Inspiration.

to teach = to inspire.

That’s my view of education. As mentioned in earlier blog entries, I believe education always results in actions. Practical. Not only head knowledge that cause paralysis.

To teach simply means to take the first (and maybe the second) step with your student so s/he knows how to walk and eventually run. Get your student experience what you’re so passionate about. So s/he can adopt that passion for him/herself.
Seeing one’s student run and dance is worthwhile. It’s inspiring.

Inspiration.

I started giving 2 private lessons in the past week. The first one is in html (basic web design) and the second one is in flash (actionscripting).

Learning is another form of communication; an intense communication where one tries to communicate the “how to” more than just the “what” like information that we get from the news. As stated in my earlier blog, one essential part of learning is knowing how to apply/use the knowledge that one has received: the next step.

I’ve always been interested in the role of technology in learning. In the past few of years, more and more communication tools have been invented that make virtual office and online collaboration possible. I believe many of those communication tools (i.e. ipod, SMS, IM, wiki, etc.) can be used to make learning process more effective.

But as with other application of technology, one has to realize that technology is not the end, it’s the mean. That is what I discovered this past week.

I thought I could just put all the information and/or demo online and anyone who’s willing to learn can just read and follow my online instruction and teach him/herself.

From the face-to-face interaction that I had, I discovered that learning process has many facets. One or two technologies cannot replace the effectiveness of in-class interaction. Based on this, I’m looking forward to employing more interactive communication tools in the learning process which hopefully can create the kind of interaction that yield the same result as in-class interaction.

This demo shows how to use few basic tools in Flash. Most of the tools here are similar to tools from other design applications like Illustrator, Photoshop, Freehand, etc. I created this demo to compliment the blog entry about getting started in flash that I posetd few days ago.

This demo was created in Macromedia Captivate. That application really makes creating demo (relatively) effortless. I created this demo in about an hour, including time to tweak. Obviously, this demo still need a little more work, but I think it’s good enough to do what it’s supposed to.

Here’s the link to view the demo : Flash Drawing demo 01

Making things as easy as possible for your users.

• Don’t make them think
• Don’t make them spend extra click
• Don’t make them wait too long
• Don’t ask too much questions
• Don’t confuse them with unnecessary visual or information

In other words, spend extra step to allow users to spend one less step to get what they want from what you design.

I had my first teaching session on Monday.

A friend of mine introduced me to alady who would like to learn how to set up her own web site. So we agreed on doing a private lesson. Two hours per session, once a week for two months. Monday was the first session.

Before the lesson I gave her some assignments which I thought were very straightforward.  I asked her to review intro to HTML and try out various html tags from webmonkey.

In my mind, I saw her coming to “class” with sample of html files.

To my surprise, she came with this question: “what do I do with these (html tags)?”

She had no idea where to start.

She knew the tags and what they were supposed to do because she did ask me questions about some of the tags, but she had no idea what to do with that knowledge.

This makes me wonder about learning process. I used to think that learning is accumulating knowledge, but seems like knowledge is worthless if it can’t be applied to actions.

Perhaps this is where interactive media can be utilized. To add the “action” element to the learning process. Providing the guided first step which will inspire the student to take the second, third and fourth steps outside the class environment.

If you’ve never touched flash and have always wanted to learn, here are the first two steps for the journey:

1. Go to Flash product page on Adobe site and download the trial version. Since most people are not sure of what they want to do, free trial is probably a wise way to go in case you discover that it’s not for you.
2. Get familiar with flash drawing tools. Tizag.com has a really good introduction to each tool, but of course the best way to get familiar with them is to use them. Find a drawing and try to re-create it in flash using the drawing tools.

These are two baby steps that will lead to many more. If you’re ready to move on, of course after you know how to draw things, you want to make them do things: animation!

Here are few things that you should do research on if you can’t wait for my next blog entry for the next step:

• symbol vs instance
• timeline/playhead
• keyframe

I have read and understood the concept and purpose of AJAX for a while now, but never really got a chance to try it for myself until then.

Last friday I finally rolled up my sleeves and got dirty with AJAX because I needed to create a prototype for the next version of interface that we’re going to build for our client.

The request form of this interface will allow users to include past projects into the new one. So that they know exactly what they’re going to get, we want to give them a “preview” of what’s inside the past projects.

Here’s the result: interface prototype

The “contentLYR” div is the placeholder of the content that gets loaded “on-demand”. On initial load, that div is empty and it gets populated as user interacts with different parts of the interface,
It was much simpler than what I expected, thanks to the really clear tutorial from DHTML Nirvana that I featured on earlier blog: AJAX 101.

I finally got around to set up my own design class: web design 101
It’s a basic web design class which will cover the building blocks of building a simple html site with the objective of giving students good overview of how web technology works and hands-on experience in building a simple static site.

I’ve always been interested in education, particularly in using technology to facilitate learning which I believe is the heart of what I do professionally: communicating concepts through series of well-planned experiences.

This class is free and will be run asynchronously, allowing students to learn at their own pace.