On 8/24/06, Michael R. Irwin <michael_irwin(a)verizon.net> wrote:
[heavily snipped]
I will do some further research. Eventually this
expensive animation I
have will be used effectively for some purpose!
Thanks for working on this Michael (and thanks to Rob and Robert for
input). I agree that video/animation will be key to creating good
educational content, so, the more we can do in providing for this need
the better.
I met the guy who's been developing video integration for MediaWiki at
Wikimania - you can see some background to what he's doing at:
http://metavid.ucsc.edu/ - it's a drag and drop tool for editing video
clips from the US senate, as well as an inline player for OggVorbis in
MediaWiki. I'm not sure how far away his work is to integrating it
fully into the codebase, but I seem to think he'll be working on this
soon. (And, in general, I agree with Rob that code development will be
something we'll need to keep in mind as we move along.)
But, as for the sentence I've just snipped, I think this is a
wonderful potential for learning about something that's *really
practical*, and is a great example of what i would see being useful to
all wikimedia participants. That's what I've meant in the past when I
say that we can be especially relevant to the whole of Wikimedia (and
not be seen as a leech project, taking away contributors from wherever
they've been working in the past). If we can use our experiences in
finding out the things we need to know, document them well in a way
that would help someone else learn what we just did, and make all of
this readily available, we would be serving a very useful role - not
just in general - but also specifically for our most likely immediate
participants - Wikimedians.
So, essentially, all I'm saying (in along-winded kind of way) is that
anything you find out about this would be great to feedback to the
project as a whole.
Cheers,
Cormac