September 29th 2007
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Blogging, Educational, Life
University is something that wouldn’t have even crossed my mind a couple years ago. I was concentrating on GCSEs and having a good time too much to think that far into the future. I know it’s a cliché but time does fly. By the end of this calendar year, I will have a good idea of which Universities I have been accepted into, conditionally or not. It kind of scares me how fast we’re all thrown into this higher education business. It scares me even more because I’m the first in my family to actually finish school, let alone go to University.
Going into higher education isn’t something you shouldn’t, and I don’t, take lightly. It’s an expensive and hard experience but one that has the potential to reward you with the best three or four years of your life so far. Going into University is something many people have questions about and no matter how many UCAS conferences your school take you to or how many open days you attend, I guarantee there are some questions that can never be answered until you experience it first hand.
Making Choices
You’ve had a minimum of eleven years to decide what you want to pursue (and spend a considerable amount of money on) at University. My own experience has been somewhat tumultuous. For many years I wanted to pursue a career in IT and it seems that fate has made sure I’ve the experience to do so. About a year ago, my attention was grabbed and has since been held by the realm of physics. I love it. Physics has excited me ever since I was taught the ‘good stuff’, as it were. I got full marks on most of my Science modules at GCSE and made sure I achieved a top A* in it as I was only doing Double Science and not Triple Science, something I do regret (but am glad I got an A*, so was worth it).
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July 23rd 2007
Educational, Film/TV, Life
I was perousing around the iTunes store the other day looking for some science and IT based podcasts when I decided to click on a small link that said ‘iTunes U’. It was a spontaneous decision - one of very few I make - and has probably been one of the most fulfilling clicks I have ever made on my computer.
It makes a welcome surprise that, for me, overshadows the absence of TV content on the British and European iTunes stores - but that makes for another rant post. iTunes U is a way for university students - or anyone for that matter - to watch lectures on a number of subjects whenever they want. I’ve been watching a lecture every night for four days now.
Long Distance Learning
The service allows you to download video podcasts of your subjects from a number of American educational institutes and watch them on your 
computer and/or video iPod. Over the past few days I’ve been watching lectures on ‘Introductory Astronomy’ from Michigan Tech University with Prof. Robert Nemiroff. The lectures that I’ve watched have been quite interesting and, although recorded from September last year, up to date. The lecturer, Prof. Robert Nemiroff, is one of the people responsible for writing the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) descriptions as well.
I have found that in the first five lectures to be extremely interesting and it was funny to see the class slowly decrease in size as more and more people found out they didn’t have to attend the lectures. Some of the content was pretty basic while some went into more depth such as the lectures on black holes - this was very interesting and I learnt a lot more that I would have at my current A-Level course. I must warn you that Prof. Nemiroff attempts to inject some humour into the lectures and if I’m honest, fails the majority of the time but you may appreciate it more than me.
Are U Ready?
I don’t know the figures of the uptake on this service but as a British A-Level student it’s been interesting to learn things on the side while I have some spare time. There are other more hardcore Physics courses on there and a host of other subjects that you can subscribe to. 
The list of institutions that provide these courses seems to have increased since I first laid eyes on the service a few days ago and I only hope that more continue the trend.
Personally, I don’t agree with courses that don’t require attendance at lectures as I think that’s half the reason you go to University but I love the fact that these places are recording lectures and allowing people from around the world to learn more about their interests.
I know it may be a stretch to ask Windows users to download iTunes but do it anyway, for me. Check out the library of lecture-casts under iTunes U in the iTunes store and give it a go. Download 7 video podcasts and watch one every day for a week. Give us a comment.
Oh, and thanks to Derby University for supplying the iPod.
February 14th 2007
Educational, Programming, Tutorials
My lessons are now into their second week and we’ve still got a way to go yet. This week we will be looking into IF and WHILE statements, $_GET, $_POST and we’ll also look into arrays near the end of the week.
Yesterday we did a simple lesson on $_GET and how to get values from a URL. Today another simple lesson on $_POST and the confusion that comes with it. I introduced you to $_POST in last Friday’s big special and today we are going into much more detail.
Lesson 8: $_POST and Forms
As I showed in Friday’s round up, we use $_POST to collect the values of submitted form data. Some confusion that I had for a while was whether or not to use the name or id attribute in the form fields to let $_POST work. I’ll settle this now - for $_POST to collect the data from the form fields, you need to assign a name attribute to them. The id can be used for labels, CSS classes and other things. Here’s a sample form form.php:
<form action="process.php" method="post">
First Name: <input type="text" name="fname" size="25" />
Last Name: <input type="text" name="lname" size="25" />
Over 16? <input type="radio" name="age" value="1" /> Yes <input type="radio" name="age" value="0" /> No
<input type="submit" value="submit form" />
</form>
In the above form we would get 3 values returned through $_POST. These would be the first name, last name and over 16 values. Here’s how we’d capture these values. This file would be process.php, as determined in the form’s first line:
<?php
$fname = $_POST['fname'];
$lname = $_POST['lname'];
$age = $_POST['age']; //either 1 or 0
$name = $fname.” “.$lname; //stitch the first and last names together
?>
Pretty simple to get the form fields’ values. On Friday we are going to combine everything and a lot of form fields to create a signup form which will include this, arrays and a bit of validation.
February 13th 2007
Educational, Programming, Tutorials
My lessons are now into their second week and we’ve still got a way to go yet. This week we will be looking into IF and WHILE statements, $_GET, $_POST and we’ll also look into arrays near the end of the week.
In the previous lesson we went into detail about IF and WHILE statements and in Friday’s big round up I introduced you to $_POST and $_GET. Today we’re going to look further at $_GET and what it’s used for.
Lesson 7: $_GET and URLs
When we have a URL that includes the values of certain variables, we can use this to get the values. Say we had a URL like this:
http://www.eop.org.uk/index.php?name=sunny%20man&cool=yes
We use $_GET to grab the values of the name and cool variables. Obviously this isn’t a secure way to transport variables around your site - we’ll look at a more secure way later on into the tutorials - this is the most simple way.
<?php
$name = $_GET['name']; //$name = “sunny man”
$cool = $_GET[’cool’]; //$cool = “yes”
?>
Tomorrow I’ll be talking about $_POST and how it can be confusing when to use the name and id attributes on form field inputs.
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