This week TED clocked up 50 million viewings.

Jill Bolte Taylor’s talk (below) is the most watched.

I found it fairly mind-blowing, if you’ll pardon the pun.

You only need one card-reader.

The card-readers are all the same bar the branding.

So if you bank with Barclays, NatWest, Nationwide, RBS and no doubt others too, you can get away with only carrying one card-reader around with you.

I’ve tried it with a couple of the major banks and building societies and I can confirm that all cards and card readers are compatible.

They’re using the APAC - UK payments association - standard. There’s some background on this slightly out of date page on the APACs website

It’s still a pain to have to carry one around though. Puts a terrible bulge in the pocket!

Tell them they can use the Tab key on their keyboard to move through a web-page.

To those who already know, it seems obvious, taken for granted.

But if you’ve ever watched people filling out boxes on forms on banking websites or when setting up an account on a website using the mouse to move from one input box to the next, you can imagine their relief on learning about the Tab key.

The Tab key “focuses” on links and form elements, such as boxes you need to fill details in, moving from one to the next.

And Shift+Tab does the same thing in reverse.

Of course, this assumes the web-page has been well-designed. You should be able to Tab through the screen in a logical order. This order can be easily specified by the web designer, and is particularly important when it comes to accessibility, so there’s no excuse for not doing it.

Each scenario has its own starting page, each of which we put in a different tab in Firefox.

This means setting up all the tabs and start pages for each research session.

To save time, we set these up once.

We then select Bookmarks > Bookmark All Tabs… > {name the folder}. [Keyboard shortcut for this is Ctrl+Shift+D]

These are then all available for each session via Bookmarks > {folder name} > Open All in Tabs.

Handy.

If you’re using tabs in Internet Explorer, the same functionality is available via Favorites > Add Tab Group to Favorites > {name the tab group}

The Tab Groups are then available via the “Favorites Center” [Alt+C on the keyboard].

Via Joe Lazarus via Scobleizer on Twitter.

See Bruce Lawson’s personal site : SharePoint and Web Accessibility.

I thought the six coins could make up a shield by arranging the coins both horizontally, as with the landscape idea, as well as vertically, in a sort of jigsaw style. I liked the idea and symbolism of using the Royal Arms, where individually the coins could focus on specific elements and when placed together they reveal the complete Royal Arms.

I found the idea that members of the public could interact with the coins the most exciting aspect of this concept. It’s easy to imagine the coins pushed around a school classroom table or fumbled around with on a bar - being pieced together as a jigsaw and just having fun with them.

Mathew Dent, winning designer of the new Royal Mint coins, explaining his brilliant thinking.

It’s a widely adopted and internationally recognised standard for tracking progress in online learning. It was first developed by ADL in the United States in 1999. The current release is SCORM 2004, though most large LMS vendors currently conform for to SCORM 1.2.

At the BBC, back in 2003, we developed our LMS, which was based on our philosophy of “learner-centred design”, to conform with SCORM.

For SCORM to work you need two components:

1. A SCORM-conformant learning management system (LMS)
2. SCORM-conformant content (based on sharable content objects, or SCOs) such as an online course or quiz

The term “conformant” is used instead of “compliance” for pragmatic reasons.

SCORM uses XML and a javascript wrapper (or API) to let the learning content communicate with the LMS.

Depending on the instructional design of your learning content, typically you might want to log certain information including:

• the completion of a section, page, video or simulation - this can then be used if the learner resumes at a later date to avoid having to re-start from the beginning
• a score that the learner has achieved, and the answers submitted in a quiz

A few sites and resources I’ve found useful on my e-learning travels:

• The SCORM homepage on ADL (Advanced Distributed Learning), includes all the specs and a downloadable conformance test suite
• SCORM definition on Wikipedia
• Rustici (pronounce the ending like the ending of “ecstasy”) Software - a really useful set of SCORM primers
• Rustici Test Track - a free web service to which you can upload and run your learning content to test it’s SCORM-conformance
• Popular sites bookmarked in delicious tagged “SCORM”
• YouTube video: The essence of SCORM in 30 seconds - you have to read this quite quickly