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 here as

The story is all inside your head
She said to me
The answer is easy if you
Go on the web and see
I’d like to help you in your struggle
To be free
There must be fifty web 2.0 ways
To tell a story

Most of my presentations stat with what I think is a clever title. The content somehow catches up later.

So I am in the middle of building the wiki pages that provide a brief intro to each tool, 2 examples of something produced with the tool. The main rule is all content must be original or stuff found, and credited to, creative commons licensed sources.

But I thought I should walk the presentation, and see if I could build thr same story 50 times over. Looney! So I am taking one I submitted a few years ago for the 60 second story contest as it was made from images and audio (the original was published in QuickTime, but I am backing out the media to assemble 50x). The original video is hanging out on the long tail of YouTube, and is of course, a story about a dog, Dominoe.

And now, in honor of the creativity of Barbara Ganley, who ventured out a beautiful experiment in telling a story in images and text via slideshare. So here is Dominoe, recast into slideshare (mixed images and text in Powerpoint to get there):

But Barbara is gone hiking in the Canadian Rockies for 10 days, so now I have a long wait to see what she thinks. Maybe by then I will have all 50 done… or I will be so sick of this I will be out on a ledge.

Once I have the 50 posted, I’ll ask my readers to take a look, suggest examples or ways to make the activity more clear.

PS – Holy irony. The day after writing this, my wife reminded me that today was the anniversary of Dominoe’s passing away in 1993 (it’s an old story- all the photos are scanned 35mm print photos).

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 was not so… well, sterotypical of a museum tour. Hanging out with Joe and seeing how he works a crowd was a gas, as was my colleagues Rachel and Larry at NMC, our incredible support staff, and Tim S from the SFMOMA, birthplace, if you will, of Pachyderm.

We all pitched in for the entire workshop; my specialty was showing folks how to record and edit audio in Audacity (“is it really free software? why?”) and they were very intrigued my the recording capability of my new little iAudio.

I am still processing and reflecting on the experience– by the end of the third day, we had some great frameworks for perhaps 7, 8 new Pachyderm produced content pieces, participants had a good sense (it seemed) of the basics of digitizing assets and building Pachyderm content.

I must admit my level of expertise in Pachyderm is novice (never having pried enough time in my previous gig to do anything with it). Authoring in this runs counter to most strategies and approaches for your typical linear or minimally branching multimedia content (see the Pachyderm Showcase for some sense of how on linear it can be). It truly demands a lot of upfront planning, sketching, outlining, storyboarding, not jump in and start free will authoring. And you can only (it seems) go about Pachyderm building once you have a strong sense of the structure, features, and link-ness of the different screen types, and you only get that sense by building in Pachyderm. So your first 2 products ought to be considered “practice” unless you are good, lucky, or better planned than moi.

So rather than try and wax on in words, I’ll let some photos tell the story, or at least suggest it.

Tim S from SFMOMA describes the “layering” approach used by his team.

“Enough talk! Let’s log in!”

Picking assets to load into a new Pachyderm screen.

“Wow, nice assets!”

Joe Lambert lends some storytelling expertise.

Video studio, where we demo-ed shooting digital video interviews, lighting, and microphone set up.

Choosing which media to use for a new screen.

Editing a “phone dial” screen.

We were treated to an evening tour of the Blanton Museum, located on the University of Texas campus,a very inspiring place indeed

At the workshop closing we were treated to demos of some new Pachyderm content.

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 is sort of like a semi-syncronous event using asynchronous discussion tools.

I do have an interest in increasing some more virtual participation, so if someone is interested in logging in to our discussion boards between 1:30-3:30 PM (MST) on January 27 (see World Time Clock for your local time), please contact me and I will provide the coordinates. It would ante up the interesting faculty to have some comments shared by participants from afar.

Spammers need not apply.

If this goes well, we may be piloting our own Maricopa Virtual Speakers Bureau and/or increasing our presence in the MERLOT version.

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 are not that interesting? Maybe everyone is out shopping right now?

Regardless, it would very much help if we had more article comments, to demonstrate to our authors how online publishing works, and to provide some stats for some of our internal critics who would prefer to stay with an old, expensive, mono-content, time-intesnsive, non-interactive print version.

As a favor, as a cheap holiday present for our authors, please find an article in the iForum, and send a comment.

Comment spam roaches need not respond. We have Spam Karma 2 standing on patrol. Along with a big old steel toed boot.

Please?

Comments here?

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 highlighted by mouse in the browser as a pre defined value for the “notes” field (generally the site description). I use this all the time with del.icio,us, and avoids the back and forth of copy/pasting a description in.

I must admit I’ve hardly spent time with the new Yahoo stuff (I even forgot I had an account there), but it is a dizzying array of customizations one can make, and definitely is a powerful rip-mixer of content form multiple sources.

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 previously written article we were given permission to republish. Tinto is a speaker at a January event here, so it ties in to local interests.
• Five Faculty Learn About the Net Generation – we paid registration for 5 folks to attend an EDUCAUSE seminar here in August, and writing up their ideas was a requirment (they are also available in our Maricopa Learning eXchange. A neat thing was Holly McKinzie Beene’s copying of the EDCUAUSE 7 Things format, to create a & Things You Should Know About My Communications Class.
• Special Assistant to the Chancellor: Reflections and Musings from a Faculty Guinea Pig – had some fun with one written by my former Director (who rolled the dice and hired me); using some flicr images and a audio clip that demonstrates how busy she is.
• The Pursuit of Wisdom and the Future of Education bu Rio Salado faculty Tom Lombardo; again a reprise of a longer paper he published elsewhere; we augmented it with an audio interview.
• Fine Arts Roundup featuring a promotional video done to highlight the various arts program at Maricopa.
• Wakonse: The Gift of Friendship and Professional Growth – reflections from faculty who participated in this professional development experience offered by Arizona State University (and great photos shared)
• Student Reflections on Honors Forums – in past issues we have just listed the pictures, bios, and titles of speakers at our Honors Forum Lecture Series; but we turned this around and collected some essays and excerpts from discussion board postings as students share their experiences at the event. We’ve also added audio excerpts from two of the Fall 2005 events.
• Grants Spotlight: Bilingual Basic Patient Assessment Video – An audio interview with faculty Mauro da Fonte who describes a video created as part of his Learning Grant (an internal grants program); also includes excerpts from his video project.
• Reusable Learning Objects: RLO The Movie – Our Ocotillo co-chairs share video from a League For Innovation presentation they did that shares their efforts over the last year of spreading interest and information about RLOs
• David Weaver’s Tablet-ing Experience an audio interview where David shares his experience sharing MagicPaper and Classroom Presenter with other Arizona physics faculty
• Wikifying a Workshop where an audio interview with Rio Salado College librarian Janelle Underhill reveals her interest in an activity Brian Lamb presented here last April, and how she adapted it for her own workshop (and how we dealt with the internet and the wiki going down over that weekend)
• Big Teacher is Watching Shelley Rodrigo poses some ethical questions about her project aiming to use screen capture software to evaluate student’s experience in usability of web sites.

Update:
On the first day we had a grand total of one comment posted… well there were two other spams submitted. I decided to make all comments moderated, so keep your pills, porns, and casino stuff in your own house.

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 for the reader. Once all the articles are done, the front page will flip to the current issue.

What is new in the new version is a lot more media- we will have 4-6 audio interviews, a few streaming media clips, and some invitations to online discussion.

So what is non-blog like is that there is no main page with reverse chronological ordered posts. No diaries here. While I could have sort of gotten the look of an issue cover by creating a custom template and using a category, it seemed to provide more flexibility to create a WordPress Page as a front entry for an issue. This also means that I could use the Static-Front Page Plugin to make the main URL point to a WordPress page rather than list the last X posts.

The layout began life as the Technology Bytes one by Joni Mueller found at the WordPress Theme Browser, but it’s been moderately modified to fit my needs. I’ve had to ad several new templates (pages, category). I change the category and search results to display only the rss excerpts using the_excerpt_rss() and then links to the full archives.

One of the hurdles has been the people that like their print versions. I have the style sheets set up so there is a decent print style sheet that will strip out the header graphics, sidebar, and footers, and produce a decent readable version. I may see if I can Acrobat the whole issue into one mega PDF.

But the answer for those that relish the paper version- File > Print. Done.

A major problem for a while was how to set up article authoring since comment notifications go to the WordPress poster. I was not relishing creating new accounts for every named author. It would not work for our articles with multiple authors, either. The solution was to de-couple all template outputs tying the article to a WordPress author (technically I am authoring all of them). Then I installed the Subscribe to Comments plugin, so as new articles are added, I can manually add email addresses for anyone who should get notifications of comments to a “post” (article).

I had envisioned having it set up so I could give editing access to article authors who could pose drafts (giving them WordPress level 1) and maye giving our in house editors access with WP level 2 so they could edit any drafts. The tricky thing is to get all the pieces in line, I need to add up to 5 custom fields and assign categories. I would like to experiment down the road with giving authoring access. It would be nice if I could customize the acess privileges (e.g. create my own rights at level 3).

I am using the Recent Comments plugin to put comments on the sidebar. I did not like my internal artlcle links creating pingbacks, so I turned off the display of pingbacks (not something I like to do as it will remove external trackbacks, but maybe I can flip it back on later).

There is also the Related Posts plugin to help display similar articles, which is not so useful now with just a few articles

I have about 4 or 5 custom fields per post or special purpose. One is the authors name under the article titles- sometimes we have several and sometimes, for a project summary, there are no top byline authors. Another is for the footer credits (next to the little triangle). Yet one more is for optional footer URL links (links to a project web site). Another is for the “department”, or section of each issue ( we usually have one article on “The Arts” another on “Honors”) usually but not always toed to topical categories. The trickiest one is a field for “volume” which ties together all articles to their published “volume” number. Rather than containing the volume number itself, the field contains the ID for a WordPress category, where the category description contains the full text such as “Volume 9, Spring 2005″. This means on search results, I can pull the custom field, and then fetch the volume string:

<?php
// custom field "volume" contains the category ID which has correct issue string
$vol_cat = get_post_custom_values('volume');
if (is_array($vol_cat)) 
  echo ' (' . category_description($vol_cat[0]) . ') ';
?>

Okay, this is pretty convoluted, but its working well so far. The other feature I needed was single ‘posts’ or articles to be able to list in the sidebar the articles in the same issue. I could have done this by creating categories for each issue, but could not list the link to the WordPress Page with the cover, and the ordering of the links would be time stamp dependent. So instead, I am using WordPress Links to create a different link category for each issue, and then listing in each, the links needed to build a table of contents.

The convoluted logic goes like:

<!-- This issue LINKS -->

<?php if ( is_single()) {

    $vol_cat = get_post_custom_values('volume');
    if (is_array($vol_cat)) {
        $my_issue = category_description($vol_cat[0]);
        echo '<li id="thisissue">' . 
            $my_issue . ' Contents<ul>';
        wp_get_linksbyname($my_issue);
        echo '</ul></li>';
    }
}
?>

Undone now that I need to add is a way to display RSS feeds for our article categories.

Well there is quite a bit more, but I have only a few days to get all the pieces together, and we have about half of our new articles. Again, it hits the e-streets December 5, 2005.

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 limit to the amount of content
* add content we cannot put in print- more photos, full color images, audio interviews (ahem.. “podcasts”), videos
* add interactivity via comments and linked online surveys, etc
* full text search
* issue and category RSS feeds

I idled a away some time in October, so now I am in full crunch mode. I pretty much have the WordPress template done, and have hacked a bit with wrenching functionality from link categories, Pages, and topic categories, using a plugin to make a Word Press page (semi-static content) as the version of the cover/table of contents, and assign the current issue page as the home page; using about 4-5 custom fields tags per post (essentially what the old timers call “meta-data”) to make the content move around as needed with fewer manual edits. As of now, I have a WordPress version of our last Spring 2005 issue (old version)… oops, there a re a few more items to tidy up, so I cannot yet provide a sneak peak. The last thing is working out the right user levels needed to give remote authors access (they will be able to compose drafts only), editors (who will be able to do a few more things)

WordPress is q powerful platform on its own, but once you get deep into the template structure, money around with the functions and database access tools, well, you can almost do anything. I am hoping to use some of the include functions to have our project web site automatically tap into the WordPress content to pull project specific article references into the web sites.. this is more or less a form of syndication, but may offer more than we see right now.

One of the key insights came from our managers meeting, where my colleague Eric noted that in our print versions, a number of the project articles were really recaps of content already on our web site– background of faculty fellows or summaries of upcoming Honors events. This is fine for the print version and might be seen as a way to get people from print to the web site, But in a web only publication, there is no reason to have the same content in a different place– so it is nicely challenging us to ask for all articles and content -what makes this different then what we already put on web sites? what can we add in terms of interactivity to make it more engaging? What can we do online that we could not do in print?

And my favorite feature? We can correct a typo at anytime!

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 the form to require a password.

So the current toolbox contains:

• Blogmarks
• CiteULike
• Connotea
• del.icio.us
• de.lirio.us
• feedmarker
• Furl
• Frassle
• jots
• Linkroll
• Netvouz
• OpenBM
• RawSugar
• scuttle
• Simpy
• Spurl
• BlinkList

If you know that the tools for these sites need a tweak or that there are other social bookmark tools that ought to be here (meaning sites that offer free accounts for adding/tagging web sites, and have a JavaScript browser tool for submitting new sites), let me know.

Finally, ironically, this is one of those precious little web gifts… the fact that Ralph from Austria, someone I do not know or have ever corresponded with, went out of his way to help improve this little gizmo. A few weeks ago when our IT department was tracking down some suspicious activity on this server, they were quite baffled why sites in Europe, Asia, Africa were visiting this web server in Arizona. I think they missed the “world” part of the WWW.

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. It looks horribly cheesy now, but I always loved the non linear flow and the small things embedded into it that made navigation not a fixed path of choices, but a subtly guided nudging one.

Anyhow, the person who called me noted it was hard to use in a browser because of the funkiness of the Shockwave plug-in and asked if there was a downloadable version, even if it was a big file (the total content size is about 50 Mb, which was huge then but not such a big deal now). I checked my archived CDs, which were pressed to boot for both Mac OS and Windows. The Mac version actually played back okay in OS X (running in Classic), not bad almost 8 years later. On the PC, though, I found that the old code meant to detect the version of QuickTime present was faulty, and the program would exit saying there was no QuickTime, although I knew there was.

I thought it would be a quick fix if I could find the source code for the launcher, delete a few lines, and re-publish the executable. First it took a while to locate my original development files- they had been archived off of my mina drives to some still unclear destination. But I did find a CD with copies of the old files.

Next was trying to get Director 7 re-installed on my Dell laptop. I found my install disks, but this version was an upgrade, and it kept promoting for a valid Director 5 or 6 serial number… and I could not find them anywhere in our software cabinet. We did some major summer cleaning, yikes. No worries, we have a FileMaker database with all of our software…. except the number someone entered was clearly NOT a valid Macromedia serial number, short by about 10 characters. All I needed was an old Director 5 serial number… so I admit I surfed one of the software crack sites that list serial numbers. I had a valid copy of the software I needed, just needed to convince the installer of that. Go ahead and arrest me, but Macromedia’s software reliance on old numbers is rather crippling.

Once I could open my launcher file, I commented out 3 lines of code, published a new executable, and we were back in business. It actually worked as it should have on Windows XP.

The download files are still hefty (30 Mb compressed) and I am thinking about learning (by doing) about publishing them as torrent files, though the number of people interested in this antiquated software must by very small.

So NRU is back in business! Our football team this year is not expected to do well, but the archery team is top ranked.