1. Pixel Display

   I have observed that there is always a difference on the amount of pixel being displayed - at least one pixel. Nothing can be perfect, and looking at the same website on each browser, you get to see no difference at all. But when you get a closer look at it (in between frames or image spaces), you will see that pixel difference.
   
   Sometimes, due to the browser's different pixel-fetching, arrangment of letters in a paragraph also differs. Some of the letters, especially if it contains hypernation, moves up-down as you shift from IE7 to FX.

   • 1.1. Font Display

     I guess this is probably due to the pixel display of the two different browsers. In Internet Explorer 7, you can see up-close the "emboss-styled" texts. You can easily spot the difference if you are using Firefox's IE Tab Add-On. Upon switching from one tab to another (from IE7 to FX), you can see how the font's display changes from "embossed" to "un-embossed" states.

   • 1.2. Horizontal and Vertical Spacing Display

     This is again, probably due to the pixel display of two different browsers. As I have mentioned above, opening same sites on two different browsers would only seem to display the same buttons, frames and image spaces. However, upon close inspection, you can easily spot the difference by using Firefox's IE Tab Add-On. For super-techies, you can see the difference by overlaying screenshots (e.g. Photoshop CS3) or by manual screenshot pixel measurment to measure the exact distance or pixel difference.

2. Loading Time

   There is definitely a difference between the two browsers in terms of loading time. Since loading time testing is included in our procedures, I was able to observe how Internet Explorer's loading time is much quicker than that of Firefox. On average, there is around 2 seconds per page difference - given that things or elements are on its usual or normal behaviour.

3. CMS Compatibility

   A Content Management System (or CMS) is a program used to create a framework for content of a website. Our company is one of those who are using this tool; and one thing I observed is that some of the functions created (specifically buttons), doesn't work well with Firefox. During one of my testing, I experienced non-functional buttons. I thought at first that this was one of our developers mistake - but later found out that it was due to the tool's incompatibility with Firefox. It was explained to me that some of the heavy-coded scripts embedded on the CMS cannot be properly read by Firefox. But so far in IE7, things worked out just fine.

I am not saying nor implying that one browser is much better than the other. My point here is to simply share my web tester experiences with the two browser giants.

Now my question is, why can't they just follow strict standards (or atleast in proximity)? I mean, I've read some articles in which these two browsers have corresponding or equivalent add-ons and other stuff, but how come in terms of the things I've mentioned above, there is really a difference? It would have been much easier on everyone else's part -- users, developers, designers, and as testers, as well.

When learners enroll on a course regardless of their locations on the globe, the virtual classroom remains the meeting place where learning activities are carried out according to the convenience of time and pace of individual learner.

Pedagogical approach

The virtual learning classroom is designed according to the pedagogical approach for the course but most times most of the LMS and CMS are designed for possibilities for the application of any of the known pedagogical approaches namely (Instructivist, Constructivist and Socio-Constructivist Pedagogical approaches).

Course design, LMS and Requirements

The approach that course designer has in mind dictates the software of choice. In all, the best software may not be suitable if it does not meet the requirements for a particular course. For instance, if instructivist approach is selected the best expected features of the software should allow learner to gain access to the materials as scheduled by the tutor with minimal interaction which in most cases is two-way communication.

The learner may schedule synchronous discussion with the tutor if the software provides for chatting in addition to exchanges of information between him and the tutor by email. A constructivist approach may demand more features for the software designer to include in the LMS.

In this case more features like possibilities for upload of documents, interaction between learners thereby allowing many-to-many communication are few examples. In this case there is an opportunity for collaboration and group activities which many researches attested to as an enhancement to learning. In any of these approaches the learner is the central focus and his roles differ in that in the former he is a recipient of information while in the later is a "creator" and user of information.

The third approach as mentioned above involves more active group learning, participation and activities lessening the roles of the tutor to a "mere" guide and so software designer will have to add features that will allow more interactivity and freedom for learner to choose between alternatives and what to learn, scope of learning, and schedule activities according to convenience which is why this approach is regarded as leaning more towards 3A learning ( Learning Anywhere, Anytime and At learner pace) which is otherwise referred to as learning at convenience, time and pace.

Personal Experiences

I recently participated in an online course organized by the branch of United Nations University named Global Virtual University in Japan (UNU/GVU). The course is an online tutoring course and online course material development otherwise known as Instructional designer course. The course is an example in an international practice in collaborative activities where institutions come together to bear their various expertise on course contents and curriculum design and delivery.

The institutions concerned put together their professional skills in course design and delivery in order to merge high level skills available so as to bring together the best in human attainment. The said course was jointly organized by UNU/GVU and Agder University College and Stord/Haugesund University College Norway. The collaboration between these institutions that are located in an Asian country and another in Northern Europe was made possible by the virtual learning environment (VLE) called Classfronter (www.fronter.com), with the participants from Africa, Europe, Asia and Middle east countries and the "new" orientation on the importance of merging resources from anywhere in order to obtain the best. The meeting place for all involved in this situation is the learning management system (LMS) which provided the opportunity for all involved to meet and share knowledge and information together.

Virtual learning is therefore a description of learning activities that take place in virtual learning environment. To anyone unfamiliar with course delivery in computer supported learning (CSL), virtual learning could mean another concept, principle, theory, or a philosophy in education. We can therefore describe it as a far departure from traditional face-to-face learning as all participants on a course do not need to see one another physically (eye-to-eye) before learning could take place. The provisions of most LMS are to compensate for the differences created by course participants not seeing one another among other things. At the beginning of course in this type of situation each participant is expected to give a short note on himself prior to the commencement of the course. This allows them to have a feel of what each personality is.

After doing some research on Google and Sourceforge, I finally found a nice piece of software called Thingamablog. This program is free to download so I gave it a try and was fascinated about its features. Thingamablog is programmed in Java so you need to download the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) in order to run the application. You can use it either on Windows or Linux. You also need your webspace FTP account data to actually transfer your blog onto your webserver (you can also publish your blog posts locally on your harddrive for first testing the software). Thingamablog is a desktop blogging software and can be used like a content management system (CMS).

Setting up your own Blog

Thingamablog works with templates and so called template tags, which are filled with data like blog posts, the name of the author or description tags. After that the software generates Html-pages from these templates which are published on your webspace. When you start the application you will be presented with a wizard that guides you in setting up your blog. First you have to enter some informations regarding your webspace, namely the Base-Path of your blog (like "http://www.mywebsite.com/blog/") and the Base-URL (like "/htdocs/blog"). The Base-URL is the path where Thingamablog publishes your blog posts to, ask your webhost for more details regarding this adress. If you want to publish your blog on your local harddrive you must enter different paths. Your Base-Path should be something like "/C:/Mywebsite/blog" (notice the first slash before your actual path!), the Base-URL is the same adress plus the prefix "file://", so you would have "file:///C:/Mywebsite/blog" as your Base-Path. I know this sounds a bit difficult, but you luckily have to set it up ownly once.

When you proceed with the wizard, you have to type in your blog title and a description. Right after this you can enter some categories (or call it Tags) in order to arrange your different posts later. The same goes for blog authors, which is the next step within the wizard. You can assign different writers for the same blog. Next comes the design part, where you have to choose from a list of different templates provided with the installation of Thingamablog. You can also download different templates from the web (use a Google search for it) or even create your own one. If you want to develop your own template you have to play with template tags, so I would suggest looking into the help files that come with the installation. The last step before you can actually begin blogging is entering your FTP account data. Thingamablog needs your publishing path, your user name and password, which are all provided by your webhost. If you want to publish locally, simply select "local" in the drop-down list. Right after this you are ready for blogging and please notice, that you can change your blog configuration at any time, so if you made a mistake it´s no problem.

Start Blogging

Now you can start blogging. The whole process of writing and publishing posts is self-explaining. First you will write a new post, the you choose one or more categories. After this you can either save your post as a draft or save and publish it. Notice that you can change the posts Html-code, simply choose the tab at the bottom of the editor window. Play around with Thingamablogs features (I suggest you first publish locally to test out the software). There are a lot more things you can do with it. For example you can drive Thingamablog to ping different servers, use it as a feed reader to stay up to date or publish your pictures with it.

If you need further instructions, visit this nice tutorial about Using Thingamablog or this Forum, where you can also find informations about setting up commenting functions for your blog, which would be impossible without PHP or other scripting languages.

Once someone has learned a simple system like Wordpress, that person can learn other CMS interfaces quite easily. Being an expert in Content Management Systems can increase a person's value to their company as well as their ability to work independently and effectively with personal or professional websites.

So, the best place to start is with a free CMS software package like Wordpress. Though Wordpress is technically oriented to bloggers, it is (1) a good place to learn Content Management Systems protocols and (2) highly adaptable to other kinds of web content. Wordpress.com lets people download everything in one simple bundle. Then, a person simply has to FTP (upload) what they downloaded to a given page on a website they own. The uploaded package automatically and becomes a ready-to-go page with a CMS interface. From there, a free Wordpress templates (these are page layouts/designs) can be easily uploaded to the template folder on the website. There are literally thousands of free templates to choose from. Additionally, customized or unique templates or pages can be purchased for as little as $50, depending upon the design and features included.

After installing Wordpress (or another CMS package) the first step is to log into the control interface. In Wordpress, this is done by going to my web page name. Once signed in, a user should familiarize them self with the menus along the top of the page. These allow users to change templates, add new posts or pages, and so on. It is worth taking some time trying out these various functions and reloading the page to see the results. Even a new user really can't do any great harm to a new page, so the worst case scenario is: the page needs to be deleted and the Wordpress (or other package) needs to be uploaded again. Thus, becoming a Content Management Systems expert is easy and relatively risk-free from the start.

After someone has familiarized them self with the basic layout and operation of your interface in non-technical terms, they can begin to explore some basic code changes if they want to make more fundamental edits to a page. For example, in Wordpress: go to the Presentation tab and select Theme Editor. Notice that there are links along the right-hand side of the page that refer to the basic content on your page, such as the Header, Footer and Sidebar.

Click on one of these and look at the code that appears in the text box adjacent to the links. Basically, without knowing what any of the code means anyone can start to get an idea of what it does just by intuitively relating the visible behind-the-scenes code to the website as it is presented.

In terms of editing the code of an existing site, it is important to be very careful. The best thing to do is: avoid deleting any code. Instead, bracket out any parts of the page so that they aren't rendered on the site. This way, nothing is deleted. Of course, it is also important to download any modified versions of the page in case they are somehow lost in the system, hacked or otherwise damaged or destroyed. Though becoming a Content Management Systems expert is relatively easy without using code, it can help to learn a little bit of basic HTML.