Matthew's Weblog

XHTML/CSS

mghorka — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 13:56:46 +0000

XHTML combines HTML and XML together to simplify coding. CSS came around as a way of putting all the font colors, fonts, size, etc. together in one location that made it easy to change the look of your page. Web standards are the standards set by W3C in order to unify the way people code and the way pages look.

Sources:
http://webdesign.about.com/cs/xhtmlxml/a/aa013100a.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets
http://webstandardsgroup.org/standards/

Podcasting

mghorka — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 01:15:08 +0000

I Believe that I would want to use podcasting as a way of updating company shareholders of the companies progress, as a radio that employees and customers can listen to and find out about sales for the upcoming week, or as another way to do movie or game reviews.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/podcasting
http://www.podtopia.net/articles/whypodcast.shtml
http://www.wilsonweb.com/newmedia/watlington-why-podcasting.htm

Information Trapping

mghorka — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:57:31 +0000

This topic greatly affects me and anyone else that is in a field that has constantly evolving software and technology. I can stay curent using tools like RSS, web page monitors, and other tools to watch for these changes and keep up to date with the technology and stay ahead of the curve.

Sources:
http://futureperfectpublishing.com/2007/09/03/information-trapping-an-interview-with-tara-calashain/
http://www.mlb.ilstu.edu/ressubj/subject/intrnt/srcheng.htm
http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp/2008/01/29/information-trapping-2008-style/

Twitter

mghorka — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 22:58:32 +0000

Twitter brings a new dimesnion to social networking by letting you see what your friends are doing at any given time. Twitter can be very useful for open source projects if everyone in the community uses it because then you can see who is working on what part of the project and make sure everything is getting done.

Sources:
http://twitter.pbwiki.com/
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/50532
http://aaroncblevins.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/leading-effectively-using-twitter/

Collective Intelligence

mghorka — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:51:33 +0000

Collective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals. Collective intelligence appears in a wide variety of forms of consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans, and computer networks. With that said I do believe that, with the help of computers and or robots, human beings can achieve a new degree of intelligence. My biggest argument for this is Wikipedia. Millions of pages of information entered and updated to be current be human beings. Thousands of people a day visit Wikipedia everyday to find information on a subject. About the same amount of people use forums to find and request help.

Resources:
http://cci.mit.edu/
http://www.community-intelligence.com/blogs/public/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_intelligence

Communities of Practice

mghorka — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 04:42:42 +0000

Etienne Wenger states that ,”Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope.”

These communities are usually formed within one practice and come together for many resons from Problem solving to Requesting Information. I now understand what Mr. Batchelder was saying at the beginning of the year when he siad that we are going to learn from each other in this class and not out of a book or from him. Each person within a community of practice like our class knows alittle bit about each subject and when we blog on the subject and read other peoples blogs we get most if not the whole picture on that subject.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_Practice
http://www.funderstanding.com/communities_of_practice.cfm
http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm

Successful Blogging

mghorka — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 07:17:40 +0000

What makes a web blog successful? Is it the content, the readers, the layout, or the writer. The formula for a successful web blog combines all of these together and a few more concepts. After reading the articles in my sources area i now know what a person must do to be a successful blogger. They must have a plan and stick to it, they need a simple and eye appealing website design, and they need to comment on other peoples blogs that talk about the same topic as them.

Sources:
http://www.intuitive.com/blog/what_makes_a_successful_blog.html
http://howtosplitanatom.com/how-to-hack-your-life/how-to-blog-successfully/
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/02/28/9-tips-to-start-blogging-successfully

RSS

mghorka — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 19:49:03 +0000

RSS in a nutshell is, “a way to easily distribute a list of headlines, update notices, and sometimes content to a wide number of people. It is used by computer programs that organize those headlines and notices for easy reading.” I have always known about RSS but not what it was or how it worked. After reading up on sites and watching some videos I now know what it is. To me RSS is like the headlines on a newspaper, it shows you the main idea of whats new in the world and if your interseted then you can read on. A RSS reader or content aggregator is like a newspaper delivery service. Instead of you having to go out to a news stand or a newspapers building they bring it to you. This helps in finding the information from the blogs you like to read and having them in one spot instead of having to go out to them one by one.

Sources:
http://www.whatisrss.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8G5dFddz8c
http://rss.softwaregarden.com/aboutrss.html

Personal Learning Environments (PLE)

mghorka — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 23:36:26 +0000

Personal Learning Environments are systems of information and applications created and used by the people that create them. They engage their users to understand concepts deeper and to make work easier to do.

Downes (2006) says that, “the heart of the concept of the PLE is that it is a tool that allows a learner (or anyone) to engage in a distributed environment consisting of a network of people, services and resources. It is not just Web 2.0, but it is certainly Web 2.0 in the sense that it is (in the broadest sense possible) a read-write application.” Important concepts in PLEs include the integration of both formal and informal learning episodes into a single experience, the use of social networks that can cross institutional boundaries and the use of networking protocols (Peer-to-Peer, web services, syndication) to connect a range of resources and systems within a personally-managed space. The ‘pedagogy’ behind the PLE – if it could be still called that – is that it offers a portal to the world through which learners can explore and create, according to their own interests and directions, interacting as they choose, with their friends and learning community. Seely Brown (1999) has drawn attention to the social nature of learning: “Learning becomes as much social as cognitive, as much concrete as abstract, and becomes intertwined with judgement and exploration.”

A Personal Learning Environment also includes any and all routines people do while they work. Whether its listening to music, working in a particular posture or space, or even something as simple as talking to your friends. Personal Learning Environments are incorporated into in some way into almost every site. These environments make us define are own goals as students about what we want to learn and how much we want to know about a particular subject.

Sources:

http://michelemartin.typepad.com/thebambooprojectblog/2007/08/supporting-pers.html

http://www.prolearn-academy.org/Events/summer-school-2008/workshops/personal-learning-environment-ple-2013-a-new-learning-concept-or-a-new-learning-system/

http://www.knownet.com/writing/weblogs/Graham_Attwell/entries/6521819364

Web 2.0

mghorka — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:51:21 +0000

There are many different ideas out the about what Web 2.0 is really about. The concept of web 2.0 came during a defining moment at the end of the dot-com bubble when few people knew where the World Wide Web was going to be heading or what it was anymore. Tim Oreilly posted a definition this blog that matches well to my belief of what Web 2.0 stands for and what it is. Web 2.0 also brought along many other changes including what sites people used for searching for information, music, and from people making thier own personal websites to blogging on one commercialy owned websites.

Sources:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/12/web-20-compact.html

http://web2.socialcomputingmagazine.com/the_state_of_web_20.htm