The first five weeks of this class had extreme highs and lows. After the first week, I thought I'd never make it through this class. I know nothing about social media and have had no accounts of any form. I do not have a facebook account or any of the others and did not have a twitter account until required by this class (I did open one but have not yet used it). I also have never blogged and didn't understand how to do that. While you helped me set up my first blog, I didn't know how to add to it. Finally I figured out how to add a "post" last weekend and found that I had entered Journal #3 as a comment to Journal #1. I did fix that and am now able to continue adding my other Journals.
Since I was struggling with setting up my local/remote websites every week, I was usually behind when you were going through the lab exercises. On some of the labs you just can't catch up if you get too far behind (like the Photoshop lab). I'd say the Photoshop lab was the hardest because I was still soooo behind in class. You have since shown me how to finish it and I understood a lot more, but I'm not sure I could do that entire lab on my own yet unless I study the Photoshop instructions more thoroughly. I'm even struggling with this entry. I don't understand what happens when you click the "Compose" choice above because I can't enter anything when that button is selected. I did find the options so that I could enter line breaks with an "enter". Is this suppose to be written in html?
Moving on, once I understood that I had to set up my local account every week (primarily because I was using Windows), I was able to be ready before you started the lab exercises and after that I was able to follow you for the entire lab. This was wonderful. Additionally, (on the "high" part of the class), after the first week when we started to get into html and css, this material was so much easier to understand. I use to program with Fortran in the ancient-of-days and html seems so easy to use. I was very happy to get to this material. Designing the overall structure of the website is of course the more challenging part of the process, but I even enjoy the troubleshooting. I think I'm really going to enjoy designing websites and am excited about my final project.
My most rewarding exercise so far has been the book exercise where we put in links between recipes, Jen's Kitchen homepage, and external links. I do understand how to set up different links and I understand the "../" nomenclature. It was fun to be able to go from one page to the other and then out to the web and back. I know this was a simple task but it was the first one I could successfully complete all on my own.
Well, I'm not sure how you want me to demonstrate my fundamental understanding of html & css, but here's my attempt... I do understand that html is the basic structure of the website. HTML has been set up to create a logical structure for the design of the website, organizing the code into logical functions. There are basic elements required in a project such as the head section with it's required title tag, the body, and the Doctype with "html" defining the version of code that is being used. There are block versus inline elements where block elements can affect more than one line and elements are separated with space. Inline elements affect just one line. There are "attributes" that help define the elements. The generic block element is the "div" with the generic line element tag being "span". They can both have singular "ids", or can be defined for multiple elements with the "class" identifier. Then there are many tags to define and control the structure of the website.
CSS is the way that the presentation of the website is controlled. It controls the colors, spacing (padding, margin, borders, etc), fonts, etc. CSS can use the structured HTML design to easily modify the presentation of different elements with minimal controls.
Anyway, here is my most difficult project so far:
Photoshop PNG
And here was the one I enjoyed the most so far:
Chapter_6_ex_2-7.html
Friday, November 29, 2013
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
JOURNAL #3: The Case for Social Media in School
Kessler, S. The case for social media in schools [Web log message]. Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2010/09/29/social-media-in-school/
Summary: This is really tough because I do understand that students are all plugged into social media. They know how to use it, they like using it, in fact, it is very important to them to be connected via it. But there are down sides to social media. During research for a debate I had to do in an earlier Multimedia class, some very dark consequences to the use of social media were uncovered. A study done with 1,000 college students around the world revealed some of the following issues:
1) Media was addictive,
2) Contact made through media was shallower than personal conversation,
3) The more people communicate through social media, the less practice they have in reading body language which another study claims is 93% of our communication,
4) Students seem to stop ranking information by it's importance correctly, placing world wide news on an even level as someone's daily events,
5) Students tend to believe the information sent via social media without checking it out, and
6) students in the study found that social media contact seemed to hide the depression/isolation they were feeling but not acknowledging.
With the negative side delineated, let's go back to the article. I do agree with the topic lines for #'s 1 and 2: "Social media is not going away" and "When kids are engaged they learn better". Just because people like to drink and it will not be prohibited again, doesn't mean people should drink and drive for example. So just because social media is not going away, doesn't mean that it won't prevent a healthy way of people interpersonal ways of communicating and interacting. Sure, students learn better when they're engaged but are they only engaged via social media?
Point 3: "Safe social media tools are available--and they're free". Ok this is good. But once students learn the social media tools do they stick to only safe tools?
Point 4: "Replace online procrastination with Social Education". I'm a little confused by this point. I think it says that extra assignments (that were interesting) were posted on a social media forum and the students became so involved with these assignments that they spent less time on other social media. I think the main idea here is to have interesting assignments. If posting them on a safe social media forum makes them more interesting, ok.
Point 5: "Social Media encourages collaboration instead of cliques". The article says that a Rochester Institute of Technology study didn't agree with her on this point. I don't either. Students are still going to clique, just on line, I've seen it. I have no comment on point 6.
I do understand that instantaneous communications via social media is now part of our society. I think we have to get students to think deeper and spend more time communicating person to person to balance this part of society out.
Q.1 How can we prevent these negative side effects in our society?
A.1 We could have mandatory classes in high school that help students develop skills that are being prevented by social media. I saw a "health" class in Chino where they presented information on human communications but there wasn't any time where the students actually practiced it. There needs to be a class where they must communicate on a regular basis and it should be more than 140 characters worth of communication. There might also be a class where the students have to check their social media at the door and do indepth research without the internet. Or...
Q.2 Is this form of communication really universal?
A.2 Yes and no. I've been in some socioeconomically challenged schools where the students still have smart phones but I've been in other schools where a large number of students say they can't afford them (and I believe them). I assume our society will eventually have social media devices in such a "need to have" state that it will be like TVs or local phones where almost everyone seemed to have at least one.
Summary: This is really tough because I do understand that students are all plugged into social media. They know how to use it, they like using it, in fact, it is very important to them to be connected via it. But there are down sides to social media. During research for a debate I had to do in an earlier Multimedia class, some very dark consequences to the use of social media were uncovered. A study done with 1,000 college students around the world revealed some of the following issues:
1) Media was addictive,
2) Contact made through media was shallower than personal conversation,
3) The more people communicate through social media, the less practice they have in reading body language which another study claims is 93% of our communication,
4) Students seem to stop ranking information by it's importance correctly, placing world wide news on an even level as someone's daily events,
5) Students tend to believe the information sent via social media without checking it out, and
6) students in the study found that social media contact seemed to hide the depression/isolation they were feeling but not acknowledging.
With the negative side delineated, let's go back to the article. I do agree with the topic lines for #'s 1 and 2: "Social media is not going away" and "When kids are engaged they learn better". Just because people like to drink and it will not be prohibited again, doesn't mean people should drink and drive for example. So just because social media is not going away, doesn't mean that it won't prevent a healthy way of people interpersonal ways of communicating and interacting. Sure, students learn better when they're engaged but are they only engaged via social media?
Point 3: "Safe social media tools are available--and they're free". Ok this is good. But once students learn the social media tools do they stick to only safe tools?
Point 4: "Replace online procrastination with Social Education". I'm a little confused by this point. I think it says that extra assignments (that were interesting) were posted on a social media forum and the students became so involved with these assignments that they spent less time on other social media. I think the main idea here is to have interesting assignments. If posting them on a safe social media forum makes them more interesting, ok.
Point 5: "Social Media encourages collaboration instead of cliques". The article says that a Rochester Institute of Technology study didn't agree with her on this point. I don't either. Students are still going to clique, just on line, I've seen it. I have no comment on point 6.
I do understand that instantaneous communications via social media is now part of our society. I think we have to get students to think deeper and spend more time communicating person to person to balance this part of society out.
Q.1 How can we prevent these negative side effects in our society?
A.1 We could have mandatory classes in high school that help students develop skills that are being prevented by social media. I saw a "health" class in Chino where they presented information on human communications but there wasn't any time where the students actually practiced it. There needs to be a class where they must communicate on a regular basis and it should be more than 140 characters worth of communication. There might also be a class where the students have to check their social media at the door and do indepth research without the internet. Or...
Q.2 Is this form of communication really universal?
A.2 Yes and no. I've been in some socioeconomically challenged schools where the students still have smart phones but I've been in other schools where a large number of students say they can't afford them (and I believe them). I assume our society will eventually have social media devices in such a "need to have" state that it will be like TVs or local phones where almost everyone seemed to have at least one.
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