Image by Serenae via Flickr

Last Thursday, March 31st, my students from #nmd2011 and #mcw2011 and I had the pleasure of a beautiful and gracious online class by Martha Burtis from UMW. The class was on Yahoo! Pipes, since I wanted my students to have an idea of visual programming for mashups. Thanks to Martha we all had an awesome intro to the theme, which was great for me too, because I had only a very superficial knowledge of Pipes.

Martha did a few examples and though our side of the connection was pretty lame she managed to go on and let us understand the basic ideas. I enjoyed my students’ questions and I think she too liked to answer some of these genuinely interested people!

Now, Martha Burtis has posted a video of her class, split into three parts: here they are: PART I at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hezn8wuBZeE; I will post the others as they are available. Plus, here is the link to her Pipes:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=3a7bb115e6d2a79bd4864d59959c0c34

so we can practice, which we’ll do tomorrow in class (Tuesday, April 5).

We will also think about a couple of assignments…

Last, I can’t forget Martha did all this in the spirit of “Give it Away”, as she put it in her post of March 8 “Give it Away, Give it away now” (was it a coincidence, this was Women’s Day?):

Basically, I’m thinking about on a fairly regular basis (once a month?) offering up (for free) my services for someone who needs help with something I know how to do.

[…]

The only “payment” I’d request would be that the person do the same for someone else (offering up a free number of hours of service doing something he/she was good at.)

So, here I am: My next post, out tonite or tomorrow, will be my own Give it Away! And I’ll setup a list of things I can do for others, as well as the rules of the game.

Thanks Martha, twice!