Definitely worth the next 4 min of your life to watch... 

Source: http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?author=1

It occurred to me that it would be a fantastic idea to use this community during ECOO 2007 as a virtual extension of the conference. I think it might also be a good idea to get a booth or organize a lunch meeting for anyone who's interested in this kind of professional development. I really enjoyed the impromptu Ontario blogger meeting that Quentin organized at the last conference. Think how productive it can be this year if we start blogging about it and preparing for it now!

I am currently working on a proposal for ECOO 2007, tentatively titled "Professional Development in a Networked World." I do intend to mention this community and focus on how it fits into what I see as an emerging field of teacher's personal learning environments (PLE Blog) or knowledge landscapes.

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??? 

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

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?

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

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.