Will Performancing For FireFox, Qumana and Flock Ever Work with Roller Weblogger?
Today was the day where I was back at work trying to weblog in my Intranet weblog and to take things for a spin I decided to see how the Performancing for FireFox extension from FireFox would work. If you would remember, not long ago, I created a couple of weblog posts on my overall experience about Performancing for FireFox and back then I mentioned how I saw some initial issues when trying to get this extension to work with one other Open Source weblogging engine, which is Roller Weblogger. And the same thing happened with Flock’s weblogging component.
Either way, I decided to give it another try today and to my surprise even though I initially had some issues getting it to work in the end I managed to set up the account manually for my Intranet weblog, which uses Roller and right away I thought I was off to a good start. Whooops, but not so fast, Mr. Apparently, the account got set up all right and I could see that there was a successful connection to my Intranet weblog. However, I do not seem to be able to get the listing of categories nor the previous weblog posts that I have created already. It just displays a grey screen. Nothing happening.
As you may have figure out already I had to set up the weblog through the manual process since it is protected in an Intranet and while doing that initial set up I had to choose the option for MetaWeblog API in order to be able to connect to it since Roller is not listed as an option on the list of weblogging engines available. So, I said, fair enough, as long as it connects I should be fine. But now that I am connected, I am not that fine. As I said the listing of categories and previous weblog posts do not seem to be working, which means that it is rather awkward to post a article to a place where some of the options are missing.
I have read somewhere (Wish I could find that link again, grrr ! Where were you BlinkList when I needed you!) that this may not be a problem with Performancing For FireFox per se, but from the MetaWeblog API option that fails to grab the categories and the history from a weblog based on Roller. Thus I am not sure if that is something that would be fixed eventually. What I was hoping for is that Performancing For FireFox would eventually fix this issue by allowing the possibility of having Roller Weblogger added as another option to choose from other weblogging engines. That way, we would not have to go through the same thing and still be able to function properly with our own weblogs regardless of what engine they run.
Oh, but don’t worry, because this same issue is happening to other weblogging tools that I have been talking about over here: Both Qumana and the weblogging component from Flock have got this same problem and unless Roller is added into the list of options available for selection I doubt we would have any success to make full use of the capabilities of each of these weblogging tools for that particular weblogging engine. And that, to me, would be a pity, because although this engine may not be particularly popular like Blogger, TypePad or LiveJournal it is still an option out there for quite a few of us and therefore it would be just like shutting us down from the benefits of weblogging in general. That is why I just hope that one of these days this Open Source weblogging engine would be part of all three weblogging tool options.
In this particular case, w.bloggar is the big winner since it includes a whole bunch of different weblogging engines, Roller included, that none of the other tools current offer that people can choose from. This, on its own, is what is making me continue using extensively w.bloggar as my default weblogging tool as opposed to other options since it just simply does the job. And quite nicely !
[tags]Roller, Roller+Weblogger, Performancing, Qumana, Flock, wbloggar[/tags]
Using Screencasts to Augment Instruction
Another interesting weblog post that I have found on my RSS feeds for today has been the one that Phil Windley has shared over at Phil Windley’s Technometria regarding the subject of using screencasts as a very powerful way to augment instruction. And I just couldn’t have agreed with him more on this very same subject.
Having been involved myself with providing different education sessions on different topics and tools regarding KM and Communities of Practice during the course of 2005, and most probably during 2006 as well, I can certainly agree that screencasts are very powerful means of delivering content and education, specially to remote, distributed and virtual teams. There are plenty of reasons and benefits as to why screencasts are very powerful while conducting different education events but I am just going to mention five reasons why they have been very beneficial to me thus far:
- Ability to record education session for later replay so that people who may not have been able to attend the education session at the time are able to listen to the original event without missing out on the audio and video of the event. And they can do that at their own leisure, while at work. Yes, indeed, what you would called informal learning.
- Ability to save time and effort by not having to repeat the same education session with others over and over again and during whatever the period of time. In here I think I could also include the good amount of costs saved by not having to arrange multiple conference calls or even arrange face to face events to conduct those sessions or even reserve whatever the web meeting room I may have thought about scheduling ahead of time.
- Ability to improve the amount of online resources for specific learning courses or tutorials. That way there is a growing amount of learning material that could be used extensively to increase the number of intellectual capital available for whatever the business and dealing with whatever the topic.
- Ease of use for wider distribution through the usage of media files, Flash or whatever other web format where in most cases people would just need to have a browser or their favourite multimedia player. Indeed, in this case there is no longer a need to have expensive software running in your computer in order to attend those events. In most cases now you would just need to have a browser or a media player so that you can view the modules with just a single click.
- Easy to create, edit and produce for later distribution and without hardly any intervention from the presenter in order to share the results with the audience. This is probably one of my favourite benefits since in most cases it would require very little technical knowledge to produce your own screencast and off it goes. Available to everyone.
So as you can see screencasts are certainly one of the most productive ways of getting virtual teams to enjoy different education events without having to worry about anything else than just getting the participants to make use of their favourite browser or media player and with no additional costs involved. By now though you may be wondering about what are my favourite tools to create screencasts and over the last couple of years I have developed an inclination for three of them:
- CamStudio (Freeware)
- Wink (Freeware)
- TechSmith Camtasia Studio (My favourite and, perhaps, the most powerful one with some very useful online tutorials in TechSmith Video Training Materials)
If you are looking for a more comprehensive listing of different tools available for creating screencasts you could also check out the link best screencasting tools where you can find a very good listing with a good number of reviews as well for each of them and many more.
Thus next time you are thinking about delivering a course for an education event, you may want to have a look into the option of creating a screencast with it so that other folks may be able to benefit from it at the same time that you have got a good and inexpensive audio and video recording of the session itself. You may want to have a look into any of the different options mentioned above or the listing from the link I talked about earlier on. You will see that they would be a very successful and effective way of letting your education events sink in with your audience and remain there for later reuse.
[tags]Screencast, Wink, Camtasia, CamStudio, Learning, eLearning[/tags]
