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The Mavericks online exhibit prototype was tested in a Calgary school on March 10th. It was the first formal evaluation of any content produced using Pachyderm 2.0, and the evaluation report was provided at today’s Mavericks steering committee meeting.

I was braced for negative feedback – a natural reaction when a new piece of software is being tested in the field – and was pleasantly surprised by the feedback we received. I can’t provide the full report (I didn’t write it, and I’m not sure all info is available for publishing), but the abridged version is roughly:

• The kids loved the Zoom screen. Loved it. Wanted more.
• The text scrolly widgets are too small for little hands to manipulate, and scrolling is too fast. Text boxes are too small (can’t see enough text at once)
• Some form of table of contents or site map would be useful
• An integrated glossary would be good
• The kids weren’t put off by the amount of content in the Mavericks prototype – they wanted more. More detail, more access to it. More information!
• Miscellaneous comments about colour scheme (which was not the final colour scheme, but hacked together out of previous presentations)

Most of the comments were entirely expected (and were already on my list of things to fix or add), but the fact that the kids wanted more information in what is already a pretty dense package was surprising to me. I was underestimating their thirst for knowledge.

There was a time when grade 3 students would (maybe) be able to use KidPix or something in school. Now, they’re using rich, interactive, dynamic content presentation systems, and demanding more… I love that.

The prototype is available online. Keep in mind that it is a quick-and-dirty first draft of functionality, with lots of UI hiccups that will be ironed out before the final version (which is about 10 times larger than the prototype).

I’m wondering if there might be a way to visualize the buddylist relationships in a Drupal site. It would seem as though when a user adds a buddy to their list, that they are defining a working relationship between themself and the other person. This is likely more useful than an org. chart, as it’s a real-world, practical, and explicit representation of a link between people.

So… Would it be possible to map the relationships that have been explicitly documented between users of a Drupal site? Kind of like “6 degrees of separation“, but showing the actual interpersonal relationships of the community…

PS. No, I’m not planning on turning this into an “All Drupal, All The Time” blog. I’m just extremely interested in the weblogs.ucalgary.ca project, and the possibilities that Drupal may offer for that.

I was just reading the newspaper while eating lunch. I never read the newspaper. Perhaps this is why…

On page 8 of the first section, was an article titled “US warns allies over arms sales to China” (several articles in today’s paper start with X Warns Y over Z). Normally not a big thing. Didn’t even plan on reading the article. But, a huge photo above the article piqued my interest. It had been obviously manipulated to remove information that was part of the context of the photograph. It is a photo of some protesters, who are showing signs/placards/banners denouncing Condi’s visit to Seoul.

But, the biggest banner, front and centre in the photo, had a fake white box edited into it. Directly over top of the URL of the protestor’s organization. How is that not part of the message? It’s ok to post the photo of the banner, as long as the readers of the paper can’t find the information to fill in the backstory?

The URL they blocked out is http://alltogether.or.kr – I can’t read Korean, so I can’t verify the content. The content doesn’t matter.

This is exactly why I prefer to get my news from multiple sources.

I do realize that the photo was likely not touched up by the Herald, but somewhere between the photographer and the Associated Press food chain. The end result is the same – my local newspaper is censored.

BoingBoing.net just posted a link to gnomz – a web-based comic authoring tool. Just fill in a web form that lets you pick the backdrop, characters and enter some dialog, and it generates a comic. Sounds lame, but it could actually be a handy way to create graphic representations of narratives or dialogues.

For example, I created a quick (and lame) comic about a professor who is concerned about using a wiki.

I would have linked directly to the “live” version, which is generated on the fly, but their database is being hammered by all of the BoingBoing readers.

Sorry for the delay, folks. I finally got the Education Directory for iPodder.org updated. There were several new podcasts to be added in both K-12 and Higher Ed categories. Be sure to check them out!

According to Adam, there are now 4213 podcasts in the directory (not counting the ones I just added). And I’m pretty sure there are podcasts out there that aren’t in the directory. That’s a pretty vocal long tail…

I also changed the directory to link to the web pages for the podcasts, rather than linking directly to the RSS/XML feeds. It’s easier to get more information about the feed before subscribing this way.

I keep noticing Drupal-powered websites all over the place. A month ago, I thought Drupal was some quirky, esoteric content management system. Now, I see that it’s a quirky, esoteric content management system that is used by a whole lotta people. And it scales from 1 user to 150,000 users. The SpreadFirefox project added 20,000 new users to its Drupal site in one month. There’s apparently a telecom somewhere with 150,000 users. It’s being used on several university campuses for campus- and department-blogging initiatives. It powers the new OurMedia.org content archiving/publishing project, which will likely/hopefully have about 3 bajillion users after it takes off.

Here’s a few of the campus blogging projects I’ve found recently that are using Drupal. I’m sure I’m missing a whole bunch of them, too.

• Digital Design | Collaborating on Digital Circuit Design
• AWG | Working Toward Architectural Principles for APU
• The Open Source Development and Documentation Project | Networked Learning for a New Generation
• Campus Commons, Prince Edward Island (PEI)
• ITDE Web Site | Instructional Technology and Distance Education
• Oh, and of course, there’s weblogs.ucalgary.ca

If I’d realized that Drupal was being used this much, the decision process may well have been less than 2 weeks…

Well, it’s officially in alpha anyway. I just created an account on OurMedia.org – a joint venture between Marc Canter’s folks and Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive group.

Marc was pimping the project back at Northern Voice – but it was undergoing last minute tweaks so wasn’t officially released then.

It offers free hosting for content (audio, video, images, etc…) for eternity, as part of the Internet Archive project. Very cool.

The OurMedia.org website is a Drupal site (put together by Bryght, it looks like) – it’s quite nice. I may have to will borrow some ideas from it for weblogs.ucalgary.ca.

My first upload to the archive should appear shortly – there is apparently a delay between uploading and hosting as part of the Internet Archive at archive.org.

Update: The image still hasn’t shown up online… A quick surf of the site shows a whole lot of “it will be available soon, please be patient” pages. Wonder if the link between ourmedia and archive.org is down? Perhaps it’s a piece of wetware that went home for the weekend?

Update: Interesting. Looks like the image file is in place, but the node for it still has the placeholder text…

Also, after looking at that image at full size – man, is my camera a piece of shit. I’ve got to get a decent camera soon…

Update: items that were uploaded today are starting to show up on archive.org. Not sure what the delay is, but I’ve added another image to test it out.

I’ve been using maps.google.com since it was first released. Absolutely love it.

But… Wouldn’t it be even cooler if you could toggle between street map view and satellite image view? Or, perhaps overlay the street maps on top of the satellite images?

If only Google had access to a catalog of satellite images like Keyhole. Oh, wait! Look at the bottom right corner of the Keyhole home page… “Powered by Google”

Here’s hoping the Keyhole team is talking to the Maps team…

update: Photoshop mockup of what it could offer, using northwest Calgary as an example:

Obviously there would have to be some calibration, but I’d assume the Keyhole images are all properly oriented. The image I used was provided by astronauts on the International Space Station, so wasn’t intended to be used with maps.

Update 2: 2005/07/23 – it only took them 4 months, but Google just released their “hybrid” view on maps.google.com – check out the live version of my mockup.

Inspired by the stuff I saw in DrupalEd, I installed the “Buddly List” and “FOAF” modules for Drupal on weblogs.ucalgary.ca.

Buddy List (buddylist.module) gives an instant-messenger-like buddy list, where you can identify users in that Drupal server as “buddies” – friends or acquaintances. It then provides you with a list of your buddies, and a page with recent blog posts from all of your buddies. It also provides an RSS feed of your buddies’ blog posts, so you can just subscribe to the users you care to listen to, rather than subscribing to the whole site, or subscribing to a bunch of individual RSS feeds (one per buddy). Very cool. This was the biggest draw for Elgg in my mind, and it’s now mostly available in Drupal. You can’t currently define the type relationship with a buddy (co-worker, classmate, friend, instructor, etc…) but it’s a start.

The FOAF module (foaf.module) is more of a sounds-cool-so-let’s-install-and-see-what-we-can-do kind of thing. It generates a FOAF XML rdf file describing your buddies. Not sure how that will be used yet, but it at least opens the door to some cool relationship-leveraging stuff.

Drupal is really starting to fire on all cylinders for the weblogs.ucalgary.ca service. There are still a few things I want to tweak, but it’s pretty darned close to an ideal social blogging service. Initially, I saw the everyone-blogs-in-one-place style of Drupal as a disadvantage, but when combined with the blog_theme.module that lets you customize the theme for each blog, I think the potential benefits outweigh the downside by an order of magnitude or three.

Update: I cross-posted this to DrupalEd.org on Boris’ request.

This has been demoed publicly before, so shouldn’t be a big NDA risk. I just held a 4-way video conference using iChat on Tiger. It was pretty darned slick, and I think was only limited by bandwidth.

Note the cool reflections on the “desktop”, and the viewing angles of the participants. Seems much more natural than just tiling a bunch of video views into a window… And you can add people to an open video conference just by dragging them from your buddy list into the video window. Slick.

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