Webducate sponsors LINGOs eLearning Global Giveback Competition
We at Webducate are very pleased to sponsor the LINGOs eLearning Global Giveback Competition through offering participant developers free annual subscriptions to author e-learning resources and activities with our tools Dragster 3, AMP and Pollster.
LINGOs is a consortium of over 45 international humanitarian relief, development, conservation and health organizations. LINGOs provides the latest learning technologies and courses from our partners so these non profits can increase the skill levels of their employees, and therefore increasing the impact of their programs.
The eLearning Global Giveback Competition is an opportunity for e-learning developers to donate their time and expertise to create on-line training courses needed by LINGOs organisations such as Christian Aid, Save the Children and World Vision. Go to the competition home page to view the courses that have been requested and find out about registering to participate. If you are taking part and have been assigned a course then set up your myWebducate account and then contact us to request your free Webducate tool subscriptions.
International Conference of Movement Dysfunction Blog – Elsevier, MACP, Kinetic Control
Leading up to the International Conference of Movement Dysfunction in November 2009 Webducate became involved in delivering a live blog from the conference. Working to the design of the existing conference website we developed and hosted a complementary blog site which integrated social web 2.0 applications. We then attended the conference and provided the live blogging services with reports published events from the conference in real time including content reports from each keynote and guest lecture.
Key features of this project included:
- Development of the conference blog site to match existing website
- Hosting of the blog site
- Integration of social web 2.0 applications including Twitter
- Live blogging and tweeting service from the conference provided
- Promotion of blog site amongst delegate community
- Management of ongoing discussion between delegates and speakers following the conference
New Dragster features – transparent skin and textbox height
Two new features have been added to Dragster 3:
- A new activity setting allows the height of draggable text boxes and labels to be optionally fixed. By default these draggable text boxes and labels automatically resize their height to fit their text content. Now by specifying a value greater than zero in the new Text box / label height setting all draggable elements will have the same fixed height. This is particularly useful for activities involving the completion of flowcharts, matrices or tables. This setting is used in this example flowchart based activity (activity courtesy of Dominic Alder – University of Bristol).
- A new option on the Activity skin colour selection is the transparent skin option. This option hides the activity skin entirely allowing the selected activity Background colour to be displayed. This facility allows for the activity to be seamlessly integrated into other web content as illustrated in this articulate presentation example.
If you can identify other useful additions to Dragster please get in touch!
Desire2Learn win patent dispute with Blackboard
Finally the court case between Desire2Learn and Blackboard appears to have been resolved with Desire2Learn emerging as the deserving victor. This court case has been extremely protracted with Blackboard appearing to take every opportunity to prolong and exacerbate the case even turning down an opportunity in March 2009 to end the case and donate related costs to education related charities .
We at Webducate are extremely pleased with the final outcome and wish to express our thanks to Desire2Learn for standing up to the aggressive and objectionable behaviour of Blackboard. We feel that the e-learning community both commercial and open source will benefit from a significantly more open, innovative and competitive environment as a direct result of this outcome . This has only been realised because of the courage of Desire2Learn and their enormous investment of time and money in fighting this case.
So congratulations to the team at Desire2Learn and thank you!
Dragster 3 – Basic formating tags in pop-up text feedback
Dragster 3 has been updated to allow basic HTML formatting tags to be used in pop-up feedback text. Four tags can now be used when defining this text:
- <b>bold</b>
- <i> italic</i>
- <sup>superscript</sup>
- <sub>subscript</sub>
NB – you should ensure that the activity setting HTML formating in element text is checked when using these tags, particularly if using subscripts and superscripts.
Unfortunately bold and italic formatting cannot be applied to superscript or subscript text.
