Fundamentals of IMD

This week we will get our personal blogs started or added to so that they are ready for us to work our weblog plan. To get started, complete the about page and write your first post in post pages.
1. Create a purpose statement for your weblog and transfer it to the “about” page of your weblog. (Use Manage Pages and edit the current page, or use “write pages” and the title will become the link to your new page, the post will be the posted statement about the purpose of your site.

2. Create the first article for your weblog by either “manage post” and select edit for the “hello world” default post, or “write post” and create a title and post for your first article.

Zoho.com has just released their new Zoho Notebook web-based application, which has very easy to use features for adding a wide variety of content into a “notebook” type of interface with pages. A 3-min video offers a good tutorial and introduction to the product. The Notebook product allows you to add audio, video, html and text to the page, and it will accept web based assets that can be moved around on the page freely to organize the information your put on the page.

The free product is one of many Zoho applications that have been developed as desktop apps all available as web based tools. Sign up for your account at Zoho.com.

Next week we will spend the whole class working on building an HTML page for your new domain. As preparation for the class it will help you a lot if you are new or inexperienced with HTML to spend time working through a tutoral before class. This will make our class time together much more valuable.

1. Two different tutorials are offered - choose the one that you relate to best, but not both of them. HTML Dog and w3schools are the sites and in each do the beginning HTML (except for tables and frames) and the Beginning CSS tutorials.

http://htmldog.com

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_examples.asp

There are also “text” oriented tutorials in W3 schools if you prefer, but this method of seeing and being able to change the code is very experiential and useful to helping  you learn what is going on.

2. Get started with your personal blog that you uploaded to your domain site. This blog is for you to define and hopefully use over time. Decide what you want its focus to be, and plan how you will work with it, and if possible create a schedule for when you will work on your blog. The “How to be Heard” article (handout) by Stephen Downes is excellent for helping you think through this process.

If you are not yet installed or not sure about working with Wordpress, write up your plans and add to your class weblog as a response. Also, if you want to learn more about your Wordpress blog, James Farmer of Edublogs has created 4 video tutorials to help you along. The tutorials are located at:

http://edublogs.org/videos 

1. Read the article: “A Web Professional Can Never Stop Learning”, by Roger Johannson and the link to Web Standards and the New Professionalism, (http://www.molly.com/2005/11/14/
web-standards-and-the-new-professionalism/) by Molly Holzschlag. This type of statement can apply to any professional but is particularily important in the interactive design industry. Together with the Robinson article earlier in the quarter, this paints a strong image of what is required of your studies and your passion for this work. Discuss how you feel about entering an industry that has high demands and requires constant updating of knowledge and skills?

2. If you are not up-to-date on the handout “to complete this course by week 11″ please begin getting your work complete. If anyone has any issues or difficulties with any of the assignments, please email me and lets schedule a meeting to get you going.

Instructors comments about topic #1.

The interactive design industry has been the only business I have entered that I did not get bored or tired of the same old thing. I enjoy being on the edge of things, of pushing to do something that may not have been done before. I enjoy this type of change as it keeps me alive and growing. My greatest challenge in the industry is in expanding the scope of my knowledge and skills - wanting to do more than any one person would be expected to do.

I also thrive on gathering and organizing information that I am interested in. In school I was a learner like many others who worked hard to give my teachers the information they wanted me to produce. Sometimes it led to my gaining knowledge. Sometimes I could not remember what I studied. The difference was always whether or not I was engaged in the information. Later in life I learned to develop new ways of learning. Technology was a key to that change, as I was fascinated with new ways of doing things and more productive tools that allowed me to maximize my time and efforts. Becomming self-directed was a battle and I still have my periods of needing something to push me along. But I know that when I choose to, I can find anything that I need to make a project work, or to work out a problem I had not encountered before. It has been a tough transition for me, and I hope to help others make these types of transitions much easier and earlier in life.

I know too, that understanding how code works correctly, means that I can communicate with practically anyone in the field. I also am vividly aware that we do not design interactive media so that we can become known as good (or great) designers. Rather we are great designers when the users of our projects find what they need and it helps them in their lives. It is really about communication, about meeting the needs of the users. That is where we find our satisfactions in this industry.

Go to the IMD section of the forum and locate “Class Specific Forums” near the bottom of the page. Open the link for Class Specific Forums and you will find a new Thread for Fundamentals of IMD. You are welcome to post comments and to begin new threads from within that Thread.

Don’t limit  yourself to this one area however, as you should explore what is going on through the entrys in other sections.

The concept of a personal learning environment may seem like a new term and process to you. But consider the many digital tools that are becomming available to you and the new world of interactive media and realize that these tools are now a part of your learning process. So why not figure out how you can organize everything into a developing environment that contains your learning processes, resources, links, weblogs, aggregators, etc. We will begin by exploring some simple environments called portals. You may have a MyYahoo or MyGoogle account already which is a portal type of product. Take a look at netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com/) for a peek at a little more sophisticated style of portal. We will work with this one in class as a way of getting an understanding of how a PLE may be a good process/product for you to begin to develop for your needs.

Questions for the week:

1. Given the descriptions of what a PLE may look like in the article by Graham Attwel, describe your thoughts about how this type of process might benefit your learning productivity. There is no right or wrong answer here, but sharing your thoughts and reading others thoughts may bring some inspiration to all of us. Dig a little and see if you can define what components you might want to include in a PLE.

2. After reading comments in the AID Creative Forums, what are your reactions to this type of communication? Do you think it is something you would be willing to check every few days to stay on top of community activity? How would you contribute to developing a Community of Practice: Would you use a forum or a weblog?

Seneca’s weblog has be re-created and is now working.

1. Purchase and establish a web hosting account. (If you have any problems, let me know by email.) Information about hosts in the article below this one.

2. Read the Robinson article: “A Recipe for Learning Web Design” and respond with a post in  your weblog by Sunday Noon. The post should be your ideas and feelings about what was stated and not just repeating what the author said.

3. After Sunday, respond to at least two other people in the class by commenting on their post about the article. Comment to two different people from last week!

I will email everyone with corrections to the class list of email/blog addresses, and the addition of Quest’s information.

A web hosting account is required for all IMD students. I am recommending two providers, ehostpros.com or godaddy.com, but not requiring you to use this host if you would rather shop on your own or find a free or less expensive hosting solution. However, one of the requirements of the host, is that you will have access to “shared webhosting” (which simply means other people use that same server - but no one has access to the others), with php and mysql services available and you must have access to at least 1 database. The amount of server space should not be a major issue for the projects you will build, and if so you can always add more.

The basic service at ehostpros.com is called the Starter Plan, which is $2.99/mo when you pay annually - which is $35.88 per year. You will also have to have a domain name (this will be the sites address - such as “wayne.com” etc. The additional cost for the domain is $11.99 per year. You can keep your domain for as long as you like and can transfer it to another hosting site, by renewing it each year.

GoDaddy at godaddy.com offers the “economy plan” at $3.59/mo if paid up front as an annual fee and the domain fee is $1.99 plus a $0.22 ICAN fee. This plan totals $45.29 per year.

GoDaddy also offers a free web hosting plan when you buy a $1.99 domain, but the account will have a limited advertising banner on any site you host. I cannot find whether this type of account offers php, mysql, or database accounts, so I cannot recommend it, but it may have these capabilities.

We intentionally chose not to have a textbook for this class, so you could use that expense for your web hosting. The reason we need you to have your own account, is because part of what you must learn is how to manage your own host. We can not give you that opportunity with our servers, although you will be given access to using them, it is not the same experience.

Try and have your domain and web hosting up and running by Week 3. If you have any delays let me know, and I can work with anyone that runs into a problem during or after class next week.

If you have not received comments to your site it may be that the site is trying to contact you to accept the comment. When you go back to the site to accept it, you should have an option to accept all comments, and then the problem should go away.

Another, more private option is to go to the  “Users” menu and then the “Authors and users” submenu. In that screen go to the bottom section where it offers “ADD user from community”. Type in the email of a classmate and select “subscriber” and “add user”. Do this for each of the class members and then our class “community” will have access to subscribe and comment to your site.

If anyone still has problems please email me at wayne.batchelder@gmail.com so I can work with you to get this corrected.