While working on a Javascript interactive for the diaBeaters project, we stumbled across an interesting problem with jQuery UI draggables. To wit: if you have draggable items inside a div with overflow:hidden, they're stuck. You can't drag them out of the container -- the div just scrolls out to infinity. (Try it sometime, it's awful.)
This semester we upgraded our WordPress Multi-User (MU) installation to WordPress3. WordPress runs our EdBlogs course blogging platform, a system we support that is designed for multi-user course blogs. WordPress3 brings the WordPress MU fork back into the fold of the core WordPress distribution and continues the gradual improvement of its technical architecture and design.
MediaThread, our new media analysis platform, previously codenamed 'Mondrian', now supports Final Cut Pro's XML Interchange Format. I split the XMEML code out as a library that might be useful to others. Get your free (as in BSD) code here: http://github.com/ccnmtl/xmeml This library helps create an XMEML file based on references to clips from other XMEML files. It was born by getting two problems to cancel each other out. This should help solve a problem the CCNMTL video team frequently encounters.
After some prodding from the community, I've finally published Drupal module Multisite Manager 6.x-1.0. I originally developed this module to fill a sweet spot that was missing at CCNMTL two years ago--allowing our Educational Technologists to just click a button to be able to create a new site to prototype content, or experiment with Drupal's features. Drupal is a great platform that makes this possible, but then allows a developer to add features later--significantly, after content and some site architecture has been worked out.
We are very excited to announce the release of our latest iteration on a web-based, multimedia, annotation environment - code named: Mondrian Mediathread ( source code ). Mediathread builds on the strengths and experiences of our long history of annotation projects here at CCNMTL.
This semester we partnered with the Earth Institute and launched an environment to support the new international Masters in Development Practice. The environment is intended to support curricular interactions as well as less formal student interactions (i.e. social networking) and our first iteration is built on a combination of Moodle and Elgg. We are just dipping into Moodle development and ran into a situation where we wanted to customize the video player we were using to display the video.
For thousands of years critical and scholarly discourse around text has revolved around citation and reference. What might this kind of discourse look like around multimedia - html text, images, audio, and video?
In March, CCNMTL shipped a laptop to a South African AIDS clinic as a part of a multimedia health-care intervention.
OpenID is an increasingly popular universal sign-on mechanism on the web. Google, Facebook, LiveJournal, even Sears' online store are supporting it. We can, in theory, adapt Columbia logins to be an OpenID provider. This would allow members of the Columbia community to login to other sites which accept OpenID with their Columbia UNIs.
