Journal #6: Reflections on Professional Learning Networks

The Affinity group that I chose and have been monitoring is Classroom 2.0.  I have found it interesting because there are a variety of discussions on all sorts of subjects that have to do with using technology in the classroom plus anything to do with classroom teaching.  There are article on classroom furniture design as well as technology integration in preschool.  I especially enjoyed an article on three sites to help students move from the classroom to career as I’m trying to help my son start his career coming out of college.

I’m enjoying the feeds I’m receiving in DIGG.  For sports, I don’t have search through all my sites to find articles about the Red Sox or Celtics or Bruins or Patriots. More importantly, I’m finding websites that pertain to my more recent interests in technology and multimedia.  I recently read an article on O’Reilly Radar titled “A connected world is a better world. Right? By Jim Stogdill.  He compares the changes we’re going through now are similar to the industrial revolution that occurred 150 years ago.  Major changes is social interactions worldwide are occurring and that can be good or bad.

 

Professional Learning Networks are useful to better understand not only your own interests, but scan areas that you may never of thought of approaching.  It’s so easy to browse topics and exchange ideas with people in your own town as well as people across the planet with twitter.  I can easily communicate with people who may have the same interests as myself.  By focusing on very specialized Affinity groups or specific categories of RSS feeds, I can spend less time on browsing for information and get better information that will help me with my personal and professional development. 

Journal #5: Reflections on the first 5 weeks of Web Design

I found the first five weeks of learning HTML and the very beginning of CSS to be interesting.  After spending some time with other languages, I thought HTML would have its similarities to programming languages I’m familiar with such as C++.  But, HTML is not a programming language.  It is a “mark up” language.  A programmer uses tags and attributes to define the structure of information to be interpreted by a web browser.  It doesn’t have conditional phrases such as “if / then /else.  It doesn’t handle events or carryout tasks.  But it’s great at what it does and with the addition of CSS that handles how the data is presented, these tools become very powerful in sending and receiving information instantly worldwide.

My experience has not helped me understand HTML but it has helped me better structure a document with indentations and comments.  CSS can be very helpful whereby you can create one CSS document to style multiple HTML documents.  What I’d like to also learn is how we can create one document with common text to be used on all documents such as headers and footers.

Of the assignments to date, I found the table exercises to be the more difficult ones.  It can get confusing when setting up rows and columns correctly.  I enjoyed working on assignments that use images such as the Tuscany one in Chapter 7.  Web pages change dramatically when you bring in images.

Journal #4: Final Project Plan for website for Himalayan School of Theology

Site Title:        Himalayan Graduate School of Theology

Developer:     John Balentine

Focus:             College Website

Main

Features:        Introduction to School

                       Faculty Bio w/ images

                       Calendar

                       Announcements

                       Students Page - Student Pictures, Assignments due, link to a page to
                       upload assignments.

Target

Audience:       Students (current & prospective), Benefactors (current & prospective)

Design

Considerations:  Admin personnel must be able to easily update as changes occur

Limiting

Factors:           Uploading capability will be addressed in later version

                                     

Journal #3: Commercial Concerns in the Social Web article response

Friesen, N (2010). Education and the social Web: Connective learning and the commercial imperative. First Monday, 15 retrieved (10/21/2013) from http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3149/2718#author.

I found Friesen's ideas very interesting.  Like him, I also have concerns that advertisers are using social media to obtain too much of my personal information so that they can then use this information to develop target advertisements direct towards me for products that will meet my needs.

But, we live in a market economy and some will say that this is the price we pay to use its resources (i.e. nothing is free).  I don't believe that advertisers are hindering the learning aspects of social media to a large extent for older audiences.  Most of us have been bombarded with advertisements over the years and we seem to be able to compartmentalize them or, we learn to work around them.  For example, I rarely watch live TV now.  I  record it with my DVR and then watch it at my convenience and fast forward through the advertisements.  I have more of a problem with this social media advertisers targeting a nine year old.  Typically the defenses are not as developed for a child and I don't always trust the messages being delivered to these younger audiences.  But this has been a problem for years on the television.  Why are all these kids asking for designer products?

Google and others are spending millions to find ways of of obtaining our "likes" so that advertisers can get then target us.  The Web and social media such as Facebook are relatively new.  Consumer groups have not yet been able to place the needed controls on it.  I believe that these controls will come. But better yet, as audiences become more demanding,  the social media competition will look to deliver products that are less evasive.  The only problem here is that advertisers are the ones that keep Google and others in business.  Who will pay for new developments?   A pay-for-use service guaranteeing no advertisements would be attractive to many but not to all.  The beauty with Facebook is that most  students and many adults are using it.  Friends are plentiful.  So what is the answer?  There are some ways we can limit the information that users collect such as deleting 'cookies' on one's computer.  Often your likes and dislikes are stored there.

Who is going to pay for future social media sites.  I believe there needs to be a balance.  Some controls are necessary but not enough to scare away the advertisers.  This medium continues to be a great way to share information and its uses in the classroom are just in the early stages.

Journal #2: Joining the Affinity Group Classroom 2.0 and reflections on Digg Stream

The Affinity Group that I chose is Classroom 2.0.  http://www.classroom20.com/

I had some difficulty deciding since what educational Affinity Group to join since I'm not a teacher.  I have lectured at Cal State L.A. years ago but I don't consider myself a teacher and most of the sites listed are truly aimed at sharing ideas with other teachers.

Since my goal is to work with industry later on marketing multimedia material to schools or businesses (training departments).  I thought Classroom 2.0 makes the most sense for my interests.  The group discusses a variety of subjects including the use of computers, iPads, Interactive Whiteboards and other gadgets in the classroom.

My goal is to have a better understanding of what teachers are doing with respect to technology.  What has been working for them and what hasn't.  Are they using Google Docs?  Are they assigning homework via social media?  What concerns do they have? Do many teachers believe technology is helping them or hurting them? How is it helping them meet the needs of the slower student as well as the high achiever? Are school administrations helping them introduce technology and supporting them at challenges arise? I realize this group won't answer all my questions but I believe it's focus will be beneficial to helping me better understand use of technology in the classroom.

For venders to meet the needs of teachers, they must have a good understanding of what is happening inside the classroom.  I am at somewhat of  disadvantage because I've never taught in a K-12 classroom but, this may actual be an advantage.  I may have more of an open mind with respect to what is needed and what should be developed based on sound research.  This brings me back to why I'm using this group...it could help me with my research.

The site can be a little overwhelming.  There are tons of ideas that are shared among the members.  For my purposes how do I begin?  Do I just browse the site depending on what strikes my fancy or do I develop some kind of structure for analyzing the ideas of teachers in the classroom?   Over the next few weeks I'll look into ways I can possible structure my use of the group. 

Journal #1: Reflections from Chapters 1-3: Robbins, J.N. (2012) Learning Web Design. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc.

I am anxious to start right in learning HTML code but logically it helps to get some background first and the first three chapters of Learning Web Design did a decent job with this task.

In chapter 1, I was a little surprised on how structured the design and development process is for web applications.  Previously, in my small business, I had one of my employees who was was somewhat knowledgeable agree to create a website for me.  I believe he used GoDaddy to develop the site.  He didn’t need to know HTML; GoDaddy’s design tools did not require any technical knowledge.  Granted, the site he developed was very basic and probably lacked much of the advanced functionality that a corporate site would have but, for the money, I was very satisfied.  It met my needs.  With this class we should eventually be able to produce much better websites since we will be able to use HTML and CSS directly to create exactly what we desire even though we won’t learn much about JavaScript until GED513.

Dissecting Web Designing into many categories such as Interaction Design, User Interface Design, Interaction Design sounded kind of weird to me since there is so much crossover.  I believe for small and medium size projects, one designer is wearing many hats.  If there is a team for large applications that is dividing the different categories than they must work close together with many meetings so that they don’t replicate each other’s work; even hear I imagine designers still wearing more than one hat.

In chapter 2, I did learn the difference between Internet vs. the Web.  I, like many, interchanged the words, but there are other ways to share information over the internet the with Web pages.  I found it interesting how browsers are different and will handle applications differently. Therefore we must test our code on multiple browsers.  Hopefully, in the future, browsers will all handle HTML, CSS, JavaScript from our applications the same way. 

After reading the introduction to JavaScript, I’m still not quite sure how it works.  Interactivity is a generic term and HTML does give you some interactivity, I’m looking forward to learning more.

In chapter 3, I was most interested in Progressive Enhancement and Responsive Web Design.  I find that many sites don’t do well on my cell phone.  It takes me a while to get the information I need as I work at sizing the document correctly.  I’m looking forward to learning to develop applications that can handle a variety of browsers and devices.

Question 1:

What is the difference between the Internet and the Web?

Answer:

The Internet includes all the hardware and software that is used to connect millions of computers on a extremely large network so that they can share information using specified protocols.

The Web is one of the ways in which information is shared on the internet using the HTTP protocol. Another way to share information is emails that use the protocol SMTP.

Question 2:

What is the difference between User Experience (UX), Interaction (IxD), and Interface Design (UI) for the Web Designer?

Answer:

In designing the user experience, the designer takes a step back and looks at how comfortable the user is with the look and feel of the website…were the satisfied with there time interacting with the site as a whole.

With Interaction Design, the designer is more narrowly focused on how the user interacts with each web page.  Can the users easily find everything the desire quickly and seamlessly.
With Interface Design, the designer is analyzing how the webpage responds to the user’s behavior.

As you can see, there is much crossover.