruction or student activity every 20 minutes.
13. Teach students how to ask great questions while they are reading.
14. Periodically, have students record/share 3 things they learned from the lesson or 3 things they found interesting.
15. Sleep is required to store information into long term memory. John Hopkins University found that it takes 6 hours for a new skill to be consolidated and tagged for long term storage. (Teenagers need at least 9 hours of sleep a night).
16. Have students listen to music before writing and spatial reasoning activities.
17. On average, learners will only remember 5% of a lecture 24 hours after it is given. However, they will remember 90% of the information 24 hours later if they teach it to someone else.
18. Use personal, white, dry erase boards in class to check for understanding as you are teaching.
19. Very specific and positive comments will be remembered over time and will be immediately motivating to the students.

and then, just to keep bloggers happy,

1. Journaling has been found to improve memory and cognition. It enhances motivation to read and reading comprehension.

(Via Monkeymagic.)

This so totally had to be done. So totally that now I have two versions. The web comic version which I did a couple of weeks back and a lolcat version I’ve just done now. I think I prefer the lolcat version. More direct and to the point.

LOLcat take on the story

A web comic take on the story

Reminds me of the Matt Madden book, 99 ways to tell a Story. Though none of them included cats, though I think one might be all furries.