Learning, technology, and other fun stuff
Added just now to your user profile is an “About Me” section. You can use this however you want. Some people may want to describe their learning goals. Or, if you’re primarily teaching a class, you can use it to describe your background so that students can learn more about you.
The field supports Markdown, so you can get fancy with it and include links to stuff on the web if you want to.
If you’ve been paying attention lately, you probably noticed that the home page has had a different design each day for the past few days. I’ve been experimenting with different designs, and I’ve finally settled on the current version for now. Sorry if it was confusing for a bit.
The second recent change involves the URLs for the classes. There used to be two date parameters in the URL (/class/my-class/2010/may) because I thought it would be necessary to do that when I originally designed the site. It turns out that’s not going to be needed so I’ve redirected all of those links to point to newer ones that don’t use a date. You probably won’t even notice that change, but I wanted to make everyone aware of it. Any old links pointing to a class and its sub-pages still work, and are 301 redirected to the new link.
Although most of my blog posts have been administrative, I do hope to start writing about learning, education, technology, and more interesting things soon.
There’s now improved activity and profile pages.
The activity page now shows a snippet of the latest assignment or forum post:
And the user profile page shows a list of all the work you’ve completed along with a snippet of the assignment. Here are some examples:
- kday (me)
- shaggorama
- pbr
- dtmetz
I find that these updated profiles are a great way to quickly see the work that a user has done, and to keep track of the work I’ve completed so far.
I also was a little surprised that it’s been 3 weeks since I last did a homework assignment, so it’s encouraging me to get back at my Bash Scripting class.
Feel free to share any feedback you have on the new changes.
I just stumbled on this post with a video from the Khan Academy founder. It’s a great inside look on what drives him to put together his video lectures on over 1,000 academic subjects.
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2329-sal-khan-and-the-khan-acadamy-to-the-rescue
There are already several classes here on Curious Reef related to OpenCourseWare content. Some classes focused on Khan’s lectures would be great too (they’re Creative Commons licensed). If any of his subjects is interesting to you, feel free to create your own class on Curious Reef around the content. It would be a great way to track progress and work with others.
