commun-IT Steering Group :: Blog

Okay - now I remember seeing a post about something - somewhere in Commun-it but I can't remember who or where. 

I had some trouble finding the search feature which was kind of ironic.

Is there any interest in creating a community for New Teachers on Commun-it. 

Perhaps a place to faciliatate some discussion, post and answer questions and share experiences?

More good news:

Chris Sessums has agreed to join us for he May 10 web conference.

In order to round out the planning for this event, I've setup some wiki pages. Please have a look and contribute any thoughts.

I'm planning on sending out a community update message email in the next few days to advertise this event as well as the developments with LeadingLearning and ECOO on the conference front. If you have any other ides on how to best share this upcoming event with others, please feel free to do so.

./tim 

One suggestion that came in recently on how to help build this community was to establish occassional synchronous events on various themes. I'm pleased to announce that George Siemens has agreed to be our first guest in a live web conference to be held May 10th (4 pm, EST). More details will follow soon, along with a wiki page dedicated to gathering questions and ideas for the conversation with George

This is just a test of some new code I wrote up to embed flash video (.flv) into postings... You should be able to see a video widget below and click on it to play a small screencast. Note quite youtube yet (I haven'tbeen able to get it to convert .avi/.mov to .flv video), but if you have a .flv file you can now embed it in postings.

To create .flv video you can check out the following options:

Commercial:
http://www.mediacollege.com/flash/video/tutorial/convert-flv.html
Adobe Premiere Elements Version 3.0

Open Source or Free:
http://www.rivavx.com/index.php?encoder&L=3
http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/
http://www.zamzar.com 

 

Once converted, upload the .flv file into your "My Files" area, then create a forum or blog post. You can then use the "Embed a file" dialogue below the blog entry area to insert the video to your post. Once you save you post, viewers will see the player andcan click the video to start it playing.

There is documentation on uploading files here: http://www.commun-it.org/wiki/index.php/Your_Files

Note: .SWF movies can be embeded the same way, as can mp3 audio files. All 3 types will play back with just flash installed on the client's machine. 

I've just switched out the wiki engine behind commun-IT to go back to being mediawiki (same source code as wikipedia).

Single-sign on should work, so that if you are logged in to commun-IT, and hen go to the wiki and try to edit something, it should log you on and let you do it.

I will move over the couple of articles that were going on the old wiki in the next day or 2.

If anyone out these is good a css style sheets, I could use a hand debugging and making the wiki "feel" like the rest of the site...

 ./tim

I am thinking about the future and the tools that this environment will use to grow.  One thing that is a real growing pain is spam in its different forms.  As the popularity of a web site increases the amount of spam in its various forms increase. 

• What do you think would be some good ways to fight spam in this community?
• What tools would be helpful to report and stop spam?

This morning Shawn and I had a good conference call and Breeze session with folks from eLearning Ontario and the Strategic Alliance about commun-IT and where is is headed. I've posted a powerpoint file that we used to the files area of the commun-IT Steering Group.

You can download it below as well... 

commun-IT.org Summary

Here an update on where things stand with commun-IT/ECOO 2007.

Urs, Robert and I had a great skype call on Thursday to go over the basic framework of how commun-IT and  ECOO 2007 could relate to each other. Here is the gist of what I had in mind:

-when a presenter submits a workshop proposal that gets accepted for the conference, commun-IT will automatically generate an account for the presenter and create a community are on the site for the workshop,  e.g. "Session A4 - Using Sticky Bear Bop to address the primary match curriculum". The presenter will be the "owner" of the community and will be able to upload files (up to 100 meg or so), blog (personal and community forum), plus use the wiki and resources (links) section of commun-IT to set up pre-conference interactions. Still some questions about when the proposals get nailed down that we need more info on...

-once the conference planner is out, and people begin to register for the conference, they will have an option on their registration to share their basic contact info with commun-IT. With that info, and their workshop choices, commun-IT will generate an account for them and pre-register them as members in the communites that associate with the workshops they chose. When they log in for th first time, they should see the 12 or so "communities" that interest them, along with a pre-build social network of people who had similar interests (I can imagine some really neat way to present that visually - a web of participants that have connections to you, ... could be cool).

-users will be able to join any other communities they want (even if not attending them). Note: some concern that people might "workshop hop" at the actual conference (which can be a logistical issue for ECOO) so some thought has to go into this.

-ECOO is looking at perhaps being able to sponsor some increased bandwidth/storage for commun-IT, especially in the few weeks before and after the conference.

-users are free (now and always) to generate their own communities in here, outside of workshops). Sort of ad hoc birds of a feather sessions. Need to write some code to be able to invite other users into your community to make this easier...

-will submit a proposal to have a first day session on how to use commun-IT and make the most of it. Would be great to do this collaboratively with a couple of commun-IT members...

-ECOO will promote the site in the planner and swag bag handouts. I planted the seed of a booth as well, but I know I will be tied up  at the OSAPAC booth for a fair bit of time, so maybe better to pass on this for now

-a placeholder url for ECOO 2007 has been set up (http://ecoo.commun-IT.org) and a blog. 

 

Any other ideas that people have on how to move this forward???