Monday 30 July 2007

continuing the quest for a visual scroll software

For a couple of months I have been searching for a software that I would describe as a visual mindmap meets google earth through a sketching pad and with tags.

I am someone who sketches/doodles a lot (not good, but still I love it). I make visual mindmap's, but not textual ones. The only problem is up until now I did not find a software that gave me the possibility to use my visual mind. I discussed this with other keen software users with a visual mind and they all do the same: they draw in their moleskin notebooks and afterwards put it into text for their computer or they scan it, but then they cannot search the items they scanned.
Of course not the drawing is a problem, I use a designpad to put my sketches on digital format, but there is no software to my knowledge that enables a google earth like mapping of visuals. One map on which I can add my new sketches: kind of a tapestry diary of drawings.

The software I would love to work with would be one that combines the Asian scroll kind of drawing (it never ends, keeps on going) with links to relevant material. So it would be mindmap meets google earth through a sketching pad and with tags.

It is something like the sketch book of artists, like Frieda Kahlo: she drew sketches constantly in her diary and used only a minimum of text. For her, her mindmap were the sketches. So if she could save all her sketches immediately on a computer and afterwards search her sketches for tags, it would (in my mind) have sort of a google earth like effect) then those sketches ideally should be linkeable, enabling the sketch to represent textual content.

Because I am not a software developer, it is difficult to get this idea across, but… I am going to try something – if possible – with the gnomedex community. Fingers crossed.

In the meanwhile I am waiting for an important confirmation for an offline eLearning software try-out.

reading up

after a great vacation, I start with reading up on things. First thing to scroll through: the open source convention of O'Reilly.

Next getting an agenda sketched out to look at all the things that need to be handled, reading all my e-mails (I really managed to leave my VL at home during my holiday).

Thursday 5 July 2007

workshop vodcasting online educa Berlin

Just been accepted to give a workshop on vodcasting in November at the online educa Berlin.

Working to get all the paper work finished.

collaborative documents

Today a few of my colleagues and I are testing software to work on collaboratively.
We selected three possibilities a pbwiki, coventi pages and google documents. All of them have different applications, so we will have to see which software we like the most.

For what: to get six syllabi that cover the same topic - but are given by different professors - to get them all into one final syllabus that covers the content and is satisfactory to all. That is why we are looking for something that keeps track of all the versions and allows easy comparison between versions.
The software also needed to be as intuitive as possible because of the difference in computer literacy.