Play My Cards Right » Schoolwork

Moving around

Luke — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 20:18:14 +0000

I imported all of the entires from my “Digital Governance Fluency Blog” that ran from September to December on Blogger. Check’m out in the “Floggist” category.

Milestone 10: Thinking algorithmically

Luke — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 02:58:00 +0000

Learning to program has been one of the most difficult undertakings of my life. For some reason, I have just always had an incredibly hard time grasping the kind of abstraction we touch on in Chapter 10 of Snyder. Even now, they way I approach things (programming and otherwise) tends to be more of the try, try again variety. And trying to wrap my head around data structures (again, touched on in Chapter 10) has always been difficult. While I understand most of the basic stuff, I have never, ever gotten very comfortable with recursion. I understand what it does and how it does it- I just don’t really know when its a useful tool.

But, this kind of understanding is important. Even working on web pages and blogs- while a site like blogger is fine for classwork and the like, if one wants to build a site that looks good and is easily navigable, one has to know more than basic html- the digital-citizen site, for example, runs on the scripting language PHP, and many of the plugins and tools used for its “theme” are written in PHP and javascript. Over the holiday break I plan on doing a major revamp of the Digital Citizen website- making it look a little more professional and giving people access to tools they can use to help out. Doing this will have me diving into a language i’m not very familiar with and trying to use it to arrive at something unique and useful. We shall see.

Create something cool, get some users, sell it to the giant: How Web 2.0 Works

Luke — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 21:12:09 +0000

in other words: del.icio.us has been purchased by Yahoo!

Digital Citizen Episode 2: E-Rulemaking

Luke — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 08:18:10 +0000

Episode 2 is up. Go check it out!

Senator Wiki

Luke — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 21:38:19 +0000

Utah Senatorial candidate running a wiki.

Why Wikipedia will survive the storm

Luke — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 17:23:18 +0000

The Wikipedia has taken quite a beating this past two weeks. Here’s an article that finally talks about why it will survive, instead of just condemning it as a failure.

Check it

Blogging in the Classroom (with Blogger)

Luke — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 17:21:24 +0000

Looks like the idea is catching on.

Public Domain Torrents

Luke — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 17:20:28 +0000

A collection of movies that have fallen into the public domain, downloadable through bittorrent!

Sweet!

Democracy 2.0

Luke — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 17:19:21 +0000

Democracy 2.0 is a Wikilaw experiment that hypothesizes that a wide range of individuals, not just politicians and special interest groups, can contribute to the creation of our nation’s laws.

Check it out!

Social Bookmarking For Digital Citizens (milestone #9)

Luke — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 19:22:00 +0000

Update:
If you sign up for this and have links for Digital Citizen, please use the “for:digitalcitizen” tag. Thanks!

This is a different sort of fluency milestone because its not really related to the Snyder book. I’m going to talk about social bookmarking and discuss a way for everyone to participate in Digital Citizen- without having to worry about speaking out loud or writing massive essays.

Social Bookmarking is like picking “favorites” or bookmarks for your web browser- Internet Explorer, Firefox etc.. But instead of having the bookmarks just sit in your browser, the bookmarks are stored on a website. Through “tags” you place on the bookmark, the bookmark is shared with the rest of the internet. You can send it to your friends, you can subscribe to feeds that feature tags you are interested in or you can just use it to keep track of the things you like.

The social bookmarking tool I’m going to talk about here is del.icio.us. There are of course others- Digg or Furl.

Here is an example of a group of tagged bookmarks. In this case, I’ve tagged them “digitalcitizen” so i can refer to them when i’m writing.

You can also look around at the popular tags through what is called a “Tag Cloud“- just for a hint of what’s popular among those of us who are forced to sit at computers all day. Its almost entirely tech related, for now. This is a great way of just happening upon interesting sites.

So say you find a story you want everyone in the class to find out about. Using the Browser Buttons or Firefox Extension, you can tag the site and give a brief summary of what you’ve found. If you tag it “digitalcitizen”, it will immediately show up here, and as a feed you can subscribe to.

You can also use the tag “for:username” to send a bookmark to a friend. Say I found an article about Wikipedia that I wanted to send to Piotr, and he had a user account on del.icio.us, I could simply tag it as “for:prokonsul” (assuming that was his username) and it would show up in his del.icio.us inbox. You can also send tags directly to me for digital citizen by tagging them “for:spacemountain”, which is my user account on del.icio.us.

I’ll be including the digitalcitizen tag feed on the Digital Citizen site so everyone can see it in action. Give it a try! It sounds a lot more confusing than it really is.