What is Memolane?

In order to keep things manageable, you can easily create stories -one story for your holiday trip to Italy, another story for a seminar you organised or attended, … you name it. Below you can see a sample story for our workshop on Moodle which took place in Athens 2011. As you can see, it incorporates facebook posts, tweets, youtube videos, and so on. As creator of a story, you have full control over which posts, tweets, videos make it in the timeline.

If you don’t know how to embed a memoline, check out this blog post. If your blog is hosted on WordPress.com, then check out these suggestions.

Below you can find a few tutorial videos on memolane:

Getting started: adding services

Creating, editing, and viewing stories:

Adding and finding friends:

Searching:

Sharing memos

Privacy settings:

The editor has a new Zen mode, where in full-screen mode all the buttons, bells and whistles disappear from the screen (until you move the mouse cursor to the top of the screen again, that’s when the most commonly used functions are accessible again). Like… this:

So tell us…seriously…what could be less distracting than a completely empty page, eh? (Okay, it may also be a bit intimidating if you have writer’s block, but let’s not go there. )

What’s new? Well…it’s a bit faster, again, support for PHP4, old versions of MySQL and Internet Explorer has (finally) been dropped. Without having done any benchmark tests, it feels like pages load somewhat faster, and the administration section seems to be snappier, too. It certainly looks cooler than in the previous version! The default Twenty Eleven theme gives you an idea of some of the possibilities of HTML5, and I’m sure that in the not-so-distant future we’ll see many more themes popping up everywhere that will make the most of HTML5.

And oh yeah, from now on they’ll start doing partial upgrades – no need to upload the entire installation anymore, every time there’s an upgrade. While we at LLIT don’t really have anything to complain about with our current provider, people working elsewhere might not be as lucky as us. (An example, you ask? Well… FTP’ing the contents of an archive as small as that of WordPress from the comfort of your home to the servers there can easily take 4 hours to complete. Obviously the auto-update function doesn’t work, for “security reasons”.)

So far, this upgrade has been a good one – no broken plugins, etc, and everything seems to work just a bit better. Again. I can’t wait to see what they’ve got planned for 3.3…

While unfortunately many web 2.0 applications are merely a matter of novelty over substance -how many timelines have you embedded in your blog so far?- Backboard does performs one of the essential tasks in any professional domain, really, be that education or a private company, and that is collecting feedback.  Backboard allows you to do just that: the basic idea is that you can upload documents or enter a web address and then ask colleagues, friends, or anyone, really, what they think of your document/website.

Three simple steps will get you going, but there's more if you want to...

The system even allows for secure uploads, but only so if you have a premium account, which you can try out for a limited period if you want to (the free account gives you unlimited Backboards, 5 MB maximum size per file, and no SSL by the way). You then need to specify who should be able to access and assess your document: you can give free access to the whole wide world, but maybe you will be more comfortable with selecting your own executioners yourself, in which case you simply list their e-mails in a text box and that’s it. Additionally, you can also provide an access code which your reviewers then have to enter before they can view your document.

Reviewing a document then is as easy as either inserting general comments, or you can use the red pencil to indicate certain sections of the document and then comment on just those sections. The owner of the document gets informed whether or not you have given feedback yet. A simple test with a pdf document resulted in this:

Provide general feedback or comment on specific sections of a document

I haven’t tried many different formats yet, but th system should have no problems with Word (DOC/DOCX), Excel (XLS/XLSX), PowerPoint (PPT/PPTX), WPD, ODT, ODP, ODS, RTF, PDF, TXT, HTML, SQL and JS), images (GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, BMP and PSD), vector graphics (AI, EPS, PS), web pages or other URLs, and free-form text.

Next time you need a couple of opinions, give it a try -I don’t think you’ll regret it.

From February 7–13, 2010 in Ghent (Belgium) vzw Let’s Learn IT organizes the workshop:

Web 2.0, Multimedia & Presentation Skills: Empowering IT Competences For Today’s Job Market (Workshop Reference number: 2009-1-BE3-GRU13-01100)

The main objective behind this workshop is to give the participants a decent training on how they can use computers to enhance their chances for finding a job. The focus will be on various web 2.0 applications, presentation tools, and digital audio and video.

Objectives

Participants will have learnt the following:

• how to use computers and computer peripherals to create multimedia presentations;
• how to use modern web 2.0 applications like wikis, blogs and social community websites;
• how to work with digital audio and video;
• how to give an efficient presentation.

Interested?

Thanks to the Grundtvig programme of the European Commission and the Flemish National Agency, vzw Let’s Learn IT can offer this workshop completely free of charge (flight ticket, hotel, breakfast lunch & dinner will be paid by us) to 20 unemployed candidates. If you are interested in attending this workshop, you can send us a letter (or email) of motivation in which you tell us why you would like to attend this workshop. You will need to prove that at the moment of applying you are officially unemployed.

• Where? Ghent, Belgium
• When? February 7-13, 2010
• Who? Unemployed European citizens
• Costs? All costs related to the programme will be paid for by the organization

For more information, please visit Let’s Learn IT.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY