--- Forwarded Message from Trip Kirkpatrick <[log in to unmask]> ---

>Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2006 09:32:26 -0500
>To: [log in to unmask]
>From: Trip Kirkpatrick <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: multimedia project

Quoth Helen Stapleton <[log in to unmask]>

>I have a professor who wants to do a sort of multimedia project where he 
>posts images.  Each student is assigned and illustration in a story book, 
>and then they must write a commentary on what they see and then attach a 
>sound file with their commentary in spoken form. He would like for all the 
>images to be seen along with the text of the commentary, and have all the 
>images in order.  He would also like it if this could be added to the 
>French Dept's website.  Right now he is doing it in PowerPoint, but wants 
>a more "seamless" format.  Do any of you have any ideas??


Helen:

I presume there is something limiting him from doing this in plain old 
(X)HTML. If he has the skills or a WYSIWYG editor or both, it wouldn't be 
that hard to create a master page and dupe it for each of the submissions, 
with the appropriate references filled in. Maintenance would be a bear, 
however.

Otherwise, some sort of (collaborative) blogging software would seem to 
make sense. All the big players, though, need a server and a db to a 
greater or lesser extent[1] -- do you have the resources for installation 
and maintenance? Using blogging software would give you a number of 
additional features, of course, like allowing users to comment on the 
posts, allowing him or others to run a similar or different project again 
with different parameters, metadata for robust searching, etc.

What does he mean by 'seamless'? There's always going to be some transition 
between hypertext pages. Even doing it in explicitly multimedia software 
(iMovie, Flash, etc.) is going to require some way of changing from one 
view to another.

Further questions: Is this an online project or offline? (Clearly, I've 
assumed online in the above.) What are the IP issues? Will he want to 
extend or repeat the project later? (Reusing the same images for another 
set of students, for example.) Under what circumstances will he want to 
demonstrate it later?

Best,
Trip

[1] http://www.ojr.org/ojr/images/blog_software_comparison.cfm A bit 
outdated, but the info about data storage is accurate, AFAIK. 
http://redalt.com/Blog+Software+Breakdown is a possibly more recent 
comparison of locally installed blogging software only.


Trip Kirkpatrick
SysAdmin / Sr. Programmer
Center for Language Study

e: [log in to unmask]
w: http://www.cls.yale.edu/ 



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