Digital Skills

About These Modules

All (or most) of the things you see here use web 2.00 or open source applications. The most important aspect of this is that they are free. This means you can go forward from here knowing that you can replicate it all without the concern of costly multiple licenses. It's also a very exciting area because these applications are improving and being added to all the time. The only problem is keeping up with them!

001 Virtual Networking

Meetings can be in a 3D world or using a variety of methods including the A Social Network. We'll show you how to do this. We'll also include in this session how to seek online guidance and support and how to set up and participate in various forms of web conferencing.

002 Multiple User Accounts

One of the most difficult tasks at the start of any community session is getting a verified web account for each participant in whatever web application your session will use. We'll show you some simple ways around this.

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Web Publishing

003 Blogging

A Blog is short for Web Log, originally a means of creating a series annotated links. The annotations got more extensive and became more akin to a web diary. There are many tools for blogging. They fall into two different camps, hosted and installed. "Hosted" is a tool that you simply use online in the webspace of the software producer and example of this is blogger. "Installed" means you have to download the software and install it on your own server, examples of this are B2 Evolution and Wordpress. Wordpress is an interesting one because it is also a free hosted blog. Wordpresss is rapidly becoming the foremost blogging tool and is used all over for entire websites as a Content Management System (CMS)
Example Blogsites: http://gdy.org.uk/blog http://www.moorsholm.org.uk/ http://www.skinningrove.tv www.margrovepark.com

004 Wikis

A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. For example, the collaborative encyclopaedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis. This page you are looking at now is a Wiki and it is set up so that only certain people can edit it but anyone can get a wikispaces account and comment on any of the pages. The benefits of using a wiki are (i) the rapid creation of new pages (ii) the ease of updating pages (iii) the ease of interlinking between pages (iv) collaborative writing and design.

005 Websites

Nowadays many people are making websites with Blogger, Wordpress, or Wikis as you'll find described in the previous two modules. Alternatively you will find in Module 020 help on Social Networking as some people consider MySpace or Facebook all the webpage they'll ever need. There are other ways too such as learning HTML (025) and FTP (024) like the old school or look at content management systems (027) or web applications (026) or use the excellent web editor NVU You could even [personal opinion alert] spend a fortune and do your head in learning Dreamweaver but the writer of this page does not advocate this. What we're going to look at here is not a wiki or a blog but an actual website created using free online resources.

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Multimedia

006 Digital Images

This module is not about learning Photoshop although moving on to Photoshop (the industry standard image editing sofware) could be a progression route. The things people largely want to do with images are * Resize (physical size and File Size) *Crop * Adjust brightness/contrast * Retouch old and damaged images We will look at some basic Photoshop principles but also carry these over to GIMP the open source alternative. We will also look at other free and open source image applications as well as online tools.

007 Digital Audio

008 Digital Video

009 Digital Music

010 Podcasting

Or Internet Radio. This can be done in many ways and has become easier than ever to do. Podcasts could range from events coverage, online audio "how to" guides to fully fledged radio broadcasting online. Quite often podcasts are spoken word because there is an issue with regard to using copyright music online. Ideally if you wanted to broadcast music on the web you should seek a license to do so.

011 Vodcasting

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012 Online Media

An important aspect of multi media projects such as podcasting, vodcasting, citizen journalism, community media etc is being able to store your media files and embed them into your web pages and blogs or at least link to them. You could store all these files on your own web space or server, but they soon add up to a lot of space. We'll show you how to store media files and then draw them into your own web pages or blogs like the example below.

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013 Animation

Animation is a great way to tell a story. It often demands team work and a range of skills. We can show you a variety of 2D, 3D and stop frame animation techniques. See the example below from Redcar and Cleveland Mind.

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014 Virtual Film, Theatre & TV

We'll show you how to become a Hollywood mogul without spending a penny. Although this a lot of fun you'll need to develop all the skills needed in a major production. Script writing, direction, camera work, location scouting, acting and editing. Most of all it's going to take teamwork to bring that production in on time. A close relative to animation, making movies in 3D worlds or games engines is also known as Machinima. Take a look at the movie below made such a workshop with Jack Drum Arts.


More examples

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Miscellaneous

015 Sceencasting

This is the process of recording computer screen activity and making videos. The process is most often used for making tutorial videos but is also used in the making of Machinima.

016 Personalised Computing

Take control of your computing experience and set things up so that wherever in the world you log on you will be presented with the same screen making all your usual links available. Draw content from other sites into your research homepage using RSS feeds. Direct access to your email. How to draw in useful news and research content and how to set up your own document and spreadsheet store that you can keep private, share with others or even set up to collaboration with others.

017 Portable Apps

Portable Apps is a free program that runs on a USB drive. In turn Portable Apps runs many free and open source software applications. These include audio editor, email client, FTP client, image editing. In fact many of the tools you need to do the activities described here. Great if you find yourself in a PC suite with little or no creative software available. Your software runs right from the USB drive !

018 Media Mapping

This is a combination of a number of things and involves attaching text, images or various media files to a geographic location and in this way you can create a "media map". Example here

019 Digital Stories

Digital Stories can be very effective and exists in a variety of forms. The simplest is a series of images with an audio narration. This is then shown as a movie. Example 1Example 2

020 Social Networking

021 Online Surveys

There may be many occasions when you might want to create an online survey. This could be for business or pleasure such as seeking opinions from your community or a wedding gift list for your family. There are a number of free tools to help you do this and we will look at two of them. Survey Monkey and Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

022 E-commerce

023 Safety and Security

Advanced

024 FTP

025 HTML

HyperText Markup Language, used to build web pages.

026 Web Applications

There are many open source web applications to do almost anything and they're mostly free. These include Content Managements Systems, Blogging, Image Galleries, Forums and much more. However, you will need to know how to upload (FTP) the files and how to configure the application on the server. You will also need some webspace to host your application too and this will involve a cost. There are many cost effective web hosting services available and some feature something called Fantastico. Fantastico allows a "one click" installation process of many web applications. Below are instructions on using some of these applications assuming you have installed them by hand or by Fantastico. NB - Fantastico is easy but there are criticisms that it installs older versions of apps that may have security probelms. Check that your web host regulary updates their Fantastico offerings.

026b Using B2 Evolution

B2 Evolution is a powerful Multi Media, Multi User, Multi blog system. B2 Evolution is open source and has a large developer and support community. Allthough the software is free it has to be hosted on some web space and configured to use MySQL. If you have B2 Evo up and running this page will give you a basic understanding of how to use it

027 Content Management System

Content Management Systems (CMS) allow a group of people to update and manage a website without the need to learn code. The Digital Village Network uses the open source CMS Made Simple for the main area of the website. Click on the title above if you are learning how to use it. If your main purpose is to add news to the news section or to add your community newspaper CLICK HERE.

Appendix

030 Adding News To CMS

(or a community newspaper)

031 Blogger

032 Tabbed Browsing

033 Google Mail