Web2Learn

You can discover which words are most frequent in a paper or Web page by pouring the text into a Wordle.  Here is one I created for my Fall’09 studio course description.  You can choose the font, colors and layout to have some graphic fun.

word frequency turned into a graphic

Gosh, I could have saved a lot of time if I had seen Diigo.com’s WebSlides facility. I created a Powerpoint that included daylighting principles and climbing wall examples, mostly drawn from Websites. I agonized over including images from Flickr.com before I had received the authors’ permissions. Many of the best photos are not covered by the Creative Commons, but the authors who have responded to my fair use requests have all been positive so far.

I could have avoided the copyright issues if instead of putting the images in my Powerpoint presentation, I just created this organized set of websites as “Webslides”.
http://www.diigo.com/list/nywcheng/arch384s09?v=p

It’s pretty handy as it keeps the list evolving as you add things. I have not included images, that would be good to try….

Caitlin posed the question, “How can we take advantage of the Internet’s resources without wasting too much time?”
>>  Please post your first answer on your blog and then add blog responses for discussion on Diigo.
My Thoughts:  In the last year, my e-mail has grown exponentially.  I’ve unsubscribed to almost every listserv, but somehow the tide keeps surging.

- A major strategy I’ve adopted is that I try to address my most important “To Do” item before I open my e-mail.  Otherwise, it’s too easy to either be sucked down the rabbit hole OR if I cherry-pick, the mass of unanswered mail becomes too daunting.

- I register secondary services, such as Facebook, under a different e-mail account that I only check occasionally, and I ferret out the little notification options to reduce the mail deluge.

- I set an old alarm watch to beep on the hour to stay aware of time or and set an alarm to keep myself to a schedule.

- For Web authoring, blogging has kept me from being so compulsive. I used to work on my websites in a big charrette and then I’d be so exhausted that I’d leave them to languish forever.  Since the introduction of WYSIWYG visual editors on wikis and blogs, both my attitude and my workpattern is transformed:  it’s SO much easier to just add a quick thought.

But the cobWebs are still a problem : I just realized that almost nobody can see the ePortfolio or this blog post because they are not linked to my “official” website.  aka the really really old one.  My virtual self is really fragmented!  On the plus side, I was unable to find the silly image of myself that I posted on my first webpage.  Whew!

I was amazed at how fully Michael Wesch portrayed what happens on YouTube.  Posting a video can generate a conversation with the World.  It made me wonder about how publically we are living now.  Sherry Turkle of MIT  explains that the culture to get students to share everything online is partially motivated by the fact that someone can make a buck of that information.  That is, if kids get used to spilling their guts online, they won’t mind when their consumer habits are tracked and they subsequently receive coupons or marketing info.  I guess it would be naive to believe that the Web wasn’t driven by profit (and porn).

What brought home to me the Global Village that Wesch describes was an interaction on Flickr.com.  In writing about our school’s digital fabrication work, I found some amazing precedent images.   After I selected one as a highlight and put in a contact request, I was happy to find that the artist had developed a sculptural screen based on one of my teacher’s designs.   Amazing to get that contact from South America!  That is really the global village.

While finding creative designers on Flickr makes me want to post my visual work there, I have a wariness about putting it all out there.  I decided to put my Powerpoint lectures for my intro graphics class behind a password, because they represented so much work and I was afraid I might have a few copyrighted images included.  But I benefit so much from others who have posted (i.e. Open Courseware at MIT) that I feel it’s silly to worry about it.  At the same time, architects and academics have such a tradition of giving it away, when other people are charging for their time.   Everybody operates under different assumptions about value, and you can be sure that the architects are undervaluing their contributions.  I heard once that if engineers are told that there is a problem on the job, their natural inclination is to say, “it wasn’t MY fault”.  In the same situation, the architect starts apologizing.  Yikes, what are we teaching?

I realize from the lack of activity that this is midterms week so it might not be a good time to have high expectations.    Good luck, students!

For my design studio class, I set up an online resource on Google Sites.  By inviting all the students as collaborators, I hope to use it as a Wiki for sharing resources.  One of the instructors, Leo Yui, loaded up a lot of site information, and slowly the students are starting to use it.
Last year most of the 66 students started an ePortfolio account,  so we’re hoping it will be easy for them to use that site to reflect on their major deliverables.