benlog

I’ve been more or less involved with people who think, talk, and research about education for a pretty long time now. Since I’ve been slightly on the outside of that, or at least placed my own thinking as somewhat removed from the actual education process, it’s been interesting to observe the changing key words and phrases that are required to be used in such discussions. Some good examples are authentic learning, student artifacts, and there are many more.

I started writing this in order to complain about ajax. When I first discovered that making interactive and dynamic web pages using JavaScript, CSS, and DOM had a new name, I thought it was pretty silly. I remember the DHTML (or do I mean dhtml?) craze, although I never did much with it at the time. That only slightly preceded the tipping point of Flash, and was only slightly less annoying when trying to find Content on a website. I’ve come around quite a bit to accept the ability of a new title for something to have an important effect, although I do still question if the effect in this case is necessarily positive. What I’ve come to realize, though, is that I just don’t like the name. It’s not that it’s a household cleaner, it just sounds bad to me. It’s abrasive or something.

I also planned to complain about blog, which is short for weblog. If I remember correctly, weblog became the new name of web journals sometime around 1999. Just about all of my computer-enthused friends where updating their homepages nearly daily - as a sort of online journal - starting around 1995. I don’t mean to say that in a, “in my day, we walked to school up-hill, both ways,” kind of a thing, just as an example of a thing people did under a different name, that got a new name for no good reason. At least blog sounds better than ajax.

Next up… blogging about ajaxing on my nlog.

I spent some time recently investigating drag and drop with JavaScript. First I found a script for making anything drag-able, which is called DOM-Drag. Then, putting that to work with modifying the sibling nodes of an ordered list is Simon Cozens. Following on his success is Tim Taylor with several examples.

My own adaptation of that is to allow you to move items from one list to another. This could also be expanded from lists to just about any container. The lists are nice because you get good snap-to positioning when you drop your drag, but this combined with those fake floating windows and you could make a File Explorer or Finder simulation and be pretty happy. I haven’t done that yet, but the simple version is over here.

For some reason, this spring, I’ve taken a big interest in curling. I guess I’ve always been somewhat interested in it, at least as a curiousity type thing. Some people think I’m being silly, and so I play up my interest a bit much. Although, I think it could be very fun to go to the 2006 World Curling Championship in Lowell, MA. At the very least, assuming my interest holds, there’s a community education class at the Detroit Curling Club in Ferndale that I hope to take next fall. I picked the wrong time of year to get interested in this.

This is me, posting to my nlog.