Fabian Gebert
2009/01/09 17:08
Technology
In order to motivate the team members, we have implemented a credit point based task management tool as a controller in our CakePHP application.
It allows us to manage current tasks and suggest new tasks that others can assign to them and work on afterwards.
The main difference to standard task management tools is that it allows setting a credit for completing the task. For instance, I got 10 credit points for writing this post. On the one hand, this allows me to estimate how long the task should take to avoid too much effort. On the other hand, it motivates me to do it as soon as possible such that I can do the next task.
The credit points itself are just for motivation and do not serve as a base for a financial compensation. But this would be possible for commercial teams.
Anybody interested in what the task management looks like can just let me know.
Frank Wolf
2009/01/04 17:43
News
From the end of November until the beginning of December, Fabian and I worked on an submission for the German D-ELINA E-Learning award. We've handed in a 10-sided file describing the current Mediabird software as well as features that are supposed to be added in the near future.
Mediabird's principles
Throughout the submission, we've put emphasis on Mediabird's general work flow. We've described the process of taking notes about a subject and relating the important notes with thoughts that come up during the study process. We thus have described the work flow of studying a textbook, some lecture notes or an article on the internet and how to sum up the most important facts and make this learning process reproducible on the base of one's own study process.
A perspective on community functions
Additionally, we have pointed out the group based learning work flow. Right now, users can create and join groups to work together by creating and discussing topics. Soon, every user will be given its own virtual profile, where he or she can display questions that he or she may have come across while studying a particular topic.
Profiles will make it easy to find users of similar interests. Users will be able to hook up spontaneously to form short- or long-term work groups for the sake of discussing questions or working on shared tasks or projects. Not to mention that anybody may simply answer other user's questions on the particular profile page.
To sustain the high quality of content on the Mediabird platform, every user can reward other users' work with thumbs that are given for a particular topic. The hall of fame motivates users to be more ambitious and share their work with other users.
With the help of this game-based-learning approach, we want to make learning more fun and more successful.
So much for the basics. If you are interested in more detailed information, sign up and get to know Mediabird. Anybody who wants to participate in Mediabird is most welcome.
See you soon on Mediabird!
Fabian Gebert
2009/01/03 20:28
Development
To make the map view (that is the structure view of a topic) more useful, I've just implemented a drag & drop handling that completely replaces the old behavior. You can now insert cards with the plus button to the right and drag these cards to any position you like. The same applies for existing cards of a topic.
With this new approach, it is possible to move an advanced card to the main or illustrative level and vice versa.
Additionally, the take-notes-and-sort-them-later workflow is now a lot easier to realize.
Fabian Gebert
2008/12/14 19:34
Development
I've just implemented a small interface that allows the user to keep changes that failed uploading and allows the user to retry uploading the changes. This makes Mediabird a lot more stable even if the server is irresponsive or you've lost your internet connection.
What it does not allow you to do right now is to keep changes and to upload them later on instead of aborting or retrying the upload process. This shouldn't be much of a real life limitation though.
Feedback to the new feature is most welcome.
The next steps will be to implement versioning, change locking (to avoid unwanted multi-user access at the same time) and the ability to have personal copies of content cards. Stay tuned.
Fabian Gebert
2008/12/03 13:46
News
You might have noticed that there weren't any code changes during the last two weeks. We are working hard on the participation documents for an eLearning competition. Additionally, we are working on a new homepage in both English and German and a major redesign of the software. Using CakePHP from now on.
And we are still looking for developers. So in case you're interested: Let us know!
Stay tuned anyway.
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