eLearning: iTunes University

So for my short course choice I went with Apple’s iTunes University. I figured that not only can learn something for my class assignment on taking an eLerning course, but I could at the same time learn more about my newly acquired iPod Touch.

At this particular moment, I have not been able to access “iTunes U,” because I do not have access to the iTunes interface/library to pick a particular course. However, as I understand it, a lot of them are videos (since the tour of iTunes U describes the course materials as episodes). So with some searching around on my iPod, I found some educational training videos on numerous subjects from Language learning, how-to’s, political, cooking, and much more.

My first experience was tapping into Mike’s Physics <–web presense. Here there are only a few courses available at the moment, but as Mikes explains it, “Physics is beautiful, breathtaking, and awesome.” A place to learn about physics in a “Dirty little easy to understand physics reviews.” He forwards the training with a the idea of the videos as not being meant as stand-alone learning tools, but complementary aids to class lectures and a good textbook.

Now, I already know quite a bit about physics, as I have studied it extensively in the past and still use it quite often today (maybe not in as much depth, but still use it). In either case, I was able to follow along with example problems that had step-by-step solutions on solving things such as the basic material covered in studying physics such as the top focus being “how things move.”  The three main things 1. position, 2. velocity, and 3. acceleration were covered in the seven minute training videos that I watched, of what they are and how they relate to one another.

The way that he explains the definitions, with images and graphics, to get the point across are done quite well. I was able to follow along quite well and it was kind of fun to get a refresher of simple equations to help one determine the average acceleration and how it equals the change in velocity divided by time. Then I was taken through a few example word problems to be solved on how to find how fast things move and the time it takes for them to get there, such as the average velocity of Usain Bolt (the Olympic world record runner) during the race.

All in all, this was a very pleasent experience. I will be attempting the iTunes U later on this week, just in case it is different. So, I guess check back to this entry for an update.

Tools of eLearning

As eLearning goes, I have only been use to one type of delivery and that is through either screen capture or video like tutorials. I have seen a few tutorials on YouTube before, but have never actually actively used them as a resource. So I decided to check it out more, especially since this might be something that I may be using in my site.

YouTube E-Learning and Bandura’s Classic Research on Violent Television and Aggression – This article was very insightful. I never really gave much thought into things such as this one, that the different uses of video contain the potential for vicarious and observational learning. Though the insight came with the added information about violence and aggression. Although I had never gave it much thought, I had noticed something as such at one point not long ago and the psychology of it all actually does make a lot of sense. My understanding of eLearning has opened up quite a bit now in that it is very perceptual and relative to the viewer, so trying to convey a certain message will actually prove to be a challenge if the viewer is outside of the taget audience.

With the things that I found on YouTube, activities of all sorts can be accomplished for eLearning. From tutorials, training, motivational, exercise, magic, video blogs and others.

YouTube eLearning – This site was also very useful in giving reference on how to use YouTube for eLearning as well as some articles.

Mashups eLearning – The elearning Learning site is very resourceful. Like the link just above I found a lot of information on Mashup and its uses in eLearning. I did not even know what a Mashup was until after checking out this site and a couple of others. Mashups eLearning Tools gives a really good definition, well that made sense to me anyhow.

It would seem that Mashups could prove to be very resourseful for the learner to collect information, identify the useful information, organize, and communicate information to others by collecting content from more than one source and using it as a mapping service to show points of interest and related information. This also seems to help the teacher/instructor using the Mashups to present information, observe student work, and assess work and information.  I guess it is kind of like an aggregator for related information? That combines data or functionality from one or more sources into a single integrated application. I may not acutally use something like this time around for my project, but I can see where it would come in handy, especially since Google Maps seems to be a type of Mashups, as well as iGoogle and Digg.

As for other options, I have had experience with them before, but never thought about them (conciously) as eLearning. Such as Twitter. Again, it never dawned on me to think of Twitter as an eLearning tool, yet as a member of Twitter, I actually follow Sitepoint.com – a resource for web designers, developers and dealmakers – and I read their post from time to time about tips and tricks, or latests developments, and articles. Actually, it is quite cool. I have been on Twitter for sometime, but had only used it as an status update area for a while and upon farther research I found that there are Twitter’ers that are dedicated to specific subjects such as, case in point…eLearning 3.0 Blog, that give you resourses to free online universities, tutorials, and a number of other things.

I am personally still trying to figure out how I would use some of these tools in my project because I think that they might be rather useful. Using YouTube of course is probably the most likely, but guess we will just have to find out. Perhaps discussion of others findings might lead me to something better.

Project Proposal: eLearning Design

Well since this is not completely set in stone yet, here is what I have so far for my project proposal. Man I hope I am not going to kill myself by going overboard on this one.

The Problem to Solve:

Most things I have noticed seem to be a design problem, so I would have to guess that whatever problem I will be solving will be design related. So the proposed problem set for solution is to create, improve design, and over all build for a site for learning the basics traditions of learning Italian sword play. As far as I know, a site like this one does not exist at all really. There is a lot of information out there about what to do and the resources to find them, but nothing that is really formidable in how to do it and I shall attempt to make it so.

Topic of Learning:

The proposed topic to learning is going to be based on learning the basics of footwork, posture, and sword work in Italian Sword Play/Fencing. The information will be derived from translations of an Italian manuscript that was written in 1409 by Fiore dei Liberi called the Flos Duellatorum (Flower of the Battle) .

Technologies to use for eLearning project:

• The platform will be web based
• Possibly even be accessible by mobile as well (need to figure out how to do that)
  
• Programming and markup languages that will be implemented will more than likely be a little bit of a lot of things such as: XHTML, CSS for style, possible JavaScript, quite possibly Action Script (for Flash). The technologies used will depend on the final decision on the delivery of the information.
• Perhaps video as it is a very visual activity.
• Authoring Applications used will be possible Flash, more than likely WordPress, XHTML, CSS, maybe JavaScript

So there you have it. Again, hopefully I will be able to do this one effectively and without too much trouble.

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.

Sr. Project – Headway…I think…

Alright, so I am finally starting to make some good headway on my community site for my Capstone FaireCircuit.com portfolio site. Unfortunately for me, I kind of had to work a bit backwards on this one. Since I am using an open source code for a social community I had to do a lot of research on how it all worked. I think I am finally starting to get it. I would post a link to it, but it is actually a bit of a live site since it is on my personal server and I do not want the link available to the general public just yet. If people start signing up to join then it will bombard my personal email account with sign-up requests since it is directed to me. However, I will show those who would like to see it tonight in class.

So like I said, it is pretty much a live site, people can register, log-in, join, create their own profile, post and much more. It’s actually quite cool. I finally got everything uploaded and installed this weekend on my server. Talk about a meticulous and time consuming ordeal. I wish I would have been able to find this open source code a while back ago, but hey I think the design aspect and ideas will actually start to make a little more sense and flow easier now that I have something to go off of.

Apparently I like this back-end stuff…PHP, MySQL and all that. I never actually realized it until this weekend though. Now, I just have to get good at it, because I personally do not think my skill level is adequate enough at this point. There is still quite a bit that I do not understand, but I think by the end of this project, I will probably have a pretty good grasp on it…at least I really hope so.

Well, for those in class…I’ll see you soon. For those following along, check back from time-to-time and I’ll keep you updated.

Now, I just have to figure out exactly how the framework operates. I know that I should not have any limitations as to my design layout, but in a way I do feel that I do have some limitations at this particular juncture because one – the layout seems very particular and common to many social networking sites, two – I do need to figure out how some of the things work that are currently there as to not go and start messing stuff up when I start to make any changes.

Sr. Project – Location Awareness Technologies

My first resource for this topic of location aware technologies was the Location Technologies Primer. This article really did not tell much about the implementations of the technologies, rather it listed out the basic principles of mobile Location-Based Services (LBS) that are emerging quickly. Over all it describes those different types of technologies and, as I understood it, the strengths and weaknesses of them.

The second resource, Location-Aware Networking: We Know Where You Are, talks about the emerging technologies and their opportunities to find critical people or resources faster to simplify the user interface for mobile voice and data functions, and improve the security and effectiveness of Wi-Fi networks.

The third resouce, How Your Location-Aware iPhone Will Change Your Life, was an article written about the Apple iPhone just before some major releases. The part I wanted to focus on here is the part about Social Networking. Apparently by the point of the article there were a lot of location-based social networking applications for the iPhone, but only if they were jail-broken. Now, looking into many of the applications on Apple’s site, you no longer need you iPhone / Touch to be jail-broken because since then there have been several dozen applications that track the location of your social networks, like Twitter, Twinkle, FaceBook, and more. As well, there are other applications that can help you decide where to go eat nearby, or where to find a store with a certain item that you are looking for, all by location awareness.

All that I have read, I think that location aware technologies could fundamentally change social networking, business, and advertising. For the most part we have already seen the uses of location aware technologies for a number of years serving purposes for Driving directions, tracking things such as cell phones, cars (lo-jack) or stolen merchandise, all with the use of GPS, but now with the new technologies coming into play, such as Windows Network Location Awareness (NLA) which collects and stores network configuration and location information and notifies applications when this information changes, are more specifically geared closer towards what is more important to our industry we are starting to see an exponential rise in the mobile location aware technologies, interfaces and even more. The location awareness is now not necessarily taking place miles above our heads, but just within a few feet of where we reside or visit our favorite restaurant or coffee shop.

Studio – Video Lessons…

This post is in response to Video Lessons: How the Barack Obama Won Using Digital and Social Media.

Now, to me personally this video mentioned nothing new to me. I guess that I expected something more. Not sure what, but something. The information presented was nothing new to me.

I view this video as something for someone who is new to the process of full functioning integration of digital media and social networking. I guess that something could come out of it for me, but I have watched it three times now and still feel the same way about it. Like I said, none of this is a new concept. In fact a concept such as this has been for a long time. It just took one person who happened to be important in the public eye to make it popular apparently.

The overall implementation of this video really is not much different than my previous post about the Business Impacts of Social Networking, except that we are seeing a more direct outcome or the effects of using social networking and digital media.

At the very beginning of the video, he explains that these are “Business Lessons that we’ve learned from Barack Obama’s campaign” and rightly so, it most certainly was “the most effective marketing campaign to integrate the use of the internet in its’ execution.”

The key thing that stood out to me that was mentioned, was the key point made…”Having people who understand who live and breathe digital social media leading these projects.” and that “Not everyone in the organization is going to get it.” In other words, it will take a team of those who already know what they are doing and have  a better understanding of how to implement the tools available to them. Though, is that not the way it should be for everything. I mean, there is a reason why people “specialize” in certain parts of their field and that is because no one person can do it all. President Obama, knew this and was just smart enough to have a good team to carry out his ideas.

The other idea that it is not about “you” or “me” but it is about everyone else,  “them” & “we”… again, nothing new. It has really always been about the consumer in anytime of success. They make you who you are or become when you are looking to exceed in popularity or in business. The thing is just getting those people (the consumer) to listen to what you have to say. That’s where we saw this campaign use the social networking and digital media to their advantage. The fact that it was a very important topic to the general public helped a lot too.

I am not bashing the video. In fact,  I think it is great actually, but more in laymen terms to explain to those who do not know how the campaign or more specifically how social networking and media work. However, I do have to say…of course it worked!

We are, without a doubt, in a new age of social networking and in a rapid growth of digital media. This kind of stuff has been building for the last few years at a rapid rate. We just happen to witness a public figure that was a Presidential Candidate who was, for the first time in all Presidential elections, a tech-junkie for the most part. Obama is the first President who has ever been allowed to carry his own cellular phone and personal computer. Why? Because he understands the technology better then the previous and knows how to use it. Plus he was smart enough to delegate the things that he did not know to those who did. That is what made him successful…the fact that he was unique in everything that he did. He is “New School” as some would put it.

I think that it is safe to say that, yes as the video states, this campaign will probably be studied for the next four to five years as a way to learn about the implementation of new applications for the business world, but more as a example to base their already progressive developments on. A way to make tweaks to existing ideas. I am curious to see how the business world will expand in the social networking and digital media world. We are seeing changes now.

Studio – Business Impacts of Social Networking

My reflective response on the “Business Impact of Social Networking “…

I found this article to be quite useful to me as a web designer because although I knew a lot about social networking in more of its’ executions – being a part of social networks like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. and especially with my current projects that seem to be centered around some type of social networking. – the article gave me a broader outlook on exactly how much social networking is effecting business practices.

It always seems that people have wanted to work from anywhere, right? No one ever really wants to go into work. They would rather conduct as much business as possible from their own home and only have to deal with the important things outside of from time to time. As it seems to be heading that way, social networking being used as a tool to increase overall business connectivity and communication and allowing employees to be mobile and conduct business from just about anywhere that would be convenient to the employee, the client, and the business. By practically bringing everyone to the same “page” or level of understand of what is going on within the company, we see a business where communication is key and can be referred to as needed.

Also, eveyone has their opinions and needs – for employees social networking gives them the opportunity to express their opinions, solutions, etc. that could benefit the company; as well, for customers it allows them to view what progress a business is making and therefore institute their needs as a consumer and in turn creating a level of inovation in the products for the business.

For those reasons, a business may see an increase in over all revenue because they will be more visible and accessible to its market because they would have an expansion of “‘reach,” marketing and advertising can become more dynamic, the costumer experience can be increased through “personalizing” their service needs with the company, as well as allow a business to find and address new markets.

Although there are a few challenges that social networking in business will have to face, the over all impacts do seem that they will or better yet…have made a significant impact and change in how we will communicate. As a web developer, I think I am starting to understand the idea of cloud computing a little more because of this article. If this, social networking, is the structure for such a thing as cloud computing, then I am more likely to accept the uses of such a concept.

In a new age of “change” – as the theme of this year seems to be going – we are starting to see a more “transparent” view of those things that we are involved with on a day-t0-day basis. By this, I agree that businesses will need to be ready to loose total control over their image, both to their employees and the public.

The outlook for myself a web designer, this could make a convincing argument for a different approach or more dynamic structure in design. To be able to allow and control things that are necessary, will prove to be a challenging aspect. Though, the road to inovation, as proven by track record, only seems to be limited to our imagination.

One Idea Mostly Figured Out…I Think…(Sr. Project Application & Defense)

Alright…so much thanks to the input and help of some people, I think I have one idea mostly figured out for one class (Sr. Project Application & Defense). Since this will be a very large project I figured it might be very good for a Capstone project. Plus, it is something of great interest to me, so that helps.

So, what is it? Well, I will go with a concept that will be basically a community and portal type site for all things that are Renaissance Festival related. I had actually developed the idea for this a while back ago, but I guess somewhere along the way I mostly forgot about it. Though I think now that by working on it, I may even be able to do more than I wanted to before.

Future outlook already tells me that there just might be a lot of back end kind of stuff, but that just might be the reason. I know that there is going to be a lot more that will be incorporated into this, but I cannot currently wrap my head around what but maybe a couple of them would be. However, the good/best thing is that I have a lot of resources in classmates and instructors for feedback. To get an idea of what I am talking about, the following links are the ones that kind of gave me my inspiration:

• The Scribe Network
• Faires.com
• The Crossroads Group
• Renaissance Faire
• Guild of St. Michael
• Renaissance Magazine

Unfortunately, I do not have very many resources as far as websites go (well Festival related anyways, though I do on an overall basis when talking about community sites), but I think you might get the idea of what kind of information I would be working with.

My idea springs to develop a more comprehensive site that really is more of a community structure (I am starting to see a trend in my websites), you know like Facebook or LinkedIn, but of course more geared to the Renaissance Festival/Faire crowds. It believe something like this would be very beneficial to a lot of people on the “circuit,” as it is known, to be able to connect with other Faire fold, keep track of each other, discuss things that are more related to the interest that they share in festivals around the world, and so much more.

Also, like many of the site above I want it to be a place that has all the information that one could need when searching anything about Renaissance Festivals and for that matter, anything relating to the Renaissance that might be useful for research in History, costuming, dialect, fighting manuscripts, and so much more. A place for those in this community to share their personal ideas and research in character development, tips and tricks, merchant exchange, and so on, instead of having to carry out these conversations on several different ‘Yahoo Groups’ for different topics, but rather perhaps have a forum area where all these things may be accessed.

Speaking of “searching” earlier, as you might have noticed in most of the sites above, not very many of them are easily searchable. In fact most of them just have a lot of words plastered all over the page that, to me personally and I am sure to many of you, could get to be quite overwhelming, especially when you are just looking for a particular bit of information on something. A listing of searched items would even be better than most of what I have seen in many of these. So I think a big part of this will be to make things less convoluted for the user experience. Actually, I have quite a bit of ideas that I would like to do with this website, but I will save a lot of that for discussions and development as things progress.

Whew! I am now a little less worried about what my project will be, especially since it will be something I will be working on for a while now. Now that I have that one figured out…I absolutely have no clue about what to do for my Studio for Interactive Media class. Go figure. *sigh*

A Dilemma For My Capstone Projects…

I’m having such a hard time on figuring out topics to do for either of my classes (Senior Project App & Defense and Studio for IM) for my Capstone Sr. Projects. I have two to figure out. One, I belive…as I understand it, is mostly just trying to put a project into the works and will be mostly reasearch based. The other, I actually have to build a website. I mean, to me this is pressing because I have to work with this stuff for the next few quarters that will be included in my portfolio.

Now, I have been doing so much research over the past few days, looking up trends, new developments and such. Though most of what I find interesting, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to incorporate that into a project that I could successfully have for my Capstone projects. Like, for instance….touch screens.  Now I don’t know about you, but until touchscreens become a lot more prevelant, a project that could incorporate that is practially impossible for a student with very little funding. Anyhow, I even found my old RSS aggregator that had a ton of stuff thinking that might help, but I apparently just don’t seem to be getting it.

I have researched every interest that I can think of: Martial Arts, Renaissance Festivals, Saving Polar Bears, Party Planning, Snowboarding, etc…all kinds of stuff, but I just cannot, for the life of me figure out what I would change or like to see done differently on any of them. Every time I do, I find things that have already been done and I can’t find any reason of why I would want to change it. If were suppose to have 20 pages or more, then definitely my ideas wouldn’t work, as those ideas just condense the amount of pages. I always thought that was the reason anyways…to make things easier, not have to go through so much to get to where you want to go.

I guess my biggest thing is that I’m always trying to figure out how they did something rather than what I how I could make it better. Doesn’t make sense to me why I would fix something that has already been done…a hundred times over. Just when I think I might have something, I find that it has already been done and so my idea would only apply to one website, where another website has already accomplished this ‘problem’ / idea. I really dislike this wording of finding a “problem.” A.K.A…a question proposed for solution or discussion requiring a solution. It’s really hard for me to pull something out of the air like this and I’m going to go nuts trying to figure it out. It would be one thing if I already knew what to focus on. There just seems to be so much going on out there and topics are so broad that I just do not seem to get it. How do people do it?

I was asked what my interest were and why I was taking web development and interactive media design. To be completely honest it really has to do with the final outcome of making a decent living. I’m going to learn how to do stuff, to be able to learn those things I wonder about so that I can have a library of knowledge to present my employer when “they” provide me with the problem.

A lot of my other interest really have nothing to do with web design really. I mean, they can have a place on the web, but I mostly use the web for email, research,  some social networking…and that’s pretty much about it, everything else is activity based. You know, actually doing stuff that requires moving around. I don’t really play games (the occasional Bejeweled on a small widget). I would like to, but one- I don’t really have the time, two-I can’t afford it.

You know, I really do not seem to grasp the whole concept of cloud computing just yet. The idea of my all my applications being online does not appeal to me at all. If my internet goes down (like it has been doing so very frequently in and out over the past few months) then I have no access to any of my applications or information. I don’t like that at all. Maybe if the online application was an addition to the application on the hardrive, then yes, I could most likely accept that concept.

Once upon a time I was good at innovation, but somewhere along the lines I have lost that ability. I am apparently better at helping people figure out solutions to things, but really suck at helping myself.
See my dilemma?  So, if you have any ideas or can offer any assistance, that would be great and I would appreciate it very much. Thanks for your considerations.

I’ll be posting more once I finally figure out what to do.