Here at Boost we lovingly handcraft our HTML and CSS when implementing our designs. We use text editors rather than programs like Dreamweaver or Frontpage. We find it’s faster, and it enables us to produce clean, correct code that’s easy to integrate.
Our process starts with the production of the designs in either Photoshop or Fireworks. Once these are approved by our client, we convert them to HTML/CSS templates before integrating them with the web application or content management system.
At the HTML/CSS stage we use two tools to ensure the design is being accurately implemented: Pixel Perfect and Litmus. Today I’ll focus on Pixel Perfect - I’ll talk about Litmus another time.
Martin Westwell is a great speaker on social change, technology, neuro-science, ‘back to basics’ policy and evidence-based practice in education. Unfortunately this video is only part 1 of his keynote to the 2009 Innovation Showcase (I’ve scoured the web for part 2, but no luck so far), but it’s well worth it all the same.
Some of Martin’s observations include:
There’s no such thing as evidence-based practice … evidence should inform practice and policy but not dictate it.
We remember what we feel. The changing environment changes the way we think, which changes the way we interact with the world.
We’re shifting from a question-rich, answer-poor society (where knowing stuff was where the value lay) to a question-poor, answer-rich society (where the value lies in transforming information into knowledge).
The appearance of a ‘back to basics’ policy in education means something has changed, and the system doesn’t understand the change and is pushing back against it.
We can’t assume that the use of technology in itself will have the influence that we want it to … It’s what you do with the technology that makes a difference.
We can use technology purposefully to manipulate the learning environment and learning experiences to meet the needs of specific students.
Here are Martin’s presentation slides, and here’s a series of podcasts from Martin on similar themes. (Thanks to Jedd Bartlett, who provided the link to this video over twitter.)
We’ve just released a new client library for accessing the digitalnz.org’s search API. This library uses nokogiri for speedily parsing the XML, making it faster than an existing dnz client library using JSON parsing.
I think it’s fair to say that there’s some tension between the breadth of the vision in The New Zealand Curriculum and the government’s crusade for literacy and numeracy, which has seen something of a narrowing of focus and funding in the education sector.
What I’ve heard said in some circles is that we’re not leaving the curriculum behind, rather that students need literacy and numeracy to access the curriculum. But how about teaching the curriculum to teach literacy and numeracy? Using the curriculum to genuinely engage with students’ strengths and interests to support literacy learning?
There’s a history of educational resource development across government departments, which serves to advocate for their work and the wider curriculum. Let’s hope it continues – I think it can both support the crusade and the curriculum.
To help out, here’s a video by Professional Daniel Willingham on why teaching content is teaching reading. (Thanks to Artichoke for the link over twitter.)
I spoke about technology in education at the Future of the Book Conference at the end of June. The conference was great fun. I was there for the second day – for perspectives on the whole conference, check out these posts by Virginia and Matthew.
I talked about how technology is changing the way young people organise themselves and take action, access information and learn, connect with each other, create and publish to audiences, and consume services and products. I talked about how we might design learning experiences for these young people.
How digital technology is changing the way young people learn, create and consume.
New technologies, new practices, new learning – the result should be new approaches to educational publishing. Did we get that at the conference? I’m not sure we did.
I’ve just stumbled across this blog – Technology for Communities. It’s the combined project of Etienne Wenger, John D Smith and Nancy While – all influential in the online communities of practice space.
It looks like the blog is working towards the publication of a book called Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities.
