My first lesson on internet application development was a tutorial on Friday the 5th of October. We all thought we were going to be told how to enrol on Blackboard (again!) and told to go away and turn up to the next lecture but pleasantly this was not the case! First we were told to find definition of a blog and find a blog on the internet and write a brief summary on it to get familiar with blogs. This was no problem for me since I visit a number of blogs on the internet.
We were also shown how to properly reference, something I found particularly useful since I hadn’t had been taught to reference before, the most I ever did was write a bibliography at the end of a piece of coursework. We were shown how Wikipedia may not be the most accurate resource by finding out what happened to Siegenthaler Senior, an American journalist who had inaccurate information written about him by a man who was trying to win a bet. The bad part is other websites took this about him from Wikipedia and published it on theirs creating a snowball effect. It was interesting because I had known information could potentially be inaccurate on Wikipedia but I didn’t know it had actually effected someone’s reputation. I will definitely be more careful when using Wikipedia to find information and would always use other websites and / or any other media to back it up.
Our first lecture started off with an introduction to what we will be doing in internet application development, the programs we will be using and a bit about setting up the blog and how it would be assessed. We were also shown some PDF help files regarding the Adobe CS3 programs we will be using.
We were then shown two flash animations, RSS Feeds in Plain English and Frog Guts. The RSS Feeds video was a short video explaining what RSS feeds are, how they can be used, why they should be used and how to access them. I’ve always wondered about using RSS feeds but I never really got round to learning anything about them show having a video shown in a lecture containing information that I could for leisure was an added bonus! I’ll defiantly look more into RSS feeds and maybe sign up to a reader like the one shown in the video. The second video was called Frog Guts, something I had not been looking forward to as a person who keeps frogs in their garden and a general amphibian lover. However when I watched it found it to be a really good flash animation. It was basically an interactive animation where you simulate opening up a frog and looking at its insides. I actually quite liked it considering people could use this information as a good alternative to actually doing it for real and has some benefits like the automatic labelling of the organs. It demonstrated how flash could be used as an education tool.
In the tutorial we set up our blog on a site called Blogger and began writing our first blog entry. Although it was my first time using Blogger, it wasn’t my first time writing a blog so I found the interface familiar. I looked up a few blogs to see the general layout and content of them which can be found on source 1, 2 and 3. On a side note, we were also shown a BBC news article on an artist who had grown an ear on his arm for art, just what we needed to start the day!
- Steve Pravlina’s personal development blog
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/
- Gamespot UK blog
http://uk.gamespot.com/news/london_calling.html?type=london_calling
- Kerrang Radio Night Before blog
http://www.kerrangradio.co.uk/blog.asp?id=19038
