Peer learning.

I have been a student and now I am a teacher. Formal learning in classroom situations is important for many but often I think the best learning experiences and the most memorable are those we learn with and from our peers. When ideas and communication on subjects of mutual interest  are shared, discussed and debated true learning, learning with meaning occurs.

At the moment I am an online student in the Blogging 101 course run by the Daily Post.

I am completing a variety of tasks and challenges over the next few weeks, all of which to date have taught me new things or encouraged me to put various things into action or challenged me to make changes which I feel have resulted in some great improvements on my blog. Feedback from my peers has been meaningful and constructive.

Today’s challenges was to blog about a topic that was raised by a fellow blogger and had you interested enough to comment on at the time.

Lesson learned: the hard way By Carolyn aka Skip taught me a very valuable lesson about uploading media and the 3GB limit on our media folder, if you just have the standard free package. I won’t go into full details about Carolyn’s post as I  encourage you to check it yourself but basically she hit the limit!

I had been pondering on this limit myself for a while as I have hit the 2GB zone and I am a fairly photo heavy blog. I hadn’t quite understood the full implications and consequences of hitting the limit untill I read Carolyn’s post. She got me to take action as she points out there is no extra available space unless you are willing to upgrade. Personally I am not at that stage yet.

Thanks to Carolyn I realised I should be resizing my images to much smaller files before uploading them, so all media from now on is a quarter of the original size! I have also started to resize old photos one at a time on my computer and am inserting the smaller ones into the relevant post before deleting the large ones from both the post and my media folder. Believe me this is a time consuming long term project! If reading Carolyn’s or my post helps you avoid this we will all be the happier for it!

So peer to peer, fellow beginners and maybe even experienced bloggers. While we definitely learn by our mistakes we can also learn from others especially when they are kind enough to share them and suggest constructive solutions. I am taking Carolyn’s lesson on board and am resizing all pictures as of yesterday before uploading. I think this will be of use to many others as well. It may save you a lot of time and angst!

The hint I would like to share with you with regard to photo management is folders on your own personal computer. Although resizing, reloading and deleting the large files from my wordpress media file is going to take time, it has been made easier by the fact that I have a blogging file in my photo folder on my PC. Each time I select a few photos for a post they go into their own file with the name of the post and category as the file name. It has made it easy to go back and find the photos I need to resize.

Here’s to keeping communication channels open, sharing our successes and mistakes and learning new things everyday!

Yoroshiku Onegai Shimasu

Leanne

Post Scrpt

Since posting this Trudy of http://www.rendezvousennewyork.com/ told me about Gimp which is a program that allows you to resize photos in batches rather than one at a time. It has being a marvel. It took me a wee while to set up as I had to add a plugin which was a new technical adventure for me but I found a very good tutorial in You tube and now that it is up and running I use it with every post to down size photos before uploading.