A months-old interview I did with Michael Williams from The Erickson Tribune finally got published with the title It’s Never Too Late to Learn. (I started learning very early in life, I really did.)
Interesting how you can talk on the phone to someone about 85 things for an hour and a half and end up with an article like this. Also fascinating is the reaction you get from someone when you are a voice on the phone rather than when you are people meeting face to face.
Even more interesting is what happens when you only know people from their words: their books, poems, blogs, tweets. Just the words. I find that if I like the words, I don’t care about the physical person in the same way that I would if I just met someone for the first time and didn’t know their words. That’s one of the things that attracted me to the Internet early on. I could be only words. There’s a wonderful liberation in simply being your ideas and not your physical self. Of course, my real self is known by many now and I no longer have the intellectual luxury of being known only for my words. I think I miss it.
I found this wonderful video among PBS’s Digital Nation videos. Charlotte Ashurst McDaniel explains how digital tools have changed her life for the better.
I suspect that many of us have stories about how digital tools have changed our lives.
This blog changed my life. In the late 1990s and early in the current century, I was teaching basic HTML and web page creation with Dreamweaver in a community college. I couldn’t find a book I liked. In those years, now familiar concepts such as web standards, symantic HTML, using CSS to create the appearance of a web page, and accessibility were all under heated discussion. I became a believer early on—partly because of my frequent attendance at SXSW Interactive where I sat at the feet of people like Eric Meyer, Molly Holzschlag, and Jeffrey Zeldman while they talked about what they were doing.
Being a believer and trying to teach that way were almost incompatible in those days. The books at the time were still teaching table-based layouts, font-tag appearance controls and other not so wonderful techniques. I decided that I needed to go public with my complaints about the books that were available, and I started this blog. That was in about 2001.
The book reviews I post now are generally fairly positive. The wheel has turned. But for several years after 2001, they were very negative. I began to hear from publishers and writers. I was asked to look at tables of contents, to review chapters, to comment on proposed work. I was asked to write teacher’s editions. I did all those things and soon realized I’d made contacts within the world of computing book publishers.
I used those contacts to find out where to submit a proposal for a book of my own. I had this crazy idea that books should teach HTML and CSS at the same time. When a student learned a tag, they also learned how to present it with CSS. I truly did not want to make students learn a whole lot of useless HTML (like font tags) for the first half of a semester and then be told to forget all about it at the end of the semester when CSS was introduced. Learn both at once. I found a publisher–Sybex–who accepted the proposal. Sybex came up with the idea of calling it “Integrated” HTML and CSS.
I wrote the book from a teacher’s perspective. I’m not a computer science person—I’m not a programmer. I pulled together the best ideas for teaching I could and applied it to learning HTML and CSS.
So I had my own book, thanks to my blog. Publishers asked me to do more jobs: tech edit other people’s books. Write a second edition of my own book. Help other writers with their Dreamweaver books. Be the writer for a Dreamweaver book. In my own small way, I put the best web standards based material I can out into the world.
Then, a couple of years ago at SXSW, I met Aarron Walter. He talked about the notion that the Web Standards Project Education Task Force should get some volunteers together to work on a web standards based curriculum. I got involved in that. It seems to me now that this is where I was headed all the time. Because that involvement, that project, that group of people, may make a big difference in web education. The WaSP Edu Task force created a curriculum and called it InterAct. At this time, the first round of courses for the InterAct Curriculum are online. More courses are in development. The core group from InterAct have expanded to include business, education and schools in a just-forming group at the W3C called The Open Web Education Alliance (OWEA). OWEA will bring industry and education together in pilot projects, education projects, outreach projects and in many other ways that will impact the education of web professionals in the future. One of those projects is the Web Education Rocks tours, which bring web standards professional educators to a location near you for training.
My blog changed my life. Dreams I didn’t even know I had are part of my life, part of many lives, part of the future of web education.
How has digital technology changed your life? I know you have a story. Please share it.
When I tried out Zemanta a few days ago, I also added another new item to the blog. That is JS-Kit Echo, a commenting plugin.
Echo is a JavaScript kit. The Echo Core version is available free at this time. There are paid versions with more functionality. I tried out the free version on Web Teacher, even though the developers offered me a premium version free when they learned I would be writing about it.
Here’s a selection of what the developers say Echo will do for your blog:
Embed it on your site – replacing your old commenting system – and you get:
Real-time – Watch people react to your content live – without refreshing the page!
Social Gestures – Echo captures the Social Gestures relating to your content including comments, likes, star ratings and more!
Hyper-Distributed – Visitors share your content with their friends across all their favorite social networks at once – broadening the conversation and driving new traffic.
Aggregated – Echo captures conversations related to your content from across the web and places them on your page.
Multimedia – Echo items can include safe HTML, photos, and video for a richer conversation.
Building 43 interviewed one of the developers and asked a lot of the same questions I would ask of him. If you are interested in using Echo, this is a good video to give you a lot more information. Even though it’s promotional from the developer’s point of view, you learn a lot about what Echo can do for you.
One of the nicest features I see about Echo is the way material that once was on your blog and has now moved off into networks like Facebook or Twitter is brought back onto your blog as comments. Something you post about your blog on Facebook may get a comment on Facebook. Echo brings that comment back to your blog and adds it there, too. The entire conversation about your blog post is aggregated back on your blog in real time.
Echo works on many platforms. In many cases it is plug and play. In some cases you have to paste a bit of JavaScript in your template.
Here’s the story of installing it on Web Teacher. I downloaded the plugin and uploaded it to the WordPress plugin directory. In my WordPress admin area, I activated the plugin.
Then I attempted to import all the old comments. That was a no go. An email to the support folks at js-kit.com popped up when the import failed, and I was in touch with the developers already because they contacted me when I published the Zemanta post mentioned earlier. I sent them a note about the problem.
Then I left town and didn’t take my computer. So Web Teacher sat in a comment-free limbo for several days.
When I returned home I had a PHP file waiting from js-kit support that needed to go into my wp-admin directory to make the WordPress export compatible with JS-Kit. With that uploaded, the support people at js-kit ran the import. (I was still not able to do it myself. This may be an issue for some people.)
As soon as Echo was installed and activated, it started working. The comment form changed significantly. The admin options for setting up the way you want Echo to work are on the JS-Kit site. Open an account and administer the way you want your setup to work there.
JS-Kit Dashboard
I would prefer it if there was a way to administer Echo from within the WordPress admin area. It’s a bit of a pain to have an off site account to administer it. One more set of usernames and passwords to track.
Another thing I’m not entirely happy with is that the comment counter is oddly wonky. It counts comments but not all comments. Or perhaps it doesn’t register trackbacks or external mentions. In any case, there may be comments following a post but the counter shows a zero. This post is an example.
In WordPress, Akismet still works on your comments, the best I can tell at this point. I found a lot of spammy comments on one post and then suddenly they were gone. Like any JavaScript, it does slow things down and the comments are slow to appear. It’s possible I was seeing spam before the script finished running and then it loaded properly.
That slow-down may be an issue for some people.
This is the third post on Web Teacher since installing Echo. Would you help test it and give it a good run? If you could leave a comment here that would be great. But it would help even more if you could mention this post elsewhere–perhaps Facebook or your blog–and see if Echo picks up the reference to it and brings in back here as advertised.
With your help, it will be easier to see if Echo is going to be a boon for my blog and help you decide if it may be a plus on your blog, too.
I mostly review books, web apps, and products like Dreamweaver.
First, I don’t get paid to review anything. I do receive the books I’m reviewing free from the publishers. I’m on a few publishers mailing lists, and when a book is released that I want to review–which includes books about HTML, CSS, graphics, microformats, standards, and accessibility–I’ll request a copy. Since I’m not on every publishers mailing list, the books I get to review are concentrated on just a few publishers. (I’d be happy to hear from other publishers, too.)
When I first started reviewing books I was pretty critical. Frankly, the books were terrible. But as awareness of standards and accessibility have evolved, books have improved, too. My reviews have grown less critical and more favorable as a result. Even though I’ve written my own books on my topics of interest here at Web Teacher, I do give honest reviews of all books and don’t try to bash other writers in order to promote my books instead. I want to help you learn it or teach it right. If I find a book that will help you do that, I’ll say so.
I do link to Amazon for the books I review. So if you buy one from my link I might make a few cents. This is not a common thing, I don’t sell very many books from this web site, but I do make small sums that way.
In terms of apps, I review the ones I’m interested in for some reason. I’ve reviewed a number of photo sharing sites, graphic software sites, Twitter tools and such. Mostly these are just sites I stumble on and want to try out and talk about.
I’ve reviewed Dreamweaver quite extensively. Normally I just do this because I want to. However, for Dreamweaver CS4, I was working on a book for Adobe and did receive the software as part of the job. Not the entire Creative Suite, just Dreamweaver. As long as Dreamweaver is a tool in use for teaching web design and development classes, I’ll continue to talk about it, whether I’m writing for Adobe or not.
That’s it: my policy. I’ve never made enough money from this blog to even pay for the monthly hosting fees, so there’s no one influencing my product reviews but me.
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