blogpost++

Web-based education has charged me with motivation that I rarely felt in my traditional school setting when I was growing up. Over the past few months, I've explored a few web-based opportunities, among them p2pu.org, iTunes U, Udacity, Coursera, and a learning management system internal to my organization. As  these venues have gotten my synapses crackling, I thought my much-neglected blog should reflect more than static.

I've returned to p2pu to participate in a series of challenges in the Mozilla School of Webcraft. Challenges satisfy my typically twitchy attention span: they are short and task-oriented, and generally are composed of one or more obnoxious-but-necessary steps to accomplishing a larger goal. This challenge required me to choose an enhanced text editor and write about why I chose it.

I've been using notepad++ for a while-- it has nice (though ubiquitous) features like syntax highlighting, auto-completion, and support for a number of languages. I've primarily used it for html, opting for full IDEs like eclipse when I've dabbled in java. For as visual of a person as I am, the highlighting is invaluable, but it can be found in many other editors out there, so google around if notepad++ doesn't fit your needs.

Sadly, there is no syntax highlighting for rusty blog posts to tell me when or how to close this entry. I'll try to keep with the spirit of my post's title and incrementally increase the number of posts-- til then....

html by hand

Now might be a good time to expand on my mission with this blog. As I alluded to earlier, I've been into social media since before it was a buzzword. I was a myspace baby, and poured my 14-year-old soul onto the pages of my (long since deleted) deadjournal. I collected blogs and networks like bad habits through high school. I incubated with facebook through its infancy, and now that it's spitting pre-teen hissy fits about its privacy I've been praying for any new site with a profile page and a hacksaw to come along and cut the cord.

It's been a messy departure, though. Google+ didn't quite catch on, though it introduced some very competitive features... think easy ways to be selective about which friends you share content with with circles, group video chat with hangouts, and, remarkably, a brief and reasonable privacy policy. facebook's done well to incorporate some of these features in its recent permutations-- more on that later.

So we've seen the way we interact with the web evolve as those interactions have become more analogous to our real-life interactions. It seemed natural that education would soon follow as a facet of social media. I have read about and had the unfortunate opportunity of participating in online ed, so when I first checked out P2PU I was a bit skeptical. What caught my eye about it, though, was its philosophy of being a free and open community which assumes that everyone has something to learn and everyone has something to contribute. What follows from this philosophy and the power of the internet is a large and willing learning-focused community.

Even more interesting in my opinion is the method of assessment: upon the completion of classes, tasks, and challenges, badges are awarded to signify competency. Though this form of assessment may fall short of accreditation for purely academic puposes, it is an interesting approach to learning which might lend credence to non-work or academic-based "experience" that individuals might want to claim on resumes or in applications to higher education. If given a chance, this might go far as a viable way of crediting people for their skills... and if not, it might at least keep some enterprising citizens of the web engaged in their education.

That's where I'm entering the picture. Twenty-something, freshly (and fortunately) in the workforce, not quite willing to let go of my self-development in favor of my salary yet. I've begun taking classes and challenges at P2PU to supplement my daily article-reading and self study pursuits, and I've found this to be a good way for me to keep myself focused. I'll be posting intermittently about my assignments (some assignments require you to post about them; one assignment was to create a blog, hence the aforementioned "kick-in-the-ass"), as well as my take on the direction of social media and the world wide interwebs. As I post more and get my website back together, I'll be migrating this blog over there, so stay tuned! For now, enjoy my hand-written html code, which was painstakingly scrawled out per the Webcraft 101 challenge course I'm winding through on P2PU.

Game Time

So I've been interested in the social world forever, and I've read enough blogs to be able to differentiate good ones from mind-rottingly awful ones. As enthusiastic as I am about getting into blogging, my concern about throwing up a blog in the latter category has held me back. So I figured I needed a kick in the ass, and who better to turn to than the ruthless, unforgiving internet?

Near as I can tell, this blog will follow my transformation from a liberal-arts student into a social media butterfly, with some tech skills to boot. Upon my $13 keyboard I lay humble offerings of middling design skills, a long-neglected familiarity with Java and C++, a psych degree, and ambitions which may well exceed my current abilities. Let's get it!