“Finally” would have been a better title for this post instead of the previous, but f*** it…

…cause I’m done writing both semester papers… I feel great. So great that I’m writing a blog at 2 am in the morning, so great that I don’t even care that I have to work on Saturday even though I should have had the day off, so great that I don’t even worry about the exam on Friday. I should though, because after discussing the different subjects in school today (thanks for putting up with me by the way), I didn’t actually leave smiling. I read Mari’s blog and I felt the same: “I’m sick of going over it, I’ve gone over it about ten times, let’s just deliver the damn thing!” Well, it’s over now, one day to go. Gonna miss PRAKTINF, ain’t gonna miss HUIN, sorry for whomever may feel offended by that, though I doubt you’re numerous…

yours

:p

Finally

After weeks of trying to open Jill’s page with no result, Mari finally sent me the text. I don’t know if it is Jill who’s an exceptional writer, or just me who’s very tired after spending hours correcting the references on my semester paper, but I laughed more than one time reading her text. The way she described her student’s reactions when they actually got the point of blogging. “Somebody out there actually cares about what I write!?” Just like me when I discovered that db “published” my blog for everyone to see. It was like reading a text on us during this semester, Jill had to push her students to get started with their blogs, just as Myriam had to push us. Well, guess we all learned our lesson… : p Anyway, it has been little time for blogging and wiki the last couple of weeks, and there will be little time for blogging and wiki the next week. If anyone feels that there is something missing on the wiki (except corpus and text-critic stuff) tell me and I’ll see if I’ll have time to write something about it. I don’t promise anything though, it’s gonna be a busy week, so don’t put ALL your eggs in that basket.

What happened?

DB has published a link to my blog about “death row bloggers”  at the end of their article! What happened!? Pretty cool I guess : p

Is this important?

In class today, me, Ingunn and Lova discussed the importance of a blog. What do we learn by blogging? Is it just a diary for our own amusement? Or does it help us understand and learn more about ourselves? I concluded by saying that to me a blog isn’t really more than a tool, helping me express my ideas around a subject (the subject at present day being ICT and Learning). But that’s good! As long as people write down their ideas and comment on each others ideas, blogging can be really helpful. But although blogging isn’t really that important to me, I understood it became more and more important to others, and when I came home today, I read an interesting article in the news. Check it out, and think about how important blogging would be in a situation like that. Here’s the link: http://www.dagbladet.no/magasinet/2007/10/30/516692.html

ICT & Learning

I was at the library the other day and found an amazing book, perhaps a life saver for this semester. It is called “Oversold and Underused” by Larry Cuban. In this book there are a lot of examples of how ICT can be used in school to get the most out of classes. There’s a lot of obvious examples that I didn’t even consider before I read about them although I knew of them. Anyway, I want to give you some examples that I found of value, if you are writing about the same as I am, ICT and Learning.

Remember the Spanish class the other day? Well, I don’t know about you guys, but although we didn’t get the most of it, it was pretty fun (at least I though so). Why? Because instead of the same old boring “listening-to-a-dull-teacher-class” we got to play a certain role, which made it all a bit more interesting and exciting. Since some of the characters were supposed to ruin the Spanish lesson for others, the whole lesson kind of “went down the drain”. I don’t think we were supposed to learn Spanish that day, but something more abstract and complicated which I haven’t figured out yet. Never mind that now.

I think everyone that were present that day agrees with me when I say that the final part of the session was the most fun (when we listened to the words and sentences using the head set). That is one good example of introducing ICT in the learning process. Think about all the lectures you have attended (or not :p ) during your time at the University. Which ones were most interesting? If you look back at the most interesting ones, I bet you picked those specific ones (at least some of you) because maybe the Lecturer used a computer program to not only tell you about the subject, but also illustrate it, using pictures and flashes etc. I especially remember the lecture Kjeldsen in PRAKTINF held about Picture analysis and Jo’s lecture about his research project in the Atlantic Ocean. Why were these lectures more interesting than others? Not necessarily because of the subjects they were talking about , but because of the way they used ICT during their Lectures.

ICT in Learning!

There are several other examples as well. Kids playing simple platform games similar to such as super Mario, only instead of defeating bosses to get to the next level, you must e.g. solve math problems etc. These types of learning techniques are getting more and more common in todays schools. The import of ICT to learning arenas such as schools. I hope this helped someone define what ICT in Learning really is. It can be everything from complex video-games and flash-presentations to simple overhead-presentations. At least that is my understanding of it.

A good tip might be to think about your own education, how did the different professors get through to you? What techniques were used? For instance the MOO we use in HUIN102 now. It is ICT in learning, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be positive and good way of learning, but you can still mention it in your paper, e.g. why doesn’t it work the way you hoped it would? What could be done to improve this etc.

The art of learning, stupid title I know :p

“Learning” means basically to get knowledge you weren’t in possession of before, and remembering/storing that knowledge. That’s the closest definition I can think of at the moment.

I can’t talk for everybody, but I bet many people agree with me when I say that I learn best by doing. Try, fail, try, fail, try again, success! Maybe not every time, but at least it works better than not trying at all, and better than just watching or studying etc. That is why I think a good teacher is a teacher that instead of just talking like he was reading a book, gives the student a push, and lets him try for him self (if possible of course). If not, give lots of examples! It’s easier for the student to understand what you’re talking about if you give examples of something they can relate to. Maybe not so easy for the teacher every time, but if he can do that he’s probably a good teacher.

A good student is of course a student that is willing to learn, even though the subject of what he is studying isn’t always as fun as he’d wish it would be. Don’t be afraid to fail sometimes before you succeed.

HUIN105 Project result

Here’s the homepage me and Lene made for the HUIN105 project. It’s a low-budget tourist guide for Bergen. http://huin.uib.no/~huin105_2007_15/

First assignment, HUIN102

Hi!

My name is Arild and I am taking a Bachelor degree in SPINF (field: English) at UiB. This is my third and last year of the degree (yey!). As you can see I choose to write in English as often as I can for practice, but Norwegian is my first language. I took HUIN105 last semester, but my impression of HUIN102 so far is way different from what I expected. I expected them to be more similar to eachother. But who knows, maybe later they will. ICT gives me the creeps. I feel I know very little about ICT, but I hope to learn as much as possible this semester. I expect a lot of work later this semester, but hopefully not as much as in the 105 class. I won’t mind other people taking part in the discussion, though I don’t know what the discussion is yet. I have some experience with blogging from last semester, as you can see further down on the page, where I have posted the assignments from HUIN105.

Usability analysis #2

I’m a user of wordpress myself so I can’t be too harsh when I write this, but I have some constructive criticism I would like to share. WordPress.com is a pretty ok web site, I use it to publish e.g. school-assignments, and for that purpose it works fairly well, I mean I write, I publish, and the teacher comments on what I’ve written and published. But there’s a lot of stuff I find strange about wordpress, if I were to use it for other purposes than just posting things I’ve done at the university.

Take for instance the front-page. Let’s keep in mind that wordpress is a site where people publish their opinions etc. in hope of getting some kind of feedback or comments from others that do the same. I’ve sometimes enjoyed reading the blogs published on vg.no, a lot of interesting (well maybe not a lot of interesting) and funny blogs. What I like about vg’s blog service is that when you enter vg.no, there’s a menu to the left where it sais blog, among other things. When you press this button you enter the blog front-page. Here comes the interesting part, on the top there’s, like wordpress, a login and password bar. But unlike wordpress, they actually have a search-bar where you can search after blogs of your interest. Where is this bar on wordpress’ front-page!?!? I mean hello!?! Shouldn’t we be able to search for blogs on this site? I mean come on, don’t make me think! Ok, so they have “blog of the day” etc. on the frontpage, but what if I want to read something besides those? I asked a friend of mine if he saw some kind of searching bar so that he could find my blogs, but he didn’t and so I had to send him my wordpress url for him to read my blogs. A major flaw (can barely call it a flaw) if you ask me. Maybe it is there and I just don’t see it, in that case make it clearer! Like it sais in chapter two of don’t make me think, we scan the page, we don’t read it, so the most important things have to be clear. That is one of the things I would do to improve this site if I was in charge. Put up a search bar on the top next to the login and password bars. This is what irritates me the most on wordpress.

Another thing, that isn’t quite as irritating and isn’t that big a deal is when I log on to my own profile. The first thing I want to see (probably like most other people) is not what I see now with what I last updated etc., but rather what my profile looks like at the moment. Ok this isn’t that big a deal because it is only one click away (the view site button at the top-left corner), but still, it is a little bit irritating, so I mention it. How I would fix it? reverse it, make the profile appear first when you log on and have a “view last updates” button in the top left corner of the profile instead.

The space I’m writing on right now. Why is it so small? It should atleast be twice as big so I don’t have to scroll all the time. I know I can fix it somewhere, but that takes time as well. Irritating! Why is the space below, the picture menu, just as big? It doesn’t have to be, how often do you need to e.g. give a picture a long description? If the description has to be long you’ll probarbly write it here in this bar instead. And the post preview below the picture bar again should either be removed completely, or at least be narrowed down so that there’ll be more space up here for writing. So what I’d do is to enlarge the bar/window that is meant for writing so that the ones writing don’t have to scroll so much. I would make the picture bar/window smaller, and I believe the post preview mode is unnecessary so I would remove it completely to make more space for the writing bar, then again, like now, I’d have a place where you could change the modes to what you prefer.

So for wordpress to be perfect in my eyes, it has to first and foremost put up a very easily visible search bar on their front-page so that people can actually search for any blogs or posts they like. I don’t even know how that works now. Every good web page should contain a search bar (a visible search bar please). The two remaining things are presenting your site first when you log in, not the things that were last updated etc., and enlarge the bar/window where you write your blogs so that you don’t have to scroll so much. You have to scroll down to the preview post anyway so why not remove it completely from the same page and put it on the same page as where you enlarge the writing bar/window now? It’s wrong to have a preview if you can’t see it completely anyway.

NEW WEB NARRATIVE

Here’s my new web narrative (workshop 5):

COYS!