Two gentlemen from the WV Dept. of Ed. came to visit our school on Friday, the 20th. They came to my class with our Director of Career and Technology. They happened into my Intro to GraphComm class, where the students were working on one of three ongoing assignments; a scanning assignment, a vector based artwork using Illustrator and a pixel based project using photoshop. 

In the course of discussion, the Globaloria Game Design course came up and we had an interesting discussion, about the whole web 2.0 and I immediately put that into the context of some corollary reading for the game design course I've been doing, most recently The Big Shift, Why it Matters by John Hagel III John Seely Brown and Lang Davison. I've read it twice now and will read it again, directly. 

The Big Shift is an eye opening look at emerging factors impacting business, strategies to deal with these emerging trends, (including new media) and how all of these trends and factors relate to business sustainability, innovation, ROI and global competition. It certainly provides come context for our endeavors to use game play and design as a gateway to understanding the new media. 

It was a very interesting conversation with the gentlemen from Charleston and quite an exciting way to end the week. 

I've been pleased the last week or so as I read my students blogs, some of them are starting to utilize the blog concept fairly well. Their comments are introspective, thoughtful, and accurately reflect their perception of the state of success or failure they are experiencing in this course. Some of them are way too harsh on themselves, and I need to post some comments to remind them of what they have learned and how far they have come on this social media path.

As for my learning, I am getting pretty comfortable at wiki coding, mostly by repairing student code and working on my own pages, and am starting to get a feel for which symbol controls what.  I do struggle with the learning methodology, because I haven't yet been able to discover a coding sequence list. By list I mean something that says if you want to start a new line of text this is the symbol you use and this is where you insert it. If you want to double space a line, this is the symbol you use and where you place it. I know what I want to do—finding the code to make it happen is another thing. 

Without a guide your learning mode seems to be limited to looking at a line of existing code, and seeing the end result. Then you go in and change some code, then using preview, you go look at the page to see what was changed. Using that information, you can then infer that your action x caused page result y.

It seems to me much like trying to write a novel in a foreign language with the only reference guide being other novels written in  the foreign language (wiki code) that also have an english version (the visible page). You can look at the foreign version, then compare that to the English version and deduce the meaning. Then  you try to utilize that information to construct a new passage for your book. It can be done and I am doing it, but a dictionary and a grammar book in the language of wiki coding would see to me to be a more efficient way of learning to code. 

I going to start searching for that. If anyone knows of such a reference tool let me know 

Well,  my friends, a new season is upon us; Daylight Savings Time is gone, Halloween, over and we are in the deep fall of the year. The wollybears are nestling in for the winner, the last of the flowers, the tomatoes and the leaves of our Maples, are all gone, fallen to the frost and the shortening days.  

I love the melancholy smell of fall, rife with the lost promise of summer, yet laden with the advent of the season to come, of wood fires in the back room, and late season camping trips, of Christmas and the deep cold of January.

In the classroom, the work is leveling out, and production is in full swing, students are bending to their assignments, photography classes are in their first field shoot, the intro classes are getting deep into vector based illustration, and my gaming class is, I feel at last, on a solid footing. 

They are getting into their flash animations pretty well, and they and I are learning to blog. 

I must say as, a generally private person, I am still having a difficult time with this public sharing of thoughts and processes. I generally avoid the phone, and manage to ignore E-Mail unless it's a really important one that I absolutely must answer. I really like people and prefer my personal interactions face to face. And yet, I am absolutely fascinated by technology, where it is leading us, and generally, I can't wait for us to arrive. 

I know, this is a dichotomy that I must learn to reconcile, and perhaps this blog is a means towards that end.

As is always true in life, time will tell.