Putting it together

A's class yesterday was incredible - as I remembered. I first took that class in 2002 and I knew so little when I took it, but I remember how it made me feel. To her new students, she is scary and funny and challenging and empowering. Going back now, after having taught elementary school, after having taught college students, her teaching is still incredible to me. Now, I see other levels to what she does, I see more of the how and why. Still, all of that only deepens my appreciation for what she does with her students. Just as it was then, I don't want to miss a single class. There's too much to learn and it's too exciting.

I've attended all three of the classes I'm taking this semester and I have some idea now of how much work each will be. I need to continue working on refining my patterns and habits so that I can complete what I need to this semester. There's a heck of a lot of reading to do and I've got to have the time and the places to do it. There's also a lot of writing to do, not the least of which I want to be online.

I got the old/current version of Semantica installed on my new computer, but I'm intrigued by the description of the new Pro version and its add-ons. Still, I don't know that it's worth the effort of recording information in it. I think, for my purposes, a wiki might make more sense. PBwiki supports tagging of pages now, and that makes a big difference. I feel like I need to be able to create articles, inter-relate the information, and tag them. It's worth investigating other sites, though. The ideal wiki would be created in MediaWiki so that the resulting code would be compatible with other MediaWiki-created pieces. That way, I could move appropriate pieces directly to Wikipedia, for instance.

UPDATE: I like what I see at Wikidot so far. I think I'll try that out.

Personal Learning Tools

I'm interested in developing some kind of a personal wiki to use as a learning log in my program. The same concepts and authors recur in different contexts, in different courses. Also, it's important to be able to inter-relate concepts. I can imagine doing this on Wikipedia, but of course that's not the venue for most of that work. I'd also love to create graphical representations, of the sort that can be created with Inspiration.

I've used Semantica in the past. It's a terrific product, but it has some serious limitations - or it did. I see now on the Semantica site that there is a new version that may do everything I've ever wanted it to do. I'll have to check out its features and see how much it costs. It might be something that I need to buy.