Week 1 - Project Management

Hello World!

San Rafael, California

This is my first entry and it took some time to get here! This project takes me into rich curricular design in an environment of K-8 students and teachers which has ongoing remixing of disciplines, materials and tools. Some call it transdisciplinary learning, others call it project based learning, still others call it inquiry based learning, surely it is all of those blended with the principles of Design Thinking in a classroom where failing rapidly and with low cost is the single most important objective.

I hope to evolve this web space through my learning and found it appropriate to start with "Hello World!" Mercurial, our primary tool for exchanging data with our primary server hosting this web space, is straightforward for the most part. My laptop admin account would not cooperate and when I created a fresh admin account on the laptop, followed the tutorials, corrected some tutorial typos I was pulling, updating, etc. in under five minutes. Fortunately, my journey took hours of tinkering and diving down many a rabbit hole to uncover the inner workings of Mercurial, the Bash shell, SSH to name a few. I learned many new tools and dusted off my aging UNIX command line skills. I have had a myriad of emails and calls with my mentor all to great learning success! The problem lied on my Mac OSX Lion installation and the permissions, which are still not allowing me to function in the Mercurial environment in my main account, having issues with private and public keys. I continue to try new things and come up with ideas, but that rabbit hole, which I find interesting, must wait. For, in the spirit of pressing onward in this project and in this class we must leave behind some rabbit holes to allow the learning to progress in other areas. Rainy days will come and the rabbit hole will be opened again in the future.

This concludes part 1 of entry 1 using HTML in Nano at the CLI of Bash. Part 2, I am sure, will reveal some inner thoughts and a bit about who I am as I pursue a final project idea that is tied both to education, the Fab Lab, and the Grand Challenges of Engineering. My search unfolds with a deeper understanding of the challenges and a search for a tool to enhance these entries, automate my updates, and ease the use of graphic and video media insertions into this journal of my Fab Academy journey.

[website later updated with Sandvox - see week 2]

mtp

© m.t.pearson 2014