Steve Thompson's blog

The first session took place today with FORCEM at Laburnam Rd Library. I discussed web 2 with the guys and talked about forcem.co.uk emails and google docs but it was going over their heads. Their focus was clearly the Cemetery and their website so we got right down to it. They created a home page, a news item and two grave records. Two down only 14000 to go! That's right there are many more recorded graves than there are headstones. Some of it comes into data protection territory but clearly the visible headstones are public and can be recorded on the website without too much fuss. The rest can come later. When I explained to them about global positioning and media scapes to chart the cemetery and they got very excited about that.

View the website here.

The first session took place today with FORCEM at Laburnam Rd Library. I discussed web 2 with the guys and talked about forcem.co.uk emails and google docs but it was going over their heads. Their focus was clearly the Cemetery and their website so we got right down to it. They created a home page, a news item and two grave records. Two down only 14000 to go! That's right there are many more recorded graves than there are headstones. Some of it comes into data protection territory but clearly the visible headstones are public and can be recorded on the website without too much fuss. The rest can come later. When I explained to them about global positioning and media scapes to chart the cemetery and they got very excited about that.

View the website here.

These sessions are drawing to a close and I can't make it next week so Carrie (researcher) is going to conduct some interviews. I'll add one extra session after that and this effectively ends the run of sessions.

I said at the outset that the sessions would react to whatever the participants want to do but I have been surprised at the range of things they have wanted to do.

This week with sessions drawing to an end I decided we needed to get back to the "program". I figured the participants may resist this and figured on some slack to pursue the other things they may wish to do. I also decided that we needed to deal with once and for all the problem of forgotten usernames and passwords and a method was put in place (can't really post details on this public blog) The groups website is driven by an open source CMC/Blog system with an "intranet" of google apps. This requires logging on more that once so we needed uniformity of usernames/passwords.

Surprisingly, the group did not balk at the idea of a slightly more "driven" session and said they enjoyed it.

We looked at personalising their own pages within the Intranet and they had quite an adventurous time exploring the google widgets. We then moved on to google docs and they seemed quite naturally to slip into using docs. Marian was able to share her doc with everyone and they collaborated on a Limeric. The spent a surprisingly long time on this - editing and re-editing.

There was a young man from Newcastle
Who thought carrying the coals was a hassle
He left everyone cold when he dropped his load
Said to to "hell" with the coal and Newcastle

An hour later and I've created all the Google Apps and altered the MX records for the domains. Whilst I was at it I threw in saltburnarts.org.uk and loftus.org.uk - that's a lot of MX records. Now I must wait 24 to 48 hours and see if these have "took". If not then it's a case of deciding whether to wait a little while longer or start the process all over again. Oh what fun!

Now looking at four possible new parts to this project.

www.brotton.org.uk Brotton
www.northskelton.com North Skelton
www.forcem.co.uk Friends of Redcar Cemetery
www.hfhc.co.uk Hemlington Family History Club

This means I have to go into those pesky MX records again to set up google apps and create an email account system. I'm going to open up several tabs in Firefox and try to do it as a job lot (gasp !!)

The most imminently needed is Friends of Redcar Cemetary with a meeting next week closely follwoed by Hemlington Family History Club.

Nobody managed to do their homework ie send me an email. A tale of forgotten passwords and things not working on home PC's like they do in the village hall. Everyone has USB's - I couldn't give a good explanation of memory sizes other than a 2GB USB stick is twice the size of a 1GB. We ended up ojn a website looking at coversion rates for MB to GB.

We looked at scanning again as well as another peak into second life. I think they view it as entertainment. We scanned and edited a police poster and created a generic poster template in word for Marian to make regular posters (I'm frogotten why)

On a similar front we looked at "overtyping" onto forms using a programme called Form Pilot. Both Peter and Marian were keen on this and we just had a quick look and made sure it would do what they wanted. Copied the prog to their USB's and they seemed happy to just poke about with the prog at home.

They seem to have a recurring prob with moving files around their PC's and USB's so we looked at this in depth. They were each given a screen grab of the process (see below)

The all seem dissapointed that the sessions are drawing to a close and the poor turn out. They have done a leaflet drop and say neighbouring villages of Bossbeck and Skelton Green would like to attend.

Starting this week’s session (blogging live). Marian said she had all kinds of problems with the videos I gave her on USB last week. Before we get to that we're looking at creating a poster for the @margrovepark email accounts.

Poster made and printed. Click Here

Now we’re looking at the problem with videos. The problem arises when inserting the USB stick and Adobe (photoshop) automatically opens up. The problem Marian had was that she tried to negotiate the Adobe browser. This is often a problem when various softwar’s fight for dominance over your system. Maybe Adobe is trying to be helpful but it's a complete hindrance. At the same time windows opened a microsoft window with a daunting range of options. We closed down the window and the Adobe interface and coined the phrase "when we want help from Mr Adobe or Mr Windows we'll let them know"

We moved on and looked at:

Scanning into photoshop.
Scanning into picssa.
Image manipulation

We got talking about meditation which reminded Trish of a Moody Blues song entitled OM. We looked at I-Tunes and discussed how we could download one track at a time rather than entire album. Did not find OM there but found it on YouTube and Trish added to the Community Pages

We created a new @margrovepark email account for Trish as she wasn’t here last week and Marian got practice making a new account. I made screen videos (screencasts) of all these activities using some free software called screencam. Eventually it would be nice to put these on the website but they’re large files at present. Last week Peter had expressed an interest in using a computer to fill in paper based forms.

We also had a little visit to Second Life.

I had some free software with me to do that but Peter didn’t show up. Marian said she’d like to sell her car on e-bay so we may look at that next week. I told them that their homework was to contact me using their new email accounts.

Starting this weeks session. Marian said she had all kinds of problems with the videos I gave her on USB last week. Before we get to that we're looking at creating a poster for the @margrovepark email accounts.

Poster made and printed.

Now looking at the problem with videos. The problem arises when inserting the USB stick and Adobe (photoshop) automatically opens up. The problem Marian had was that she tried to negotiate the Adobe browser. This is often a problem when various softwares fight for dominance over your system. Maybe Adobe is trying to be helpful but it's a complete hindrence. At the same time windows opened a window. We closed down the window and the Adobe interface and coined the phrase "when we want help from Mr Adobe or Mr Windows we'll let them know"

We moved on and looked at:

Scanning into photoshop.
Scanning into picassa.
Image manipulation

We got talking about meditation which reminded Trish of a Moodie Blues song entitled OM. We looked at I-Tunes and discussed how we could download one track at a time rather than entire album. Did not find OM there but founf it on YouTube and Trish added to then Community Pages

Low numbers again for the MyWeb2 workshop. This week we:-

Created a spreadsheet for the Village Halls finances.
Looked at some YouTube videos.
Added a story to the website showing how all the houses narrowly escaped demolition.
Shot some video fottage using a small hand held video camera that gave people the idea of a Margove Park "walkthrough" video.
One new @margrovepark.com email was created to go through the process of new account creation.

All the tasks were recorded as a "screencast" so that participants could refer back to the processes they had learned. These videos are quite large and we are still wondering how best to use them. Too large to get many on a USB stick. Maybe we need to compress and add to the website.

A couple of people expressed and interest in being able to electronically fill in forms that can at present only be filled in on paper. We'll look at a simple piece of free software to do this.

I know I said there was no plan but the session didn't even go as NOT planned. Small numbers again but at least different people. The're still dead keen to add stories to their website.

I had been downloading a widget to resize images and they jumped on the idea of "what's this downloading malarkey".

so they went thought the process of

1) downloading a Microsoft powertoy
2) Downloading Picasa
3) Installing both

[name] flapped about her lack of success with image downloading/uploading and we discussed htat the proper terminology had to be "transfer" (from camera to PC) I showed her how to treat the camera as an external drive and forget about the camera software thus taking charge of your own devices.

the END product is this:

http://www.tvcm.co.uk/ecol/index.php/mp_com/2007/08/09/high_veiw