Web 2.0 Test Kitchen

Sound wave by betmari is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 As my recent blog entry on Audacity mentioned Ogg Vorbis, I thought I’d try to give an explanation of this technology a shot. Ogg Vorbis is an open source, studio level audio encoding and streaming media. It’s licensed under the GNU General Public License and is supported by a community of developers. The .ogg file format may not be recognizable to most but can be recommended as a substitute for .mp3. It is valued for it’s low bandwidth and benefits to efficient storage. Where Vorbis is the audio compression, Ogg is the container format. Both technologies were developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation.  The combination of Audacity to create and edit files and exporting to .ogg shows how open source solutions can be expertly applied to your next project.

Nerds viciam by Ninha Morandini is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 Soundcloud is a community of music artists, producers, podcasters that deliver content to a wide and diverse audience of listeners. As a visitor to SoundCloud, you can search and listen to tracks. However, by creating an account, you can experience many more features. Just as any Web 2.0 tool, you have the ability to engage with the content and the community. You can openly comment on content, follow accounts, add to personal playlist, as well as share the content over social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, Pinterest) and good old-fashioned email. Interacting with content is unique as comments go directly on the waveform’s timeline and not a comments section per se. It’s as if the audience is directly engaged with the track, just as if you were commenting about something with friends in a face-to-face live setting. This allows the community to specifically point out their interest in the co

For this Lunch Bytes, I’m keeping the the theme of free apps going and we’re looking at Audacity . But what is it? Well, it's a multi-tracking recording and editing software that will help you with your audio projects. Whether it’s laying down, cutting, enhancing, or exporting audio tracks, this software application has kept its user base happy. My Audacity 1.3.6 Mix by Roy Blumenthal is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 Licensed under GNU General Public License, this open source software is free to the public. It's also supported by major operating systems (Windows, Linux, and Mac OS). The success of this project is the result of a community of developers and audiophiles working together since 2000. Why pay for studio level software, when Audacity can handle your project's needs. The user interface (UI) is straightforward and intuitive. If you’ve seen timeline applications, it’s just a main panel with a visual representation of sound (waves) by track and allows for

The expression, “too many cooks, spoil the broth”, is an accurate precaution for managing projects. The solution, a hard and fast rule underscoring that information flows to a single project manager to best oversee a job. However, when it comes to a community of practice, where we invite all sorts of contributors, a different set of rules apply. So, let’s form a line in the Web 2.0 Test Kitchen, as it’s all about order and convention. Kars in the Kitchen by Glen Zazove  is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 As far as I can tell, well-engaged communities of practice are cooperative and follow a formal set of policies and applied governance.  The Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities typically have a philosophical understanding or ethos that binds the community similar to a social contract. There are also codes of conduct that clearly identify unacceptable behavior as well as the repercussions. Here are a few policies for FLOSS communities: Drupal Apache Ubuntu

As I approach a produsage project for students in a first year course in Computer Science, I have to think of it in layers. Yes, I know. It's just become too easy to incorporate this food theme, so I'll spare us for a moment. But back to the plan. I'm interested in seeing a collaborative process, where learners describe their experiences with technology and report these back using some form of a blog or storytelling platform. I'm especially interested in how learners can respond or interact with each other in this environment. The sharing process is key to building the community and exchanging ideas but realistically they're extrinsically motivated (by points or grade) to complete their responses to classmates. Perhaps, I can use that to continue the assessment process of learning the instructional materials. Assessments based on students building something together like a knowledge repository based off the topics covered in the course. I'm seeing the pieces c

Sometimes, hybrid skills pay dividends in the form of informing your audience and learning from them. Let's say you want to promote content or survey a group of people to determine the value of the content. I know, happens every day, erright?! These are typically skill sets for the marketing crowd but I assure you there are tools out there for us. It's time to go bananas as we look at MailChimp and SurveyMonkey in the Web 2.0 Test Kitchen. Remembering that email is one of the most frequently employed ICTs, we can lean on MailChimp for marketing-based strategies that promote specific content on other platform or just inform our audience. Choose from a ton of templates configured for specific communications. Also, it's loaded with rich analytics that let you know who on your distribution list is actively clicking and which links they're accessing. It's free to use, when accounts have less than 2,000 emails on their database. Now, if you want to start coll