Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
The Problem of CSS Form Elements is at Smashing Magazine.
Seven Things Still Missing from CSS at .net magazine.
Video from the recent W3Conf are available on YouTube.
The Google Glass Feature No One is Talking About. Is Google becoming Big Brother?
Lerio Designs has blog posts with weekly roundups of web design and development resources that is excellent and worth subscribing to.
The other day I attended a breakfast meeting of Women in Technology (it’s a focus group under the umbrella of the NM Technology Council). We talked about apps. I was one of the speakers, talking about the app Swipp. My thoughts on Swipp can be found on BlogHer.
Here are my very rough notes on what the other apps were.
Scan biz cards: reads cards and lets you correct before you add to address book. Then can send an email intro with contact info and photo and invite to connect on LinkedIn. Can also load into Salesforce. A lite version and a paid version.
Sales force: connects to all devices and outlook calendar. Lets you share information about your companies so that anyone can come in and support an account. Can enter tasks, appointments, notes. Contacts are searchable. Easy user interface. A paid app. Amount may depend on level of usage.
Evernote: take notes, clip articles, web pages, take pictures, share notebooks. Can set up notebooks for various projects. Includes Skitch, which makes annotating images easy. Searchable for all content including images and handwritten notes. Can share with others in your company. All cloud based. Both free and paid version. Lots of storage in free version. {Evernote trunk lets you add tools and capabilities. Lets you use Evernote tools from within other tools. } Can make todos.
RH Technology: good for job hunters. Enter your expertise and zip code. Can find jobs and email them to yourself. Free. Can calculate salary. Lets you read articles about job hunting and advancement. Roberts Half.
Slide shark: can show slides you upload to slide shark. Control the slides from iPhone. Free cloud based. Keep animations even when outside PowerPoint. Can see what’s coming next on iPhone. Has a build in “laser” pointer based on touch.
Lino: like a giant bulletin board with lots of sticky notes that can be manipulated by all participants. Good for collaboration. Shared. Free.
Zip list: online grocery shopping lists. Can get list of ingredients for shopping. Calculates calories and weight watcher points. Book marklet lets you add recipes while surfing. Send shopping list to your iPhone. While shopping can compare prices based on zip code. Tracks if you have coupons.
Skype is a free, ubiquitous peer-to-peer (P2P) Internet based telephone system that was created by the same company that developed kaZaa in 2003. Unlike other instant message applications such as Yahoo and MSN, Skype works seamlessly across firewalls and has more refined voice and video quality. It uses voice over Internet protocol technology (VoIP) which converts and encrypts voice signals into data streams that are sent over the internet and converted back into voice on the other end. Making record of the data streams for future reference through Skype is possible. With Skype, a person can communicate with anyone else across the globe without the need of expensive tele collaboration equipment. This is because the VoIP application has in-built capabilities to support instant messaging and teleconferencing.
Being relatively easy to use and to set up, Skype has provided students in the classroom with a wide range of opportunities with which to improve learner comprehension and engagement.
A tutor can provide his or her students with the experience of traveling overseas over the comfort of their chairs through Skype. The tutor can arrange for teleconferences through Skype with foreign students located in different parts of the globe. This provides the students with the opportunity of interacting with foreign nationals and exchange of ideas becomes possible. According to college paper experts at SolidEssay.com, discussions concerning mundane subjects and assignments can lead to cultural exchanges among students located in different parts of the world.
Language students benefit the most since they can easily initiate a live correspondence with a native speaker of the language that they are undertaking. A student can record his or her audio conversations with a foreign colleague who is native to the language. Replaying the conversation later can help the student improve his or her grammar and pronunciation skills. It goes without saying that the student acquires all these benefits without actually having to pay for airplane tickets whose cost can be quite prohibitive.
Holding debates through Skype saves the students and teachers a lot of time and money by minimizing physical movement. Being a computer based application, students can peruse for facts over the internet to strengthen their point of view. This way, students improve their communication and critical thinking skills quite fast.
Naturally, most students perform poorly when it comes to interviews. Technical skills and knowledge alone do not guarantee automatic acceptance into the market. Skype enables teachers to help their students with this crucial stage by providing them with mock job interviews. A teacher can make arrangements with a real life human resource manager to conduct interviews with his or her students over Skype. If that is not possible, then the teacher can make arrangements with an authority figure such as a counselor or fellow teachers to help with the mock interview process from their office.
The foregoing is not exhaustive of how Skype can help students improve their learning. Skype can indirectly support a student’s learning by enabling teachers to conduct conferences with parents via Skype. This saves the parents and teachers’ time, energy and costs associated with gas. The convenience of the application encourages parents to interact with teachers from time to time. Skype enables students to meet with mentors who can help them make appropriate career choices. Most important, Skype can be used as a reliable platform to share presentations, provide tutoring and conduct lessons. Skype recordings help students who are unable to attend classes for various reasons to catch up with their peers.
Author bio: Craig R. is an experienced college paper writing expert having worked for a number of educational companies, including SolidEssay.com where he helps students advance in their academic life.
With little ceremony other than an announcement written by Bruce Lawson and Steph Troeth on the Web Standards Project blog, the volunteer army of people who worked to bring web standards into common use have ceased their organizational work.
I want to quote the entire announcement. I know you can go to the WaSP blog and read it, but it seems like something of an homage to the important work done by so many dedicated designers and developers for the past 14 years to reprint it below. And I’m proud of my small part of the work as a member of the education task force and the development of a web standards based curriculum.
When The Web Standards Project (WaSP) formed in 1998, the web was the battleground in an ever-escalating war between two browser makers—Netscape and Microsoft—who were each taking turns “advancing” HTML to the point of collapse. You see, in an effort to one-up each other, the two browsers introduced new elements and new ways of manipulating web documents; this escalated to the point where their respective 4.0 versions were largely incompatible.
Realizing that this fragmentation would inevitably drive up the cost of building websites and ran the risk of denying users access to content and services they needed, Glenn Davis, George Olsen, and Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded WaSP and rallied an amazing group of web designers and developers to help them push back. The WaSP’s primary goal was getting browser makers to support the standards set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
In 2001, with the browser wars largely over, WaSP began to shift its focus. While some members continued to work with browser vendors on improving their standards support, others began working closely with software makers like Macromedia to improve the quality of code being authored in tools such as Dreamweaver. And others began the hard slog of educating web designers and developers about the importance of using web standards, culminating in the creation of WaSP InterAct, a web curriculum framework which is now overseen by the W3C.
Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality. While there is still work to be done, the sting of the WaSP is no longer necessary. And so it is time for us to close down The Web Standards Project.
Many (if not all) of us are continuing to work in the world of web standards, but our work is now largely outside the umbrella of WaSP. If you are interested in continuing to work on web standards-related projects along with us, we humbly suggest you follow these projects:
- A List Apart – The magazine “for people who make websites” is run by WaSP founder Jeffrey Zeldman and is a consistent source of forward-thinking articles and tutorials.
- HTML5 Doctor – A solid resource and discussion forum on all things HTML5, brought to you by Bruce Lawson and his team.
- W3C Community Groups – If you have a passion for a specific web technology, you can help make it better by participating in one (or more) community groups. In particular, you might be interested in one of these: Core Mobile Web Platform, Responsive Images, Web Education, and Web Media Text Tracks.
- WebPlatform.org – A fantastic web standards resource, providing up-to-date documentation, Q&As, tutorials & more. Chris Mills, Doug Schepers, and a number of other standards advocates are involved in this project.
- Web Standards Sherpa – An educational resource founded by WaSP which continues to operate under the leadership of Chris Casciano, Virginia DeBolt, Aaron Gustafson, and Emily Lewis.
- Web Standards + Small Business – An outreach project started by WaSP that educates small businesses about why they should care about web standards. This project is overseen by Aaron Gustafson.
The job’s not over, but instead of being the work of a small activist group, it’s a job for tens of thousands of developers who care about ensuring that the web remains a free, open, interoperable, and accessible competitor to native apps and closed eco-systems. It’s your job now, and we look forward to working with you, and wish you much success.
Congratulations and a big thank you to everyone who gave time and talent to the Web Standards Project. WaSP changed the world.
Here are the kind of resources are already available on the topic of Internet etiquette. Could they be the basis an organized plan of action to build a set of culturally agreed upon acceptable behaviors around internet conversation and interaction? Are these resources a start or are they inadequate even as a starting point?
Many of the resources listed above use the same old advice: don’t use all caps, blah, blah, blah. What they aren’t talking about is learning to communicate skillfully and effectively when your only contact is through cyberspace. Shouldn’t we be talking about that?
See Also: Long discussions around the coffee table vs. Internet interactions and What Would an Internet Etiquette Curriculum Look Like?
Yesterday I suggested that it might be time for something along the lines of an Internet etiquette curriculum for modern times. A curriculum that could be used to shape behavior and improve the quality of online discourse.
What would people learn from such a curriculum? Here are a few suggestions.
These are a few of my initial thoughts. Do you have other suggestions? In all these situations, I think what people need is practice in framing responses and writing ideas that are positive, down to examples of exact wordings and sentence structures that can be useful.
In my college days, we’d gather for pizza and a huge jug of cheap wine. We’d sit on the floor, gathered around a coffee table, and hold long discussions about the fine points of just about everything. There was always someone whose imagination took the discussion beyond reality into the realm of absurd extremes. There was always someone who made fun of everything and turned every remark into a sarcastic joke.
We laughed at these forays into the land beyond reality or into parody land because they were funny and we all knew that going to extremes was a part of the creativity of the conversation.
Now when we hold these kinds of discussions about the fine points of just about everything, we are doing it on the Internet: in comment threads or in short bursts on Twitter. Sometimes anonymously. Everyone gets to express their opinion just like we did back in the all-night conversations of yore. But we aren’t looking at each other, we aren’t friends who can judge how much everyone else has had to drink, how serious everyone is, and who’s indulging in a flight of imagination to carry the conversation beyond its logical limits.
Here’s the point. We haven’t learned how to do these free-for-all discussions on the Internet without inflicting pain. Sometimes what we do is civil and respectful, but sometimes it crosses over into an area that hurts. Perhaps because anonymity gives people a feeling that it’s okay to be insulting and demeaning. Perhaps because we have no body language and tone of voice connected to typed and transmitted electrons.
For whatever reason, we aren’t handling things well. We damn people who are giving their all to their community. We call little girls disgusting names. We insult people who disagree with us. We comment on how people look or dress. We threaten violence.
It’s time we stop spending our time talking about how to ignore the trolls and instead develop a plan to help people learn how to act on the Internet. A big plan, lead by charismatic leaders who can teach with effective results. An education plan that sets up social conventions, rules of etiquette, and behavioral standards for all of us.
We need web sites, convention speakers, media articles, YouTube videos, and every other potential communication tool to be full of people sharing ideas about good behavior on the Internet. We need to be trained in civil conversation skills on the Internet. It’s a new world, we need to learn new skills.
We’ve done it with other issues. We can do it with conversation skills on the Internet. How can you help?