Aarons Blog

Category: Uncategorised

Inclusive Design

December 3, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Inclusive Design is a fundamental aspect of engineering.

In Software Engineering,  a key property of any software is robustness.

Robust Software is Software that takes into account all possibilities of input/output.

Another key property of good software is usability, good software must be able to be used by everybody and anybody.

Software Engineers have produced many inclusive technologies such as AI voice recognition (E.g Alexa, Siri), voice to text converters. portable notetakers, organizational software and many more….

One that I find very useful to learning is Audio\Digital Text.

Students with visual impairment can benefit from Audio Texts as texts on screens are translated to audible audio, which these students will find more useful to process. Also, students that may suffer from reading dyslexia can understand what is being translated from text rather than mixing up letters on a screen/paper. There is also, a fraction of students that find it hard to focus and read boring texts; Listening to the audio instead enables them to learn and retain better compared to reading.

Digital Texts can help students hard of hearing as they can visually understand what they can not hear.

Digital texts do not just help hard of hearing students but also students who process what they read faster than what they hear, thus aiding their learning.   Non-hearers of the language of the lesson can read the digital texts and comprehend the lesson at a pace suitable to their understanding of the language.

 

Peer Review: Public goods

November 29, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Thank you for sharing your amazing resource in public goods. I found the topic you chose very interesting.

The topic “Public goods” is a bit more specific to people with an economics background but you found a way to make inclusive for everyone. So, Great Job!.

I Like the layout of your blog, everything seems well put together, the overview clearly defines your chosen topic and key concepts.

The blog is also well organized and I can tell a lot of effort was put into it.

The activity in your learning modules seem highly interactive and encourage students to explore the topic in-depth.

A great way of incorporating technology with the use of Twitter and WordPress, the only concern is the protection of privacy. Particularly if the students are not comfortable sharing private academic information online.

Some students, may not feel comfortable sharing assignment answers on a place like Twitter where they are open to criticism from anyone in the world, also there is the risk of students feeling discouraged to post their thoughts on Twitter if they do not feel knowledgeable on the subject matter.

Perhaps you might consider creating a safer space to share material, for example, a class forum or something similar to what we have in this class (EDCI 335) where students can share material with people taking the same course rather than having their thought available to the whole online world.

 

Overall, the lesson plan looks well put together and very inclusive. It is well detailed and thorough, although there is still little work to be done. I hope you found my comments helpful!

image showing person walking in pre-painted footprints
Photo by Flickr user jfchenier under CC license: BY-NC 2.0

Welcome and Introduction

May 2, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Before proceeding with this first blog post, we expect you to consider your privacy preferences carefully and that you have considered the following options:

  1. Do you want to be online vs. offline?
  2. Do you want to use your name (or part thereof) vs. a pseudonym (e.g., West Coast Teacher)?
  3. Do you want to have your blog public vs. private? (Note, you can set individual blog posts private or password protected or have an entire blog set to private)
  4. Have you considered whether you are posting within or outside of Canada? This blog on opened.ca is hosted within Canada. That said, any public blog posts can have its content aggregated/curated onto social networks outside of Canada.

First tasks you might explore with your new blog:

  • Go into its admin panel found by adding /wp-admin at the end of your blog’s URL
  • Add new category or tags to organize your blog posts – found under “Posts” (but do not remove the pre-existing “edci335” category).
  • See if your blog posts are appearing on the course website (you must have the the edci335 category assigned to a post first and have provided your instructor with your blog URL)
  • Add pages, if you like.
  • Include hyperlinks in your posts (select text and click on the link icon in the post toolbar)
  • Embed images or set featured images and embed video in blog posts and pages (can be your own media or that found on the internet, but consider free or creative commons licensed works). To embed a YouTube video, simply paste the URL on its own line.
  • Under Dashboard/Appearance,
    • Select your preferred website theme and customize to your preferences (New title, new header image, etc.)
    • Customize menus & navigation
    • Use widgets to customize blog content and features
  • Delete this starter post (or switch it to draft status if you want to keep it for reference)

Do consider creating categories for each course that you take should you wish to document your learning (or from professional learning activities outside of formal courses). Keep note, however, that you may wish to rename the label of the course category in menus (e.g., as we did where it shows “Learning Design” as the label for the “edci335” category menu.  This will enable readers not familiar with university course numbers to understand what to expect in the contents.

Lastly, as always, be aware of the FIPPA as it relates to privacy and share only those names/images that you have consent to use or are otherwise public figures. When in doubt, ask us.

Please also review the resources from our course website for getting started with blogging:

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