Posterous: CMS for simple web publishing via email
"Posterous is the easy way to get content online using e-mail. You can e-mail content of just about any type (such as rich text, photos, music, video, Word/Powerpoint/Excel/PDF documents, and zip archives) to us. We will post it online in the most web-friendly format, then reply with a public URL that can be forwarded or shared with friends. Account creation is never required, but if a user does create an account, posts from your various e-mail addresses (work, home, and mobile phone) can all be integrated into one blog."
(Posterous, Inc.)
Fig.1 Susie Blackmon's Posterous weblog [available at: http://susieblackmon.com/].
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Talis Aspire: shared UK-wide Resource List Management System
"Talis Aspire takes into account the rise of e-content, evolving pedagogy techniques, higher student expectations and user-generated content. Talis are fairly sure that they got the stock management aspect right with Talis List, so they took as the starting point of development the needs of students and academics, as well as the library. Essentially the VLE is still seen as the hub that co-ordinates services, and Aspire is designed to work with existing systems. . A lot of academics seem to be using Moodle to provide their course reading, but at present it still mostly consists of links within Moodle to word documents or PDFs. Aspire has been designed to fit in with the look of the institution so that it can work with Moodle without the students necessarily knowing that they have even left Moodle. It integrates with e.g. Shibboleth/Athens and student registries, so that it's possible for students to be presented with the relevant lists as soon as they start a course (rather than having to seek out their lists). One of the goals of Aspire is to maximize the value of e-resources, so in-line content plays a big part – library catalogue information is displayed on the page, and you can embed e.g. e-books, articles and videos within the list. This looked particularly useful so the students can get to content quicker and should help them to access more e-resources. YouTube is easy to embed, but I was pleased that they were currently talking to the BUFVC to see if Box of Broadcasts could be directly embedded."
(Paul Johnson, Royal Holloway, University of London, 23 April 2009)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Wix.com: Web Design Builder
"Wix.com is a Flash website builder, built to create a simple way for everybody to build and design Flash websites.
Make a free website like a pro: Whether it's business or personal, music, art or photography, the Wix Flash website builder is simple to use with a drag and drop creator. It's the complete solution to publish & promote your Flash website like a pro. Choose from hundreds of Flash templates, art and photographpy porfolio sites, MySpace layouts and music templates. Easy to customize, modify and update, Wix is your complete web design , create, publish and hosting solution. All Wix free website templates & MySpace layouts are Flash based."
(Wix.com)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Google Docs: the networked computer classroom?
"The networked computer classroom has always held out the promise of improved collaboration and peer review of documents. The foundational work in this area was based on social constructionist theory ( e.g., Barker & Kemp 1990; Cooper & Selfe 1990; Hawisher & Selfe 1991): scholars saw networked writing as a concrete application of social constructionism, which emphasized collaborative writing, and consequently produced collaborative tools (such as the Daedalus Interactive Writing Environment and the enCore MOO). More recently, content management systems and wikis have joined the list of ways to collaborate. All allow participants to review, co-edit, and comment on a single text in a single space.
However, these technologies have tended to fill relatively narrow niches, due in part to the learning curve for using them (most people don't want to learn special markup) and the need for specialized hardware and software to run them (most people don't have dedicated servers to run a CMS). Not surprisingly, most documents -- in university settings and in business collaborations -- are still created in Microsoft Word or another word processor, and emailed from collaborator to collaborator (a practice known as "ping-ponging"). This solution is a variation of the timeworn solution of handing drafts from person to person. And it has the same drawback: it's impossible for multiple people to work simultaneously on the same draft without versioning problems. Nevertheless, people limp along with this solution because it has a shallow learning curve and leverages existing services.
...
In August 2006, Google launched Google Apps for Your Domain, a suite of tools that includes email, calendar, and website design software (Google Mail, Calendar, and Page Creator), and is aggressively marketing the suite to the education market and small businesses. In essence, these organizations can outsource a chunk of their information technology to Google, and Google brands these services for each organization. This service is particularly valuable to the education and small business markets since these relatively small organizations frequently devote considerable IT resources to electronic collaboration and publication, and they have trouble holding on to people with deep IT expertise.
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Eventually the product relaunched as Google Docs, integrated with Google's spreadsheet offering
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Google Docs Features The headline news about Google Docs is that the application supports easy parallel collaboration. Once you've logged in, you see a list of the most recent documents (word processor files and spreadsheets) and the collaborators who have been working on them. You can choose to share your own documents with collaborators at a variety of permissions levels -- and they can similarly choose to share theirs with you. "
(Clay Spinuzzi, University of Texas at Austin)
Barker, T. and Kemp, F. (1990). Network theory: A postmodern pedagogy for the writing classroom. In Handa, C., editor, Computers and Community: Teaching Composition in the Twenty-First Century, pages 1-27. Boynton/Cook Publishers, New York.
Cooper, M. and Selfe, C. L. (1990). Computer conferences and learning: Authority, resistance, and internally persuasive discourse. College English, 52:847-869.
Hawisher, G. E. and Selfe, C. L. (1991). The rhetoric of technology and the electronic writing class. College Composition and Communication, 42:55-65.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Symphony Customisable CMS
"Symphony CMS is a beautifully minimal PHP+MySQL-based open source content management system that uses XML and XSLT as its backbone.
On the surface, Symphony is similar in function to ExpressionEngine, Textpattern, WordPress, or Drupal. While Symphony is certainly capable of running a standard website or blog, its conceptual elegance and focus on data structures puts it in a unique position, straddling the line between a CMS and a full web application framework such as Django or Ruby on Rails.
Symphony’s layered infrastructure allows the site developer complete control over every aspect of the site building process. Though this is initially intimidating, its flexibility and power is extraordinary. Fortunately, the documentation is solid (and improving), and the community is extremely responsive and helpful.
Symphony is compatible with modern Apache or Litespeed web servers. (See the Installation Guide for complete server requirements and compatible hosts.) You can install it either via a .zip package (easier), or by cloning the offical Git repository (preferred.)"
(Mike Johnston, 15 July 15 2010, CMS Critic – Content Management Reviews)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
