Welcome to the wiki for Web Scripting 2 April 08
The idea for using the wiki is to create a space where we can all collaborate on the live project and also communicate with the director of the Thare Machi Charity Steve.
News Update: The ftp details will be sent out today Monday 12th May as Nikki was off on Thursday & Friday of last week. The server structure: I am going to place within the public_html folder a folder called sollStudents. This will have all of your individual folders within it.
PPA Sessions begin on the 16th of July and you will have two sessions with some tasks to complete over the course of the summer. The PPA sessions will be completed at the beginning of September.
Final hand in date 30th July.
Hand in on CDROM Your completed prototype both FLA and swf files, or SMIL code, together with HTML and CSS designed container with pages for the PHP quiz and all associated files. Also hand in on the CDROM the report detailing the development of the prototype.
Week 12 9th July
Final taught session Completion of prototype, Css, Html container and Php quiz.
Week 11 2nd July
You will be continuing work with CSS, Html and php with James. Concentrating on php development of online quiz
Week Ten 25th June
You will be continuing work with CSS, Html and php with James.
Update: Steve Clarke the director of Thare Machi will be reviewing the work that you produce with me when I mark the final submissions. He has been so impressed with your efforts so far that he wants to mark it in some way by publisising the collaboration between you the students on the course, and the Thare Machi charity. More details will follow about this.
I still don't have everyones initial prototype links so please place the files on the server and then e-mail me the links to your prototype page.
Links to some Prototypes:
Week Nine 18th June
You will be continuing work with CSS, Html and php with James.
Week Eight 11th June
Thank you very much for all who attended the session this week. Those that presented their prototypes to Steve Clarke had obviously thought hard about what they were doing. The quality of the research and the implementations of the prototypes were very good. I was impressed by both the Flash based examples and also the Smil brothers prototype which showed great promise and potential.
I met with Steve today and he was very impressed with the quality of the work, and asked me to pass on his thanks for all of your initial efforts. He is very keen to take things forward and to see how these great examples can be taken on and used further. Steve will be coming in towards the end of the module to see some of the developments in terms of web interface and php elements.
Well done! I will be posting up links to the live web examples so that Steve can show his team. If some of you who weren't able to present would like to e-mail me their web links I will put these up as well.
I will be joining you for some of the php sessions as well.
Steve Clarke will be coming in for this weeks session for us to informally present to him the work achieved so far. The idea is to openly present to him the working examples stating the benefits and some of the problems encountered while making the prototypes. You can use the report format as a guide to help structure your presentation.
The presentation is informal and will only be 3-4 minutes. If you can try to show your prototype online from the server space that you have. If not then please bring with you a usb stick with your files on.
After the presentation and a break you will continue with James.
Some of you will be presenting in groups others individually.
Week Seven 4th June
Use of web technologies for Thare Machi. What technologies might be useful? How might we replicate the quiz online? How are we going to make use of CSS and Rss? How might we utilise an online video player. Produce downloadable web files of lessons to work on mobile platforms.
Do some dummy runs of the presentations ready for Steve Clarkes visit on the 11th of June.
Week Six 28th May (Half Term)
Important! : There is no session this week. This week is to be used to write your report and polish your initial prototype/presentation.
Week Five 21st May
This session will again be workshop based. I will be going through the use of handbrake and the formats that the video from the DVD's can be saved in. I will be spending some time digitising clips that can be copied from the shared drive for use in prototypes. We will also consider some of the other elements of the brief that we need to consider. The use of web technologies by the charity, the possible use of a video player for users to look at linear non interactive versions of their lessons. How to present the prototypes in a web based wrapper.
We will be looking at what you need to include in your reports before presenting your prototypes to Steve Clarke the director of the charity. Steve Clarke will be coming on the 11th of June for that evenings session and this is when you will be informally presenting your work so far. As mentioned last week this can be in a group or individually.
The last part of the session will be a review of where the prototypes are so far what problems exist and what remains to be solved.
Week Four 14th May 2008
During this week both Frank Burrow and myself will be running the workshop and we will be focusing on the scripting of the prototypes and also any hanging over scripting problems from OOPS.
Devoting a session to scripting will allow us to further improve prototypes and this session will put back your initial presentations of work so far to the following week.
In week Five you are not expected to present a finished report but to informally talk and show where you have got with your own protoype and examples. Problems, issues, things to work on etc.
Part of wek four will also be looking at creating an RSS feed at the moment this is a technology that hasn't been exploited by THare Machi the charity but it is incredibly useful to be able to send new up to date information to regular subscribers.
The article by Stephen Downes How to create a simple Rss feed is a really useful starting point and it is something that we will be going through. Look at the article Simple Rss.
Week Three 7th May 2008
During this week we spent the session looking through in detail at how the initial prototypes have been constructed. The use of movie clip symbols to load content into the main stage from external file sources. The use of scenes to provide the structural navigation between the elements and questions on the DVD.
We also looked at some of the short comings of the current prototypes. The main issue at the moment is that the interactive invisible button elements are clickable by the user throughout the course of the movie rather than just on the final frame of the movie.
A number of students were beginning to grapple with this proble and were on the edge of answering some of the problems in making the buttons live and clickable at chosen times.
The initial prototypes have enabled the construction of substantial parts of the DVD interactivity and the code for both prtotypes is available on the university shared drive in the LL folder then in the TME Assets folder. Before week four have a close look at this code and make sure that you are comfortable with combining Nicks prototype with the scene based navigation prototype that Mez has developed.
As discussed the ftp password and username for the server space will be sent to you by Nikki via your e-mail if for any reason you do not receive this I will give you the username and password at the next session on wednesday.
I will set up a folder for each of you, with your initial and surname and this folder can be found in the public_html
Week Two 30th April 2008
This week we are going to be looking at several things that will help develop a simple prototype that initially tries to answer some of the problems set by Steve Clarke in the brief last week.
First of all we will be looking at the use of Handbrake to get the video, sound and image assets from the Thare Machi DVD's. What format should we save them into so that they can be imported into Flash? What settings should we use what physical size of video might we need in order to keep file size down but still maintain quality?
After using Handbrake we will be looking at the options in Flash for then taking the files from hanbrake and encoding them into a form that can be used within the Flash environment. What are the encoding options what can be done in the encoding window that flash offers us? What data rate should we be using? Should we be embedding the video or not, what sort of streaming method might we best use?
All of this presumes that we will necessarily be using Flash as the best technology for this particular problem that Steve has asked us to try and solve. Is Flash the most suitable technology? We will be looking, after the break, at some other options that might be useful and are worth researching.
Exercise: 45mins
During the second half of the session this evening you will be asked to try and produce the beginnings of a simple, in this case Flash based, prototype that uses some of the video assets from the Thare Machi DVD to emulate the most simple functionality of the DVD. Using simple buttons to return the user to a previous section of video or to carry them forward to the next section of video once a question has been answered.
Final Part of the Session
After the attempts to produce a simple prototype we will demonstrate some of the initial solutions that we have come up with ourselves. We will give you access to these examples in order for you to develop them for the following week.
Thare Machi Charity Website
To get some background to the work of the charity have a look at Thare Machi's TME website
Workshops
During the course of the module we will be running workshops that help with combining the various technologies in order to develop a working web prototype that duplicates the user interaction currently available on the DVD's.
Outline for the Module
Some notes from Steve Clarke Director of Thare Machi:
Steve is looking to satisfy a range of requirements in turning the DVD content and functionality into web based form. These are set out below:
Stripping and re-organising the resources which make up an individual DVD
Making one lesson web functional
Making one quiz web- functional (quiz is a separate thing to the lesson and has a scoring component)
Making the output
A) compatible with MP4 players
B) OLPC compatible
C) Other low end laptop compatiuble
D) Mobile Phone compatible
E) Non-interactive version for playing in a loop in waiting rooms etc
F) Audio only for broadcast on radio
Download the current module information below:
ResearchReport.doc
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