Resources for Designers

I discovered I wanted to be a designer back in the 1980s when I was working as an accountant, a job I hated for 26 years. When we started using spreadsheet programs all I wanted to do was design beautiful spreadsheets. I really wasn't interested in the numbers that went in them. I found these resources in a wonderful book I am reading titled A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. It explains why, in the near future, a MFA will be more valuable than a MBA.

Fonts & Typography

www.fontifier.com - Create a font from your own handwriting

Design Studios

Karim Rashid
http://www.karimrashid.com/index.html
Animatrix
http://www.animatrix.com/animatrix.htm

Museums of Design

Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum
http://cooperhewitt.org/

Design Museum of London
http://designmuseum.org/

The Herb Lubalin Study Center at The Cooper Union
http://lubalincenter.cooper.edu/

Museum of Modern Ar
thttp://www.moma.org/

The Art Institute of Chicago
http://www.artic.edu/

V & A (United Kingdom)
http://www.vam.ac.uk/

Eisner Museum of Advertising and Design
http://www.eisnermuseum.org/

Robin Williams (the designer, not the actor
)http://www.ratz.com/

Great Free Text Editor

When you are developing a website if you need lots of text the best thing you can do is to create PDF documents and link them to your pages. Sometimes, though, you need to include lots of text on web pages. Typing text in Dreamweaver is slow and cumbersome. It is much better to type your documents in another program and paste them into your web pages. You can type text in Microsoft Word and import it into Dreamweaver and have Dreamweaver strip out all the unnecessary Word formatting, but this sometimes messes up your text.

A much better solution is to type your text into a text editor, save it as a text file, and paste it into your web page, using the Paste Special command and keeping your basic formatting and line breaks. I have used EditPad Pro for years, but I have just found a free text editor that is better. It is Notepad++. It is more like typing in a word processor than EditPad Pro and is also a great editor for writing code. It is best to use very little formatting when typing text for a web page. I would not do anything beyond perhaps typing bulleted lists. You should use CSS to style all your paragraph headings, headlines, etc.

I am taking a course at Lynda.com on CSS. The author recommends Notepad++ for the PC and BB Edit for the Mac. You can download Notepad++ at this site: http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ .

Movie I Just Made

The Dream Cats - A Baseball Story - Introduction

I am not sure what led to this story. I was lying in bed suffering a terrible allergy episode and trying to go sleep when it just started writing myself inside my head. A couple of days before I started writing it I heard an interview with Jackie Robinson's widow on NPR and I imagine that generated the process that led to this story. In part the story is based on my reflections on relationships in the 1950s between white Southerners like the ones I grew up with and African-Americans. I hope no one finds anything I say in the story offensive; I never use the n-word, but excluding that, I try to make it a pretty honest depection of what life was like for African-Americans and whites in the last days of the Jim Crow era. I will publish additional episodes of it as I complete them. I am sure the final version of the story will be somewhat different, and hopefully better, than the episodes I post here which will not be the final edited version.

I was a tow-headed twelve-year-old the summer the Dream Cats came to town to play our local baseball team. Actually my hair was more of a medium dull brown, but since a baseball story always has to have a tow-headed boy in it, and since I am about to tell the story of an event that changed my life, I think I can be excused if I begin my little tale with a lie. It was early July when the mayor and his secretary started putting up the posters advertising the "Game," "The Big Game," the "Biggest Event" in our little town's meager history. Bliss, Texas, wasn't much of a town then and still isn't. In the early 1950s, it couldn't have had more than 4,000-5,000 people. If we had been someplace up north people would have called it a hamlet, but since we were East Texas rednecks we referred to it as our town.

The mayor was an ambitious young man named Damon Bigsby. He got the idea of having an exhibition baseball game because the town needed to build a new wing on our tiny hospital, more of a rural clinic actually, and he thought he could gin up enough interest in a game between the up and coming Negro (that's what African-Americans wanted to be called in those Jim Crow days) team everyone in east and central Texas was talking about and some of the local boys who thought they knew how to play the game. In those days, in the era when Mantle, and Mays and Aaron were budding young superstars, when you mentioned the "game" everyone knew you were talking about baseball. In the small towns of the South in the early 1950s no one ever paid any attention to basketball and football, but everyone knew what you were talking about when you mentioned the "game," and everyone knew about the legends of the game such as the Babe, the Georgia Peach, the Iron Horse, and modern stars like Ted Williams and Stan Musial and Roy Campanella.

The Dream Cats were one of the touring baseball teams that travelled around the South playing exhibition games against any team the town they stopped in could put together. A few years later when we had a television set I used to occasionally watch a basketball game between the Harlem Globetrotters and their hapless rivals the Washington Generals. The Globetrotters always won, usually by lopsided scores such as 125-30. That's pretty much the way games between the Dream Cats and the thrown-together local teams they played all over east and central Texas and Louisiana and Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma turned out. As far as I know the Cats never lost one of these games, not even one. Their star player was a seventeen-year-old outfielder named Delbert Jackson, Jr. Today he would have been called "Del Jack," or "DJ," but nicknames in sports weren't as common then. Sure, there were some such as the Babe and the Splendid Splinter, but I think baseball names showed more imagination in those days. They weren't just dumb takeoffs on a person's name. Young Jackson was a tall skinny lad, about 6'2" or 6’ 3" with a throwing arm like a cannon. It was said he could throw a baseball so hard it reached home plate quicker than if it had been fired from a rifle. He also had surprising power in those rock-hard, lean arms and shoulders and often hit three or four home runs in a game. Our small baseball world was awash in rumors that any day now he would be signed by a major league team and sent to one of their farm teams for seasoning.

I was standing on our town’s only sidewalk mid-morning of a hotter-than-Hades day in early July when an ancient yellow school bus drove down Main Street and parallel parked on the curb across the street from the Mayor’s office. At least I think it had been painted yellow before it rolled off the assembly line several years before World War II began, but now it was mostly rust-colored with the rust broken up in various places by streaks of fading yellow paint. On both sides just below the windows they had painted “Dream Cats Baseball Team, Marshall, Texas.” The driver, a portly black man just past middle age, opened the door, got out, and walked into Mayor Bigsby’s office. Later I learned that the driver’s name was Willie Williams and that he was also the team manager, president, ticket taker, and whatever else needed doing except for playing the game of baseball. He didn’t need any extra help in that department, as our amateur team was about to find out. None of his players got off the bus to stretch their legs. They were all from East Texas and knew how to stay out of trouble. After getting directions to the ball park from the mayor the driver climbed back into his bus and drove up the street toward the baseball park which was in a former cow pasture on the north side of town.

Lou Holtz

Which three words that begin with the same letter do you think of when you see ESPN's Lou Holtz? My three are: obnoxious bromides, outdated cliches, outrageous predictions,





-- Post From My iPhone

Jimmy D Clark (GizaPage)

Jimmy D Clark (GizaPage)

Shared via AddThis

Life before iPhone?

Last night one of my cats looked Cute sitting in a chair, so I took his picture with my iPhone. I baked some fish that were supposed to cook for 19 minutes, so I whipped out my iPhone and started the stop watch. I have an app on it that let's me check on my friends in facebook and one that let's me do the same for second life. If I am bored, I can play the piano on my iPhone. Did I mention I can make phone calls on it also? I wrote this blog on my iPhone.






-- Post From My iPhone

Check out this podcast episode!

Jimmy Clark''s Podcast


Give it a listen!


UFO Landing - Garageband Version






Enjoy! -- Jimmy Clark

L'Etat C'est Moi

Last night I had a dream that was so weird I have to write a message about it for my own records, even though it can't possibly mean anything to anyone except me. I dreamed I was at the court of King Louis XIV at about the midpoint of his reign. The Sun King, his court, and I were in a church. The King conducted the first part of the service, it would have been a Catholic Mass, but I didn't get that impression from what I remember about the dream.

After the King presided over the first part of the service, he left the church and one of his assistants delivered the sermon or homily. He said the King had to leave because he was ill. That's all I remember.

Why did I have this bizarre dream? Lately, I have thought about what King Louis XIV said when he said "I am the state," or, in French, "L'etat c'est moi." I have been ill the past couple of days. That's the only reason I can come up with for having this little dream.

2006 TxBUG Conference

With this post I reach a milestone -- this is my fiftieth post to my blog. I can't wait to reach 100!!

Last week I attended the 2006 Texas Blackboard Users Group Conference, held on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin. I attended several great workshops and picked up some good ideas for my school's upcoming Teaching and Technology Trends Symposium. I think the highlights of the conference were the keynote address about how Blackboard plans to meet the challenges and opportunities of Web 2.0,a workshop explaining the new features of Blackboard 7.1, and one on podcasting.

I left the conference with some new ideas and some new resources, and had the chance to make some new friends from other colleges in Texas.

Back to Blogging - At Last

When I set up this blog I planned to post about 20 blogs per month. For the first couple of months I kept to this schedule, but in the past three months I have not made many posts. There were several reasons for this. First, I have been very busy doing other things that were more pressing. Second, I have had some problems with my health. I have already written about the glaucoma scare. Fortunately, I do not have glaucoma. On Monday of this week I had surgery to repair a coronary artery that was 95% blocked. The surgery went well and I am almost back at full strength. I am not making any promises, but I hope to return to my regular blogging schedule and post from 30-40 times between now and the end of the year. I can't wait to reach 100 postings!

Learning a Computer Programming Language in One Month

During the month of October I took an online programming course in Perl. The reason I took this course, other than the fact that it is part of my Webmaster certificate program, was that Perl and Ruby are supposed to be a lot alike and I want to learn Ruby. That brings me to the reason I have not posted a blog since October, and that is the reason! Of course you can't really learn a programming language in a month, but I did learn a lot of the basics of Perl. When I started writing Perl programs I made lots of syntax errors, but by the time I finished the course I was not making very many. I still make logic errors, but at least my programs will run.

Perl used to be the language of choice for server-side scripting, but in the past few years it has largely been supplanted by newer languages such as PHP, ASP, JSP, CFM, and lately the hottest language on the Web--Ruby and its development environment-Ruby on Rails. I can't wait to study Ruby.

Beware Clever New Phishing Scam

This morning when I opened my email at the place where I work I nearly had a heart attack. I had received an email from PayPal about a computer I had just ordered from Dell. PayPal had deducted $700 from my account to pay for it. I knew I had not bought a computer, so my first thought was, "Oh My God, someone has accessed my account information at PayPal and has hit my bank account for $700!!" After I picked myself off the floor I started composing an angry email to PayPal, but before I finished it I thought, "Maybe this is a scam."

I went to my online bank and checked to make sure the $700 had not been deducted from my account. I went to PayPal and verified that the money had not been charged to my account. I looked at the email again. One thing that seemed strange was that the computer was being shipped to a man- someone I had never heard of - in Pennsylvania. I went to Google and searched for his name. The web site that opened contained a list of phishing scams people had submitted to it. Near the bottom of the email, below the "list of purchases," was a huge button that read: "Click here to Cancel Transaction." I right-clicked on the button and looked at its properties. It said: "blocked:http://vanguardngr.com//www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/login.html.

I copied the first URL into the browser and was taken to a website in guess where-- NIGERIA!!! If I had clicked on the Cancel Transaction button I would have been sent to a phony website that looked like the PayPay home page, where I would have been asked to login with my user name and password. That information would have been sent to the website in Nigeria, the world capital of Internet Scams!! Uh Oh!! Am I glad I knew how to check all this out. Would a 75-year-old person who barely knows enough about computers to type an email known this was a scam. Maybe, if he or she was a retired professor of computer science. I have to admit this was a clever scam. One thing that should have made my suspicious was that the email was addressed to "Member." If it was legit, it should have been addressed to me. Also, there was a four-cent difference in the total amount of the "purchase" in the two places where it was listed.

You can read an interesting article on phishing at Wikipedia. Click here.

XHTML And HTML - What Are The Differences?

In my last post I listed ten technologies I think every web designer should know. In this post I am going to describe some of the differences between the previous standard, HTML, and the new standard, XHTML. First, the good news: if you are currently using HTML 4.01 to design your web pages, it will be very easy for you to convert to XHTML 1.0.

XHTML is based on XML (eXtensible Mark-up Langguage). To the browser it behaves exactly HTML. The major differences between HTML and XHTML 1.0 are the tighter rules required by the latter. Let's discuss what they are. The most important differences, according to www.w3schools.com are:

Please ignore the ' inside each XHTML tag. I added them because when you write a blog you are writing HTML. If I had not inserted an extra character inside each tag, the browser would have assumed I was trying to write HTML code and given me error messages. When I type <'HTML>, ignore the left apostrophe.

1. XHTML elements must be properly nested. (Example: <'h2><'b>This Heading is bold<'/b><'/h2>).

2. XHTML elements must always be closed. (Example: In HTML this tag does not have to be closed, i.e., <'p> with no closing <'/p> tag is acceptable. XHTML requires both <'p> and <'/p>.

3. XHTML elements must always be in lowercase. In HTML all these element tags are correct: <'HTML>, <'Html>, <'html>. XHTML always requires <'html>.

4. XHTML documents must have one root element. In other words, all XHTMl elements must be nested within the <'html> root element.

5. In XHTML attribute names must be in lower case and must be in quotes. (Example: <'table width="760">) This is incorrect: <'TABLE WIDTH=760>.

6. Atttibute minimization is forbidden. (Example: This is wrong: <'input checked>. This is correct: <'input checked="checked" />.

7. The id attribute replaces the name attribute. (Example: This is wrong: <'img src="frodo.jpg" name="frodo1" />. This is correct <'img src="frodo.jpg" id="frodo1" />.

8. All XHTML documents must have a DOCTYPE declaration. The minimum XTHML document template:


<'html xmllns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<'head>
<'title>Differences Between HTML and XHTML<'/title>
<'/head>
<'body>
Content goes here.
<'body>
<'/html>

NOTE: The World Wide Web Consortium requires that DOCTYPE be typed in all caps. IT is not part of the XHTML document itself and is always placed before the opening <'html> tag.

Most web designers are using XHTML 1.0 Transitional because it is more compatible with HTML and with current web browsers. It is much easier to convert HTML to XHTML 1.0 Transitional than to XHTM 1.1 Strict. The W3W has been working on XHTMl 2.0 for several years, but it is not ready for release.

10 Essential Technologies Every Web Designer Should Know

I have been creating web pages and web sites for about ten years. Part of my job as an instructional designer at a community college is creating web pages/web sites for our faculty members. When I started building web pages there were no good web design programs such as Dreamweaver, so I learned to build them in HTML code. I will always be glad I learned HTML before I learned programs such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage, because I understand how web pages are designed from the ground up and I can always "look under the hood" when I have to fix a problem.

I have been thinking a lot lately about which software programs/technologies every person who wants to be a serious web designer should learn. This is my first attempt at putting together this list, and I may make changes in it from-time-to-time. I would be interested in reading comments from my readers about which web design technologies they think every web designer should know. Here are my top ten, in no particular order:

1. XHTML
2. XML
3. DOM (Document Object Model)
4. Javascript
5. Dreamweaver
6. Flash
7. PHP
8. Ajax or Ruby with its application developer Ruby on Rails
9. Photoshop
10. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

In future posts I will comment in detail about all these technologies.

How Do You Spell Relief- Not Having GLAUCOMA

About six months ago I had an eye exam. The optometrist thought there was a possibility I had glaucoma and told me to have an exam for glaucoma at another location of the same company which had the equipment to test my eyes for that condition. I had the test and the optometrist there said there no signs of glaucoma.

Today I had another test for glaucoma. Once again, the doctor said he saw no signs of glaucoma. Before I saw him I was trying to reconcile myself to losing the sight in one of my eyes, and possibly going blind someday. I was wondering if my pug could be trained to be a seeing eye dog!! Needless to say, I was very relieved to learn that I do not have glaucoma--at least not yet. Today the doctor said I will always be a "suspect" for glaucoma. Why couldn't he have said I would always be a "candidate" for glaucoma? If you're a candidate for something it sounds as though you might win something. When I hear the word "suspect" I think of being a suspect in a crime. Oh well-in six months I'll have another test for glaucoma, and I hope that the results show that I'm still merely a "suspect," not the winner of the glaucoma lottery!!

Welcome to UNIX!

I taught computer classes at my community college for eight years. Every semester the hardest thing by far to try to teach my students was file management. I always wondered why I could never teach them to even come close to navigating through Windows directories with my blazing speed as I effortlessly opened directories, copied files from one directory to another, made shortcuts, selected files, deleted files, ad nauseum. I have to admit that I have been working with personal computers since 1984 and that I have used every flavor of PC-based operating system from MS-DOS through Windows XP. That helps.

At least I thought I knew how to negotiate file directories until I started taking an online class in Perl. I had already worked my way through over 100 pages of the Dummies Guide to Perl and I thought the language was very easy to learn to program. I downloaded Perl 5.8 from the Web and installed it on my laptop. I made a directory on the C drive to hold my Perl scripts, typed my scripts in a text editor, and ran them from the command prompt. Very simple stuff. I thought the Perl class would be a breeze.

Welcome to UNIX, the favorite operating system of hard-core geeks! In my online class we make a connection to the UNIX server through Telnet, open the UNIX Pico editor and type our programs, save them, use chmod to set file permissions so we can open our files, navigate to the subdirectory we save our files in, and run the scripts.

This sounds much easier than it is. A Perl script has to be stored in a subdirectory you have to navigate to by following this path: /usr/local/bin/local/perl. To save a file, instead of using the ancient keyboard shortcut, Ctrl + C, you use Ctrl + o. To exit the Pico editor, you have to type Ctrl + X. I thought this command was used to cut text--not in UNIX.

To cut text you use Ctrl + k. To set the file permissions you type "$ chmod 755 filename". Once you actually get into programming in Perl, you learn that the language shares lots of things with other languages such as C++. If you know how to use variables, program loops, conditional statements, etc., it is a pretty easy language to learn. Perl's ability to handle anything you need to do in text files, retieve information from databases, etc., is truly impressive. If you have had to write C++ commands to manipulate text you will really appreciate Perl!

I could go on and on and on, but since you are asleep now if you have read this much of this boring post, I'll shut up and let you finish your nap.

Beware the "Free" Download

This morning I wanted to upgrade to the latest version of iTunes. I did a Google search for "download iTunes free." The first site Google found was one named "free-download-site." the iTunes logo was prominently displayed at the top of the page. At first I thought I was on the Apple iTunes download site, so I clicked the huge Download button near the top of the web page. I knew something did not seem right when I was asked to pay $37 for the download. Then, I knew I was not on the Apple iTunes site because Apple had not charged me anything to donwload the version of iTunes I already had on my computer. I went to Apple.com, found the iTunes page, and downloaded version 7 of iTunes free.

I am sure it is legal for the "free-download-site" to charge for iTunes downloads. Supposedly if you download the software from this site you receive some benefits such as tutorials and tech support. At the bottom of the site's home page a tiny footer
proclaims, "This website has no affiliation whatsoever with the owner of this software program, and provides ONLY a link to the software program." Please make sure you know whose website you are on if you don't want to pay for downloading software that is supposed to be free.

Web Standards - Part I

Several years ago I attended the computer show at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. One of the featured speakers was Jeffrey Zeldman, who has been designing web sites since 1995. Mr. Zeldman is the publisher and creative director of A List Apart (www.alistapart.com), an online magazine for web designers. He and Eric Meyer, the stylesheets guru, founded An Event Apart, a conference on standards-based design. An Event Apart held its last show of 2006 in Austin on September 27. In 1998 Zeldman cofounded the Web Standards Project. Molly Holzschlag is now the de facto leader of the Web Standards Project.

I am going to do a professional development project on web standards, so naturally I bought Jeffrey Zeldman's new book, Designing with Web Standards, Second Edition (New Riders: Berkeley, 2007). This post is a brief introduction to web standards, focusing on what they are and why they are needed. Other postings will explore the subject in much more detail.

Only a few years ago there were no consistent standards for websites. A site that displayed correctly in Internet Explorer would not display properly in Netscape Navigator, and vice versa. Netscape JavaScript would not run in Internet Explorer, so Microsoft developed its own version and called it JScript. JScript would not run correctly in the Netscape browser. Web designers had to spend lots of time and tons of their clients' money developing separate versions of the sites they built so they would run in both browsers.

This is why Jeffrey Zeldman and a few other designers founded the Web Standards Project. The web standards this group, the World Wide Web Consortium, and all the major browsers now support are: XHTML, XML, CSS, ECMAScript (standardized JavaScript), and the DOM (Document Object Model). Other posts will examine each of these technologies in depth and explain why all web designers should follow them.

Resources:

Jeffrey Zeldman's home page - www.zeldman.com

The Web Standards Project - www.webstandards.org

Happy Cog - www.happycog.com

A List Apart - www.alistapart.com

An Event Apart - www.aneventapart.com

Eric Meyer's home page - www.meyerweb.com

Molly Holzschlag's home page - www.molly.com

Wikipedia article on Web Standards

Air Travel Now Safe - Passengers not Allowed on Planes

Yesterday, Captain Bleu Sky, President of MACCAs (Make American Commerical Carriers Absolutely Safe), announced that beginning January 1, 2007, no passengers would be allowed to board any domestic or overseas flights of American commercial airlines. He went on to say that this is the only way air travel can be made completely safe from terrorist attacks. He informed the press covering his news conference that MACCAs considered several other approaches before taking this drastic step, such as:
- Banning all carry-on luggage
- Banning all luggage
- Banning men between the ages of 18 and 75 from flying on commercial aircraft
- Banning all persons whose surnames end in either a vowel or consonant from flying,

but banning all passengers from boarding aircraft was the only measure that would make flying totally safe and that would not be considered discriminatory or profiling.

Captain Sky wants to reassure the traveling public that they will still be able to purchase plane tickets and book vacation trips; they just will not be able to use their airline tickets. To quote the Captain: "In this age of cyberspace and virtual worlds, is physical travel really necessary? Would it not be much better to take virtual trips and virtual vacations? You can reserve lodging at a five-star resort and simply stay home and view your resort on the Web in the comfort and safety of your own home. You will still be able to pay the full cost of your virtual vacation as though you were physically going to travel to your destination, without having to put up with all the hassles of packing, unpacking, driving to the airport, standing in long lines at the security counter, getting sunburned, over-eating all that great resort food, etc. I definitely think that actual, physical travel will soon come to be seen as a relic of our decadent distant past."

Starting a New List at Walmart

The other day I posted a message about several things that annoy me at Walmart. After Friday's visit to a local Walmart I have to start a new list. Friday afternoon I stopped at a Walmart on the way home from work. Evertything was fine until I checked out. The cashier was very busy so I helped her by putting some of the plastic bags full of merchandise in my shopping cart. I interrupted this to take out my debit card and pay for my purchases. Instead of placing the rest of my bags in my cart, she started checking out the person who was behind me, so I had to put the rest of my stuff in the shopping cart.

She was checking out the other person so rapidly I didn't have time to put my debit card in and the $20 cash I got back in my wallet before I put the rest of my plastic bags in my shopping cart. I had to hold my debit card, my receipt, a $20 bill and my temper in one hand while I finished loading my cart.

I'm sure after my next trip to Walmart I will gather material for another post next weekend.

100 Pounds of Cats and Eight Dog Feet

I am single, but I don't live by myself out here in the Texas Hill Country. I share my home with twelve cats and two small dogs. Thye are my fourteen children. For thirteen years I had a thirteenth cat named Bobo. Bobo died just a few days ago. I don't know how old she was because she was a grown cat when she showed up at my former home in 1993. Bobo had six kittens, and I kept them all. I still have three of them: Arthur, Caesar, and Taliesin. They are twelve years old.

My oldest cat is named Jihan. I don't how old she is because my sister bought her in the late 1980's, kept her for a few years, and gave her to me. Jihan is an Egyptian Mau, a domesticated wild cat the Egyptians have been keeping as pets for over 3000 years. She is gray with black spots.

Fauve, whose name in French means wildcat, is well-named. She is a large, hot-tempered brown tabby and is part Maine Coon. She is thirteen years old. My other seven cats are much younger. Three of them: Zorro, Carmella, and Dulcinea, are brothers and sisters. They are about six years old. Dulcinea is black, her brother and sister are black and white.

My four youngest cats are the kittens of Zorro and Carmella. They are about five years old. Mordred is a small black cat. Morgan, Vivienne, and Merlin are black and white.

I have two dogs who live in the house with the cats and me. Frodo is a fat little black pug. He is two years old. His best friend is Arwen, a four pound Chihuahua. She is seven months old. Arwen and Merlin and Vivienne are good friends. Most of the other cats tolerate Arwen fairly well, except for Fauve, who hates all dogs. Tal (Taliesin) and the puppy fight all the time. He beats the daylights out of the fiesty little dog, but she keeps coming back for more. Later, when I have time, I will add photos of my fourteen children to this post.

"Windows" No Longer In Public Domain"

I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you today. You are going to have to come up with another word to describe the holes in the walls of your house that you have always used the word "windows" to refer to. Microsoft has just announced that it has secured a copyright on the words "window" and "windows" after a lengthy legal battle that cost it four years and approximately $4 billion dollars. At first the US Office Copyright Office was only going to issue the bully boys of Redmond a copyright on uppercase "Window" and "Windows," but the Microsoft mouthpieces eventually prevailed, and now both upper and lower case versions of the commonly used terms are copyrighted!

The objects in my house formerly known as windows henceforth will be known as "portals to the outside world." I'll bet my readers can come up with something even catchier. The question now for me is, will the zealous guardians of the Microsoft reputation (after the Windows Vista decacle which seems to have been a long-running news story of the past decade, you'd think Microsoft's reputation has been permanently trashed!!)find this article and threaten me with a huge lawsuit if I don't remove this posting?? If this post disappears from my blog, you will know that's what happened!!

Blogging: Learning Tool in the Constructivist Classroom

This is the second in a series of postings on the use of blogs, wikis, and podcasts as tools for the constructivist learning environment. In this article we will briefly review the history of blogging and discuss how it can be used as a learning tool by teachers who believe that students learn best when they construct their own learning.

The word "blog" is short for weblog. A blog is an online journal, or diary, that is formatted as a Web page when the blogger writes a posting to it and publishes it. There are several types of blogs. Blogs are often classified by media type, device, genre, or whether they are public or private. If you want to find blogs on your favorite topic, you can use a blog search engine, such as Google Blog Search. The number of blogs is increasing so rapidly it is impossible to track them accurately, but according to David Sifry, as of August 2006, there were over 50 million.

What makes blogging such a powerful tool for the teacher who believes in constructivist learning? I'm glad you asked. Joyce Seitzinger, in her article, Be Constructive: Blogs, Podcasts, and Wikis as Constructivist Learning Tools, discusses how blogging facilitates reflection and authentic discourse. She goes on to say that blogging can help create a community of learners who enthustically engage in the task of creating learning. Many students complain about the lack of social interaction in the online classroom. A class blog facilitates the development of a social presence in the online classroom.

Let's take a briefly walk through the history of blogging. Blogging evolved from the online diaries kept by early diarists such as Justin Hall. Two other early bloggers were John Carmack and Matt Drudge, who created the Drudge Report. Jorn Barger coined the term "weblog" in 1997. Peter Merhloz coined the short form "blog" in 1999. One early blogging site was Xanga. In 1997 it had only 100 diaries. By December 2005, it had 50 million. Evan Willians and Meg Hourihan started Blogger in 1999. Google bought it in 2003. You can read more about the history of blogging at Wikipedia.

Okay, now that I've convinced you to start your own blog, your next question is, "Who will host it for me?" You can either host your own blog on your server or website, or you can find a free hosting service such as Blogger. If want to host your blog yourself, you might want to consider these blogging tools:

Wordpress
Greymatter
Movable Type
Typepad

I use Blogger, because it fits my needs for a blogging tool extremely well. It is very easy to use and has all the features I need at this time. Elizabeth Castro has written a book titled, Publishing a Blog with Blogger, that covers everything you need to know about blogging. Other free blogging tools and hosting services are: LiveJournal and Edublogs. Edublogs is a free blog site for educators.

Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts as Constructivist Learning Tools

This is the first of many postings I plan to write on the use of three new tools - blogs, wikis, and podcasts - in education. In this article I will define constructivism, as well as blogs, wikis, and podcasts, and list some links to websites where you can learn more about constructivism and these three tools that assist the teacher in creating a constructivist learning environment.

Every few years a new learning theory ending in the suffix "ism" captures the attention of educators and is favored by them until the next hot "ism" appears on the scene. For at least the first sixty years of the Twentieth Century behavorism dominated both the worlds of psychology and learning theory. If you want to learn more about it, go to Wikipedia and look the term up. About 40-45 years ago the cognitive learning theory of Jean Piaget became popular. Piaget was a Swiss developmental psychologist who spent most of his long life researching how children learn. Unlike the behaviorists, Piaget recognized the importance of the mind in creating learning. Please look him up in Wikipedia if you want to learn more about him and his work.

Constructivist learning theory builds upon cognitive theory rather than refuting it. Piaget is considered the father of constructivism as well as cognitive learning theory. My own definition of constructivism is that people learn best when they construct their own learning. Wikipedia has an interesting article on constructivist learning theory. My intention in this posting is to introducethe three tools mentioned at the beginning of this discussion that can enhance constructivist learning.

First, let's define blogs, wikis, and podcasts. Blog is short for weblog. A blog is an online journal displayed on the World Wide Web. A person who wants to set up a blog can go to a website such as Blogger and set up a blog in a couple of minutes. After setting up the blog, the blogger simply types his or her posting in a simple text editor that functions as a simple word processor. When the blogger finishes a posting and publishes it, the blogging software formats and displays it in a web page.

A wiki is a website published as a collaborative by a group of people who share a common interest. It allows information to be organized for easy access, either in a database or in files. Please see my posting on wikis if you would like to learn more about them.

A podcast is an audio or video file broadcast on the Web and received on the user's computer or some sort of mobile device such as an iPod or other MP3 player or cell phone. Audio is recorded in MP3 format. The next article will discuss how blogs or wikis or podcasts can enhance constructivist learning.

Here are some resources where you can learn more about constructivism, blogs, wikis, and podcasts:

Constructivism

- Wikipedia article

- Piaget, Jean. (1950). The Psychology of Intelligence. New York: Routledge.

Blogs and Blogging

- Blogger Website

- Wikipedia article

- LiveJournal

- Edublogs

Wikis

- Wikipedia - The best-known and largest wiki

See my posting on wikis for more references

Podcasts and Podcasting

- Wikipedia article on podcasting

- Wikipedia article on RSS

- Odeo

- Podomatic