Macworld Web 2.0 Reaction: AJAX Rocks

Of all the technologies brought up during the presentation I was most intrigued by the AJAX solution. I am interested in this because I teach Web Design. One of the topics we spend a lot of time on is hand-coding HTML pages. I like teaching this topic because it allows students to get under the hood and explore how graphical interfaces look on the inside. Dreamweaver is great but it doesn't serve to debunk the myth that all computer design is graphical in nature.

AJAX will give my kids a chance to jazz up the interactivity of their pages without doing too much heavy lifting. I want my kids to learn JavaScript but a full course would leave many in the dust. By tinkering with JavaScript via AJAX, I think it would be a good complement to the existing HTML curriculum. Of course, AJAX may not be the best of breed, and I would be wise to shop around, but it looks like a great starting point.

Google Earth Presentation Made With Camtasia

Here is a page where you can find a link to the Flash movie I made about Google Earth:

http://www.seq.org/~gstein/links.html

Here is a link to Techsmith, the maker of Camtasia Studio software that makes instructional movies in Flash or other formats:

http://www.techsmith.com/

My Wetpaint Wiki Site

for some reason i haven't been able to edit it for a week:

http://cyberstein.wetpaint.com/

ITEC 830 Week 4: Wetpaint and Netvibes Troubles

Last week I created a wikibook with Wetpaint and then linked it t0 Netvibes Spring 2008 Wikis. I verified that both were working properly last week. Now, my link is no longer included in the Spring 2008 wikis and the Wetpaint site itself is a headache. I assume the Netvibes issue may be due to an administrator action related to the problems we were having last week. After I sign into Wetpaint I am unable to edit any pages or even add discussion threads. When I click buttons on the Wetpaint pages nothing happens -- in either Firefox or IE, even restarted. It is like a plug-in is missing or something -- even though it worked fine last week. Am I missing something here?

I have to say that thus far I have found the Wetpaint site to be unreliable, cumbersome, and far less enjoyable that just generating my own HTML pages in Dreamweaver. It could be that I am making simple mistakes. Any ideas from anyone?

Connectivism

Way back in the day I was a philosophy major in undergrad. While I have forgotten most of the details of the modern epistemology debate one thing does get remembered: any theory that attempts to explain how knowledge is defined, acquired, and disseminated is bound to be contested by other rival theories (many seem as credible). I remember leaving that debate no more certain about the "Truth" (notice the capital "T") than when I entered it, but I do recall feeling that regardless of what was really the case, some theories seem to correspond better with my intuition than others.

This discussion of learning theory seems to be parallel to this. No one strong theory is likely to be found correct in an absolute sense, but some theories are bound to seem more valuable than others. As a high school teacher, I agree with the notion that it is more important that I teach my kids how to learn, than it is to teach them a set of static facts. One method inspires a lifelong skill set for helping students find what they need, the other runs the risk of being outdated and useless.

I need to meditate more about this before writing more...