Mobile JWiki

On the side as of late I’ve been working with Tim Jore at Distant Shores Media to help them create ajaxy goodness for their MediaWiki-based site at http://door43.org that features free and open licensed contributed discipleship resources for everyone in every language, including an open Bible, open Bible School, open worship music, etc. Anyway, I’ve just released a new application for them that dynamically has the ability to turn their entire wiki into a mobile online/offline application.

So if you are using MediaWiki, or would like to mobilize someone else’s Web site or wiki, you can find the simple 1-2 pages of code here: https://github.com/rwadholm/Mobile-JWiki. The code can be put on any server anywhere (that supports PHP 5.3), and will create a mobile offline/online version of whatever site you point it  at (out of the box it works with MediaWiki) via PHP,  JQuery, JQuery Mobile, and HTML5 (and it works as well without javascript enabled, so for non-smartphones it’ll still serve up your mobile site just fine). Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but you could even use it to make your own mobile offline/online version of Wikipedia that’s hosted on your own server.

The real purpose, however, is to allow users of wikis in areas with spotty internet connectivity or expensive data plans to be able to learn on the go, using their phones, without a continually active internet connection.

The Little Library Beta 1 Release

The Beta 1 version of the Little Library application was release earlier today (to mild applause by my family). You can check it out here:

https://github.com/rwadholm/The-Little-Library-Beta

Follow the instructions on that page, and you too can be the proud owner of a test library! You’ll be doing the world a service by breaking things now so they don’t have to later. Please send any comments and feedback my way.

Some new features include syncing with other libraries (actually works now!), automatic creation of an online library, a three page End User License Agreement that quotes Patrick Henry, file validation (to avoid loading those pesky malware files onto your computer and in the cloud), optimized iOS page sizes, automatic thumbnails for any items that have images in them, and the ability to upload and view multiple files for every item in your library. This last feature allows you to use your library as a private Web server. You could host every file of a website you’ve made in one item, and when users click on the item–BING!! (not really “BING”, I actually prefer non-microsoft products), they’re at your hosted Web site. So you could share your library with them, they could make changes, share with you, and you can have a dynamic Website between friends. How lovely.

Beyond Web sites, you could include all of the Word documents, books, videos, audio and images you wanted to all in the same library item, so that you can serve up a college course, a series of videos, a compilation of songs, etc. all packaged together nicely. You’ve just got to make sure the content is owned by you (as in, you created it, or you found it with a Creative Commons license that allows you to share it). That’s because the End User License Agreement requires you to only upload and share Creative Commons or Public Domain or other similarly licensed content.

So you can think of the Little Library not as a file repository, but as a multi-device, peer-to-peer, distributed online/offline open content bazaar based on bleeding-edge technologies like JQuery Mobile, HTML5 WebStorage, and CouchDB. Although that is a bit wordy…

More to come.

The Role of RSS in Education

What can a simple xml file do for education? What’s the big deal? So what if RSS gets the word out easier and more consistently than other forms? So what if its standardized and often rich in metadata content (making it more thoroughly searchable even than html)? So what if it caters to a society that doesn’t want to take the time or effort to actually go anywhere even when they’re not going anywhere (i.e. to not have to surf the net while sitting at a chair at their computer)? So what if it helps make the user the meta aggregator of what is meaningful and useful, and the editor of their own publishing empire? So what if learning opportunities are made more readily available and mobile? So what? Why should we all get excited about a couple of xml tags with some simple content? What’s so revolutionary about having the world’s news, entertainment, blog entries, podcasts, and latest updates in education sent to your favorite E-mail client or feed reader? What’s so great about not having your head explode from information overload? And from a Web programmer’s point of view, what’s so great about being able to serve up others’ continually updated content for free without having to code a thing?

I say RSS has no future in education. Why would we want to educate more people anywhere in the world? What kind of bleak world would it be if everybody was able to streamline their content so that they could control their own education? If students didn’t have to sit in a specific chair in a specific room in a specific building at a specific time of day to learn? And why would people want to increase their choices in educational media delivery and production? Do we really want to learn more often? Do we really want to hear a professor on our ipod? Do we really want to share with the world? Nah. I think clay tablets are the future.