Serendipity35

Professional learning (still called professional development or PD by some) has gone through a lot of changes since the Internet hit us. Virtual or online learning, webinars, the MOOC and Personal Learning Networks have all been covered on this blog over the years. 

An Edcamp is a kind of unconference designed for teachers by teachers.  Unconferences are not like the traditional conferences that many of us attend. The usual call for proposals and schedules set up months in advance by the organizers are not a part of the process. The bulk of the agenda is created by the participants at the start of the event. The events are usually held in a school building on a Saturday or during a school break with the district donating the space. There are also very few person-in-front-of-the-room sessions and more discussions and hands-on sessions.

All these events are based on the principles of connected and participatory learning. And that makes me think about how this model makes sense for at least some of the professional learning we do with faculty or employees. Edcamps and unconferences have a strong presence in K-12 than in higher ed and I'm not sure why. They attempt to bring teachers together to talk about the things that matter most to them. The closest model I have for this are some of the Teaching, Learning & Technology days we have offered at NJIT since 2000.

Sponsors are still a part of Edcamps and unconferences as a way to provide money for materials and refreshments, but they may not have special sessions or the tables and booths we are used to seeing. Oh yeah, these unconferences, as with our TLT events, are free.

On the edcamp.org website, they give the criteria for an Edcamp as:
- free
- non-commercial and conducted with a vendor-free presence
- hosted by any organization interested in furthering the Edcamp mission
- made up of sessions that are determined on the day of the event
- events where anyone who attends can be a presenter
- reliant on the “law of two feet” that encourages participants to find a session that meets their needs

How might this model work for training? Dare I ask if it could even work in some courses? Is it too unplanned for those of us in academia used to highly organized events? Too many unknowns?

This blog has passed another anniversary (or is it a birthday?) today. Since the first post in 2006 ("Why Serendipity35?") as a test of blogging software, we have now amassed 3,133 entries. 

Sometimes posting these articles seems like throwing out a message in a bottle because I don't usually know who might find it or read it. Tim shut off commenting a few years ago because he got tired of the hundreds and (on some bad days) thousands of spam hits. But we have our stats and the blog with its wagging long tail still gets a lot of hits. Last month Serendipity35 had 1,024,502 hits, so even allowing for some spammers and bots, someone is reading.

So, I'll keep writing. I do want to hit double digits in blog age.

You might have heard the term responsive web design. It is generally associated with designing to give an optimal user experience on all devices.

Since more people may be viewing your website on tablets, smartphones (or just feature phones), and large TV screens than are looking at it on the more traditional computer and laptop screens, it has become incumbent on designers to learn responsive web design.

It is something that anyone who is involved in the process of creating websites should know something about. That means more than just developers and coders. Marketers, social media workers, UX (user experience) and UI (user interaction) designers all need to understand how a site works on other screens and with their users.

Of course, it is more than screen size, but also about improving the user experience based on how we use devices and maximizing their capabilities. If your website can be viewed in a vertical and horizontal format, how can you maximize that?  What does a touchscreen or a retina display allow you to do? Or, on the bad side, if you do not design with all of that in mind, how bad will your site look on other screens?

All this means that you start with content strategy before creating a visual design. (It turns out most designers start with the default design being for the narrowest screens.) A lot of this is still using HTML elements and CSS properties, plus media queries to display different CSS styles based on a device’s viewport width. And you need to rethink all the "old" design elements like images, typography, and navigation.

I also like to think of responsive design as meaning that the designer responds to the needs of the client and their users. That is an area that takes more than tech skills. It seems a bit insulting to call those "soft skills" but sometimes they are viewed as softer than than the hard coding types pf skills.

Designers use performance optimization techniques to make sites lighter and faster, especially on mobile browsers. The answer is not to design two websites – one for mobile and one for larger displays - but to have the site know what type of device is being used and adjust automatically.

I'm no pro at this and I am still learning responsive web design. and how to think outside the desktop box. As with many things in technology, we all need to be, like these new designs, flexible and wanting to deliver the best experience to our users no matter who they are and how they interact with us. That is why you will also hear about having a  responsive design "workflow."

My first experience was making a demo site in Blogger using a responsive web template and then studying the code. Those tools have responsive elements because it is getting easier and easier for people to build websites (including responsive ones) using WYSIWYG tools like Blogger or WordPress without knowing much about HTML, CSS, or responsive design. But it definitely helps to know some of that.  There are plenty of templates for sites like a portfolio site to showcase your work that includes the ability to display an image carousel and that automatically adjusts according to the device. If you resize your browser window or switch devices, you can see how that template responds.



Want to learn some responsive design on your own?  Try these two titles: Learning Responsive Web Design: A Beginner's Guide and Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3

It was on January 28, 1754 that the word "serendipity" was first coined. It was long before this blog and yet we feel a kind of connection. We like that it means "the phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for" and that it was listed by a U.K. translation company as one of the English language's 10 most difficult words to translate. Easy definitions are never any fun.

Back in 1754 the writer Horace Walpole wrote in a letter to a friend that he came up with the word after a fairy tale he once read, called "The Three Princes of Serendip."

"as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of."

Those three princes were from modern-day Sri Lanka and "serendip" is the Persian word for the island nation off the southern tip of India, Sri Lanka.

I was reminded on today's entry on the Writers Almanac with Garrison Keillor that many inventions can be attributed to some serendipity, including Kellogg's Corn Flakes, Charles Goodyear's vulcanization of rubber, inkjet printers, Silly Putty, the Slinky, chocolate chip cookies, Fleming discovering penicillin. Viagra had been developed to treat hypertension and angina pectoris, but turned out to be better at something else, just as the discoveries of radioactivity, X-rays, and infrared radiation all turned up when researchers were looking for something else.

Brother Tim and I had our reasons for choosing the name back in 2005 and, as we approach our 10 year anniversary, if you sometimes find valuable or agreeable things not sought for by reading these posts, that would please these two modern day princes of serendip very much.