TCS Instructional Design

This will be a nice and easy post to get through. Even Mark might enjoy this one! I thought that I should just share a couple of little computer-related things to make your life slightly easier every now and then. Let's start with the Windows Task Manager—you know, that guy you pull up whenever something starts freezing and you want to shut it down quickly? How do you specifically pull up the task manager? That's right, you probably press [Ctrl + Alt + Delete], wait for a bunch of options to come up, and then choose the task manager from the options. Well guess what? Just press [Ctrl + Shift + Esc] , and the task manager will pop up much quicker! Try it. Also, you know how sometimes you are rapidly churning out some document and you type a mistake, but you are typing so fast that you've already typed another 2-3 words? That really stinks, because the mistake was just close enough the where the cursor is that you don't want to bother wasting time to gra

Some of my favorite things about this thing called the world wide interweb are the lecture-based websites like TED, Fora.tv, and RSA. A few years ago, RSA pioneered this concept of accompanying short lectures with whiteboard drawings. It is now a common technique used by the likes of apple, dropbox, etc., in order to demonstrate their "innovative" products. Anyway, I thought that I would share my top five ID-related(ish) RSAnimates with you all. Enjoy!

Okay, this post really will be short and sweet. This is a tip that I learned very recently while collaborating with a SME. Like many or (hopefully) all of you have already done, this SME signed up for an account with dropbox. She downloaded the program onto her work computer and promptly began loading up important documents for the class we are working on together into one of her folders. Then she emailed me and gave me her username and password so that I could access the files. I promptly emailed her back and told her that it would probably be best if she never disseminated that information to anyone. Instead I gave her instructions on how she can simply "share" her folder with me so that I could have access. It is incredibly easy to share dropbox folders, and it is much more preferable than emailing back and forth all the time. This also ensures that as long as she makes changes to the file that is in the dropbox folder, then I will have access to the latest docu

Yea, I know that it has been a while since the last post. I've been busy lately! Anyway, this one will be very short and sweet and perhaps moderately useful every once in a while. We will discuss how to modify the properties of a horizontal rule <hr>. <hr>'s have been revered as rogue html elements for many years now. They don't behave well and often when styled they appear differently based on which browser you are using. So why bother even learning this, you ask? And I answer: I don't know. So let's get into it, shall we? In days past, you could actually style <hr>'s using pure html. You could type something like <hr size="5px" width="90%" align="center"> and it would actually render. But that is all deprecated now. As is becoming the trend with everything web-design related in terms of formatting, you'll want to switch over to CSS for that stuff. Let's begin exploring the possibiliti