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new links 04/21/2012

@codecademy comes to the rescue when my son’s e-mail account is hacked! http://t.co/bQD7uYne #codeyear

tags:codeyear
- TEDxMuskegon — Maria Andersen — Recipe for Free Range Learning – YouTube

Carve out 20 minutes and listen to @busynessgirl’s TEDx talk on free range learning: http://t.co/sXHmlrWb #eLearning

tags:eLearning
- Assessment Marking and Feedback using iPad, iAnnotate, and Dropbox | ELEVATE@UCS

Assessment Marking and Feedback using iPad, iAnnotate, and Dropbox http://t.co/6ROdNUbY
- Forget the business case, open online courses are about learning | Higher Education Network | Guardian Professional

RT @GdnHigherEd: NEW: Forget the business case, open online courses are about learning http://t.co/4m0T9Wqi

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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The Trouble with Apps

Here’s the thing. You take your tablet PC to lunch with the intention of reading the latest on the RSS feeds. You open your news reader, you like an article, you want to share. One option is twitter. You try it, but the embedded web browser doesn’t know your twitter password. You open the article in the browser, and it doesn’t either. The app that does, the official twitter app, is not available as an option for tweeting.

Compare this with the experience on a web browser. It remembers your twitter login details because there’s a cookie set. Sharing a link from Google Reader is simply a matter of pressing “tweet this”. Bang, it’s gone.

Am I the only one who thinks that having multiple, separate web browsers, each with their own cookie stores (the App Model) as opposed to the single ubiquitous web browser with a single shared cookie store and unlimited available apps, is a retrograde step?

Reminds me of the nightmare of cut-and-paste between applications on MS-DOS!

Why can’t tablet PCs do this? Is Google Chrome OS (apparently just a browser as operating system) better?

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Firefox 10 Adds New Developer Tools

In my courses on Web Design, EG-146, EG-153, EG-259 and EG-253 I have long advocated the use of Firebug as must-install developer tool. Over recent years, Google’s Chrome Browser, Apple’s Safari, Opera and even the new Internet Explorer have built developer tools into their standard browser offering. In Firefox 10, released on 31st January 2012, Firefox has finally built-in developer tools too, and they look pretty slick. And more is to come in Firefox 11 to be released in March. Here’s a short video introduction and you can read more in Developer Tools in Firefox Aurora 10 and in An Overview of Firefox Developer Tools and Firefox 10 Arrives with New Dev Tools and Full-Screen API.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TnGE3yl8dI]

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my bookmarks 02/02/2012

Mark Pilgrim wrote Dive Into Python (bookmarked elsewhere in this collection) and here he is writing an emerging O’Reilly Book called “HTML5: up and running” which will be released in a similar way … in paper with on-line version available under Creative Commons. It is now being maintained by the community.

tags:html5 book free online mark.pilgrim dive.in eg-259 tutorial ebook html resources eg-146 eg-153
- A long digression into how browsers handle unknown elements

Part of Chapter 3 or Mark Pilgrim’s “Dive into HTML5″ that discusses how browsers handle unknown elements that introduces a JavaScript fix that will enable Internet Explorer to build the correct DOM from an HTML5 document which will enable the new element to be styled and accessed by JavaScript.

tags:html5 element fix javascript mark.pilgrim diveintohtml5 eg-259
- How Did We Get Here? – Dive Into HTML5

Chapter 1 of “Dive into HTML5″ the on-line version of Mark Pilgrim’s book that will eventually be published as HTML5: Up and Running by Google Press to be published by O’Reilly. I’ve linked this because it’s a very nice potted history of how HTML came to be.

tags:eg-259 eg-146 web standards html xhtml mime mark.pilgrim diveintohtml5 html5
- Detecting HTML5 Features – Dive Into HTML5

Chapter 2 of Mark Pilgrim’s book. This one is interesting in that it is both a discussion on how you might, as a web developer, use JavaScript to detect your customer’s browser support for the new HTML5 features, as well as, at the same time, using these/

tags:example testbed browser html5 javascript detection html webdev tutorial reference book mark.pilgrim diveintohtml5 modenizr eg-259

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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my bookmarks 01/27/2012

I asked for suggestions for a replacement for Netskills TONIC and Chris Hall (@chris_hall) passed on this recommendation from one of his students: BBC WebWise. This is a beginner’s course aimed at adults who are new to computers and the internet. It has a very wide brief which seems to be the closest to TONIC in it’s range of topics. Very high-quality resources as well as you’d expect from the BBC. Although not a direct replacement, WebWise was the best alternative that I have come across so far, and is the one I will be using with my EG-152 class this year (I will be linking to the Internet Detective and OU Safari too).

tags:eg-153 digital literacy beginners guides internet web digital library online safety tutorial bbc webwise education guide resources for:swansealearninglab TONIC replacements
- Welcome to SAFARI

I asked for suggestions for a replacement for Netskills TONIC and Sam Oakley (@rscsam) also suggested SAFARI “a guided expedition through the information world.” This resource was developed by the Open University (OU) and looks like a comprehensive tutorial on accessing, finding and reviewing information  — and not just from the Internet. The recommended time to work through the examples is 10-13.5 hours. TONIC was much more of a beginners guide to the internet but Safari looks an excellent resource for students embarking on a research project.

tags:eg-353 sr-311 eg-153 safari digital literacy TONIC replacements howto reseach web information_literacy research studyskills tutorials tutorial for:swansealearninglab e-learning
- Internet Detective

I asked for suggestions for a replacement for Netskills TONIC and Sam Oakley (@rscsam) suggested the Internet Detective (developed by the University of Bristol and Manchester Metropolitan University from an original tutorial by Marianne Peereboom. Though launched in 2006 it doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2009. TONIC was about the internet generally though, not just research.

tags:howto internet TONIC replacements digital literacy reseach web eg-153 for:swansealearninglab tutorials website evaluation research education critical_thinking tutorial detective

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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my bookmarks 01/21/2012

“Last month I did a talk at the Campus Party, one of the biggest technology events of the world, talking about Fireworks, HTML5 and CSS3. It was very nice, the receptivity of the audience was sensational, and thinking that many of you would also like to see the contents of the workshop, so decided to write a full case study and share here on the blog.”

tags:tutorial eg-259 html5 css3 case study tutorials resources webdesign casestudy

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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More on the Year of Code

My Progress on the Code Academy Code Year Open Course.

My Progress on the Code Academy Code Year Open Course

As mentioned earlier, code and how to create it has become a bit of an early meme this year. As reported by the BBC and The Guardian, UK Education Secretary Michael Grove has announced a shake up of the Schools ICT curriculum which will allow schools to teach programming. The Guardian newspaper has also just launched a Digital Literacy Campaign, co-sponsored by Google, with the aim of creating a new generation of coders, and Michael Kölling and the Code Academy launched open courses in Java (with Greenfoot) and JavaScript (see 2012: Year of Code? post for links). There’s also the Raspberry Pi, a really cheap microprocessor that it’s Cambridge developers hope will be the 21st century equivalent of the 1980s success the BBC Micro.

Last week I followed along with Michael Kölling’s introduction to Java (I’ve not had chance to catch up with this week’s yet) and I also worked through the first four exercises published by the Code Academy (see Bragging Rights on post image). Neither were too challenging to me as I already teach this stuff, but it’s still surprisingly satisfying to earn badges and points!

Of course The Guardian and Google’s and now the UK Government’s definition of Digital Literacy doesn’t match JISC’s, and therefore my University’s, so there’s a whole debate waiting to be had there!

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