Web standards

Articles Used

• What are Web Standards: A comprehensive explanation of what is comprised in the term
• Developing With Web Standards – Recommendations and best practices
• Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards

Web standards took me a while to grasp the understanding partly why my post cam so late, but to my understanding web standards are a way to have full compatibility of your web site in any browser regardless of the version. This is achieved through markup languages such as cascading style sheets (CSS) and others.

With that being said I would say that web standards are vital almost above all other pieces of the site except for a design and idea. I cant tell you how many time that I’ve opened my own projects and tested it in one browser only to find out that in another the spacing is all off and the video doesn’t load correctly. Not to mention viewing other sites in a browser you like and their drop down menu works but isn’t in the right place and dissapears when you try to roll your mouse over it. I’ve been a visual person my whole life if I liked the way it looked I considered it to be good, I’ve even been known to rent movies based on the covers, and what happens is designers will make this really cool looking site that is a pain to try to navigate. Now, before I try to make a pleasing site to look at through web standards I want to be just a pleasing if not more to use and navigate.

Cloud Computing

Articles Used

• Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing
• The Cloud’s Best Kept Secret
• Ellison Shoots Hole in Cloud

In a way cloud computing could be described as using a computer through the Internet, now while that might be over simplifying it, its not that far off. Essentially  you would be using your computer as a portal to a service that’s online and you basically have all your data on “The Cloud” and all the applications that would normally be stored locally on your computer would be run over the Internet.

Now right off the bat I thought that this would be the wave of the future, since all gadgets and lap tops are getting smaller and mobile it would make sense that they would eventually be able to run applications and such remotely through the internet. I’m still not totally sure how fast the service could be running over the internet, especially for someone like me that edits video and motion graphics I would need a fast connection and lots of ram to run the application and have play back in real time, assuming that there is a service that allows me to be edit video and motion graphics. Even though cloud computing makes sense, I’m still attached in a matter of speaking to my local hardrive and having the security of knowing where my data is at all time we’re in the age of identity theft and having all my information on the internet doesn’t seem like the safest way to store my data, even though it’s probably the most accesible way,I would still be afraid of having my information out there.

Tweet Tweet

Articles Used:

• Twitter Support
• How Twitter can help at work
• Twitter: Why It’s So Great And How To Effectively Use It

So the video should give you some idea as to what twitter is and what is does, at least the short and sweet version. I myself found it to be very helpful when I first visited the site a few months back to try and figure out what the big idea was. So to sum up what twitter is again, twitter is a form of micro blogging the allows the user to either update his or her status or receive updates on the people he or she is following. Similar to the way one would change their status message on Facebook or myspace, only this allows people to subscribe to your tweet via mobile device, rss, or another third party application.

That is basically what twitter is in a nutshell, now what twitter is capable of doing is a horse of a different color. Some users will use twitter to self promote their work by updating what they’re currently working on, or share ideas with their peers about a certain topic and create a small community of practice, and since twitter is so immediate probably one of the most common uses is to get instant updates in the news or celebrity gossip.

I haven’t quite made up my mind about twitter simply because I haven’t tried to use it to its potential, but what I can do is lay out my plan to put it to work. My plan is to use twitter as a self promotional/networking  tool. The blog that I’m going to start for my final project,  something I hope to be an ongoing thing, is going to be used to promote my work as a short film maker, designer, and later a web developer. I am going to commit myself to using twitter to promote my blog and myself for the remaining 4 weeks I am in this class with the option to continue at the end.

www.twitter.com/view_finders

Communities of Practice

Articles Used

• Communities of practice a brief introduction
• Communities of practice
• Communities of Practice:The social dimension to the virtual world?

Now maybe since I was brought up in a digital age, as most people my generation and younger were, I often find that I’ve participated in most of these social learning practices in some form or another with out even realizing it at first. Communities of Practice is no exception, from what I understand a CoP is a group of individuals communing together on a shared subject in order to learn more from each other on a regular basis. Now with that being said not everyone that shares common interest is a community of practice it takes a commitment, as it does with members that belong to the same industry that encounter the same problems for example.

As I said earlier I’ve particapated in a community of practice for a number of years, most notably in my college years, without even knowing it which is probably due to my involvement in digital technologies. I’ve accumelated a nice amount of knowlege about digital imaging, and compositing, and manipulation just to name a few where as my team members have their expertise in something else but all of us share a common passion for film making. When we meet we either go over past problems we’ve encountered that we now have a solution for, problems we have now and look for a solution together, or ideas that we have and try to avoid or plan for problem that we might encounter during our next project. The topics change the solutions are almost never the same, but we remain focused on what our goal is and the reason why we gather together and that is to learn and teach each other to become better at what we do.

A successful blogging practice

Articles used

• 10 Principles of Successful Business Blogging
• How To Become A Professional Blogger
• Being a Professional Blogger

I’ve always been a supporter of people being able to express themselves through whatever medium they choose and the same goes for blogging, if  a person chooses to share his/her thoughts, ideas, and opinions with whom ever wants to read then by all mean I think they should. Being a professional blogger means that people weather they be  a business, corporation, or a group of people is willing to pay you for your opinions, thoughts, ideas or to blog about certain topics and issues because of your comprehensive writing style.

I greatly appreciate the blogging community without the group of professionals that I frequently read my evolution as an artist would have taken twice as long as it has if not longer. Even though I think my career as a professional blogger is as likely as me becoming a Olympic gymnast there’s nothing wrong with seeing what it would take to become a full time blogger. In most of the articles I read they all say that you should find something that you are passionate about, a topic that gives you a lot to speak about, and preferably something you know a lot about. They also say that you should make blogging a daily habit after a while when you’ve been in the subject for a while that the words will come and if they flow then you’ve found the thing you like to speak about. Probably the most important part about being a professional blogger is generating traffic, create links to your blog, ping other bloggers in hope that they ping you back, brand your look.

As I mentioned earlier how much I appreciate the blogging community the chances of me picking it up full time are very slim. I’m writing this blog as and exercise to further my understanding of how the community works and what can be accomplished using these tools.

Collective Intelligence

Articles used

• Wikipedia: Collective intelligence
• A Crash Course On Complexity, Emergence and Collective Intelligence
• Defining “Collective Intelligence

Summing up Collective Intelligence proved to be more difficult to do than I had originally thought it was going to be every article I read the authors just used a bunch of five dollar words that resulted in me searching for a new article, this is a problem I find with most blogs. Nothing against those with a wide vocabulary or higher education I’m just trying to find something the doesn’t require extra research after I read the article. A couple of articles I found for defining Collective Intelligence used the analogy of a group of ants functioning as one organism using the community towards one goal.

Over the years I’m sure that there were many instances where collective Intelligence came to the rescue, and all my buddies and peers put our heads together to come up with a solution to fix the problem in front of us. However, the time I wish to share as a designer was one of competition I complete regularly in film competitions where you either have 24 or 48 hours to make a 3- 5 minute film which includes all three phases of production( Pre-production, Production, and Post production). Usually movies are composed of hundreds of people working together, we had five so collective Intelligence was ever so apparent in our work where one of us seemed to lack in skills another would fill in and around it went like that. All of us working towards the goal of best film was motivation enough to solve problems together most notably in our editing and vfx when stuck on a particular effect or on a cut we rely on each other to step up and face the problem together.

Yes we did win

• Best Film in dallas
• Best cinematography
• Best use of prop
• Best graphics

As an iteractive designer the use of CI as an idustry is crucial in growing, as many of the teacher I’ve had that are very knowlegeable in their own right, they dont always have all the answers so its up to us as a community to find those answers and help each other.

RSS

Articles used

• Wikipedia
• What Is RSS? RSS Explained
• What is RSS (Really Simple Syndication)?

I’ve heard the term rss feed, I ‘ve seen the logo all over the place, and I know that if I click it then I’m going to be subscribed to which ever article its on, but that’s all I know nothing else really comes to mind so what good is it for other than bringing me the articles that I tell it to. Well thinking from an educational angle Rss feed are extremely helpful when keeping up with other designers opinions and trends, because as we all know design and technology move extremely fast some faster than other. In fact they move so fast that if we don’t utilize tools such as rss feeds we are going to be left behind wondering why everyone else is so ahead of the curb.

As with most of the tools on the web the are far deeper uses for this tool that I haven’t seen yet and in all honesty probably wont use.  However the basic function of the rss feed has help the efficiency of which I learn drastically  I frequently read several design blogs and through the use of the rss I can now have those in a convenient location called an aggregator or a reader and that small function works in a very big way. I think with out these tools I’d still be nose deep in a pile of books in a library corner fishing for answer that more than likely did have adequate examples

My Personal Learning Environment

Articles used

• Personal Learning Environments: What They Are And How To Implement Them
• Personal Learning Environments
• Blogs as personal learning environments

Ever since I was a kid whenever someone said a word that I didn’t understand, or if I heard a term that I didn’t understand I always first try to figure out its meaning in my head. It worked most of the time, but the rest of the time I would look up its meaning then I would put it in the context in which I heard it and that seemed to workout just fine. In the case of PLE or Personal Learning Environment the same strategy didn’t work out, the definition of a PLE is “a system that helps learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes providing support for learners to set their own learning goals, manage their learning, manage both content and process, and communicate with others in the process of learning.” At first PLE sounded pretty self explanatory, but as I’ve learned through the use of the Internet and its tools that almost everything having to do with learning takes on a whole new meaning. In the article Personal Learning Environments: What They Are And How To Implement Them it states the most recent evolutionary step in a learner-centered approach to education.

I’m a digital native and early in my college years most of my teacher weren’t they were old school in the sense that learning came from the books, and discussion, and exercises like home work. I still think that’s a very valid way of learning, however I think now with all the tools we have available to us on the web that learning can take on a whole new dimension in the form of PLE’s. I recently started my own collection of sites that I regularly visit all in one place using an application found on the web that is cutting the time it takes me to search and find answers in half. But in the end I think it’s all about convience to your resources and putting all the helpful tools around you and ready at your disposal.

Web 2.0

I had heard the term web 2.0 around and seen it when I surfed the internet on social networking sites and other various pages, but I never really understood what it meant. My first thought after hearing it was that it was an upgrade in delivery software or functionality or just a new standard of design and look for the web. It wasn’t until it was briefly explained to me that my curiosity grew, and as with most of my curiosities I went directly to wikipedia to see what it said there. “Web 2.0 encapsulates the idea of the proliferation of inter connectivity and interactivity of web-delivered content” I have no idea what that means so i knew further investigation was in need so i ventured to google and this time took a different approach. After reading the first article on wikipedia i knew this was a deep and intelligent subject that would be hard for me to understand right off the bat, so in the search bar I simply typed in web 2.0 for dummies in hope that it would lead me to a simpler and easy to follow article and indeed it did in fact it lead me to a really helpful video

After I finished watching it the first time I took from it that web 2.0 is using the internet as a platform, I had trouble understanding what the word platform meant in this context, so as I did with the meaning of web 2.0 I looked it up and a platform is a place for public discussion; forum. So now web 2.0 is starting to make a lot of sense, and with the comparison of the web 1.0 applications and the web 2.0 application it made even more sense to me. Still I felt like I could further understand it I did one more search and cam to O’Reilly Media
and it touched on a lot of the same things that the video touched on. That web 1.0 was singular with no sharing in term of information and input from peers, and with web 2.0 these application are specifically meant to encourage feed back, input, sharing, and discussing of opinions, ideas, and even news.