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Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Lesson review(4th lesson, 13 april)

The IT lesson for today was on CSS. Though this time, I find that this lesson is the hardest to understand so far as CSS is quite complicated for beginners. But, I think that mr kent did a good job and taught us just enough important points on CSS for us to understand it and finish the assignment without much problems/trouble.

1.About CSS

Firstly, I would like to say that CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet.
Cascading Style Sheet is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML.
CSS is also designed primarily to enable the separation of document content written in HTML or other similar markup languages from document presentation, including elements such as the layout, colour or fonts.
This can also improve contents accesibility, and to enable multiple pages to share formatting.

2.The CSS Challenge

This was an assignment given to us by mr kent and it is more of an add-on to the HTML Challenge that we had done last week. We were supposed to try out CSS by using it to edit the news document that we had done using HTML.
I feel that this was not much of a challenge as the skeleton of the CSS document we were suppose to create was already done for us and that we just needed to copy it from the handouts that were given. The rest however, was just pure experimenting with the elements such as the border of the background around the news document.
The main thing that I have learnt about CSS though, was that CSS is used to enhanced the way of presentation of your documents and also to beautify the documents. It is also convenient as you can edit multiple pages of a website at once to save time and make it less complex or confusing.
One very important thing to note about the assignment is that we have to copy and paste the link into the HTML notepad we had done at the HEAD section to allow the CSS to work. Another thing is that the two documents must be in the same folder or else, the HTML web page would not be able to locate the CSS and so, the whole thing would still be the same old, dull and boring unedited white backgorund.

I found this assignment quite essential to our overall understanding of CSS and its uses. I also reflected that if I had not made the choice of doing this alone, I would not have gotten this personal experience in doing CSS and that would be a very big disadvantage for me in the near future as I'm quite sure there will be a IS test around the next or next 2 weeks.
I would also like to take this oppurtunity to thank mr kent for creating this assignment for us and doing a good job at teaching us about CSS.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Lesson review(3rd lesson, 6 april)

This week's IS lesson was on HTML.
Personally, I feel that it's something quite new and foreign to most of us. Nonetheless, it was still as fun as the previous IS lessons.

1.About HTML

As we have been taught by mr kent, HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. Basically, it is a very popular "language" to create websites with. Think of HTML as another language, just like English and Mandarin.
So in other words, HTML is a computer language devised to allow website creation. These websites can then be viewed by anyone else connected to the internet. From what I've been taught by mr kent, I can say that it's relatively easy to learn and HTML is also very powerful in what it allows you to create.

2.The HTML Challenge

This was the assignment given to us and it's suppose to allow us to have a taste of how to create simple websites with HTML.
Well, for this assgnment, I didn't have any difficulty doing it as I had my partner to work with.
First, we revised all that was taught in class about html, the tags, how to link pictures and websites and stuff.
After that, it was all easy for us already since the indirect answers are all provided in the handouts, and we just had to spend some time revising it over again to ensure our website looks sound. We learnt a whole lot of stuff about html, example, the absolute and relative URLs.
To summarise it, absolute url brings you to another website from the link given by the website you are visiting, while relative url brings you to a page that is also from the same website(e.g. page 1,2,3, etc.)
We also learnt about the different tags. Something that we found out that is very important to note is that there are tags that come in pairs and tags that don't(single). So for the pairs, it is very essential to remember to put the ending tag after you've written or done anything after it's beginning pair, as it would most probably not work if you don't.


Altogether, I think that I'm starting to get very interested in IT as I thought that the HTML that we've just learnt was very, very intriguing and enjoyable at the same time. I hope that mr kent also had fun teaching this to us and that he would continue to teach us more of such things in the future.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Lesson review(2nd lesson, 30 march)

Today's IS lesson was even more interesting than the last.
We were supposed to learn some IT-related stuff on a forum from mr kent's website. I had learnt so much...

1. Decide blog or website?(register no. 23-34)

For this forum subject that i participated in, I thought it was rather interesting "debating" this subject on the forum with my friends. Mostly, I learnt that blogs are generally very easy to create and that it takes only a matter of seconds to do so. However, a succesful, well-customized and well-designed blog requires lots of time and knowledge of IT to make. Whereas, websites require some basic programming knowledge to create. But, the very good advantage of websites over blogs, is that for blogs, you have to post multiple posts and update it everyday to maintain and attract the number of followers on your blogs while for websites, you only need to do one well-designed one, and post some information about whatever your web's subject is on, and it will automatically attract more people to view your websites everyday and that you only need to update it around twice a month as most of the information are for references and knowledge.
So, I commented on the forum that I would rather learn how to create a website first, then use the followers on my website and bring them to a blog that I would create later on so as to ensure that the followers on my blog won't keep decreasing everyday as I know that I would not have the time to post on my blog everyday.

2. Social impact of new media(register no. 1-11)

As for this section of the forum, we were supposed to choose one other topic other than the one that we are supposed to do and reply to one of the comments made by our classmates and I chose this, Social imapct of new media.
I also chose to reply to the comment made by my classmate Darryl. He said " if we rely on these machines completely, we shall weaken and become lazy."
On the forum, I replied by saying I disagree with it. The big reason behind this, is that I feel that we're only merely getting help from these high-tech. devices to make our lives easier. These machines are just like our domestic helpers or maids, they are just helping us to do some daily chores, and the main reason for people nowadays to employ maids is that they totally don't have the time to do these daily chores as they have much more important things like their career and work to put their mind into instead of, for example, sweeping the floor of their own apartments. So, I conclude that we only use these devices as we have to focus on other more important stuff other than our daily chores as they can help us to do them.


Altogether, I feel that I have gained more knowledge on the technologies that are available currently and learned a lot more about IT for after this valuable lesson.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Lesson review(1st lesson, 23 march)

WOW!!
it's only the first IS lesson for the term and I cant even believe that we are already learning so much stuff. I thought that mr. kent appear friendly too , he doesn't scolds us seriously, or maybe at all.
Well, these are the few things out of the "infintite" things that I have learnt for this lessson -

1. Web 1.0, Web 2.0.
I thought that this was something very important to learn. Apart from the only video that mr kent has provided us with for the explanation, I have gone to do some research on it to further clarify my doubts. Basically, web 1.0 is sort of like a "read-only" web, which means that the visitors only go to that website to search for information and read it- that's all. So, the really big, bad point is that web 1.0 allowed little or no users interection or content contribution. This way though, the admin of that website would be burdened with the work to provide information for all the other users without their help. *whoah, talk about being hardworking*.....
But, on the other hand, the current web 2.0 is the "read-and-write" web. Examples are facebook, twitter, myspace, or even blogs. If you don't know any of these websites yet(which is quite impossible), I shall give a brief description of them. Generally, these social networking sites allows the users to interect with one another as much as they want either by chatting on the websites or even sharing photos, images and other documents. Well, if you still don't get it, the easiest example is youtube. You see, youtube depends on the users to submit or upload videos to the website for it to work. Then, other users can watch their videos and make a comment or a video response. Now we can all see that web 2.0 is a much efficient and more interesting way to allow us to "connect" with other people around the globe easily.

2.The 57 slides (what the heck ?!)
At 1st, we all thought that this was some kind of crazy long lecture for us. But surprisingly though, it only took mr kent like,what?- at most 30 mins to go through it all? Personally, I feel that these slides were probably one of the things that made me "out-of-reason" , suddenly interested in IT. You might think that 57 slides in 1 powerpoint presentation seems scary, but it turned out that the slides were just very easy and brief(and important) information that only required less than half an hour to explain. One of the most useful knowledge I have gained from this is about the IP address and the url and their differences.(IP address is the code of numbers that are always displayed when your computer is loading the website, while url is just the web address. e.g. http://www.hci.edu.sg/)

Finally I would like to say that Mr. Kent's lesson was very interesting and that it made us interested to learn more of the stuff that he's gonna teach for the rest of the lessons. I guess now, that we are officially off to a start of an exciting and "exhilarating" journey of IT !!! * cant wait*