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