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U is for User Generated Content

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Friday, 30 May 2014, 09:12

  • Ugly Fonts

  • Universal Design

  • User Generated Content

  • University in your pocket

  • Upgrades

  • User Centred Design

Ugly Fonts is directly related to learning and the idea that something that is harder to read is more likely to stick as information. For me this puts into question every kind of 'spoon feeding' information from the TV or slide show, to games that supposedly teach instead of getting students to stand at their desks and take notes with a pencil for an hour at a time. Seriously, properly directed effort is the way to support learning. Technology can make it too easy; it ought to make it hard(er).

Universal Design is a philosophy and if variety and difficulty, as I suggest above, is what matters, then why might I think that 'Universal Design' has a role? Universal Design makes for transferability. 

The 'University in your pocket' is how an MBA student described the Open University MBA he was doing while on service in Afghanistan (a colonel in the Royal Marines).

'User Generated Content' - such as this, provides multiple voices. If, for example, you seek out blogs on a subject that interests you each will have a different voice. You find the voice that expresses things in a way that makes sense to you and follow. You want to learn something, so you get a fourth and fifth opinion if you like. 

UGC can be anything at all, from a blog post or a video, to the kind of annotation of an iconic First World War photograph I've done above. It is a blog, or shared student project, it is teacher content and lecture notes too. Shared content offers a reader a multitude of ways into a subject until they find one that fits the bill for them. 

 

 

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Design Museum

H810 - Evaluating accessibility : e-learning scrutinised

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 19 Nov 2012, 12:34

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Fig. 1. Evaluating accessibility - H810

All of this can be multi-layered, more like petals of a rose that a poster-sized mind-map.

It is of course an iterative process too - things get shifted about all the time. Exported as a TEXT document it becomes the first draft of an assignment. At a glance I can see there are 6 or 7 main themes here, though a substantial part of my thinking will be around the ideas of usabilty and accessibility and whether universal design is more appropriate than highly focused user centred design.

I thought I could offer a PDF version here - apparently not. Clicking on it will allow a download that can then been zoomed and should remain legible.

Not an assignment, but can something like this work in a piece of work for evaluation?

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