07/02/2008 by nicola.

Stewart Mader of Wikipatterns, Wikis in Education and other great feats of wikitivity has started a 21 days series explaining wikis and how they can be used. So far:
Day 1 Growing wiki support from grassroots
Day 2 Explaining differences between wikis and email
Day 3 Conditions for successful wikis, wikipedia isn’t only way

When I was creating a variety of wikis last year and advising others on getting going, we used the wikipatterns to help promote discussion beyond ok - we’ve got started, now what happens. Its easy to fall into anti-patterns even unintentionally whilst you are getting familiar with contributing in a public editable space and the patterns provide great examples to assist with wiki community building.

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07/02/2008 by nicola.

Bilkent Uni su anda 3boyutlu cep telepfonlari uzerinde calismaktadir. Daha fazla bilgi icin linki tiklayin.

There has been an EU funded project, running since 2004. They are investigating using mobile phones to create 3D environments/games.

Some links:
1.A paper has been produced on mobile 3D environments. They use the camera as the input device and the user’s physical movements are captured in incoming video. The paper then outlines how they map the motion to 2D and 3D interaction.
2. 3D phone project website has more details.

There is a lot of buzz about 3D in Turkey at the moment, we are having multiple requests from nephews for 3D glasses etc

Very cool stuff - would love to be a fly on the wall at the meeting today !

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07/02/2008 by nicola.

Had a presentation to do and decided to stick 2 clips of Second Life together. With all 3 macs in use at work here yesterday, decided best bet was to try and download Premiere (had used before for a podcast project), I am not a highly experienced video editor. To cut a long story short, premiere and my work pc did not like each other and faced with a short time to try and cut and put two short video clips together, went online to Jane Hart’s Top Tools (thank you Jane for this site) .
Tried a few from here, Jumpcut seemed to offer most functionality (I had two clips with built in music, so just wanted to edit both clips slightly and run one after the other, so transition effects optional), but I had problems with the site. I hope to use once it is out of beta.

Used Eyespot, a bit like Jumpcut, you can only trim at start and end of clips (can’t chop in places like Premiere) and had effects, transition options. It took about 5 mins to mix, 1 min to preview and you have option to make public, share or download. Provided you have a facility e.g. in Firefox to download video from the web, you can then save offline as an .avi file.

I used WinAvi to convert the avi file to an MP4, you have to pay$24.95 to buy the basic convertor and remove the watermark off files, but I’ve found it a worthwhile investment. Going off the point but I don’t have Quicktime Pro on this pc, or Sorensen Squeeze which probably would have used should I wish to make an ipod friendly podcast. Generally my experience is that WinAvi is excellent for video but I noticed in a previous podcast project using slides & audio or slides & video, both Sorensen and WinAvi just had slightly less smooth transition and colour, QuickTime Pro seemed to produce best result for slides.

The mp4 file from WinAvi was perfect, so job done even though it was all in a panic, another sign that web tools are providing functionality just when you need it.

I’ll still be looking to get Premiere though, should I wish to do more video editing, but in the meantime will definitely use Eyespot again

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