Paul's ETEC 565 Experience & Domain

I am not a crazy social web 2.0 person; at least not yet.  About a year or two ago I figured I should log in and make an attempt at understanding the life sucking embrace of connecting and making “friends” with everyone and anyone to improve my self-esteem.  It didn’t go so well.  I backed out and neglected all the friend requests, retreating back to my family, my school and the B&B.  In evaluating different TOS agreements b/w social networking sites, I focussed mainly on the controversial Facebook.  It surprised me the level of ownership they take of members content.  It seems they own all the content provided to their webspace to virtually use as they see fit.

While I do plan a return to the explore some networking aspects of FB, I will be very careful with my privacy settings and maintaining my “space” from students and others I don’t want to share with.  Here is a quick clip to intiate some of these settings for security and privacy.

Well Wimba definitely surprised me! For synchronous and asynchronous communication this product was brilliant. I have used IMs, Elluminate and Skype before but I was very impressed with Wimba right from the get go in this course: Introducing ourselves (async). Then in our first group assignment we worked in the classroom together and I found it a great way to be in “sync” with my peers. Lastly, I was most unfortunate to be unavailble to participate during the online seminars, however, I was able to download the seminars and feel like a part of the original class ~ I even commented a couple times, but alas the moment was gone!

Wimba is a terrific and strong product for the market in supporting both methods of communication and it is surprisingly easy to participate with. If I was delivering a course online I would find this an invaluable tool for myself and my students.

Here are some links from my ETEC 565 course that I wanted to keep handy for future reference:

Web Pages that Suck

• Web Pages That Suck good ideas for classes too
• Top Web Design Mistakes Checklists 1 & 2

Web Design Basics

• http://webdesign.about.com/od/webdesignbasics/u/webdesignbasics.htm

Cascading Style Sheets

• What are Cascading Style Sheets and why should I use them

Accessibility

• http://www.uwsa.edu/ttt/schwanke.htm#Introductory

Web Design Tutorials

• How to Build Websites Tutorial
• How to Storyboard
• How to embed audio and video files
• How to upload files to WebCT/Blackboard using WebDav

Web Design Software

• Adobe Dreamweaver CS4
• Amaya
• NVU

Creating a webpage was not a problem for me…stylistically and creatively however to create a page that doesn’t suck…a different story!

Well, I have taught html modules in the past using both Notepad and Frontpage Express (yeech) and now I am trying to learn Dreamweaver on my own.  So far I have found this quite challenging as I tend to struggle with CSS and would like to incorporate more of this into my projects.

The link Jennifer Kyrnin I found quite helpful and the Q&A by the University of Adberdeen likewise.  That being said this will still be a project to learn more about.  I was surprised at how little of this stuff I have retained and how ultimately basic my knowledge and skills are.  Obviously this is definitely a goal for me to improve upon and learning more DW will be a big step for me.