Cormac’s blog

Since I know my way around Wikiversity fairly well , I decided that for this exploratory session, I would be better off exploring LeMill, which I’m much less familiar with.

I’ve been looking through Teemu’s resource “Brief History of New Media”. It’s got some good basic foundational ideas/players in the development of new media - and I learnt quite a few things. I like the way that some sections are explicitly labelled “not ready”.

One instantly appealing quality of LeMill is its clean layout; looking at another of Teemu’s resources, “Future Learning Models and the Impact of Visual Culture”, I like the way the slides are presented, with the audio clip at the top, in a clean, uncluttered window. And even better - I then discover the slideshow view - nifty, and again, very clean (and something I’ve been wanting for Wikiversity for some time). And when I go into the edit view, the interface is self-explanatory and very user-friendly - and I’m surprised that I could delete images from slideshows if I wanted to! (Does LeMill give more trust to users than Wikimedia projects? If so, is this because of a smaller or more dedicated userbase?)

(In another session), I want to find out more of the community aspect, so I click on the “community” hyperlink from the main page - there are “featured people” (something we’ve discussed in Wikiversity), and “recent discussions in my groups” (so far, I’ve only joined the History of New Media group - though how/when I don’t actually know!). I note that “recent discussions” don’t need to be so recent - “recent” comments listed from August 2007, October 2006 on my main page. This is no bad thing - on Wikiversity (and many other wikis), it is quite easy for developments/comments to be missed or forgotten amidst the reams of recent changes, and even on individuals’ watchlists. I like the idea of a longer “now” in these asynchronous worlds…

However, I feel like seeing what is happening right now to get a sense of overall activity, so I go to find an overall site “recent changes”, which I find from “what’s going on” on the main page. Again, the look and feel (and even naming) of these things seems a lot more friendly than the wiki environment (though perhaps the ‘crammed’ layout of a wiki’s recent changes is more appropriate to a busy environment, and better for giving a sense of the nature of the edit, and flagging possible vandalism). One thing I’m struck by is that all the changes (apart from people creating accounts) are to content pages - I don’t see any activity on discussion pages, nor messages to other users. Perhaps user messages are done via other means - or perhaps other media…

In LeMill’s recent changes, I see an edit I made the other day - uploading a presentation I gave recently on wikis. The resource is in “draft stage”, as I left the edit when it seemed to freeze on uploading the ppt (Powerpoint) file. I try this again and get an error value: “FileUpload instance has no attribute ‘isalnum’”. Well, that probably means something to somebody, but not to me! But when I return to the edit page (and as I suspected), I see that I need to upload an image file, not a ppt file. I open my ppt file, thinking I’ll save it as a whole pdf, but then I find I can save a powerpoint presentation as a series of individual PNGs. I’ve learned something new here - nice! Then LeMill’s slide uploader script takes me through the process - straightforward (one-by-one) uploading of the slide images, and afterwards, adding captions. Then I’m taken to a metadata page with a number of things to do - adding tags, assigning to a group, specifying subject areas, and target group levels. This is really good to have as an inherent part of adding content - and, even though I’m not sure of some of these (I create a “wikis in education” group, without knowing if one exists or being able to find out), I know that it can all be changed later. So, here it is - my first LeMill content!: “Wikis: an introduction”, or see the slideshow view (I’ve even been so audacious as to “publish” it.)

Overall - to myself, a mediawiki user - there are certain things missing here, but which are outnumbered by very nice variations and additions. Overall, it’s a very (user-)friendly process (though I’ve yet to get stuck in with other members of the community - or figure out how). So yes, as a start, I’m impressed - no “trouble at (Le)Mill”