Category: UsefulLinks

Useful links: Flipped Classroom, The Web Behind

A Flipped Classroom Model for Higher Education is a slide deck from Jackie Gerstein.

I keep forgetting to mention the new project from Jenn Simmons and Eric Meyer called The Web Behind. As Eric described the podcast project,

The goal of this podcast, which is a subset of The Web Ahead, is to interview people who made the web today possible. The guests will be authors, programmers, designers, vendors, toolmakers, hobbyists, academics: some whose names you’ll instantly recognize, and others who you’ve never heard of even though they helped shape everything we do.

The Web Behind podcasts come from 5X5 and would be good for any educator teaching one of those Introduction to the Internet classes to keep an eye on.

Useful links: BioWare, targeted ads, headers on Twitter, Coursera

BioWare Co-Founders step down. Gaming has been good to these two, who are retiring from the company they founded to do other things.

Rob Weychert used his turn on The Pastry Box Project this month to talk about Hulu advertising and how it is supposed to be tailored to individual interests but fails at the task. Makes me think about how Klout is often spectacularly wrong about your influence or how Facebook shows you ads for things you absolutely hate.

Guess you heard the news that Twitter is now using a header image something like Facebook’s big one. I already changed mine to something similar to what I use on this blog. You’ll find the option in Settings > Design and then scroll down the page to find Header.

Coursera is growing. If you are an educator, you need to be keeping an eye on it and what it means.

Useful Links: ySlow, WordPress headers, mobile form validation

Getting Started with YSlow is at Speed Awareness Month.

Creating a responsive header in WordPress 3.4 at Web Designer Depot uses a bit of jQuery to insert a responsive image into a WordPress header.

Steven Hoober makes a case for form validation on blur for mobile devices in Mobile Inline Form Validation.

Useful links: Decent Men, Google Fonts, Building Responsive Layouts

A Call to Arms for Decent Men by Ernest Adams is at idga.org. It’s a great post, very long, very well-written. Here are a couple of quotes:

Guys, we have a problem. We are letting way too many boys get into adulthood without actually becoming men. We’re seeing more and more adult males around who are not men. They’re as old as men, but they have the mentality of nine-year-old boys. They’re causing a lot of trouble, both in general and for the game industry specifically. We need to deal with this.

. . .

Use your heavy man’s hand in the online spaces where you go – and especially the ones you control – to demand courtesy and punish abuse. Don’t just mute them. Report them, block them, ban them, use every weapon you have. (They may try to report us in return. That won’t work. If you always behave with integrity, it will be clear who’s in the right.)

Let’s stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the women we love, and work with, and game with, and say, “We’re with you. And we’re going to win.” 

A very nice resource indeed: Google Fonts Reference Posters.

The exceedingly awesome Zoe Gillenwater released her slides from a Building Responsive Layouts talk. You can find them on slideshare, and see them here:

Deborah Edwards-Onoro was present at Zoe’s presentation and created a Storify version of it with tweets and images as well as the presentation.

Useful links: Gamification, Karen Sandler, Cyber Law, LEAKED

How Gamification Results in 21st Century Learning talks about the work of Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Geek Time with Karen Sandler is a video interview with  Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation

What is Cyber Liability and Why Should You Care? is a great overview of copyright. It would make a good reading assignment for those just venturing into the world of publishing on the Internet.

I’m going to post something tomorrow about the rumors about the next Apple product release. Concurrent with that, a friend of mine was talking to me about how her sons curate their boring, unemployed existence on Facebook and Twitter to make it appear that they are cool and awesome. Then, thanks to spydergrrl, I learn that there’s this video LEAKED: Official Apple iPhone 5 Promo Video. Serendipity strikes again.

 

Useful links: normalize css, media queries, flexbox

All CSS today. Get your styles on.

normalize.css is a new, free to download, suggestion for a standardized set of CSS base line rules.

Resolution in media queries is meant to  help designers deal with styling for retina displays.

Chris details the changes to the Flexible Box Layout Module in Old Flexbox and New Flexbox.

Useful links: Mobile first, Google search results, design problems

The Many Faces of Mobile First is thought provoking read. The photos used in this article are powerful as well.

An Update to Our Search Algorithms on the Google blog explains that search results will now take into account the number of valid copyright removal notices  for any given site. Google says, “Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results.”

Top responsive web design problems – and how to avoid them is in .net magazine by James Young.