a little knowledge

I know just enough about HTML to be dangerous. In a previous life I worked on a digital project that required (fairly simple) coding and I felt I had a good grasp on how it all worked. The suggested tutorials were fine, if not terribly inspiring, and provided a good refresher. What I found useful from w3school was the list at HTML4.01/XHTML 1.0 Reference of common tags. As long as the web page does not becoming too ornate I feel comfortable enough. What I am not sure about is the reasons/need for the different Declarations.

p.s. while all summer colds are evil, I feel it must be said that a summer cold in Arizona when it is over 110 degrees is just hell. Luckily, I can't contaminate any of you, my virtual classmates.

Teaching

The other side of learning is teaching. I only have the DigIn program for experience and am curious as to the whats and hows others have experienced of good/bad teaching for online classes. For myself, I like D2L so far and have had no real technical issues and the classes have been interesting and well planned. But I still have the mindset that a classroom would be better. I wonder if I will change my viewpoint as the classes progress.

Learning style & Myers Briggs

Unfortunately a repeat of what I posted in the discussion blog - I hope to add more to this after experimenting a little on my ideas of prioritizing.

The learning style article was both insightful and timely. It reminded me a great deal of the Myers-Briggs test I took a two years ago when I recognized that I wanted to do something new in my career. It was an eye opener and I reference it in my daily work life quite a bit. The idea that I am INFP helped give me perspective on why I don't do well having to immediately respond to emails; I just don't think that way. And knowing that, I can compensate in some ways and make my job less stressful. After reading the Felder and Soloman article I worked out what type of learner I am and I think that will help me find similar types of compensating techniques. As I have complained ad nauseum, time management and keeping up is one of my largest problems. It seems like understanding more about how I learn will allow me to better optimize and organize each week's time frame and be more efficient.

trials and tribulations

This week was a reminder to stay focused and humble. Previous assignments in Ubuntu like the downloads have gone well for me and have been without significant problems. This time, because of personal plans over the weekend, I have been running late and have had problems with both Ubuntu and the sandbox. Help from the activity discussion board has been great and I remain deeply impressed with how timely Professor Fulton has been (really, not in a smarmy way but in a thank-goodness-he-is-around-and-patient-or-I-would-freak way). And boy do I love the snapshot feature! Once in, however, I felt that this week’s topic of user and group creation and permissions made more intuitive sense than previous topics have and I felt fairly confident moving around in the CLI. I also had a big mistake with the sandbox by powering it down when I shouldn’t have. Which I will never do again and which has permanently impressed upon me what the differences are for the two. Which is a good thing.

ETA: have just tried to re-do something from the assignments and it is not working again. Which is not a good thing

This blog post is about the assignment for week 2 for class 672. The blog assignment asked us each to comment on how I felt about the teaching videos and tutorials.

After completing the installation of Ubuntu successfully and completed the rest of the assignments for class I looked back to see what worked best for me. Accessing the remote desktop went smoothly for me though I ultimately watched Professor Fulton's youtube lessons several times. The Arthur Griffith lectures likewise were useful as the visuals clarified a great deal of the command line structure and the logic behind it. In fact I shudder to think of trying to learn these concepts without these visual aids. Because I took extensive notes on the Griffith lecture and had to pause frequently, the ten lectures took a significantly longer time than the estimated 1 hour. The six lessons in Look Around the File gave a overview of important topics in the basic structure of organization. I particularly had an a-ha! moment with the codes for granting permissions. Areas I will need to go over again are the grep. The Intro to Unix Command Line structure gave a useful (and brief) description of key concepts. The tutorials from LinuxCommand proved the most difficult to follow. Most of the commands and concepts covered by Arthur Griffith made sense to me and practicing the LOM examples solidified the ideas. Areas I had difficulty with were over the I/O redirect commands and/or using pipes and the kill command. Likewise job control needs more work. I hope to go over the tutorials again next week.

I also have to say that I don't get why techguys do things like take the e our of user. I refuse to believe that skipping one key stroke is a truly valuable time saver.