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

I reviewed my progress in using electronic portfolios to enrich student learning, outreach and assessment this year. I developed performance criteria, assignments and help sheets to guide the students. The graduate computer graphics students did a good job presenting their work and reviewing each other, the design students neglected the online systems. The faculty team built up trust and reached out to useful partners. Read more here:
eportfolio_summary_jun09-cheng2

Tulips for spring!

I was happy to learn that it is possible to customize headers in our Wordpress install – it just depends on which theme that you install.  The images work most consistently if you upload them at the EXACT pixel size requested : somehow the cropping is problematic.  Don’t know why my widget bar is now too wide:  somehow when I tried changing the page width to 1024pixels, it got messed up.

And I found a fun little Flickr.com flash flag and looking at everyone else’s photos, and making contacts and ….. which makes it all too evident how one could spend huge amounts of time online.  Click “what is this?” to see how to make a badge.

My experiments with galleries are on my Light blog.

I was able to add a blog to my Flickr account and send an annotated image to it from Flickr that became a post.

I don’t think I can do that for this account because of the password redirect.

We had a good discussion on Wed April 15.  Students advocated for providing paths for both beginners and advanced web designers.  For the latter, Will K explained that those like him with their own domain would want to have full participation in all the social networking aspects of BuddyPress.  At the same time, he wants the freedom to customize his site.  He found the idea that he couldn’t just drop in any plug-in to be a big constraint :  he is used to having a great deal of freedom.  Will would like to enrich his existing website with his school work, present himself professionally and continue the portfolio after graduation.

Sarah T. expressed that having an easy on-ramp for beginners is also crucial.  While she grasps technology quickly, she could see how the many menus and choices on WPMU/BuddyPress could easily be overwhelming.  We need to support the many students and faculty who are less comfortable with technology.

On a different note, I was horrified to learn that Google Sites cannot be expanded, backed up or exported. ( From working with PB Wiki, I had just assumed that if I gave them $100 to 200, the quota would zoom up.)  So my glorious Arch384 experiment requires a workaround just after I got everyone on board with it: either all our large files go elsewhere or I recreate the site on my academic account with a larger, but still finite quota.  YIKES!!!   Google has been getting requests on this for over a year and they still haven’t implemented it.    Lesson learned:  Next time read the fine print before jumping in.