OLDaily

The UXer’s guide to user personas
JustInMind, 2019/02/07

I'm not totally a fan of personas, because they encourage stereotyping, but they help designers create use cases, so they're relevant in most aspects of e-learning. This page is a decent introduction to the development and use of personas, and even has a link to a PowerPoint personas template. The idea is that the persona is based not on the stereotype but on actual data. "Having the right facts at hand can provide a designer with invaluable guidelines about what their ideal users actually want and will find useful. They can then build the app around the user rather than their opinion of what the user wants or should want, which can be quite subjective."

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Study Finds No Difference in VR Learning Outcomes Compared to Other Modes
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2019/02/07

According to this study (4 page PDF) that compared VR with hands-on and computer-based activities in an astronomy class, there was "no difference across conditions in average levels of performance on a pre/post knowledge test." Now it should be noted that this is a small study in one particular class, and it would be improper to generalize based on these results (though the Campus Technology article doesn't try very hard to restrain itself). What's interesting, though, is that this result is consistent with the "no significant difference" phenomenon reported in the 1990s. But the real question facing VR (as it was facing digital technologies generally back then) isn't whether you can do the old things just as well, it is what new things can you do with VR that you couldn't do with traditional methods?

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RIP “Do Not Track,” the Privacy Standard Everyone Ignored
Chris Hoffman, How-To Geek, 2019/02/07

The lesson here is that you can't just depend on companies to do the right thing just because you them to. Even though people option for "do not track" in their browser settings, websites basically ignored this preference. Worse - as the article notes - your selection of "do not track" became another data point that was tracked. That's why "modern browsers that include tracking protection don’t wait for a “common understanding” to develop in the industry. Instead, they proactively block trackers." Note that you don't have such protections on your iPhone apps - as this report suggests, for some apps, "every tap, button push and keyboard entry is recorded — effectively screenshotted — and sent back to the app developers."

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The Secret Weapon to Learning CSS
Robin Rendle, CSS-Tricks, 2019/02/07

I've been thinking recently about what it takes to learn web technologies today. We've come a long was from copying the source on a web page. Even the sort of instructions we give computers have changed - we don't tell them to "let variable x be 12" any more - it's more like "imagine an infinite plane filled with objects" or some such thing. We need new mental patterns - "ways to frame the problem in our heads, so we can break problems into their constituent parts and notice recurring patterns." That's why our services are called things like Docker or Digital Ocean. But we also need a path into the technology. See also Where do you learn CSS and HTML in 2019. And HTML, CSS and our Vanishing Entry Points.

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