Been so busy with work, home, dog, commute, and visitors from other-space that I have thoroughly neglected this space. With that as my excuse, and I am sticking with it, consider this a mini-post to touch on some educational/technology topics that have been filling my days to brimming over.

• Using Drupal to rapidly prototype a site on a cultural competency curriculum.
• Learned (and love) Django for Tomorrow Unlimited.
• Digging Eclipse with PyDev, Subclipse, and Mylyn (formerly Mylar).
• Pro bono consulting on Hella Delicious. Further evidence that good content is what really matters.
• VC keeps calling for Plone/Zope/Zeo/Apache help on the Jehle/Reny economics site.
• Putting together QA process with folks at CCNMTL.
• Nursing faculty are loving podcasts.
• Recently re-read the Foundation series. I miss Isaac, and am thankful that I can spend time with him through his works.
• Currently reading The Pragmatic Programmer by Hunt & Thomas.

In cleaning my house, I found an early copy of the Digital Tour of Poughkeepsie DVD I produced with Leonard Nevarez at Vassar over the last three years. I hope to post some clips, stills, and a write-up describing the project, its goals, and the techniques we used to get it done.

Using a content management system to promote collaborative writing in the sciences (and beyond)

NERCOMP Annual Conference 2006

View the slideshow. (Web-based using S5)
Download the PowerPoint. (524 KB)

by Ken Bolton, Eric Eberhardt and Cristian Opazo — last modified 2006-03-27 16:58

HarryRoseman.com is a combination portfolio and social networking tool for the professor and sculptor Harry Roseman. Harry is also an avid photographer of his works and friends. We used the Zope/Plone stack and a lightly modified version of the PloneLightBoxJS product.

Chris Joslyn did the hacks to LightBox. Michael Pepe-Mooney modified the skin to make it slightly less Plone-ish. Me? I managed the project, the content, and Harry.

The best thing about this project has been watching Harry go, “Ah ha!” He totally gets it now, and makes changes and additions almost daily.

We justified using Media Cloisters resources for what was pretty obviously a portfolio project thusly:

1. The project content could be used as a teaching and reference platform in art history and studio art courses.
2. With modifications to the LightBoxJS, a hide/show button could be added to hide and reveal the metadata, making it potentially as useful a study guide as Luna, an analog slide library, or Gardner’s Art Through the Ages.
3. The students working on this would develop skills in Plone and CSS which would be applied to future projects.