Some thoughts about blogs
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
As I've mentioned a couple of times before, I am working on this project that involves the creation of an online environment for PhD students and young researchers. The purpose of the online environment would be to help them learn how to do research by looking at what other people are doing and going through and by making them share their own experiences as well.
I have recorded a good number of video clips and collected other kind of material as well. Now I am uploading that material in the blogger tool in Sakai. I have an idea about what I would like this site to look like, but I am having some problems at achieving that.
Idea: create articles or posts containing video clips or PPT, etc. (I wrote ab
out this idea in another post, now I am actually doing it!) Each article will address a particular issue related to research in general or the PhD degree in particular. I have organised all the videos, etc I have got under general topics (as I mentionend in my previous post) I have drawn links between general topics so I have got a kind of network of topics. Starting from one topic the idea is to create an article for that topic and embed the video, audio, or PPT and write an introductory text. In addition to this I will add a section called Related Articles where I am going to list three or four other articles with related topics (as shown in my network of topics). Finally I would like to upload all that information on behalf of the person who did the video, or wrote the PPT, etc.
The final result, I hope, will be a network of articles addressing research issues, interconnected between them by simple links to other articles. As each article will be own by different people this will help the site to create a sense of community where more than one person (i.e. me) is working on uploading material. Hopefully in the future, after I open the site to everyone in the school, other people will like to comment on the articles and perhaps write their own articles.
Reality: I have managed to work around some problems but I have three new problems now. First some old problems. I filmed the video clips using a mini DV camera. I moved the DV content into the computer and created WMV files. I learned how to embed these files into posts in the blogger tool. But I kept on having problems with the security of the site. Videos will not show if I set up the settings of the WMV to private within the sites. I reported the problem to our Sakai team and after a few weeks they re-installed? an editor that included the option to upload Flash videos. So I bought a Flash video maker.... I bought Adobe Flash C3 Professional. I learned how to convert the WMV into Flash files, add a skin and upload the files into Sakai. Then I had also problems with relative URLs so I had to set all the Flash files to search for their skin within a specific URL in Sakai. Now all flash videos work. (unless someone changes the location of the skin!!!)
Problems I have now are:
Conclusion: I need a beer!
Footnote: "You never know how important something (or someone) is until you lose it" ... Everyone has a life lesson to learn
El día empieza iremos hacia el sur
qué caro está el peaje, qué caro está
el Perú
I have recorded a good number of video clips and collected other kind of material as well. Now I am uploading that material in the blogger tool in Sakai. I have an idea about what I would like this site to look like, but I am having some problems at achieving that.
Idea: create articles or posts containing video clips or PPT, etc. (I wrote ab
out this idea in another post, now I am actually doing it!) Each article will address a particular issue related to research in general or the PhD degree in particular. I have organised all the videos, etc I have got under general topics (as I mentionend in my previous post) I have drawn links between general topics so I have got a kind of network of topics. Starting from one topic the idea is to create an article for that topic and embed the video, audio, or PPT and write an introductory text. In addition to this I will add a section called Related Articles where I am going to list three or four other articles with related topics (as shown in my network of topics). Finally I would like to upload all that information on behalf of the person who did the video, or wrote the PPT, etc.The final result, I hope, will be a network of articles addressing research issues, interconnected between them by simple links to other articles. As each article will be own by different people this will help the site to create a sense of community where more than one person (i.e. me) is working on uploading material. Hopefully in the future, after I open the site to everyone in the school, other people will like to comment on the articles and perhaps write their own articles.
Reality: I have managed to work around some problems but I have three new problems now. First some old problems. I filmed the video clips using a mini DV camera. I moved the DV content into the computer and created WMV files. I learned how to embed these files into posts in the blogger tool. But I kept on having problems with the security of the site. Videos will not show if I set up the settings of the WMV to private within the sites. I reported the problem to our Sakai team and after a few weeks they re-installed? an editor that included the option to upload Flash videos. So I bought a Flash video maker.... I bought Adobe Flash C3 Professional. I learned how to convert the WMV into Flash files, add a skin and upload the files into Sakai. Then I had also problems with relative URLs so I had to set all the Flash files to search for their skin within a specific URL in Sakai. Now all flash videos work. (unless someone changes the location of the skin!!!)
Problems I have now are:
- Posts in the blogger tool in Sakai do not have permalinks, and that drives me crazy!!! Because of this I've been unable to include links to other posts in a post. I had designed a sort of box in every post called "Related articles" and in there I have written a list of articles we suggest the student or researcher can read. I just need to add links to that list but I have no individual links for the posts, actually all the URLs I get for every post in the blog and for the list of articles are the same! I have sent a request to fix this, lets see what happens.
- I asked the Sakai people to give me grants to upload information on behalf of other members of the site and they said No :( buuaaaaa I will have to think on what I can do to sort this out. Help!!!
- There is no option for moderating comments. If someone posts a comment I cannot remove it or move it to another post. Also all comments are ordered in the order they were posted, so the first comment goes on top and the last one is at the end. The user has to scroll down to see the last comment. I was thinking that it could be a better idea to have them the other way around, so the last comment will always come on top. I think that would be more useful because people will always see new things in the top of the screen and they will not need to scroll down to see "if" someone has added something to the discussion.
Conclusion: I need a beer!Footnote: "You never know how important something (or someone) is until you lose it" ... Everyone has a life lesson to learn
El día empieza iremos hacia el sur
qué caro está el peaje, qué caro está
el Perú
Labels:
blogs,
PhD students,
Sakai,
videos
Posts
to be honest, I think you do not need to depend on Sakai to build some dynamic features of your site. Maybe you can leave some 'static' stuff there, and then ask people to participate using a different type of tool (an electronic forum for instance). That will also help you to create different communities as they go along. First year students can have their community, so the second years, and possibly there will be a big community for them all. Why do not you try to set up some experimental communities using a blogger or something like that, and see what works best.
The SAKAI guys seem to me the 'geeks' that will make your life difficult.
I still think you need to give research students a kind of personal diary tool for them to record their own experiences and possibly share them.
The hubby
Its very nice and useful article to post the information. I have noted to use this tips. Thank you!
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