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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

2. Weblog: Post a response to the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Article. Describe what you read that was interesting and that you want to learn more about. Were there any surprises that you did not know about? How do you feel about these types of changes and how they will affect your role as an interactive designer?

These posts must be completed by Sunday Noon, so that everyone has time to read and comment on at least two others responses.

3. Read at least two classmate’s weblog responses to the Web 2.0 article, and post a comment about what they said. Did they add to your understanding of the article? Did you see something in their response that you didn’t see or understand in the same way? Assume you are communicating with each other, and you may want to post comments back and forth.

I have always thrived on change and moving on to whatever is leading edge or the next big thing. Some people in my life have criticized this as instability or simply not wanting to stick with something. I have never accepted that view for myself, as wanting to participate in leading edge activities is just part of who I am. Doing the same thing over an over is boring to me. Even teaching a class the same as I did last quarter is boring, and I think I am not doing my job as our industry changes enough that even every eleven weeks there is something new that can affect a course.

I was working as a manager of a design department for a trade show company when I first began creating web pages for commercial use. I created a site for our company that served as an “index” for the trade show industry. This meant listing and connecting all types of services and companies related to the industry and giving others a means of accessing these businesses. I received email and analized our weblogs of activity and was amazed at users coming to our site from all over the world. Email alone was a busy chore as people contributed information to add to our index. Our site design was on the cover of two industry trade magazines. All of this type of activity was like a magnet that attracted me. The excitement of communicating with people around the globe and doing new things, exploring a new type of media that was changing constantly soon became more interesting that what I had been doing, so I evolved into a webmaster/designer for our company, offering design services for our client companies. After a spell doing this for the trade show company, I went out on my own as a designer/developer. During this time I was approached by The Art Institute and asked to design and put together a web design program. I developed the first courses and became an adjunct instructor, then a full time instructor. And so the story goes.

Interactive media changes for good reasons. The move from HTML to XHTML was significant in that  HTML limited the types of data that could be ported to the web. XHTML, an application of Extensible Markup Language (XML), allows the tags to be generated by the designer/developer which means that any type of data can be addressed. The development of CSS allowed design to take over presentation on the web and make our documents far more efficient and easier for users to read and understand. Web 2.0 represents the most recent transition toward a more user oriented and directed web that established social software and social networking as a major activity for users. Never before did users participate in communities of learning that they actually brought back into their daily lives. The web went from a push information to users media to a pull information that we want specifically, so that we can integrate it into our lives.

I look forward to any new phase or activity on the web that improves it global affect on humanity. We have so much potential to reshape the world now, and to solve problems like poverty and war, if we access the global scope of people coming together for the good of humanity. These kind of powerful concepts and activities keep me excited about integrating web design with everyday life.

Several factors about the way the world works today, are influencing our culture and in particular your generation of learners. Gonzalez (2004) describes the half-life of knowledge as that span of time when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete. Only half of what is known today was known 10 years ago. The actual amount of knowledge in the world has doubled in the past 10 years. Now (2004) it is doubling every 18 months! (American Society of Training and Documentation).

There is simply too much information for any one person to “contain”, if in fact that is even a valid goal. These trends in learning defined by George Siemens in his “Connectivism” paper, provide additional factors:

1. Many learners will move into a variety of different, possibly unrelated fields over the course of their lifetime.
2. Informal learning is a significant aspect of our learning experience. Formal education no longer comprises the majority of our learning. Learning now occurs in a variety of ways – through communities of practice, personal networks, and through completion of work-related tasks.
3. Learning is a continual process, lasting for a lifetime. Learning and work related activities are no longer separate. In many situations, they are the same.
4. Technology is altering (rewiring) our brains. The tools we use define and shape our thinking.
5. Many of the processes previously handled by learning theories can now be off-loaded to, or supported by, technology.
6. Know-how and know-what is being supplemented with know-where (the understanding of where to find knowledge needed. (Siemens, 2004)

A simple example of know-where vs know-how or know-what:
A student wants to change an area of content in an HTML document and temporarily change it to an image. She knows that it can be done with CSS but does not remember how to do it. She activates her browser and types “image swap” + css in the Google window. Immediately there are numerous references that provide solutions to the problem and she selects the one that is most familiar and reads how to perform the needed process.

Is it important that the student did not know how to perform the function she needed? Does it matter whether it was “in her head” (memory)? Of course not. The issue was swapping content for an image and within a few minutes the process was completed, by knowing where to locate the necessary procedure.

This is the reason for the objective, “learning how to learn”, and this is the objective to experience the various tools that will be used during the Interactive Media Design program that allow you to communicate, collaborate, research and distribute information.

We need to comment on each others work – the uniblogs, the new Wordpress blogs, by sharing your aggregated favorites, and working with social bookmarking software to share in a broader world of users and learners. And it is important to you that it comes because you want to communicate your ideas, and develop a community that will support your studies as you progress through the IMD program, and life.

Does any of this ring true to your experience? Is the digital age just for certain people? Are we ready to participate because we want to? Your responses would be helpful!