Final Project

Here is my Flash .swf file. The URL functionality may or may not work based on your Flash player security settings. In case it does not I have included the links for the wiki and VoiceThread used on the site:

flash swf:
http://www.seq.org/~gstein/web_design/web_lesson/bike_trip_10.swf


voicethread:
http://voicethread.com/#u83423.b131790.i688662

wiki:
https://steins-wiki-site.wikispaces.com/Day+1+-+Yorktown%2C+VA+to+Glendale%2C+VA+%2870+miles%29

My Project Proposal

I did it in a Word Document so I'd rather post it as such:

http://www.seq.org/~gstein/web_design/web_hand/stein_proj_proposal.doc

Web 2.0 Booth Crawl: Excellent Beer, Mediocre Content

I attended the booth crawl on Thursday from 4:30pm to 6:00pm. It was good timing as there was free beer for all in attendance. When I first entered the room I was reminded of how many of these shows I have attended. The familiar (and some not so familiar) logos of tech players and upstarts dotted the room. As with past shows, I was also reminded that these types of events end up being primarily brochureware. Of the exhibits that seemed relevant to my high school computer classes I ended up talking to marketing bunnies with enough information to get me to take a free t-shirt and the URL of their flagship product. One product that looked promising is the Jing Project by Techsmith, makers of Camtasia. I look forward to trying this cross-platform tool that captures video and screen capture. Other than that, no big suprises. But the beer tasted great! Next time I will attend some of the talks given by experts and hit the booth crawl for happy hour purposes.

lynda.com design critique

see it on my wiki site:

http://cyberstein.wetpaint.com/thread/1372002/lynda.com+design+review

PowerPoint on Play

Here is a copy of the PowerPoint I created about Play:

http://www.seq.org/~gstein/web_design/web_ext/Play.ppt

Also, here is a link to the Launchball game I will talk about in class:

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/launchpad/launchball/

Voicethread: Frustrating Faucet

This hotel faucet design obsures a critical piece of the shower experience: how to get water to flow out of the shower head and onto you. The designer figured you would need no visual affordance to know that pulling down on the end of the all-too-hidden bath faucet head would cause the shower, some four feet above, to spray water. The feedback itself (imagine if the nozzle were extended only partially and it wouldn't work) is mediocre at best as the fully extended state looks basically the same as the fully retracted state from the vantage point of a standing user. The mapping between an event with the bath faucet and the outcome on the shower head is also dubious, but forgiveable since users are accustomed to numerous traditional fixtures that also involve something to do with the bath faucet fixture. Seeing as how there are very few constraints on faucet design, I think designer did a bad job, especially for hotel users who have no prior experience with this type of system before or after ther stay. See an image and hear this same commentary at Voicethread:

http://voicethread.com/share/101378/

Greg's Picture Frame Story

See if you can guess what happened!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23980795@N06/sets/72157604333213968/

FreeMind Map

Here is a jpeg version...

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...

About Week One in ITEC 830...

...Tonight Professor Foreman introduced all of us to the class objectives for ITEC 830. It all looks very intriguing. Admittedly, I haven't really embraced Web 2.0 to this point in my life. I've unfairly written off a lot of 2.0 stuff as narcissistic pandering designed to reinforce the lives of narcissistic panderers (e.g. hey here's a blog about every second of my life -- and you should spend every second of your life reading about it!) I need to figure out what these new technologies can do to make a postive change in my life and for my high school students. My students are embedded in these technologies already and I need to keep pace with them. -- Greg