In the name of design I started my practical (home) exam in Mulitmedia-journalism a Tuesday morning in December. Inspired over the years by a number of slick and shining splash-screens, I knew that I wanted to design a cool hoover (vacuum cleaner) illustration.

Our assignment was to design a website and fill with content for the support group: Menn mot hybelkaniner – Men against dust collecting at home. We had to interview people, come up with tips and techniques for keeping the house clean. Check out a copy of the webpages here on stepheno.net .

I am sorry that all the pages are in Norwegian, and as this was my first Flash video conversion I am not sure how fast they load.

Adding some multimedia content to the more traditional webpages using interactive accessible video. The pages were all designed in Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 (which also kept me stuck at school for the software) since I did not have time to code it all raw. (I normally prefer raw-coding instead of WYSIWYG, since I feel you have much more more control.) Considering the site was created in less than I week I am quite pleased with the result, although doing it all over, or with a couple more hours of time I would have made a number of changes.

A couple of my Norwegian friends did at some point need a dictionary to figure out a couple of my written words here. So I was pleasantly affirmed with the results of the blog readability test: My pages have a level of education required to understand my “blog” comparing to Junior High.

Take the test for your blog here. (Warning some loan advertising will try and make its way to your blog if you use their recommended code.)
(Via Vianho)

When you don’t actively use the knots you may have learned years ago in school, on field trips or summer camps, you might forget them. If you are like most people you do fine with the basic overhand knot. Del.icio.us bumped up this knot link: How to Tie the 10 Most Useful Knots.

So perhaps if you might want to try a new knot or two, there are the supposedly 10 most useful knots: Shoe laces anyone?

In December I wrote Study Effectively with Noise and Stu.dicio.us. However compared to actual studying for a quiz, test or exam it might not help you all that much. Quizlet on the other hand seems like a good cramming solution, finding its niche in the good tradition of “virtual” flash cards.

Quizlets mission is to make learning vocabulary become more than just another “chore”. And from my first couple minutes of playing around with somebody else’s set of vocabulary (somebody’s SAT preperations actually…), it has given me a good impression. It has even given me an appetite to use Quizlet when my next cramming sessions resume in a couple of weeks.
The whole site and fashionable Web 2.0 solution is created by Andre Sutherland a high school student.

(Via Digg)

Semester exams are in progress, and you might be studying, retreating to place of peace and calmness. Noise in general is disturbing and for optimal studying you might even put ear muffles on, to block out disturbing noises.

In a Wired interview with Professor Bart Kosko from the University of Southern California, Kosko explains that noise could actually enhance learning.
To block out disturbances there is always pink noise, which masks out disturbing noises. But beware of lengthy use, as your hearing might get tired and worn by it.

It might be a little late for this semester exam, but it doesn’t hurt trying stu.dicio.us out. At a first glance it may look overwhelming. But it looks like a handy tool to keep track of notes and your class schedules. And best of all online, during classes. Stu.dicio.us integrates Wikipedia and Google to automatically link highlighted words. In addition you can compare notes with other students who attend the same school and classes. (Apparently an account at Facebook gives you even more possibilities.)