Digital literacies with OERu - Declaring myself on LiDA101

Declaring myself on LiDA101

About this blog:

I have changed this Blogger site from 'private' to 'public' because I'm not using it for its private function and it was always meant to be about my learning. It seems that writing to myself is not very motivating - I need at least an imagined audience.

I am struck by this idea of 'declaring' my participation: it certainly feels difficult and very committing!

Why this bit of learning?

I am trying to find out more about badging and micro-credentials and thought I should re-visit some MOOC sites and other alternative courses to see what is in use now. The different models that OERu are offering for learning in this micro-course (participation, quizzes for assessment, small charge for certification) seem enlightened and attractive.

I stumbled across an older (2012) post, too, which has a model for assessment with badges that I find very persuasive. Karen Jeffrey @karenjeffrey  wrote about ePortfolios as Badges - A Badge System Design for Learning by Creating - in particular, tactics for encouraging authentic reflection on the artefacts that the learner has made. She describes two badges associated with an artefact, one awarded for the creation of the artefact - the learner can self-assess their eligibility for this - and one awarded by the teacher, commenting on this badge and other learning, and on the learner's reflection on the 'really big ideas' that this activity links into. I'd like to make use of this distinction in my teaching.

In someone else's office today, and they have a real standing desk! (not a bit of wood on a defunct table frame)

Undertook Mendeley (advanced) workshop, Wednesday 19 October 2016

Mendeley Advanced: This session was advertised as covering:

• Share references and exchange ideas
• Create groups
• Create an academic profile
• Create new citation styles

Wednesday 19 October 2016, Time:02:00 PM to 04:00 PM

This was a very unsatisfying session because of the lack of knowledge of the presenter and because all but two of the attendees had little Mendeley knowledge.

The social and personal profile aspects were emphasised.

On the Origin of Species

01 From fairest creatures

Sonnet 1
https://docs.google.com/document/d/10kgCNTvaJcFfsIEZ4Je9SFfNSy-T2BLV1ip-62gHcbI/edit#heading=h.1etz28cs45d1

Self, self, self. And not in a good way. The multiple ways that rhetorical tools are employed is a little bit strangling, and reminiscent of postmodern texts so nicely excoriated in this month's Conversations across the Creek.

Re-enchanting the city

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/re-enchanting-the-city/1/steps/80729

As an instructional designer, AP Oya Demriblek is used to changing focus / scale from the individual human to the wider scope of human activities.

Thinking of the city, what scale should we look at levels of meaning?

my marker on the map: https://www.zeemaps.com/edit/OipJU3YRZ--MbRADvicgYuZT_qe9830i

Key terms:
'built environment' - street furniture --->

'liveable' - for all people

design features: personal voices of presenters, activity directly inspired by lovely video from Oya, full of the personal and persuasive fascination


 

assertTrue( ): The Serif Readability Myth

assertTrue( ): The Serif Readability Myth

Adobe Acrobat accessibility seminar, 3 March 2011

seminar at National Museum of Australia, conducted by Jacqui van Teulingen and Andrew Kirkpatrick

Key points

* we already do a lot of what was covered
* seminar was for Techos, but the questions were so dumb, and hand-raising responses to e.g. do you use template, v. small
* look out for testing techniques for PDFs, end of March
* AGIMO recommends changing publishing processes so that business units know how to construct and check the documents
* and basically you need to consider why you are using any format

Australian Government leading the world on accessibility. Following on from the National Disability Strategy, Jacqui van T. group created the Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy - the Aust. Govt's implementation of WCAG 2.0

The goal is inclusive and accessible communities

Joint approach for all 3 tiers of govt was negotiated by Online and Communications Council

The lead agencies are helping solve 'mitigation projects', of which PDF accessibility is Number 1 - because the majority of complaints are about PDFs, and PDFs are the second most common format.

The key finding of the PDF study was the very poor document design of many documents, not the format itself.

What are the areas that need attention?

* semantic structure of the document
* image equivalents
* understandable information
* proper identification of the language
* resizable text
* colour and contrast

Learned about

* the role map in Acrobat (mapping styles to tags)
Note that assistive tech needs HTML names

Slides to come - to show what else must have been done for the PDF to be accessible, not just pass the full accessibility check

* forget the 'Print to PDF' exists - this print method cannot access the DOM, so cannot make accessible PDFs

* alt text is in diff. place in Word 2007 (under 'Size')

* text box is read when it was created

* tables: row headings can't be indicated the way col. headings can: this has to be done in Acrobat

InDesign: set reading order in InDesign. Method to add - 'Agg untagged items' to structure; add new attribute 'Alt' (Andrew has requested this be added). Note that bullet list is not possible to handle for tagged PDF in InDesign, neither is table headings.

* showed us how to repair PDFs - crashes!

* Redaction - note to add '[redacted info] ' overlay text to blacked out blocks

Key links

webguide.gov.au

agimo.govspace.gov.au/category/accessibility

Techniques for WCAG 2.0