Enough is Enough

I thought Ashton Kutcher retired and was barred from being mentioned in the media. I will no longer use twitter. Now I’m being told Larry King has a twitter account so after vomiting, I will delete my account.

Group Blogs

We’ll soon see how the ITEC 845 Spring 2009 course did on their group blog assignments.

Web 2.0 Aggregators (Briano/Munson)

Merrie Monarch Festival (Chi/Sullivan)

Blogs 2 Books (Davila/Green)

Packing for the Carry-On Traveler (Rutherford/Sena)

Anatomy of a Twitter Post (Devlin-Clancy/Tuccori)

Wetpaint Guide for College Students (Cordeiro/Esteban)

A Picture is Worth…..

CSS Background Images and Accessibility – Be Careful

Someone asked in class about how to add an Alt Tag to images that are generated as CSS background images.  The bottom-line is that while this is an oft-used technique for presenting images, there is no way to add an Alt Tag to this kind of image. Any work-arounds do not support accessibility needs. Semantically, if an image is content, it should be in the markup.

http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200512/use_css_background_images_responsibly/

Personal Learning Environments (PLE) and EduBloggin

D’Arcy Norman muses about Personal Learning Environments. This post illustrates a few things:

1. The concept of a Personal Learning Environment as melded against various Web 2.0 applications we’ve discussed in class and will experiment with.
2. Somebody for whom blogging and use of other web-based services is integrated into their daily activities, an expert in using these. The interesting point here is to read his trajectory for the use of technologies over time (from FidoNet to Listserv’s, etc.). Think of the increase in sophistication over the last decade, the potential for complexity for ‘average’ users (read: not experts), and think of the role of the instructional designer in rolling these applications into a usable PLE-for-all.
3. Examine the graph he generated and see on display the potential power of community/social blogging we talked about in-class.
4. Look at the post itself and read the comments to see how they extend the view of the initial post. Also, see how the post itself references the original inspiration for the post (another post) and various other references and resources.

http://www.darcynorman.net/2008/03/05/on-the-ple/

Spring 2008

This is the first post for Spring 2008. It’s nice to see that WordPress has improved quite a bit from last year when the course used it. I think it will provide great opportunities for all of you to familiarize yourself with the practicalities and possibilities of blogging.