CogBlogged Tagged ‘projects’

I am sidestepping some of my own blog advice by blogging something that’s not fully ready for prime time. Among my frantic evening time prep work for my October Australia tour, I am starting to weave together workshop / presentation materials I’ll likely leak here first to get some feedback. What seemed like an off the cuff idea, and mostly because I just liked the title, I am working on a workshop activity called “There Must be 50 Web2.0 Ways to Tell a Story” – the premise being to introduce participants to at least 50 sites that allow them to assemble at least two kinds media as a story and republish it to other web sites. About a week or so of digging around got me at least 54 candidates. So for those missing the musical allusion here, it is a nod to the elegant lyrics of Paul Simon, re-purposed [...]

The clever blog post entry title not used here was “Museum People Have Great Assets”. Last week I was in Austin all week, not to soak up cool music or wander aimlessly down 6th Street, but holed up in an anonymous, freeway junction hotel for the first of several NMC training sessions in support a new project. The web site is yet to be done (ummm, that is in my court now). This project is supporting art museums from across the state of Texas to develop new online interactive pieces, built in Pachyderm — and tying in with the concepts of digital storytelling, with the aid of the Center for Digital Storytelling. So this was a 3 day ‘boot camp’– not only in technology, Pachyderm, digital video, photography, editing sound, lighting, but also sessions by the brilliant Joe Lambert on the notions of “Storymining” an approach for creating content that [...]

This Friday, January 27, 2006, Maricopa is welcoming Alice Bedard-Vorhees (Colorado Community Colleges Online) for a workshop on Bringing Guests to your Courses with a Virtual Speaker Bureau. This is a concept she developed at CCCOnline and has been nicely expanded as a service offfered in MERLOT. Simply, it means creating a directory of people and their subject matter expertise who are willing to participate as virtual guess “discussants” for classes with online discussion boards. It’s a great way to bring expertise into a class, w/o much effort and no travel needed. I’ve done this a handful of times, and with good up front structure, it can be a very valuable activity. Alice will be leading a hands-on session here with about 40 Maricopa faculty and staff, and she is bringing in two more remote colleagues so our participants can see how these are set up and carried out. It [...]

It’s been 2 few weeks since we released the first online version of our MCLI iForum publication (see the background info blogged nearby). We are hoping to push the publication envelope to go completely online (the print button is in the reader’s hands) and using WordPress as a publishing platform. Our timing was not optimal as it was during the ramp up to finals week here. However, even with the blatant red “i”, and what we thought were obvious invitations to respond to articles via the comments field, the response has been… well… not much. A major justification we prepared for this move to online publishing was the ability for readers to connect with authors (all comment notifications are sent to all credited authors, and we offer per-article email subscriptions to comment updates). So I wonder… is it a fear of commenting? of making the first comment? Maybe the articles [...]

Thanks to an email nudge from “Jamie”, I’ve added Yahoo My Web 2.0 to the set of social bookmark tools you can combine into one browser tool via the Make Your Own Multipost Bookmarklet Tool. For those not even sure what all this means, I built a page that allows you to pick all the bookmark tools you might use (del.icio.us, furl, simpy, and like another 12 more), and combine their JavaScript add site browser buttons into one… This means, while viewing a site you want to add, you can populate several sites via one click. This was done solely in my own interest at a time when I was using more than one. It was about 2 minutes of work to add Yahoo as it is a pretty clean JavaScript. The only thing it lacks that others have, is the ability to also submit the chunk of text currently [...]

We announced to Maricopa today the availability of our MCLI iForum at http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/iforum/ This is the first online version of the print publication we’ve run for many years. This is all built in WordPress. Our hope for upcoming issues is to have people submit drafts remotely, but with a time press, we had folks send drafts as email and word docs. However, internally, we used WP to do the cleanup editing, and that worked out well. As much as possible, we tried to get away from the tone of third person dry reporting, and aimed for some more reflective type articles. We are encouraging with some leading questions (ahem, outsiders welcome too) comments/feedback via the comment box. I’ve used the subscribe to comments plugin to make sure all authors get notification. Features include: Student Success and the Building of Involving Educational Communities by Dr. Vincent Tinto – this was a [...]

I’m under my own gun for getting all of our articles ready for the December 5, 2005 planned release of our MCLI iForum– as alluded to earlier, this is going to be a 100% online publication replacing the print/web publication we’d been doing since 2001 (and an earlier version back to 1993). To do this, I’ve been sweating hard with hammer and anvil on a WordPress publishing platform to pull this off. To set things up, I started by recasting the Spring 2005 last issue onto the new “iForum” site (the little i is a rip on “interactive”). What you can see now is this last issue (eventually all past issues will be moved over to make a nice searchable archive). Compare the old and new (well those are not all that different). Some of the newer articles are there if you dig around, but that is an exercise left [...]

I’m scurrying madly trying to ramp up a promise to have a Word Press publishing platform ready to release an online version of our mcli Forum. We have been doing a print and web version of this since 2001, and a previous ancestor since 1993. The print version twice a year costs more than a few $k, and takes up a huge amount of staff time in the editing and layout process. Then the web version is another conversion on top of that. And we have no good data on what people do with them after they go out through our campus mail system and land in peoples old fashioned in boxes (the wooden cubby ones in department offices). What we are proposing as gains for a completely online version are: * save money and time * shorten the editing process time and allow remote online editing * have no [...]

Thanks to an email from Ralph in Austria, I updated the bookmarklet tool for Simpy on my Multipost Bookmarklet Tool, the cheesy script I made for combining multiple social bookmark tools into one. Since these days I have pared my tool set down to one tasty tool, I have no idea if the others have gone bad or changed. As Ralph pointed out, my page did not have an easy way to contact me, so I have added hopefully obvious links to my standard web feedback form. Also, I did go in and discover that the tool for Blinklist no longer required a cryptic coded user id, so that one is also updated. And I removed my own Bag of URLs site because (a) it really is not a social bookmark tool; and (b) because 90% of the submissions were spam, and the other 10% were all me, I changed [...]

Yesterday, a phone call cam and was like one of those cans of compressed air designed to blow the cobwebs off my neurons. Someone teaching psychology at a school located in the middle of the US was interested in a multimedia project dating back to 1997 (and that was when it was completed). Negative Reinforcement University (NRU) was a multimedia CD-ROM that was actually content designed by a team of students and a faculty member. NRU was sketched out to be a game-like exploration and experience of negative-reinforcement, with the navigation metaphors lifted directly out of Myst. It was one of my favorite of all time projects. Back in 1997, the web was not very viable for creating this, so it was done as a CD-ROM built in Macromedia Director. We did manage to convert it to a version that does play back via the web using the Shockwave plug-in. [...]