Update: For the latest information on the Web Literacy standard work, head to http://mzl.la/weblitstd
Today we had our inaugural Web Literacy standard community call. I’ll not be posting the recordings of these here, but rather on a new blog we’ve created specifically for the purpose:
Do join us next week if you can! You’ll always be able to find the latest details of the Web Literacy standard work on the Mozilla wiki. 🙂
(Email and RSS subscribers will need to click through to see the change)
I’ve felt for a while that I should make this blog better suited to mobile interfaces and, in particular, touchscreen devices. This is known as responsive web design and I’ve been particularly impressed with Microsoft’s ‘Metro’ design language leading to a tiled approach on Windows smartphones. To my eyes it seems streets ahead of Apple’s skeuomorphism.
Yesterday, when I was browsing architecture blogs and came across the Contemporist site, it reminded me of that clean, touchscreen-friendly approach:
I did something I always do when I see blog themes I like: right-clicked to ‘View Source’ as you can tell which blog theme is being used. Judging by the CSS it’s a custom job, meaning I couldn’t simply download the same theme.
That was a shame, but it spurred me on to look for Metro-inspired blog themes. I was looking for something with a tiled, fairly squarish look but that didn’t scream Microsoft. Beautiful though it is, the Subway WordPress theme (from €39) was out of the question. I’d have looked like a Microsoft fanboi:
I also found the MetroStyle theme ($45), which I rejected for having too many boxes at the top:
I downloaded and installed the WP Metro theme (£FREE), but I had trouble making it look decent with my content:
In the end, after considering signing up to a course to get the Anaximander theme, I decided to pay $35 for a WordPress theme entitled Metro:
Like many premium themes it comes with an extremely easy-to-use configuration dashboard in addition to the usual WordPress options. Nevertheless, old habits die hard and I delved into the CSS to tinker about a bit!
I hope you like what you see, and if you want to see the ‘responsiveness’ in action, either resize your browser window or visit this site on a mobile device. It’s only my first attempt – I’ll be tinkering around making improvements here and there over the next few weeks.
Any feedback is gratefully received!
Back in 2009 when I was Director of e-Learning of The Northumberland Church of England Academy I started tracking my own activities.
Using a private WordPress-powered blog with the P2 theme, I quickly logged what I was up to, adding tags as I went. Below is the tag cloud after one month of using the system as a Senior Leader in an newly-minted Academy:
As you can see, the following tags were prevalent (I don’t think I included teaching in there for some reason!):
The above screenshot is from yesterday, soon after finishing my two-year stint as Researcher/Analyst at JISC infoNet. Apart from changing my avatar and tweaking the colour scheme, what’s changed?
Finally, you can see that wiki and Skype are small but significant in the tag cloud. I’ve never worked for an organisation that had better knowledge management and procedures than JISC infoNet. The internal wiki had everything you needed to work effectively and was an active, living repository of information. Skype is used extensively throughout JISC, sometimes for calls, sometimes for ‘backchanneling’.
If you’d done something similar which tags would YOU expect to show up?
