eLearning

*Update* – I was wondering why I no one was responding to my post these past couple of days. Apparently when I thought I had posted all it did was save a draft. Weird. Anyhow, please read and if you have any comments I welcome them. Thanks!

There must be something wrong with me. Why do I just never seem to get it? I just cannot seem to find anything of interest. I mean, I love learning about things, but I cannot figure out anything that is of any interest to me at this particular moment other than the things I am learning at school…and I find it pretty stupid to do an eLearning site on eLearning. Ahhhh! Very frustrating! It feels like I should actually know something about whatever topic I am researching.

I have aimlessly visited a hundred sites and more tying to figure out something that would be cool to learn, but none of them have sparked interest in much of anything. I guess I have so many things on my plate that it really is difficult to care about anything else. I would rather have direction than such an ambiguous find something of interest. I wish people understood how much I do outside of school.

Anyways, I digress. Here are some things that could possibly be ideas for projects, but honestly…I cannot figure out how to make any of them work interactively and within a reasonable amount of limited time that I have to complete it. Hopefully this is what I was suppose to do for this assignment.

• Ellusionist.com – The biggest thing that I have been trying to learn for a very long time, that has taken a back seat to school is learning magic tricks. I bought hundreds of dollars worth of training videos  just before starting back to school from this site, which is the best magic learning resource to me, that I have barley ever had the time to even look at them, much less learn anything from. Ha…most of them are still in there packages. Though again, trying to think of an interactive way to make a magic site with any reasonable amount of time seems rather out of reach. This is something that I would love to do, but the only way I can think of it is by video and I feel that I would have to actually know how to do at least some magic to make video worth while.

• Photoshop Tutorials – this site has always been a big resouce for me when learning how to do certain effects in Photoshop as well as for digital photography. I have even contributed a few tutorials to this site a while back ago, but like everything else on this site, it was not very interactive, rather screen captures with text explanations.

• Good-Tutorials – has also been a big site for me when learning about different Photoshop, Illustrator, some CSS, and even JavaScript and they have a lot more other things to learn through tutorials. They have very good and crips looking images and good explanations for learning in the tutorials.

• Lynda.com – In the past, Lynda.com was the #1 place that I visited for tutorials on just about everything. The best thing about the tutorials here were that most of them were all video tutorials and for me being a visual person it is easy for me to follow along and see how someone else did the effect they were going for.

• Online Italian Help – I have been learning to speak Italian for a very long time, especially for translating 16th centruy Italian fighting/combat manuscripts. This site is a great resource to learning a lot of the basics. In fact a lot of the learning is actually interactive. So, how do you redo something like this that has already been done. I kind of have this idea that if it is not broken, do not try to fix it, if you know what I mean. Unfortunately, languages have it all taken care of when it comes to eLearning. Just take a look at Rosetta Stone.

• Flash & Math – Flash & Math has been a nice resouce for me in the past as well for learning things for Flash and ActionScript. Flash has always been something that I wanted to understand better, especially since I have a past interest and experience in animation. The ActionScript was someting that both made sense and did not all at the same time. Also the use of the stage and trying to figure out how the animation worked has always proven difficult to me. I am continually amazed at a lot of the things that some one has made and even more so when I get the oppotunity to see how they put it all together. How did they do that? What thought process led them to put certain elements in one scene and others in another scene to make a single piece?

So there you have it. Thanks for painfully making your way to the end of this poist. The only thing I think I could effectively do, is a tutorial, but with such a high expectation to make them better and more interactive, I have no idea how I would go about doing that effectively since I have had experience doing them one way. Hard to expalin, but I have a point there somewhere. I guess I just do not currently seem to have the imagination for coming up with anything clever. If any of you have any ideas I am most certainly open to what ever you might have. See you all in class.