Learning Assesment

Ok first off  have learned a lot about the options that the internet provides for seeking and organizing information. As for blogging, I doubt I will continue after class, at least not right away. I don’t really like posting about things that I only have passing knowledge in. Once I am able to flesh out my knowledge base a bit more on the subject of web design I can definitely see the benefits of having my own blog.

As for my PLE, I ended up discarding much of the feeds that I had acquired during this class because as time went on they proved to be less relevant in a long term perspective. I have subscribed to some new ones  that  cover some of the  subjects that I have learned about during my first quarter here at school. I view this as a sort of virtual library that will grow as I do. For RSS feeds I use Google reader because it is already linked to my email and I prefer a streamlined experience on the internet. For single pages that I wish to keep or share I use del.icio.us. I like this particular service because of the custom tags i can add and search.

For discovering new information I still use Google search although I like to think that I use it more effectively now than I did before. When I am not looking for anything in specific I use Stumble upon to look through websites that have been added by other users. I can use this to look through pages based on tags that are added by users. I can also use Stumble to store and share sites but the list of saved sites is not search-able. At least if it is I have not found a way to do it.

Right now my PLE is a simple one but I can foresee it becoming more complex as I learn more and find more information worth storing and sharing.

Web Standards V2

So apparently I screwed up and did not in fact publish my earlier blog on this subject as I had thought. This will be a quick and dirty version of the previous post.
So basically what I got from this article on Wiki is that web standards are an unofficial way of making things work together on the web. This idea makes a lot of sense due to the huge number of web sites, browsers and web tools out there. Without a unifying standard none of them would work together, and that would defeat the purpose of the internet as a means of massive information dissemination.

Languages are one of the prime means of standardization. Html is from what I gathered the language used to define how text based pages interact with the internet by allowing for links, and changes in font, colors, and size. Xhtml on the other hand is used for automated processing and is a link between Html and XML. Now exactly what that means…… truth be told I am not sure.Truth be told to me it seems that Xhtml seems like just a beefed up version of Html.
Css on the other hand seems to be a way of organizing pages written in html/xhtml under a set of rules that can be applied broadly across an entire web site.

There are even more languages that are out there that we’ll need to know how to handle, including : Perl, Java, Flash, Php, and more that I probably haven’t even heard of. It all seems to be a very intimidating wall that I’ll have to handle soon enough.

The main thing I have earned about web standards is that they are constantly changing and so in that spirit I leave you http://motivationalimage.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/poster92654750.jpg

Oh and here is an link to a group that is trying to get better and more refined standards added to the internet.

Podcasts

Simply put podcasting is a spoken version of the RSS articles that we examined earlier. I found this site that links to tons of different podcasts. The podcasts are search able by subject and title. The site also has forums that talk about the process and programs needed to create a quality podcast.
Quite frankly I don’t really like podcasts because its hard to go back and find the exact information that you are looking for. I cant search for a specific phrase like I can with a printed article. However for certain applications I do enjoy Vodcasts …. or the video version of the podcast. I do find that most people on the internet put no distinction between the two types of pod casting. In particular I find vodcasts that are instructional in nature to be of great use. A good example of these are here at metacafe.com. One of the big things I have recently been using videos for is Photoshop tutorials. This site makes really good video tutorials for Photoshop.

Mashups

I had to do a but of research due to my missing class last week on mashups and figuring out what constituted one and what didn’t. Unfortunately I still have little to say on the subject other than how its a very cool way of getting information from several different places and making it useful.
One of my favorite websites seems to fall into this category. Digg.com is a great way to get news from lots of different places at once. The media is then sorted into simple categories that are easy to browse through. Then the articles are rated on how many people “Digg” it. I find this an easy way to look through a lot of information and only look at things that I find relevant.

I also looked at Yahoo! Pipes and that just about blew my mind. The ability to look through so many sites and with so many different parameters is just amazing. I did notice as I used some of the existing pipes that they can be a bit buggy. I was looking for a video of the trailer of the latest House MD episode. The results were not even remotely related to my search…..even though at some of the supposed source sites did bring up the correct result when I used them directly.

Lastly I found this blog by Daniel Nations that list his top ten web Mashups. I have only played with a few of them but they all seem like really neat applications. He also has some other articles about building your own mashup.

Research

I discovered Zotero a Firefox add on to assist with online research. It works in my browser, lets me take notes, and keeps the citations of web pages if I need them for a bibliography or referral. I’m pretty sure there is even more it does but I haven’t had the time to play around with it much.

In addition to that I found this site that leads to many more great places to actually find the information your looking for. I in particular thought the magizine search was a cool way to look into things that may not have normally made it onto the internet.

Communities of practice

I started off my research by finding a paper defining CoP’s by Etienne Wenger. This paper told me what a CoP is and what functions define it. It seems like a good idea of how to pass on and share knowledge. In fact I do believe that in some ways I was part of what could be called a CoP back in the Navy. When I was training for my nuclear qualifications I was required to get “check outs” from senior qualified operators in order to get signed off. During this training process much local knowledge of how our systems on our boat worked were passed down to junior sailors. In addition when we found an error in one of our nuclear manuals or even a more efficient way of doing things the manuals would be changed in accordance. It was useful because as Mike Burk discusses here I could tap into that knowledge anytime. I learned many useful tricks to getting my work done without mishap by listening and learning from those who had done it all before.

Blogging

Well here we go again. I was looking around at different sites on how to blog and trying to think up something to blog about on my other blog when I came across this blog on 30 Blogging Tips to Screw Up. This blog entry is pretty much just a list of things new bloggers do to screw up, but I did find some interesting things in that list that I wouldn’t have thought about. like the following:
Blog without passion
Blog without personality
Take all blogging tips and advice for granted and don’t pass them through your personal filter
Ignore the importance of SEO

The last one I noticed because I have no idea what SEO is, and in the spirit of knowledge I looked it up on Wikipedia. Then I realized it stood for search engine optimization, and I felt kinda dumb. The other tips on things not to do on the site I found useful and I plan on looking through more of the blogs on the site to find more tips on how exactly to avoid these pitfalls.

Well I was feeling a bit discouraged at this point. So many ways to screw up and no idea what to do. I found this blog from Gala Darling in which she talks about how to increase your traffic. What I found interesting was when she was talking about filling a niche and then went on to talk about writing what you enjoy. I think these two tips together make sense because if there is something you are really passionate about chances are there is someone else out there that is too. Now if I can just figure out what that thing is I’ll be all set.

Collective Intelligence

First off let me apologize for this being posted a day late. My internet crashed hard last night while I was working on reading up on the material and stayed down.

Now that thats out of the way I’ll get started. First off i decided to find what I could on defining collective intelligence first and foremost. A pure definition I found in the first line of this wiki article. “Collective intelligence is a form of intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals.” I also found this blog on the subject which wasn’t that great but the video is trippy and will lodge the Idea in your head fairly well. I also found this blog that seems to be about nothing else but the way collective intelligence can actually make an individual grow and when an individual grows how it benefits the collective intelligence. I particularly like the little graphic at the bottom because it reinforces the idea of a symbiotic relationship between the individual and the collective.
Anyway defining it was well and good but then I needed to look into how the concept applies to our field of work. Well looking back at the work we did last week on PLEs and the talks on utilizing blogs brought to my mind ways the concepts could be used to an individuals advantage and so I set out to find out what others might have to say on the subject. This article really explains the importance of collective intelligence in marketing. I think that is a good example of showing how we as web designers will be using the concept of collective intelligence in our work. We wont just be designing sites that give customers what they want but also ones that get more individualized as the customer uses it. This kind of work will benefit both the customer and our clients and will be expected of us in the future.

PLE

Well after doing some reading on the subject I can say that a PLE is definable by it’s diversity. I also think that its important to point out that everyone has a PLE already and that from this point out its a matter of refining it and making it more efficient. I use several tools to find any and all information to find what I need to know on the internet and thats really the key of what a PLE is. However there is more to it as well as pointed out here.
A true PLE not only helps find information but sort it and store it as well. In any event the best way to show what a PLE is is to break your own down as done by this author. In any event I can see the definite benefits of storing the information that I have found in a way that is easily accessed as well as having a place to share myu own information with others.

RSS

Rss is simply a system that allows you to make a bookmark that actively keeps you informed of a site or blogs updates. Usually you can use it to subscribe to different parts of the site or to the entire thing so whenever the site updates you get the information sent to you via your Reader service