Web Designer-ish

If you've ever tried to create something artistic, you've got to read Peter Reynolds' books called "Ish" and "The Dot". The Dot is a great story about a young child who does not want to create art at school. A very astute teacher begins with the child, appreciating every attempt, until the child untimately finds her way and then shares her new confidence in her abilities with another child.


The other story, Ish, is a wonderful tale about taking the risk to try something creatively new. We don't need to be perfect at our attempts we just need to endeavor to be 'ish!

As I'm now deep into the process of webdesign, working at the edge of my zpd, I realize that like the little child in Peter's book, I just need to be webdesigner-ish and give it a try! I'm up to my eyeballs in nav bars and content and headers and footers... vertical vs horizontal...what size to make the graphics...do I shadow the text...
learning how to drag boxes into footers and prevent images from snapping together...good grief it's huge!

I've turned to where I most often go to find experts these days...the web...and successfully found a couple of blogs that have helped me along my way. 11Mystic Media,
Rowan Cottage, and Vaarkgirl.

I like being immersed in what I propose for students...working to construct knowledge with the help of experts, using whatever resources you might have at hand...a bricolage approach.

Concept for my final project

I'm jumping for joy today because I've finally got a solid concept for my final individual project. It is meant to be a resource for teachers to learn about constructivist uses of technology in education, and I've been struggling with how to use stories to tell about different kinds classroom experiences with technology in a way that lets readers construct their own knowledge and perhaps build upon the website and tell their own stories.

I've loved the term bricolage (referred to by educators such as Seymour Papert, Gary Stager, Mitchel Resnick) which I think can, in this case, relate to what holistic educators believe about uniting the parts of a learner: body, mind and soul....hands, head, heart. Bricolage is defined as a construction made of whatever materials are at hand; something created from a variety of available things, and aptly describes the idea that technology, in it's widely varied forms, can be used flexibly and purposefully by learners in order to construct knowledge. The idea of making something, called Constructionism by Seymour Papert, has been an important one to me, and will be reflected in my web project.

And so, I've got a title Bricolage: Connecting Playfully. Now, the scary part is to put my text (which I'm really good at collecting) into a story that somehow reflects me...my holistic attempt at constructing a product from a variety of available things! Yikes!

Group Project Completed!

This was a challenging project for our group, but in the end I think we've created an excellent construction of what we feel is important about Community and Collaboration. We created a website called Professional Learning Communities and we addressed this quite academically, which doesn't really surprise me, given our group members: Denise, Deborah, Sarah and Allison. We're a rather committed (in a good sense), knowledgeable group interested in learning and committing to doing our share and following timelines.

The assignment began exploring the larger issue of Connections and my part was about the Social Networking connections that students are making as Net Generation learners. Somehow our title then morphed into Professional Learning Communities, but I hope my part still fits okay. Social Networks are Learning Communities, especially if teachers use some of the recommended ones like http://www.iearn.org or http://www.takingitglobal.org.

Anyway, it was too late as things went on to discuss the change with the group, so I'm living with it as it is...an excellent resource that I know that I'll use in the future.

We had a few aggravations with issues like browser problems. For some reason when you view the site you may see ? marks instead of "quotation". This, in addition to the ads on the page, finally helped me decide to use iWeb rather than Freewebs. There are a lot of great features in Freewebs, but the browswer issues were problem.
You can check it out at http://www.freewebs.com/seeirwin/ if you like.


I wondered too, whether I should have volunteered to take on the technical side of things on the website, although Sarah did a fantastic job and she volunteered to take it on early on in the project. It was hard to help without a login to the site, and I would have done some things a little differently, for example, linking our audio and video using the template links for media to avoid them looking just like another weblink.

My proofreading could have been done a bit better as well. In my hurry to make the content deadline, I neglected to proof my work well enough, which led to a headache for Sarah I think.
The onslaught of email for her must have been frustrating from the 3 of us and some messages were missed which created some confusion. Next time I would proof better and suggest revisions by section and more communication (probably IM would be best) between the writer and the web editor.

All and all a successful project, and a great learning experience!