Insights

The blue card for Moodle, developed by the Student Experience Team in Information Services, is live in Moodle and has been announced in Onstream . The Wellbeing team have put together some videos with instructions: For markers   For students

There are some amazing learning resources on the web, in every area of development, design, mobile, responsive, UX, and more. Here are some of my favourites. 24 ways The advent calendar for web geeks. For twenty-four days each December they publish a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring everyone a little Christmas cheer. A List Apart Explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices. The Agile Manifesto The core ideas and principles behind agile development. CSS Tricks Nifty things you can do with CSS, like making interesting shapes, or speech bubbles, or pull-out quotes. Meyerweb.com The website and blog of Eric Meyer, CSS guru and web consultant. Boagworld The website and blog of Paul Boag, user experience guru and web consultant.

There are some amazing tools available for developers on the web, from pretty-printing your code to validating it, from colour palettes for visual impairments to tools for testing APIs. Here are some of my favourites. Stack Overflow This is the go-to site for questions and answers about coding. It has questions and answers on just about every programming language that you can think of - PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, JavaScript, jQuery, Angular, and more. And every environment you can think of - Windows, iOS, Android, and so on. And every mark-up and styling language - HTML, XML, CSS, and Sass. Stack Overflow has an awesome community of people willing to help complete strangers, which I think is amazing. I have learnt so much from reading Stack Overflow, and I haven't asked that many questions on there, because many of the common questions have already been asked and answered. User Experience This is the equivalent site to Stack Overflow for asking user experience questions (usability an...

The season of advent is well underway over at 24 ways , with a daily article on an aspect of web development. One title that leaped out at me was What the heck is Inclusive Design? by Heydon Pickering, who is the accessibility editor for Smashing Magazine and works with The Paciello Group as an accessibility and UX consultant. He is the author of a book on  Inclusive Design Patterns  which should probably be on your wish list. Inclusive design is a new name for the idea that web accessibility and good user experience benefits everyone, including (but not limited to) people with recognised and registered disabilities. Good readability and well organised content is good for dyslexic users, but also for busy people who don't have time to trawl through your unreadable and badly-organised website. In short, inclusive design means designing things for people who aren’t you, in your situation. In my experience, mainstream UX isn’t very good at that. By bolting accessibility onto m...