Beyond School

The continuing saga: I worked my way through the Sitepoint book on XHTML and CSS for beginners, but stopped before the Blogger template-hacking chapter. Why? Some of the very helpful people on the Sitepoint forums answered my noob questions about the best tools to use when writing and editing HTML and CSS mark-up. I’d asked about the Firefox Web Developer add-on, and why I couldn’t just use it to create the .html and .css files. It seemed so powerful (but warning: if you toggle the Code View to align on a different edge of your browser, you’ll lose all unsaved edits - I discovered this after three hours creating forms for the Global Cooling Concerts / “Community Service 2.0″ campaign).

Anyway, the Sitepoint gurus kept saying the word “Dreamweaver.” I figured I’d had enough of manually coding on TextEdit to get the gist, and to fire up my Dreamweaver 8 and see what I could learn.

I learned these things, among others:

• The Dreamweaver “getting started” help manual was adequate to teach me how to design websites using tables for the layout. But, since this is bad practice both in terms of load-time (more code) and accessibility (tables don’t help the visually impaired who rely on browser readers), I went to the “Creating Websites Using Tables” tutorial on Dreamweaver’s help, and it was a poorly done tutorial indeed. It said, “Enter your site’s content in the same way you did using the Tables Layout.” In reality, the two processes are considerably different, and not that intuitive. It took me two or three hours of trial and error to figure out the ropes, but I did.
• Dreamweaver is dead powerful. It took me two hours to build the same site I spent days on using the hand-coding on TextEdit method. Want to insert a Flash video? No need to write the code. Just drag and drop it into the cell or layer you created for it, and Dreamweaver writes the code for you. One example among many.
• Absolute positioning versus “relative” and “floating” positioning: I’m still trying to get my head around this. It’s important because it dictates whether the layout of your page “expands” when you “ctrl/apple +” to increase the font size on Firefox - essential for projecting websites in the classroom - or whether the text “spills out” of its containing cell on the webpage layout.

So now it’s time to stop the tutorials, and design some websites from scratch for real use. My two pet ideas: a “Jazz in Seoul” website (free drinks and no cover fee at the jazz clubs, anyone?), and the global cooling project website. * That’ll be “hobbyist” work for the next week or two.

Because I have a more pressing issue: learning PHP and MySQL databases. I just sent an email to W. Jason Gilmore, the author of the 952-page Beginning PHP and MySQL: From Novice to Professional, 2d Ed. - he encourages his readers to contact him with questions and comments - warning him that I’m still covered with noobie amniotic fluid from XHTML and CSS, but intend to learn enough PHP and MySQL to be able to administer Moodle and Wordpress MU. My goal is to work through his book in two weeks. It’s ironic, though, that I’m doing this while at the same time veering toward dropping Moodle and Wordpress MU from our school’s edtech menu in August. Using Ning to replace both of these is very tempting - I’m running an AP Lit Summer Reading Ning with my students right now, and loving how “un-schooly” - and low maintenance - it is compared to Moodle and Wordpress MU. No back-ups, no headaches with servers and upgrades and crons and php hacks, etc. If anybody out there has an argument against using Ning instead of Moodle and Wordpress MU - Jeff Utecht, I’d love to hear your point of view on this, since I blame you entirely for all this summer homework - I’d love to hear it. I know that I don’t know the answer here, so I’m all ears.

After that, I’ve got an AP Lit workshop online through UCLA extension - five weeks’ worth, which is so much better than a one-week in-house workshop for learning in depth - that starts on July 19. But I hope to learn Java at the same time. It’s summer vacation, after all. Free to learn instead of teach. I’ve already traveled so much it seems a bit old. And as my Quote-a-Day widget taught me, a closing quote by George Bernard Shaw: “A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.”

And to that I would add: People who warn us not to work too much don’t know what it is to love your work.

–

*I know I’m silent on the Global Cooling / Community Service 2.0 project lately, but it’s because I’m working on doing it with my students so much that there’s no point in talking about it - and no time. If you want to work with us - or, better put, point your students this way and let them connect with 18 students in Seoul who are already planning videos, concerts, websites, and logos, request an invitation on the members-only Global Cooling Collective. But don’t join just for the sake of joining another Ning, please! This is a project - I actually prefer the word “campaign” for this one - not a network. Interesting etymology: “Projects” are literally “thrown forward,” implying action. “Networks,” on the other hand, imply static “hanging.” So those who want to do instead of more talking about connecting and connecting to talk more are welcome to join. In fact, if you can’t think of any students you know who could run with this idea, hold off on joining. It’s really a project for students, and adults are not that necessary, beyond spreading the word to create the opportunity for students to take over. And if I sound like a wet rag about all the edublogging talk in the last month or two, well . . . somebody needs to be the gadfly.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

1. Belgium, Turkey, Maryland and Seoul: A Two-Minute Summer Vacation...
2. Beautiful, Relevant, Teacherless...
3. DIY Summer Geekdom: Rough Roads with Apress...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.